Home in Tacoma (HiT) was a landmark achievement, the result of five years of meticulous planning, policy reform, and community engagement. By rezoning two-thirds of the city and overhauling single-family zoning, HiT has cleared the path for much-needed housing development. However, as the Planning Commission warned in their final recommendation, this effort alone cannot guarantee housing affordability across all income levels. While HiT sets the stage for building homes for higher-income households and those at the lower end of the economic spectrum, it leaves one part of our community out in the cold: the working class.
I would like to wish my friends in China on the other side of the world a Happy New Year and happy year of the snake. I hope that this year brings you all good health, prosperity and new possibilities.
If you live in the West and haven’t noticed, a quiet revolution has been taking shape on a Chinese social media app called Xiaohongshu or RedNote. In the lead up to this revolution, the US federal government enacted a draconian law meant to coerce, censor and align content filtration on the short-form social media app TikTok with the incoming Administration.
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.
Today is the day.
This evening the Tacoma City Council is poised to vote on the final Home in Tacoma code package. With that event, I thought I would get some reflection down for better or for worse.
It’s taken five years to get this far, longer than a presidential term, longer than most people’s journeys through high school, and even longer than the COVID-19 pandemic.
The substance of the package is enormous relative to most items that the Planning Commission and Tacoma’s planning department have taken on over the years: 246 pages of changes to the Land Use Regulatory Code.
