Vladimir Cole / Vlad Cole / VC

Richard Florida’s Who’s Your City was a key read in my quest to become comfortable with the idea of moving to Southern California. If not for that book, I might have never made the move, and I’d certainly still harbor a lot more venom for the goddamned sprawl (and attendant traffic and pollution) that defines this region. However, Richard Florida helped me understand that all that stuff is nothing compared to the huge advantages that come to a region that becomes a world magnet for creative talent (as LA has). Because knowledge workers of all types tend to mass together, LA is to the creative world what NYC and London are to finance, San Francisco is to technology, and Washington DC is to stupidity.

So, it’s with some glee that I saw LA top his Bohemian Index.  If that were a worldwide index, it would pretty accurately describe the only cities I’d want to live in.

Loving this:

“According to Mr. Janzen, he came to the realization that “I don’t want this life — the life of someone who’s working too hard to pay a large mortgage to live in this house.” The catalyst, he said, was watching the value of his home plummet with the rest of the real estate market, while the time and money required to maintain the property only increased. “The energy cost is enormous,” he said, “and the bigger your property gets, the more there is to do.”

Which is why Mr. Janzen has become interested in the small house movement, whose adherents believe in minimizing one’s footprint — structural as well as carbon — by living in spaces that are smaller than 1,000 square feet and, in some cases, smaller than 100. Tiny houses have been a fringe curiosity for a decade or more, but devotees believe the concept’s time has finally arrived.”

I love it and am hopeful that this “movement” can gain steam (more often than not, newspapers invent trends where there are none, but I think this one taps deep into the zeitgeist).

The WSJ covers, as many other papers did this week, the converging trends of higher gas prices, demographic shifts, increased interest in sustainable living, and increased value placed on the richness of urban living. In a nutshell:

“Baby boomers and millennials are the country’s two biggest generations, with some 82 million and 78 million people born during their respective eras. Both flocks are leaving their nests and finding that higher-density urban housing fits their lifestyles.”

It’s my hope that these shifts continue and accellerate.

Didn’t know this: “In terms of the broader neighborhood, this corner [12th and Pike] of Capitol Hill is the only area in the northwest United States that achieves residential densities approaching east coast cities” (source).

Hey, cool, that’s where I live! No wonder I’m nailin’ the 98 walkscore. Unfortunately, though, the quote lacks meat because it doesn’t tell exactly how dense nor which east coast city we supposedly compare favorably to. Washington DC wouldn’t be a very favorable comparison. That place is pure sprawl.

Zipskinny says my hood’s density is 12,266. Unfortunately it can’t narrow it down any further. 98122 covers a very large swath of land, some of it very low density.

Bernard Tschumi says: “I live in Paris and New York, the great cities of the 19th and 20th century, respectively. But the 21st century will have a number of great cities. You’ll choose between cities of great population density and those that are like series of islands in the forest.” 

The Seattle-Bellevue-Tacoma-Redmond area is like this. Where else?

In addition to my update to the prior post, this one’s also typed while in traffic. I’m stopped. Still stopped. Still stopped. It’s raining… ooh some movement … ooh … moved 15 feet! Stopped again. Stopped some more. Now crawling and crawling some more. Moved 30 feet! Oh my goodness! Stopped again. It’s raining. The fellow in front of me has his blinker on but the lane to his right hasn’t budged enough for him to get over. How I wish it would… because then I could move forward! Still stopped. Still stopped. Still stopped behind this dude with his blinker on. Movement! Holy movement! I moved a good 10 car lengths just now. Oh my gosh! My exit is a mere quarter mile away! But it’s not really my exit. It’s just an exit from this particular stretch of bad traffic to another, altogether different, altogether the same stretch of bad traffic! Still stopped. Crept forward a foot. Still stopped. Still stopped. I realize now that I should have stored “still stopped” in the copy-paste buffer. Still stopped. The sun is shining cruelly down upon us even as the rain continues to patter the parking lot of cars on the 520. Crawling forward. Crawling some more. Stopped now again. The radio (c89.5) plays: “I can’t help it, can’t help myself. I can’t help it, got no self control, there’s nothing else to do.” Well, truer words never sung. I can’t do a damned thing right now, and this little mindless distraction is keeping me sane. More movement. More movement. Close enough now to my exit that I should consider shutting down. If I were to die behind the wheel right now, my car would creep forward at just the right speed. My death might not be discovered for MILES. That would probably creep the cop out that pulled me over. Would my surviving relatives have to pay the ticket? Or would the Redmond police forgive? Likely they’d add another infraction for driving while incapacitated. Ahh, we are creeping forward at an ever unslower pace. Movement is strong. I shall save and post now. LIVE FROM REDMOND!

• 25 minutes: commute time via the 545 bus from Seattle’s Capitol Hill to the Overlake Transit Center in Redmond (a distance of about 17 miles — this should be the longest part of the commute)
• 22 minutes: commute time via Microsoft Shuttle service from Overlake transit center to Millennium D, a few miles away (if you’re not local, you wouldn’t know that this is a maddening crawl through stoplights and bland corporate office parks, but now you do know that)
• Reason: Redmond’s pro-sprawl policy that limits building height (and Microsoft’s tacit support of Redmond’s pro-sprawl policies through its decision to locate and remain in Redmond); if this were Manhattan, the commute from corporate lobby to my office desk would be mostly vertical and would involve only a few idle moments in an elevator
• Further aggravation: I spend 1 to 3 hours per day just puttering around Redmond (going from meeting to meeting in disparate, far-flung buildings). If I were working in a reasonably dense urban environment, I’d instead spend 5 to 10 minutes taking the elevator from floor to floor. It’s demoralizing to feel that you’ve arrived “at work” only to spend an extra 1 to 3 hours getting where you need to go.
• Result: one pissed off employee, many thousands of wasted man-hours commuting around the Microsoft Redmond campus, many dollars wasted on gasoline, vehicles, and shuttle services designed to move people around in this wasteland of sprawl.
• Suggested fix: move more people to Bellevue and Seattle, where zoning laws allow office space to be stacked.

Disclaimer: my experience is not representative of the overall Microsoft experience. It just so happens that my immediate team is currently (and temporarily) spread across three buildings that are a handful of stoplight-infested, SUV-choked miles away from each other. It also happens that Redmond is a very, very poorly planned city and that a good portion of my coworkers are lucky enough to work outside of it.

Update from the thick of rush hour traffic (yes, it’s so slow that I can type on a laptop while driving — safely): it should be noted that I love my job, love the products I work on, and really am excited to get to work every single day. That’s why it’s so damned frustrating to suffer this particular commute. I’m seriously considering getting a sleeper sofa for the office just so that I can avoid the commute a few days a week.

Happy Spring, everyone!