Tacoma has spent a lot of energy and effort to revitalize its downtown into a vibrant urban center and to plan for future growth in its mixed use growth areas. These centers are meant to provide walkable commercial services, densifying environments, with added opportunities for housing, public amenities and access to robust public transportation.
Growth centers are classified into three broad categories: Regional Growth Centers, Neighborhood Centers and Crossroads Centers. There are only two Regional Growth Centers: Downtown and Tacoma Mall, which represent the largest areas in the city with the highest levels of land use intensity in terms of commercial and residential development.
A primary focus of Home in Tacoma has been to identify just how to absorb new growth into areas outside of the regional growth centers and mixed use centers. The largest change by land area is the conversion of single family zoning to an inclusive zoning framework that enables more housing types citywide: duplexes, triplexes, accessory dwelling units, and clusters of townhouses or cottage housing.
Housing Types considered for Home in Tacoma Another significant change is the addition of mid-scale residential along walkable corridors, which should enable a bridge between development in the higher intensity mixed-use centers with lower scale predominantly residential neighborhoods.
The debate on the existence of human-driven climate change is over. For the last two centuries humans have been burning solid, liquid, and gaseous fossil fuels in increasing amounts, which has been gradually changing the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere and oceans. And with those changes, new changes occur in the complex system of our planet’s biosphere, yielding differences in typical surface temperatures, rates of precipitation, even the acidity of seawater.
I have the pleasure, honor and duty of serving on Tacoma’s Planning Commission. I was appointed in 2019 by the Tacoma City Council in the public transportation seat. I do my best to represent the interests of bus and rail riders and operators as well as the city’s interest in supporting public transportation.
The point of the Planning Commission is to ensure that the City’s plans are generally consistent with the overall Comprehensive Plan, otherwise known as the One Tacoma plan.
