nickhat.ch
71 posts
38 followers
142 following
Active Commenter
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Agency interop is the best part. Favorite scanner recordings are SPD borrowing a Stingray from the feds, using it for a lazy-ass bust, then covering it all up with parallel construction in court. Agent literally called it "a half million dollar paperweight"
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"These are trees on people's private lawns that they're saying homeowners should be forced to keep" doesn't sound very supportive of tree protection.
Problem since 2023 is regs that define tree tiers, and purport to protect them in dev, but don't actually.
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But they built to the legal limits of the lot and didn't retain any trees, so that's gotta make the YIMBYs happy right? Right?
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Naw, I think you win. Question is clearly looking for a city that "has the name of a car" and not "the car is named after"
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Brewster en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brewste....
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Fooled? I'm being earnest because it doesn't make sense to me to pretend that the Cle Elum housing market is interchangeable with ours.
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That's not a map of commute modality, or commutes by car. It shows that when the city surveys employees of Seattle employers about where they live, there is no response registering in Kittitas county. Cle Elum is not Issaquah. It's not a suburb of Seattle. It's not absorbing our housing demand
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Mitigation of the heat island effect, air and water filtration, as well as water transpiration are all local effects.
Cle Elum is so inconsequential to Seattle and our metro housing needs that the most recent Seattle commuter survey doesn't even register it in the responses. It's not a SEA exurb
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Everywhere! Many of the specific public comments at the May 19 council meeting were about the senselessness of allowing tree removal during SFH dev. Grace the greenlake sequoia and the cedar on the log cabin site in Broadview were two big campaigns. www.greenlakesequoia.com
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Five years from 2016-2021, not a decade.
But yeah, guess we can agree that Suncadia sucks.
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How do you reach 3 acres? City says 35 acres removed on parcels under development, of which 31 was resi.
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Housing is about 250 acres of the site IIRC
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You're arguing that dense development in Seattle is saving/adding more tree canopy than resi development as a whole? I don't see that in the cities numbers. Multi-family alone removed net 14 acres of canopy
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I don't think it's myopic to acknowledge that trees in Seattle provide more ecological services to Seattle residents than trees in Cle Elum.
Also am deeply skeptical that Cle Elum is intimately linked to SEA housing market. eg, Doesn't follow Seattle population or property value growth trends.
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Where does your "less than 10%" number come from? According to the 2021 canopy report, development accounted for at least 13.7% of total canopy loss.
Parcels exposed to development saw a nearly 40% reduction in canopy coverage.
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I still don't understand why you're so surprised that people advocate for local policies more than they advocate for policies in communities they don't live in.
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The 255 acres of loss were from 2016-2021, or half a decade. During that period, 77 acres of canopy loss occurred in residential areas.
The "800 acres" figure for the Cle Elum development isn't accurate either.
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How do you deacribe this statistically? Florida draws people from Seattle too. I don't understand how to objectively measure and explain the relationships between these markets.
I grew up in Bellevue in the 80s. That mess was gonna happen regardless of Seattle density
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It's really weird. Almost like their attention is on Seattle for some reason
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Yeah, I had a B'ham to SEA coworker for a bit. They wanted a hobby farm. Sadly Seattle doesn't have many of those. Crazy commute. Saved by Covid.
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As a Seattleite, I'm not sure how invested to feel about the details of Cle Elum's UGA. There are crappy suburbs all over this state.
Developers gonna develop. Resort developers even more so.
Not In Their Backyard is deliciously ironic though.
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Probably also worth mentioning that 530 of those 800 acres would remain undeveloped.
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Wait - wasn't this planned as a resort community though? In 2002 when it was initially proposed, it would have doubled the existing housing stock in Cle Elum. What market do you think this is intended to draw from?
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Everyone has a price, but at any reasonable revenue number this isn't worth doing at all.
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A reduction in heating degree days also shaves the winter peak load, which is useful for capacity planning.
How much does SCL care about retail sales? Can always sell extra capacity on the spot market
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Viewpoint discrimination not as easy as it looks?
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Side-sewers are the common exception.
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Moore's amendment as-passed doesn't mandate 20' setbacks anywhere, let alone side setbacks.
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Backstory on QA Blvd is kinda wacky www.djc.com/news/const/1...
Surprised that the city is so chill about encroachments
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See legistar page for CB 120969, though I'm not seeing Ammendment8 v2 there anymore.
seattle.legistar.com/LegislationD...
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I'm trying, heh. Maybe later days
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Why not both?
Companies building data centers are sophisticated consumers who site their development with energy sources+costs in mind. They don't get a pass for being decoupled from dirty producers by a grid. If demand is up, clean sources aren't, they should account for their emissions.
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Morality aside, it's not mutually exclusive so long as electricity generation is carbon intensive.
The badness of travel is not an independent question so long as it depends on jet fuel.
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Can't speak for all, but a big part of my multi-million cloud spend being at GCP is their better attention to environmental issues. Makes sense that recruiting would also benefit.
I don't have specifics, but find it hard to believe goog would abandon carbon neutrality if costs are rly negligible
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Companies are persuadable when consumers demand it, hence why clouds and tech companies already do PPAs and offset their emissions. Or did. AI has them binging.
End users also need take responsibility for their usage and demand inducement.
You writing in response to the MIT Tech Rvw piece?
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Dunno. Companies trying to push responsibility for their choices onto suppliers and vendors is always lame. Due diligence and supply chain QA is a responsibility of the consumer.
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Let's call them a bundle of despicables
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Google's emissions alone increased 48% since 2019, and now admits that it is no longer maintaining carbon neutrality through offsets.
Why isn't that a legitimate criticism? You can greenwash anything by comparing it to larger sources of emissions. Carbon impacts from AI independent issue to EVs
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Moore's amendment 8 basically only affects setbacks for SFH and maxes out at 15ft. Kettles is a QA-only loophole. You do missing middle and amendment 8 is a moot point.
I'm not in love with setbacks either, but the hyperventilation over this imaginary 20ft setback is goofy and hurts the cause
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It's not that interesting when you stop stereotyping people and realize that people in favor of stronger tree preservation aren't a monolith.
Its easy to find pictures of wealthy SFH neighborhoods with old beautiful, soaring, trees. This isn't a serious argument.
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Yup! I totally misread you.
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Sounds like a good thing if lot perm is moot now. But in any case, depending on runoff treatment in combined sewer systems is really expensive. Grew up in the NW and the cost of untangling combined systems and dealing with overflow events and capacity has been a big deal everywhere.
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I don't think it's more efficient though? Combined sewer overflow events are expensive and require a ton of infrastructure expansion to prevent. There's legit public interest in lot permeability and what happens to rainfall in urban areas. Dripline = permeable
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Neat! Douggies weren't on the approved list before, wonder when sdot added them. Was stoked to be able to put a red oak in a 9ft strip.
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Source for this? I'm unaware of any studies on tree distribution within lots in Seattle, or any other PNW city.
Advocates for the front setback are also citing that reservation for future tree plantings, not just tree preservation.
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Most of those are street trees, yeah? Seems like Seattle wouldn't permit their removal even if the architect wanted them gone
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R2 specifically:
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Ahhh ok, thanks. "Gee so much traffic might as well go get a coffee now at THAT Starbucks" said no one ever