Fire evacuations mean more Spokane residents lack housing than ever: Spokane never had enough shelter beds for all its needy citizens, but providing enough wasn’t a problem for city leaders as long as those citizens were homeless. But with tens of thousands of homeowners under evacuation order from fires, the lack of shelter space is more apparent than ever, with demand from refugees causing a full-blown housing crisis. Spokane’s mayor, Lisa Brown, said yesterday that short-term rentals are gone and hotels are almost fully booked, the Seattle Times reports.
Seattle isn’t exactly setting a good example at fixing a housing crisis: Hundreds of families used to live in enlisted housing at Fort Lawton in the heart of Discovery Park, and Magnolia’s apartment building cluster on nearby West Manor Place—built on military surplus land—is one of the most densely developed residential communities in the city. Yet some Magnolians still claim building public housing on decommissioned army land on the edge of Discovery Park is impossible. Opponents have delayed the project for years, so successfully, The Urbanist reports, that the current environmental impact study includes assessment of a completely different potential site out on Aurora.
Yet there are even stupider barriers to progress in the United Kingdom: According to the BBC, a £430 million cable built to bring electricity to the people of Northern Ireland (good of the English to get around to it) had to be diverted due to the fantasies of transphobic children’s author J.K. Simmons*. It’s hard to parse the details of the story from the foreign language press, but apparently the cable was originally planned to cross a monument to a fictional evil child’s elfin slave named Dobby and was instead rerouted to pass closer to a documented Bronze Age burial site (“typically associated with human burial,” but it could be another elf) instead. Sorted then…