Missing Middle from AIA Austin Right now the Olympia planning commission is considering a list of recommendations about the so-called Missing Middle. These recommendations would hopefully increase density in Olympia’s least dense neighborhoods by allowing duplexes, townhomes, courtyard apartments and ADUs in the mostly the upper elevation swaths of single-family homes neighborhoods. As you would…
Month: January 2018
If you work outside Thurston County, you’re more likely to not like downtown Olympia
The city of Olympia commissioned a public opinion poll in December. The poll mostly covered concrete things like how important various city services are and how well they’re being delivered. But the survey also got into an interesting line of questioning about how residents perceive safety in Olympia. The pollsters asked whether we feel safe in our…
As neighborhoods go, downtown Olympia is pretty valuable
One of the most incredible things happened last week. The Thurston County GeoData Center released a huge swath of datasets that had previously been prohibitively expensive to access. All the datasets are available to download, and if you have your own GIS application, you can play with them there. But with a few of the datasets,…
Lakewood was not built for walking
This town was not built for walking It isn’t the trains that make pedestrians unsafe in Lakewood. Like a lot of cities that were built primarily in the era of car-centered infrastructure, Lakewood is not particularly walkable and a lot of people end up getting hurt and killed because of it. Since the Amtrak derailment…