Super Lawyers - Washington 2011

"People want to live here and so we have to accommodate them, but it has to be smart growth and it has to be growth that protects the environment and it has to be growth with jobs and housing."

of it—and putting it in Central Puget Sound. That is going to require over 900,000 new housing units and offices and factories and shops for a bunch of those million people that are going to have new jobs here. We are one of the areas of the country that is a great place to live, and that’s why people come here. That’s why companies come here. People want to live here and so we have to accommodate them, but it has to be smart growth and it has to be growth that protects the environment and it has to be growth with jobs and housing. This is my passion that I’m working on now and I’ll be working on for at least the next 25 years—and that is finding ways to connect housing and transportation and employment, and the way we do that is with high-capacity transit.

Q: What are you doing to bring that about?
A: I worked with a very broad consortium
of governmental and nongovernmental
folks last year and spearheaded a
grant application to the new Office of
Sustainable Housing and Communities,
which happens to be in the office of my
friend Ron Sims, who’s deputy secretary
of Housing and Urban Development, [a]
former King County executive. We got
the maximum grant—$5 million—for
Central Puget Sound to do transit-
oriented development action strategies.
That’s my most active current passion.
When you think of all the neat things I’ve
got to do, it’s going to be even better,
and as important as the Black Diamond
communities are going to be. … What we’re
going to be doing in Central Puget Sound
with transit-oriented communities is going
to be transformative of the region. We’ve
got to get people out of their cars and onto
mass transit, and we’ve got to get them to
live closer to where they work and closer to
where they can get on light rail.