What role should climate change have in planning policy?

Did I do that?

The American Planning Association‘s assembly is considering a new policy guide on planning and climate change. The guide makes recommendations for local, state, and federal policy changes required to deal with climate change.

Comments are due by Friday, April 25 by email to govtaffairs@planning.org. Click here for more information and click here to read the draft.

More than a 20-year lifespan

Anyone who deserves another $100,000 to spend?

The Urban Land Institute is seeking submissions for the 2008 J.C. Nichols Prize for Visionaries in Urban Development. The $100,000 prize honors Kansas City developer Jesse Clyde Nichols. He developed Kansas City’s Country Club District, worked on the National Parks and Planning Commission and helped plan Beverly Hills and Cleveland’s Shaker Heights.

The prize was established in 2000. Past winners include architectural historians, mayors, urban planners and real estate developers. None has been from the Pacific Northwest.

Nominations for the 2008 prize are due May 1.

Some bus drivers on the No. 11 route call out the stop closest to the Washington Park Arboretum with the eerie signifier “Lake Washington Boulevard, Tree Museum.”

Some might think that’s just a Joni Mitchell reference, but there’s been a lot of scary talk lately about Seattle’s dwindling tree population.

According to the city, Seattle’s tree canopy has shrunk from 40 percent city coverage in the late 1970s to around 18 percent right now. Last year, the mayor said the city should take steps to address the shrinking canopy, getting back to 30 percent coverage by 2037.

DPD is rewriting the city’s tree regulations to try to reach the target. A comp plan amendment proposed by Ilze Jones of Jones and Jones Architects and Landscape Architects would have the city set aside 48,000 acres and name a tree czar to manage city trees.

While we’re waiting for the laws to be sorted out, and with Washington’s Arbor Day coming up on Tuesday, some people might want to roll up their sleeves and take advantage of an annual freebie from the city.

The Department of Neighborhoods is accepting applications from Seattle residents for free trees. But you have to talk to your neighbors and plant the trees yourselves. Groups of five households or more on a street or block are eligible to apply, and can request between 10 and 40 trees.

In exchange for free trees delivered by the city this fall, the groups must attend a training session and then plant the trees. Applications are due on Friday, August 15.

Get an application by calling the Seattle Department of Neighborhoods at (206) 684-0464 or Click here.

Just don’t charge a dollar and a half to see ‘em.

Click here for more stats and links on Seattle tree.

Sugimura

“As we look at how do you make Center City more family-friendly, and how do you get more families down here, people always say a school,” Sugimura said.

But the school district won’t be able to afford land in those areas, she said.

DPD has been talking to interested neighborhood groups in Belltown for the past year about the school. Recently, Sugimura said, developers from Belltown and South Lake Union have asked DPD about incentives to include a school in a project.

There’s one incentive already on the books: excluding certain square footage from Floor Area Ratio calculations. Excluding school square footage from calculations would let a developer build bigger if they include a school. That tool was used to encourage downtown department store development decades ago.

What about an FAR bonus? Like the ones developers get for including affordable housing in their plans? Sugimura said that’s a possibility, but it would need council and mayoral approval.

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DPD is floating an idea to cap I-5 to turn it into a walkable space that reconnects First Hill and Capitol Hill with downtown.

Freeway Park

Interstate-5 has cut Fifth from Sixth Avenue for about four decades. And as anyone who’s gotten off the No. 11 or No. 10 bus right where the three neighborhoods meet can attest, the scale is almost Soviet. Freeway Park makes for a green connection near the convention center, but crossing elsewhere is cement city.

The idea is in early discussion and costs or specifics are nonexistent. It’s one of 21 possible comprehensive plan amendments that had an initial hearing Monday night at City Hall. The comp plan sets the framework for city zoning and planning policy and can be amended once a year.

Other amendments up for consideration:

Not everybody likes the Burke

• Protecting tree canopy: A proposal written by Ilze Jones of Jones and Jones Architects and Landscape Architects would set goals and policies for increasing the city’s tree canopy. Kit O’Neill and Cheryl Trivison are co-sponsors of the proposal, which would make trees an element for consideration in land use planning and recommends the city set aside 48,000 acres for trees.

The urban canopy, aka trees

• A dozen up-zones and rezones, including changing specific industrial zones in Ballard, South Lake Union, Harbour Avenue and Stadium East to mixed-use or commercial use.

City Council’s Planning, Land Use and Neighborhoods Committee held its first hearing on comp plan amendments Monday night. Contact Committee Chair Sally Clark to let her know what you think.