News

On a typical evening at the Wool Factory, a renovated textile mill in Charlottesville, Va., guests savor local wine and hors d’oeuvres in a spacious courtyard decorated with festive string lights. Between bites and sips, their eyes might gaze at the factory, a 100-year-old red brick building where as many as 200 workers once made military…

University of Washington researchers have been conducting studies into various facets of Seattle’s $15-an-hour minimum wage for years. For their latest study, they looked into how the higher minimum wage has addressed (or failed to address) income inequality. Seattle minimum wage will increase on Jan. 1 The study found that over a 12-year period, inequality…

Imagine buying your dream home — and then learning you are prohibited from owning it. A surprising number of residential property deeds in Washington state contain clauses excluding certain groups from ownership. Those clauses are no longer enforceable thanks to a 1968 anti-discrimination law, but the exclusionary language — a reminder of sanctioned racism in…

Urban@UW colleague Rubén Casas shares his perspective on the city of Tacoma’s goal of becoming an ‘anti-racist city’ in his Crosscut article. — Mayor Victoria Woodards wants to make Tacoma “an anti-racist city.” The question is, can she do it? And if so, how should it look in practice? This was a central theme of her…

Over the past century, the Earth’s average temperature has risen by 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit. Although it seems like a negligible amount, this global warming is out of the ordinary in the planet’s recent history, causing dramatic shifts in climate patterns and weather. Beyond that, scientists predict it will get even worse in the years to come. Every human being…

Environmental and Forest Sciences Ph.D. Candidate Ashlee Abrantes, shares a perspective on how wildlife depend on urban infrastructure in this op-ed written for The Conversation.  — As the Biden administration prepares to make the biggest investment in U.S. infrastructure in more than a decade, there’s much discussion about how systems like roads, bridges and electric power grids…

Record-breaking heat took a heavy toll on the Northwest this summer, from beaches to cities to mountaintops. In the Washington Cascades, some glaciers lost an unprecedented 8% to 10% of their ice in a single hot season. For many residents, the snow and ice missing from the volcanoes poking up on the horizon was jarring….

A few short months after the end of a devastating wildfire season, many B.C. communities are cleaning up after disastrous floods that have swept away highways, submerged homes, triggered deadly landslides, stranded hundreds of people and forced thousands more to evacuate. While climate change and (bad) luck each had some role to play, previous wildfires are known to boost the…

On Monday, December 6th, 2021, Gina Ziervogel Associate Professor in the Department of Environmental and Geographical Science at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, joins Urban@UW and CBE to discuss the route she has taken over the last 20 years as a geographer working on climate change vulnerability and adaptation, urban governance, and social…

Over the past year, two teams of researchers from the University of Washington tackled a host of urban challenges in our region with the support of Urban@UW’s Research Spark Grants. In August 2020 grants of up to $20,000 were awarded to amplify collaborative research-to-practice with a focus on today’s urban issues. Two UW teams of…