Civic research and planning at operating speed.
The Burnham Civic builds the plans, the coalition, and the paper trail for a better-built Seattle, and every file below is built to end in action. The work is organized by domain. War & Defense covers the region's strategic assets. Infrastructure covers the systems the city runs on and the plans it forgot. The Accountability Series audits the institutions, one file per agency. Architecture holds the Skyscraper Series and the design standard. Development holds the Civic Works Series, the projects we intend to see built. The national docket sits under USA, precedents from abroad under International. MEMBERS items are visible to intelligence subscribers.
War & Defense
- ⚔ Water Treaty Economics ENERGY Two US-Canada treaties move hundreds of millions a year in power and flood control. Seattle wins on the Skagit, the US overpays Canada on the Columbia, and Seattle City Light charges its own customers three times Tacoma for the same public hydro.
- ⚔ MEMBERS Federal Levers FEDERAL Consent decree and federal infrastructure control.
- ⚔ MEMBERS Washington State Packaging Fab Project MANUFACTURING
- ⚔ MEMBERS 47 Shifts OPERATIONS The Seattle Unsheltered Response: 4 crew chiefs, 47 shifts, and a live operations map built on data from Seattle APIs.
- ⚔ Washington County Organizing Network NETWORK In 1772 Sam Adams started a network of town committees that became the working government of the thirteen colonies in sixteen months. Washington's 39 counties answer to the same state housing mandates, the same Department of Revenue, and the same Olympia agencies, and they answer alone. They should not.
Infrastructure
- ⚒ Seattle Dumps Sewage 87 Times a Year CSO Seattle dumps raw sewage into Puget Sound 87 times a year. The feds already control the fix through a consent decree and $192M in WIFIA loans. We mapped every outfall.
- ⚒ MEMBERS The Century Gate Lid LID Freeway Park was the Bicentennial lid over I-5. The 2020 study says Madison to Denny is buildable from $966 million, and the 2026 visioning has no design standard in it. Century Gate 1a is the arch at Seattle Center. Century Gate 1b is the lid.
- ⚖ The Federal Property Series FEDERAL LAND Every federal holding in Seattle, who has it, and what happens to it next. Nine files, from the Albert Kahn Ford plant on the sale list to the Locks. The list is public.
- ⚒ Seattle Building Material Standard CONSTRUCTION There used to be rules about what public buildings had to look like, and then the rules went away and nobody noticed for 30 years.
- ⚒ Seattle's 1909 World's Fair (AYP) 1909 Seattle hosted a world's fair the same year Burnham published the Plan of Chicago. One city got a century-long plan; the other got 138 days.
- ⚒ The 1911 Bogue Plan for Seattle HISTORY In 1911 Seattle had a master plan for transit, parks, and a civic center. Voters killed it. The city has been improvising ever since.
- ⚒ Wacker's Manual (Seattle Civics Guide) PLANNING Chicago gave every 8th grader a book about how their city worked and why it mattered. Seattle has never had anything like it.
- ⚒ Seattle Building Permit Tracker DATA Every active building permit in Seattle, who filed it, what it costs, and where it stands, updated continuously.
Accountability
- ⚖ The Accountability Series SERIES Nineteen files, one per institution: SDCI, SDOT, SPD, the council and the utilities, the state agencies behind the income tax push, and the homelessness apparatus from KCRHA down through its pass-throughs. What each one spends, what it produces, and who is responsible.
Architecture
- ☩ The Skyscraper Series SERIES What Seattle builds at the top of its zoning envelope: where the next tallest building goes, what the suburbs should dare, and the nine glass towers that show what happens without a material standard.
- ☩ MEMBERS Century Gate Design Standard DESIGN What Seattle's public buildings should look like.
Development
- ✑ The Civic Works Series SERIES The projects we intend to see built: a street circuit through the stadium district, a monument recast from seven tons of bronze, a corridor plan for Lake City, a second bascule at Fremont, and a fishing pier on Elliott Bay.
