Final results for the neighborhood surveys. Ballard had more than 2x as many participants as the next most active 'hood. Click for full chart

When it comes to telling the powers that be about life in the neighborhood, Ballard may be good at filing in online surveys but they aren't getting a second chance to meet face-to-face with city planners. The Seattle City Planning Commission announced that Capitol Hill and Pike/Pine are getting a second shot at a neighborhood plan status meeting after the initial session in June failed to draw more than a handful of participants.

Here's an e-mail circulated to various Capitol Hill organizations about the second chance from Capitol Hill Housing:

The Central Area has successfully gotten a “redo” of their Neighborhood Plan Status Report Meeting due to poor attendance (for Cap Hill and P/P this was the meeting held in June at the Armory in SLU, also poorly attended). Info on this redo meeting is below. These are the meetings that the Planning Commission and the Neighborhood Plan Advisory Committee (NPAC) have been co-sponsoring (along with the online survey) to “check-in” with neighborhoods on where they are at with plans. Supposedly, info gathered at these meetings will impact which neighborhoods are updated next year, if there is a budget for it…

Because there are significant and overlapping areas between the Central Area and our neighborhoods (12th Avenue and Miller Park specifically) we (several NPAC members including myself) have been working with the Central Area to get Capitol Hill and Pike/Pine materials at this meeting too.

Sounds like we have pushback from the Central District to thank for the opportunity for a bigger, better discussion of Capitol Hill and Pike/Pine issues. Here's the meeting info from the planning commission:

Thursday, September 3, 6-8 PM at the Miller Community Center, 330 19th Ave. E   98112

 Please join members of the Seattle Planning Commission and the Neighborhood Planning Advisory Committee on Thursday, September 3 from 6 to 8 pm at the Miller Community Center for an important Central Area community meeting.

 These two citizen groups want to hear your thoughts.  Come and tell us how the Central Area, Pike/Pine and Capitol Hill has changed since the creation of their Neighborhood Plans. Your comments and input at this meeting will help the City of Seattle complete a status report that will look at how well your neighborhood plan is achieving its goals and strategies.

 This meeting will provide an opportunity to learn about your neighborhood plan, the projects that have been implemented, and growth and changes that have occurred since your plan was written in the late 90's.  We will explore issues such as growth, transportation, housing, economic development , basic utilities, neighborhood character, open space and parks, public services, public safety, and other issues.

 It would also be helpful to know your Neighborhood Plan and to bring it with you, so you can reference to them when needed.  So, here are the links to your Neighborhood Plans:

Central Area:

http://www.seattle.gov/neighborhoods/npi/plans/central/

 Pike/Pine:

http://www.seattle.gov/neighborhoods/npi/plans/ppine/

 Capitol Hill:

http://www.seattle.gov/neighborhoods/npi/plans/CAPHILL/

 

 

 

http://www.seattle.gov/dpd/Planning/Neighborhood_Planning/StatusReports/default.asp

 

http://www.seattle.gov/dpd/Planning/Neighborhood_Planning.  With questions, please contact David Goldberg at (206) 615-1447.

 Also, about the data from the online survey: A spokesperson for the planning commission says they are working to make an anonymized dataset stripped of all personal information such as names and e-mail addresses available. CHS will love getting its little hands on that dataset to make some groovy bar charts just for you.

Bus Plow Originally uploaded by AdonisPhotos

Many will say that Seattle's incumbent mayor Greg Nickels failed to make it through the city's primary and into the fall general election because of snow.

As much fun as we had playing on the streets, Capitol Hill also got tired of slipping on sidewalks. And some dangerous stuff happened.

But the weather wasn't really the problem. The problem was information. Seattle was hit with a situation that required systems of communication and information distribution that it did not have. The city's dying newspapers couldn't keep up and City Hall's various departments were too busy trying to dig out from underneath the snow and ice to turn to their antiquated systems of information distribution. They couldn't connect information to the neighborhoods and streets where it was needed. The County's Metro bus system fared no better despite its established Web site. There was no planned information core to power Seattle. And so it slipped on the icy sidewalks and tried to make...

Want to defend Capitol Hill? The Pike/Pine battle, it turns out, begins with PDF files.

This proposal for changes to zoning and the rules that govern development in the Pike/Pine corridor will be presented tonight at a public meeting hosted by the city council.

WHAT: Pike/Pine Conservation Study Open House
WHEN: 5:30-7:30p Tuesday, Oct. 14th
WHERE: Seattle Central Community College in Room BE 1110

The proposal document and the two studies that accompany it are full of interesting takeaways and datapoints about the Pike/Pine environment. Kind of cool to read such an in-depth study of an area you walk through every day and for the wonk inside us all, some things to think about when it comes to efforts to preserve things like gay or bohemian culture via the process of city government bureaucracy. I've done what I can to cull the best stuff and some important points but -- if you take the time to look at the documents yourself -- you'll see that it's too big a job for any one person. Hopefully a few neighbors can pitch...

This conversation has me working on a Capitolhillseattle.com census. Details to come. I'm in a measuring the collective kind of mood. Add in this weekend's KEXP's pledge drive promotion countdown of the top 903 albums of all time and this question was inevitable:

What's your favorite album... ever?

I'm data driven so will not argue with the numbers -- my favorite album, it turns out, is Morcheeba's Charango (unsurprisingly not on Rolling Stone Mag's list of top 500 albums). You?

While we're posting free commercials for happening dot coms, we should mention the debut of the very cool and very locally focused EveryBlock service here in Seattle -- here's the EveryBlock Seattle Capitol Hill page. On it, you'll find news, and fun items scraped from various public databases like the most recent 911 reports, construction permits, and, personal fave, health inspections (be careful with these -- some will put you off food for a week).

None of the content is unique to EveryBlock -- you can find this same info spread across the Internets -- but its value is in cobbling it all together and eventually, assume, learning how to bubble up the most important stuff so you don't have to dig through boring reports about the 15th Ave 7-11's lack of adequate hand-washing facilities. You'll even find a few posts from good ol' CHS in the mix -- though, it seems EveryBlock's fancy algorithm's chooses appropriate content by looking for posts with addresses in the text. So, if EB takes off, expect a lot of 432...

If there's one thing this world is lacking, it's good neighborhood infographics. Redfin's new neighborhood real estate data page for Capitol Hill has some useful visualizations of the local market. If you're considering making a move, the charts provide an overview of what is happening out there -- kind of like those partly cloudy weather graphics on TV.

This inventory chart is pretty simple -- shows two fever lines tracking the number of houses and condos on the market. What do you know! There's a dramatic uptick in condos available in the area.

These next two are interesting gauges of price conditions in the area. The red one is for houses, the second blue one shows condos. Both track a comparison of the average list price vs. the average sold price in $/square feet over time. Basically, the graphs show two indicators of price -- what people have been paying recently and what they're going to be asked to pay going forward. In the red home chart, you can see that the list line has crossed the sold line earlier...