We have vacationed several times on Whidbey several times via AirBnB and we love it - you made the right choice to live there.
Inertia plus the thought of cleaning out over 20 years of accumulated crap is keeping us in our too large Sammamish empty nest.
But if and/when we do decide to downsize, downtown Redmond would be my choice. It has the shopping, restaurants, parks, bike trails, the old folks medical care we need and soon a light rail station. My husband can no longer drive, and if I lose that ability too, we'll be in a world of hurt if nothing is in walking distance.
We know quite few couples our age who have gone the "retirement community" route. But I like having kids around, plus I notice that retirement communities in this area don't reflect the true diversity of King County.
Thanks for sharing conversation about this concept.
Sammamish and Redmond are very diverse - that's why it's discouraging to see retirement communities that are 95% white within a larger community that is 60% white.
I'm guessing some of that is down to much of the diversity being recent immigration driven by the tech industry. That will balance out in time. But retirement communities by definition are not diverse - age wise. We need to design neighborhoods for all ages together.
Hi Neighbor (sort of): I am part of a family that owns a cabin on Useless Bay (Han’s Place) and enjoy the photos you sometimes post. We are not there a lot because we are living within a 15-minute city in New England right now, though packing to move to somewhat less dense surroundings. In fact, we can easily walk to the essentials except for a hardware store. This is wonderful, but it does feel crowded to me (a rural kid who has spent time as a ranger in various wild places) at times and there are specific drawbacks. Traffic noise during the warm months when windows need to be open (and I think this increases energy consumption because people run air conditioners more than necessary as white noise). This is about my self discipline really, but living within a 10 minute walk of 4 good bakeries has not helped my weight. My biggest complaint is, I guess, spiritual. You can’t really see the stars and open fire is discouraged. But also, the rents are astronomical. No new housing stock and high amenity mean that the people who work in the walkable paradise all drive on from rural areas.
Beyond living here, I was also deeply involved in creating a “new” 15-minute suburban growth center while working as a town planner. Thst work began some 20 years ago so it is possible to evaluate. It’s very attractive and pretty functional, though there are specific traffic issues, etc. Nothing is perfect. And it is almost totally unaffordable to-working people. There are serious tradeoffs involved in making places nice in a competitive capitalist economy. We increased density roughly 7 times and the cost of housing did not drop. In fact, it came close to doubling.
Enough for now. There are a lot of tradeoffs, but the main lesson is that if you don’t have the political will and clout to address affordability, your 15 minute city will be operated by workers who are commuting a lot farther than that
Hi Neighbor! I live just up the hill from Hans' place. I'll be walking past there shortly with the dog we're sitting!
Your comments on affordability are spot on. Although I haven't stated it explicitly, part of my reason for this series of posts is to highlight abundance. For competitive capitalist economy, profit lies in scarcity, not abundance, which is why the market will never build affordable housing. There is so much to do.
Thank you so much for commenting. Enjoy your move, to the extent that that's possible, and please let me know next time you visit the island.
I've been working on walkability in my hometown for many years now, and have written about many neighborhoods in the U.S. who intentionally focus on the issues of displacement and gentrification that come along with walkability and public transportation. One of the things I'm heartened by right now is that the people in my town working on affordable housing/housing affordability asked to meet with me for some intentional work on the intersections of walkability and housing going forward (I've tried to make this happen for years, but it took new members with more innate understanding of how these issues are intertwined to make it happen). There are hard, hard problems, and you're right -- they don't even have a hope of being addressed without intentionally focusing on them.
We have a newish local affordable housing initiative https://islandrootshousing.org/. The managing director is a good friend. Her wife is the mayor of our small city which is the site of the first project. The walkability score will be high. We're overdue a catch up.
My spot in Bellevue seems like a good 15-minute city. I can get to just about anything within that time frame. I can even walk to grocery, pharmacy, library extension, theatre, etc, although I don't do that enough. I miss the small town community feel that I grew up with. Here people tend to keep to themselves (myself included). Our neighborhood leaders are really trying to build community where we live, so I think there's a push in the right direction. Most of the time we can live with one car. I don't work, my son walks to school, and my husband works from home or walks to work.