- ✑ MEMBERS Bloedel Reserve by Water LANDSCAPE The finest garden in the Pacific Northwest, the people the city is named for, and the water that was the original road between them. The operation file is for members.
- ✑ MEMBERS TBC Parcel Map INTEL An evaluation of Seattle's building owners, the quality of what they've built, and their responsibility for the long-term viability of the city.
"Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men's blood."
Daniel H. Burnham, 1907
National-scale operations. The format is the same. Headlines tell you what we found, tags tell you the domain, and descriptions tell you what we are doing about it. MEMBERS items are live operations visible only to intelligence subscribers.
War & Defense
- ⚔ MEMBERS The Centralia Fab CHIPS ACT Washington State has the workforce, the power, and the land for semiconductor packaging. The application has yet to be filed.
City Planning
- ☩ 1893 Columbian Exposition (Chicago) BURNHAM In 1893 Burnham built a city of 200 buildings on a Chicago swamp in 26 months and drew 27 million visits. Most of it burned in 1894. It is the founding event of American civic architecture.
- ☩ The 1909 Plan of Chicago BURNHAM Daniel Burnham's 1909 plan built the lakefront, the parks, and the boulevard system. It is the most successful city plan in American history. We are pushing to finish it.
- ☩ Burnham's Plan for San Francisco BURNHAM Burnham delivered a plan for San Francisco in 1905. The earthquake killed it. The bones are still visible. We are making the case to revive it.
- ☩ Burnham's Plan for Manila BURNHAM In 1905 Burnham planned Manila for the Taft administration. Most of what got built was destroyed in the 1945 Battle of Manila. The plan is still on the public record.
- ☩ Burnham's Plan for Baguio BURNHAM Burnham's hill town for 25,000 on a Cordillera plateau was drawn in ten days and mostly built. It was Yamashita's last HQ in 1945, the 1990 earthquake leveled the center, and it is still the summer capital of the Republic.
- ⚒ Wacker's Manual (Deep Dive) PLANNING In 1911 Chicago gave every 8th grader a book about how their city worked. It's the reason the Burnham Plan got built. Full analysis of the original manual and what a national rollout looks like.
Infrastructure
- ⚒ MEMBERS Twin Tunnels CASCADES Snoqualmie Pass is the only highway connection between Seattle and the rest of the country east of the mountains, and it closes more than 200 times a winter. Twin mega-bores through the Cascades along I-90 give the Pacific Northwest a year-round freight highway to Boise, Spokane, the Tri-Cities, and the national network. The Swiss did it through the Alps with the Gotthard. The operation file is for members.
Accountability
- ⚖ MEMBERS The American Revolution Playbook PLAYBOOK The Founders ran an eleven-year information operation: twelve documents and five thousand committee members across thirteen colonies. They started with a mailing list. We are running the same playbook today.
- ⚖ Federal Fraud Task Force Seat FEDERAL The White House established a fraud task force chaired by VP Vance targeting federal benefit programs. TBC sent the letter with the comprehensive accountability package on Seattle's homelessness spending, plus a Washington State companion section covering Bob Ferguson childcare grants, CCS IT waste, Sound Transit bonuses, and Cascade Bicycle Club policy capture.
- ⚡ Water Treaty Economics ENERGY Two US-Canada treaties move hundreds of millions a year in power and flood control across the border. Seattle wins on the Skagit and the US overpays Canada on the Columbia, while Seattle City Light charges its own customers three times Tacoma for the same public hydro. Who pays, who profits, and what a fair deal looks like.
- ⚖ Viva Voce: Public Voting in America CIVIC MEMORY Citizens used to vote out loud, in front of their neighbors. The Athenian Assembly voted by show of hands on the Pnyx hill. Rome voted aloud for three and a half centuries before Cicero spent his career fighting the ballot laws of 139 BC. John Stuart Mill, of all people, argued against the secret ballot in Victorian Britain. Jefferson and Madison voted that way at the Virginia courthouse. The last Americans to do it were Kentuckians in 1891. We should consider bringing it back.
