News

With support from sponsors including Urban@UW, the West Coast Poverty Center will host its annual summit on June 1st. This year the topics will revolve around housing equity. The legacies of redlining and other federal policy choices of land and wealth extraction continue to manifest in racial wealth gaps, unequal access to housing, discrimination in…

The UW Native Garden is a place for indigenous students to share their culture and community to learn about combining tradition with modern techniques. A garden in the corner of the UW Farm at the Center for Urban Horticulture is offering a space for growth and learning, with volunteers invited to be part of the…

Comparing Silicon Valley and Seattle has become something of a regional pastime in the Pacific Northwest. But the comparison might be more accurate if directed a few miles east, across the shores of Lake Washington to where Bellevue skyrises are multiplying. Because historically speaking, the rise of the eastside closely mirrors the trajectory of Silicon…

The average home in Seattle costs over a million dollars. And now, rising interest rates have made mortgages more expensive. Homebuyers just can’t seem to get a break. Condominiums used to be a gateway to homeownership. Even if you didn’t have a big nest egg, you could get your foot in the door and own…

For those of us who did the majority of our growing up in upper Manhattan, it’s not hyperbolic to say that New York’s Central Park was our backyard. We spent snow days careening down Cedar Hill on our sleds. I attended a bar mitzvah reception at Loeb Boathouse, spending a good portion of it perched…

Ty Charnicky gripped a broom and smiled as he swept the floor. It wasn’t dirty. He swept it often. “When I was in the car, I did this to the car too. I cleaned it out at least once a week. I did my laundry once a week,” Charnicky said, before straightening some of his…

Urban@UW’s Urban Environmental Justice Initiative is hosting a virtual roundtable examining the ways a changing climate and extreme weather events are giving shape to local places, communities, and politics. Moderated by the UEJ Initiative Faculty Lead, Rubén Casas, participants include Kenneth Walker, author of Climate Politics on the Border: Environmental Justice Rhetorics (2022) and Nik Janos, co-editor of Urban Cascadia and the Pursuit of…

Pathways toward the future: Assessing the digital dimensions of urban dynamics Who is building the cities of the future? For whom are they being built? Can big data, smart cities, and other emerging technologies contribute to a sustainable and equitable world? As we move deeper into the information age, technology has gained renewed relevance as…

Urban@UW is excited to be able to provide another cycle of funding for small-scale, new or emergent projects in urban systems for academic year 2022-2023. Our Urban@UW Research Spark Grants are intended to *spark* new ideas, connections, and next steps for UW researchers undertaking cross-disciplinary and community-engaged urban scholarship. We have made a few substantive…

By some accounts, Seattle is among the most stressed and sleep-deprived metros in the nation, but let’s forget about that for a moment. New reports find Seattle, and Washington as a whole, rate high on the happiness scale. In fact, Seattle is the seventh-happiest city in the nation, according to WalletHub’s 2022’s Happiest Cities in America report. The personal finance website…