I'm curious - what does building community looks like where you live? What is it that a small town has that a city neighborhood doesn't? If we could bottle it and sell it...
Maybe it’s attitude, I don’t know, but people know each other. They know their neighbors, know the owner of the mom and pop store, etc. My aunt and uncle used to host everyone down our road and then some for the yearly nativity play. My high school social studies teacher lived two doors down and my skating teacher lived next door. Some towns in New England still have town hall meetings where everyone shows up. I’ve never been to a Bellevue City Council meeting. Some of it’s me not making the effort, but when there’s a bigger population you don’t run into the same people all the time like you do in a small town.
Yes, the unit of government is bigger in a city. Stores are mostly chain stores.
We have just three chain stores on the south end - a Payless, a DQ, and a Les Schwab. There are pitchforks in the street at the mere mention of a McDonalds or a Starbucks.
We've become too addicted to convenience, with self-checkouts being one of the latest manifestations. We need more - and here I'm searching for a word - inconvenience? friction? inefficiency? All those have such negative connotations. They're all part of the language of scarcity, which it seems is the only language we have left. I'm trying in this series to write from a place of abundance, but it's hard to find the words! Even then, people so easily turn it around to look at the "freedoms" that they feel are threatened rather than the gains. I'll keep trying.
A good article John, thank you. I also appreciate the other fommenters who point out the uncomfortable truth that access costs in our late capitalist societies.
I live in the 2nd biggest city of Australia, a city that covers a larger footprint than Greater London, so even here managing to get the whole list in one area isn’t straightforward. A ‘tree change’ wasn’t an option for me as outside the capital cities, medical care gets very patchy and involves a lot of travelling. The other killer was transport. I suffer from migraines and a common symptom is that my depth perception goes: not every time, but often. So I don’t drive when I have a migraine or the preceding aura. Which means I don’t drive anywhere I can’t abandon the car to be collected later, if need be. I live in the inner city, where access to everything I need comes with a substantial price tag. I’m likely to be priced out of this market soon, which is, frankly, terrifying.
It is terrifying. I wonder, too, what I'll do in five, ten, fifteen years. There are some clustered cottage communities near our very small local city, but they are in high demand.
I hope you're able to find something that works for you.
I appreciate your sharing the intentions in your move and choice of community. About 15 years ago I started thinking about moving to a resilient community (in the social aspect more than the physical) because of some interactions that made some climate change realities clear (mostly that even people I knew took climate change seriously weren't willing to make any personal changes that felt like sacrifice to them; not that it's something that can be solved individually, but there were specific interactions that became factors for me). I'm very lucky in that the town I'm from is one of those. And I appreciate Chuck Marohn's work on Strong Towns to help communities all over find their own social resilience along with the physical.
I enjoyed your comments on resilience in your podcast interview. It gave me a little extra impetus to get this post finished, so thanks for that! Thanks also for Strong Towns - just looked it up!
A month or two after I arrived on the island, and before I knew how to say "no" (which I still periodically forget), I found myself on the board of Transition Whidbey and shortly afterwards board president. We actually wound it up as we realized that the program wasn't needed. The pump was already primed. Better just to dive in and help!
I remain curious about the barriers to resilience elsewhere. Are they physical or social? How much can we lay at the door of a capitalism that pushes us to be transactional, rather than relational? Questions for another post.
Oh ... if you haven't delved into Strong Towns yet, you're in for a treat! An interview he did a couple years ago (I think with David Roberts's podcast/Substack) about the financial realities of maintaining suburbs over the next 100 years haunts me. Might be this one: https://www.volts.wtf/p/volts-podcast-charles-marohn-on-unsustainable
I really think they're both, with capitalism strangling change. That's why I'm such a fan of Henry George, because he lays bare how land ownership locks in economic inequality while turning land (life) into capital for a few.
Forward to the past... The 15 minute city template is, at its core, how humans organically organize themselves, given the opportunity to do so. That's probably why it feels right. Most American small towns formed in this way, though along more linear lines than square. The European model of neighborhoods surrounding squares with shops and a parish church fits the bill.