- ⚖ MEMBERS Athens to America: Architecture and Democracy DIPLOMACY EO 14344 formally declares American democracy descends from Athens. 139 antiquities returned to Greece in 2025. The diplomatic and architectural implications are enormous.
- ⚖ MEMBERS Cultural Heritage Agreement TREATY The U.S.-Greece cultural property agreement expires November 2026. What happens next determines whether the Parthenon Marbles conversation changes permanently.
Housing
- ✺ MEMBERS HUD CoC Reform FEDERAL 24 CFR 578.11(b) allows HUD to de-designate a Continuum of Care lead agency for cause. KCRHA meets every trigger. If Seattle proves the model, it works in every city with a failing CoC.
Development
- ✑ Coming soon. Members only.
Architecture
- ☩ A Brief for American Ambition MONUMENT A titanium Prometheus finished and bound for Starbase, a 450-foot colossus proposed for Alcatraz, a Triumphal Arch and a garden of 150 commissioned statues rising in Washington, and the towers we have filed for Seattle and Redmond. Liberty heard the same objections in 1885. We filed in support of all of it.
- ☩ USDOT Beautify Transportation Challenge COMPETITION The challenge offers $650K in prizes for transportation infrastructure design concepts: bridges, transit hubs, corridors, and rural features. The professional tier pays $250K for first place, the deadline is May 13, 2026, and TBC is submitting.
- ☩ MEMBERS Greco-Roman Architecture: A Reader's Course READER Twenty-eight plain-English, textbook-quality sections run from the Mycenaean Lion Gate through the Pantheon, covering the orders, the temple plans, the Acropolis program, the Roman concrete revolution, and the throughline from Paestum to the Lincoln Memorial.
- ☩ MEMBERS Renaissance Architecture: A Reader's Course READER The 1414 rediscovery of Vitruvius in a Swiss monastery, Brunelleschi's dome and the invention of perspective, Alberti through Bramante through Michelangelo, the pattern books that taught the world, Palladio in Vicenza, and how Inigo Jones brought the language to England.
- ☩ MEMBERS American Classical Architecture: A Reader's Course READER The course covers two and a half centuries of the buildings of the Republic, from Jefferson at Monticello through Bulfinch, Mills, Walter, McKim, Burnham, Bacon, and Pope, then the 1962 Moynihan break, the demolition of Penn Station, the sixty-year drought, and the 2025 return under EO 14344.
- ☩ MEMBERS The American Civic Canon GALLERY A filterable visual library of 200-plus American civic landmarks, from the Early Republic through the City Beautiful and the Machine Age. Search by city, era, or style and open any image full screen. The proof, building by building, that we already know how to build.
- ☩ MEMBERS EO 14344 and the Parthenon CLASSICAL The White House issued an executive order declaring American democracy descends from Athens, then mandated Greek architecture for federal buildings. We were the first to connect this to the Parthenon Marbles sitting in London.
- ☩ MEMBERS Federal Architecture Audit NATIONWIDE A building-by-building assessment of whether U.S. federal courthouses and agency headquarters comply with EO 14344's classical architecture mandate.
Ideas for taking the model abroad. Burnham Civic began as a Seattle project, but the method is not local. Read a city honestly, publish the standard, build to it. That method built Chicago and San Francisco, and it built Manila and Baguio a century ago. It exports. MEMBERS items are live operations visible only to intelligence subscribers.
The Model
- ⚑ MEMBERS The Civic Restoration Compact EXPORT Everything on this site is a template: the accountability ledger, the material standard, the committee network, the World's Fair Index. A compact packages the method a city or a sovereign can license and run: the audit first, then the standard, then the buildout. It is what we are doing in Seattle, done anywhere.
Burnham Abroad
- ☩ Burnham's Plan for Manila BURNHAM In 1905 Burnham planned Manila for the Taft administration. Most of what got built was destroyed in the 1945 Battle of Manila, but the plan is still on the public record and still legible in the city today. The proof the method was never only American.
