News

When the pandemic limited travel and forced many professional workers to work remotely, many city-dwellers sought retreat in the mountains, trails and waterways of Central Washington. Chelan and Kittitas counties were a short car ride away. In the same places Seattleites found recreation and retreat, demand for second homes — and even permanent single residences…

How does the design of the built environment – such as houses, schools, workplaces, streets, parks, transportation systems, and urban form – affect our health and well-being? To explore these issues, editors Nisha D. Botchwey, Andrew Dannenberg, and Howard Frumkin, recently published the second edition of “Making Healthy Places: Designing and Building for Well-being, Equity,…

However you slice it, Seattle homebuying is wildly expensive. The median sale price for all homes is $840,000, according to Redfin. If you look only at stand-alone single-family homes, the median is $975,000. The median condo is selling for over $500,000. Supply and demand isn’t the only factor in Seattle’s housing costs — 50-year-old bungalows…

A class project quickly became a passion project for civil and environmental engineering Ph.D. student Dan McCabe. A cycling enthusiast, McCabe is working to optimize the delivery of groceries from food banks to people experiencing food insecurity — by bicycle. To help streamline delivery operations for the Pedaling Relief Project (PRP), McCabe is developing technology…

In June, King County made headlines for a huge deal in the fight against climate change: three parcels of land – in King County, Issaquah and Shoreline – got the highest prices ever for carbon credits generated by urban forests. The purchaser is Regen Network Development, a Delaware-based blockchain company that plans to offer the…

Urban@UW is excited to announce awardees for the third round of funding through our Spark Grants program. The three projects selected address critical urban challenges, with a focus on transdisciplinary scholarship and engagement with vulnerable populations. Analysis of a Food Bank Home Delivery Program Food security, defined as access at all times to nutritious food,…

Enid McAdoo was only 6 when her family of five moved from the apartment above her dad’s Capitol Hill office to a brand-new custom home in Bothell. It was an impressionable age, an influential era and an exceptional place, and so her kaleidoscope of early memories reflects the still-vivid images of childhood. Enid is the…

Today, Washington state and Seattle have some of the best laws in the U.S. when it comes to protecting tipped workers, but the practice of tipping has an ugly beginning and a rocky past. As service industries (where most tipping happens) continue to be shaken up by the pandemic, and as the emerging gig economy…

A new study from the University of Washington found much of the outpouring of customer support for Black-owned restaurants during the summer of 2020 was short-lived. As Black Lives Matter protests sparked calls for racial justice and equity in the weeks and months following the murder of George Floyd, tech companies including Yelp, Instagram, Google…

Less than a year after its launch, Vancouver officials are expressing optimism about the city’s newest approach to helping unhoused people, and hope to see more of it in the future. A report card released Monday shows Vancouver’s first “Safe Stay Community,” which provides shed-like housing units and around-the-clock case managers, housed 14 of its…