Yesterday I was looking at a small, impoverished town in the Namibian desert on Google maps street view. As I nudged the cursor down the street I came upon a tree on a street corner. In its shade were a number of items serving as chairs, occupied by a group of 6-8 people and a dog. They looked like they were having an animated conversation. It was a good picture of how people organically get together in a neighborhood without a need for central planning or coercive government regulations. No doubt, these neighbors on a street corner could handle all the planning that might be needed, and carry it out as well.
Back to America, it's not useful or accurate to stereotype those who balk at the idea of having their driving restricted as right wing conspiracy theorists. Owning a car, with the ability to go where you want, when you want, and to hit the open road to explore the wonders of the country, is at the core of Americans' sense of freedom and possibility. Car ownership and the freedom to travel is fundamental, and only a very coercive, authoritarian new system could ever hope to take it away.
It hardly seems necessary to politicize this, though. Most everyone would enjoy living in a 15 minute city, where they don't have to drive everywhere. That's a kind of freedom. Most everyone would also enjoy having a car so they can go where they want and need. That's also a kind of freedom. We can have both; it's not a zero sum game.
We can ponder why our cities and suburban sprawls have become so ugly and dysfunctional, but to me it seems obvious: we the people voted for those who made it happen. Suburban sprawl was somebody's idea of a good thing. Building the factories that employ people far away from neighborhoods was somebody's idea of a good thing. These things don't happen in a vacuum. Most people don't give it too much thought; they just adapt. When a certain model of planning happens over and over again for a hundred years, as it has for our American cities, well, we allowed it.
But, honestly, given the choice, most Americans would rather commute 40 miles to their job than live in a 15 minute city -- if it meant giving up their car. But they'd like both if it were possible. Living on south Whidbey Island, with the ability to ride your bicycle to the grocery store and the hardware store is great. But I'd bet when you have a load of lumber or groceries to carry home, you'll still take the car. Moment to moment, day to day, we make the decisions that are practical, economic and convenient.
We have vacationed several times on Whidbey several times via AirBnB and we love it - you made the right choice to live there.
Inertia plus the thought of cleaning out over 20 years of accumulated crap is keeping us in our too large Sammamish empty nest.
But if and/when we do decide to downsize, downtown Redmond would be my choice. It has the shopping, restaurants, parks, bike trails, the old folks medical care we need and soon a light rail station. My husband can no longer drive, and if I lose that ability too, we'll be in a world of hurt if nothing is in walking distance.
We know quite few couples our age who have gone the "retirement community" route. But I like having kids around, plus I notice that retirement communities in this area don't reflect the true diversity of King County.
Thanks for sharing conversation about this concept.
Diversity is lacking here too, sadly, although getting better.
Sammamish and Redmond are very diverse - that's why it's discouraging to see retirement communities that are 95% white within a larger community that is 60% white.
I'm guessing some of that is down to much of the diversity being recent immigration driven by the tech industry. That will balance out in time. But retirement communities by definition are not diverse - age wise. We need to design neighborhoods for all ages together.
Hi Neighbor (sort of): I am part of a family that owns a cabin on Useless Bay (Han’s Place) and enjoy the photos you sometimes post. We are not there a lot because we are living within a 15-minute city in New England right now, though packing to move to somewhat less dense surroundings. In fact, we can easily walk to the essentials except for a hardware store. This is wonderful, but it does feel crowded to me (a rural kid who has spent time as a ranger in various wild places) at times and there are specific drawbacks. Traffic noise during the warm months when windows need to be open (and I think this increases energy consumption because people run air conditioners more than necessary as white noise). This is about my self discipline really, but living within a 10 minute walk of 4 good bakeries has not helped my weight. My biggest complaint is, I guess, spiritual. You can’t really see the stars and open fire is discouraged. But also, the rents are astronomical. No new housing stock and high amenity mean that the people who work in the walkable paradise all drive on from rural areas.
Beyond living here, I was also deeply involved in creating a “new” 15-minute suburban growth center while working as a town planner. Thst work began some 20 years ago so it is possible to evaluate. It’s very attractive and pretty functional, though there are specific traffic issues, etc. Nothing is perfect. And it is almost totally unaffordable to-working people. There are serious tradeoffs involved in making places nice in a competitive capitalist economy. We increased density roughly 7 times and the cost of housing did not drop. In fact, it came close to doubling.
