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The first online-only news site in state history to get media credentials to cover the state capitol and Seattle city hall, PubliCola has been called a “must-read” by the Seattle Post Intelligencer and a hot “New Media Mover and Shaker” by Seattle Magazine—which also cited our own Erica C. Barnett as the city's No. 1 news nerd.

Ask and You Shall Receive

City Hall, Politics   April 15, 2010 at 1:10 pm Erica C. Barnett

Earlier this week, I wrote about the apparent impossibility of getting a P-Patch plot in my neighborhood (I’ve been on the waiting list for more than a year), and suggested that Sound Transit might donate some of the vacant lots it owns along the light-rail line in Southeast Seattle for that purpose.

Well, this just in, via the Rainier Valley Post: The city is working to come up with sites for new P-Patches in 21 underserved “priority areas,” four of which are along the light-rail route. (North Beacon Hill and Rainier Beach are particularly underserved, with just a few lonely plots on the outskirts of the former and just one “possible site” identified in the latter.

The new P-Patches will be funded through the Parks and Green Spaces Levy, and the city is taking suggestions for locations at its web site.




  • http://twitter.com/GlennF GlennF

    There's an intent to get 500 to 1,000 more P-Patch plots open, my wife heard at the Picardo orientation a couple weeks ago up from what the city describes as “over 1,900″ now. Picardo apparently had a lot of turnover: we were offered 20 x 40 plots, which were too much to manage this year!

  • downbythefreeway

    I think a better title would have been “Why It's a Good Idea to Do Research Before Publishing Bitchy Blog Posts”

  • http://iangilman.com/ Ian Gilman

    Getting more P-patch locations is wonderful, but this post highlights another opportunity for improvement in the system: better information flow. Perhaps someone could start a forum/wiki for the P-patch community, so we can share information and connect with each other more effectively.

  • Pay attention to priorities.

    P-Patches should not be built on just any old vacant Sound Transit lot.

    Why? Because building anything (even a few planter boxes, a shed, and a fence) is building new realities. Realities that become accepted, that become constituencies, that allow low priorities (P-Patch for a few) to supersede higher priorities (parks for all or housing for all).

    If a highest and best use (not in a narrow economic sense– in a broader, sustainable-economic sense) beyond a p-patch exists… say, a park, community center, dense transit-oriented development, whatever… and is only hindered in implementation by normal economic cycles, Sound Transit should be very careful to exclude developing lower uses, and where it does not, keep very short time frames for their operation.

    I won't even get into the awfulness that is the current management of scarce P-Patch space… (explicitly separate from the issue of the scarcity of P-Patch space itself).