Enough for now. There are a lot of tradeoffs, but the main lesson is that if you don’t have the political will and clout to address affordability, your 15 minute city will be operated by workers who are commuting a lot farther than that
Hi Neighbor! I live just up the hill from Hans' place. I'll be walking past there shortly with the dog we're sitting!
Your comments on affordability are spot on. Although I haven't stated it explicitly, part of my reason for this series of posts is to highlight abundance. For competitive capitalist economy, profit lies in scarcity, not abundance, which is why the market will never build affordable housing. There is so much to do.
Thank you so much for commenting. Enjoy your move, to the extent that that's possible, and please let me know next time you visit the island.
I've been working on walkability in my hometown for many years now, and have written about many neighborhoods in the U.S. who intentionally focus on the issues of displacement and gentrification that come along with walkability and public transportation. One of the things I'm heartened by right now is that the people in my town working on affordable housing/housing affordability asked to meet with me for some intentional work on the intersections of walkability and housing going forward (I've tried to make this happen for years, but it took new members with more innate understanding of how these issues are intertwined to make it happen). There are hard, hard problems, and you're right -- they don't even have a hope of being addressed without intentionally focusing on them.
We have a newish local affordable housing initiative https://islandrootshousing.org/. The managing director is a good friend. Her wife is the mayor of our small city which is the site of the first project. The walkability score will be high. We're overdue a catch up.
My spot in Bellevue seems like a good 15-minute city. I can get to just about anything within that time frame. I can even walk to grocery, pharmacy, library extension, theatre, etc, although I don't do that enough. I miss the small town community feel that I grew up with. Here people tend to keep to themselves (myself included). Our neighborhood leaders are really trying to build community where we live, so I think there's a push in the right direction. Most of the time we can live with one car. I don't work, my son walks to school, and my husband works from home or walks to work.
Good article, John. Got me thinking.
Thanks Kim.
I'm curious - what does building community looks like where you live? What is it that a small town has that a city neighborhood doesn't? If we could bottle it and sell it...
Maybe it’s attitude, I don’t know, but people know each other. They know their neighbors, know the owner of the mom and pop store, etc. My aunt and uncle used to host everyone down our road and then some for the yearly nativity play. My high school social studies teacher lived two doors down and my skating teacher lived next door. Some towns in New England still have town hall meetings where everyone shows up. I’ve never been to a Bellevue City Council meeting. Some of it’s me not making the effort, but when there’s a bigger population you don’t run into the same people all the time like you do in a small town.
Yes, the unit of government is bigger in a city. Stores are mostly chain stores.
We have just three chain stores on the south end - a Payless, a DQ, and a Les Schwab. There are pitchforks in the street at the mere mention of a McDonalds or a Starbucks.
We've become too addicted to convenience, with self-checkouts being one of the latest manifestations. We need more - and here I'm searching for a word - inconvenience? friction? inefficiency? All those have such negative connotations. They're all part of the language of scarcity, which it seems is the only language we have left. I'm trying in this series to write from a place of abundance, but it's hard to find the words! Even then, people so easily turn it around to look at the "freedoms" that they feel are threatened rather than the gains. I'll keep trying.
Didn't know you were a skater. My wife too!
Yes to just enough friction to give us all time to take a breath and say hello.
A good article John, thank you. I also appreciate the other fommenters who point out the uncomfortable truth that access costs in our late capitalist societies.
I live in the 2nd biggest city of Australia, a city that covers a larger footprint than Greater London, so even here managing to get the whole list in one area isn’t straightforward. A ‘tree change’ wasn’t an option for me as outside the capital cities, medical care gets very patchy and involves a lot of travelling. The other killer was transport. I suffer from migraines and a common symptom is that my depth perception goes: not every time, but often. So I don’t drive when I have a migraine or the preceding aura. Which means I don’t drive anywhere I can’t abandon the car to be collected later, if need be. I live in the inner city, where access to everything I need comes with a substantial price tag. I’m likely to be priced out of this market soon, which is, frankly, terrifying.
It is terrifying. I wonder, too, what I'll do in five, ten, fifteen years. There are some clustered cottage communities near our very small local city, but they are in high demand.
I hope you're able to find something that works for you.
Thanks John. I hope we all do!
I appreciate your sharing the intentions in your move and choice of community. About 15 years ago I started thinking about moving to a resilient community (in the social aspect more than the physical) because of some interactions that made some climate change realities clear (mostly that even people I knew took climate change seriously weren't willing to make any personal changes that felt like sacrifice to them; not that it's something that can be solved individually, but there were specific interactions that became factors for me). I'm very lucky in that the town I'm from is one of those. And I appreciate Chuck Marohn's work on Strong Towns to help communities all over find their own social resilience along with the physical.
I enjoyed your comments on resilience in your podcast interview. It gave me a little extra impetus to get this post finished, so thanks for that! Thanks also for Strong Towns - just looked it up!
A month or two after I arrived on the island, and before I knew how to say "no" (which I still periodically forget), I found myself on the board of Transition Whidbey and shortly afterwards board president. We actually wound it up as we realized that the program wasn't needed. The pump was already primed. Better just to dive in and help!
I remain curious about the barriers to resilience elsewhere. Are they physical or social? How much can we lay at the door of a capitalism that pushes us to be transactional, rather than relational? Questions for another post.
Oh ... if you haven't delved into Strong Towns yet, you're in for a treat! An interview he did a couple years ago (I think with David Roberts's podcast/Substack) about the financial realities of maintaining suburbs over the next 100 years haunts me. Might be this one: https://www.volts.wtf/p/volts-podcast-charles-marohn-on-unsustainable
I really think they're both, with capitalism strangling change. That's why I'm such a fan of Henry George, because he lays bare how land ownership locks in economic inequality while turning land (life) into capital for a few.
Ah, thanks for all this. More to read!
Great story and a subject to look into myself! Thanks John!
Forward to the past... The 15 minute city template is, at its core, how humans organically organize themselves, given the opportunity to do so. That's probably why it feels right. Most American small towns formed in this way, though along more linear lines than square. The European model of neighborhoods surrounding squares with shops and a parish church fits the bill.
Yesterday I was looking at a small, impoverished town in the Namibian desert on Google maps street view. As I nudged the cursor down the street I came upon a tree on a street corner. In its shade were a number of items serving as chairs, occupied by a group of 6-8 people and a dog. They looked like they were having an animated conversation. It was a good picture of how people organically get together in a neighborhood without a need for central planning or coercive government regulations. No doubt, these neighbors on a street corner could handle all the planning that might be needed, and carry it out as well.
Back to America, it's not useful or accurate to stereotype those who balk at the idea of having their driving restricted as right wing conspiracy theorists. Owning a car, with the ability to go where you want, when you want, and to hit the open road to explore the wonders of the country, is at the core of Americans' sense of freedom and possibility. Car ownership and the freedom to travel is fundamental, and only a very coercive, authoritarian new system could ever hope to take it away.
It hardly seems necessary to politicize this, though. Most everyone would enjoy living in a 15 minute city, where they don't have to drive everywhere. That's a kind of freedom. Most everyone would also enjoy having a car so they can go where they want and need. That's also a kind of freedom. We can have both; it's not a zero sum game.
We can ponder why our cities and suburban sprawls have become so ugly and dysfunctional, but to me it seems obvious: we the people voted for those who made it happen. Suburban sprawl was somebody's idea of a good thing. Building the factories that employ people far away from neighborhoods was somebody's idea of a good thing. These things don't happen in a vacuum. Most people don't give it too much thought; they just adapt. When a certain model of planning happens over and over again for a hundred years, as it has for our American cities, well, we allowed it.
But, honestly, given the choice, most Americans would rather commute 40 miles to their job than live in a 15 minute city -- if it meant giving up their car. But they'd like both if it were possible. Living on south Whidbey Island, with the ability to ride your bicycle to the grocery store and the hardware store is great. But I'd bet when you have a load of lumber or groceries to carry home, you'll still take the car. Moment to moment, day to day, we make the decisions that are practical, economic and convenient.