- ☩ Burnham's Plan for Baguio BURNHAM Burnham's hill town for 25,000 on a Cordillera plateau was drawn in ten days and mostly built, and it is still the summer capital of the Republic of the Philippines: a whole city, planned abroad, that outlived the war and the earthquake.
Precedents
- ☩ Napoleon's Elba BUILDER Exiled to an 86-square-mile island in 1814, Napoleon governed it like a sovereign state and rebuilt it in ten months: sixty miles of new road, a dredged harbor, reopened mines, a school, a theatre, a civil code. The cleanest test on record of what a real operator does with a patch of ground. Seattle has the same acreage and twenty years and has built none of it.
- ☩ The Building of the Vittoriano MONUMENT Italy spent fifty years and a mountain of white marble building a single monument to its own unification, and demolished a slice of medieval Rome to make room. Garish, unmissable, and finished, it is proof that civic monument-building at the highest scale is a decision.
- ⚔ Napoleon's Way of War DOCTRINE The doctrine rested on the corps system, the strategic square, the maneuver onto the enemy's rear, the grand battery, and a meritocratic army built for speed and concentration. How a capable operator forged a pile of disconnected reforms into a doctrine, and why a system that could not outlive its founder still lost.
- ⚔ Alexander's Way of War DOCTRINE Philip II built and Alexander perfected the Macedonian military machine: the sarissa phalanx as the anvil, the Companion cavalry as the hammer, siege engineering, and obsessive logistics. Eleven years and zero battles lost produced an empire that fell apart the moment its founder died.
Sovereign Compacts
- ⚑ MEMBERS The Emerald Century: An Invitation to the UAE GULF Abu Dhabi built Saadiyat, a cultural district at sovereign scale, in a single generation. The same patient capital that built the Louvre Abu Dhabi could underwrite a century of civic architecture in the Pacific Northwest. That is five projects at sovereign scale, the Century Gate, Halo Vista at Centralia, the Cascade Tunnels, the Independence Arch, and an architecture academy.
"Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men's blood."
Daniel H. Burnham, 1907
Latest
Dates are first-publish dates pulled from the live repository.
- ✉ MEMBERS The Only One That Makes Money
- Executive Order 14217 named four federal entities for reduction. Three spend appropriated money. The Presidio Trust has taken none since 2013, has generated more than a billion dollars, and returned $58 million in net operating income in 2024. Then the administration fired its board and seated its own, which is how you take over an organization rather than end one. The ask is to move it off the reduction list and onto the list of models. September 3, 2026
- ✉ The Federal Property Series
- Nine federal holdings in Seattle, from the 1932 Albert Kahn Ford plant the government has on the sale list to the 1917 locks it cannot afford to maintain. Surplus federal land goes to the city first by law, and Fort Lawton is what that produces after twenty-one years. The list is public and the files are for members. September 2, 2026
- ✉ MEMBERS The Fort Lawton Trust
- Congress chartered the Presidio Trust in 1996 rather than sell the place, and it paid for itself eight years early. Fort Lawton has waited twenty-one years for 500 city homes and has zero. Put Fort Lawton, Federal Center South and the Sand Point archives under one Presidio-style trust. Federal Levers now has nine levers. September 2, 2026
- ✉ MEMBERS The Century Gate Lid
- Freeway Park was Seattle's Bicentennial lid. The 2020 city study prices a Madison-to-Denny lid from $966 million and the 2026 visioning starts this fall with no design standard in it. Century Gate 1a is the arch, 1b is the lid, and Denny Way is the mile between them. September 2, 2026
- ✉ The Seattle Grand Prix
- Formula 1 turned Miami and Las Vegas into the biggest civic events in America. Seattle has the stadium district, the rail, and a waterfront backdrop no American circuit can match. A SoDo street race puts the city on the calendar next to Monaco and Singapore. Jul 4, 2026
- ✉ The Elliott Bay Fishing Pier
- Expedia opened the best stretch of working-waterfront beach downtown and stopped one step short. What is missing is a place to walk out over the water and cast a line. Build the pier at Smith Cove. Jul 4, 2026
- ✉ Going Global: The Burnham Civic Model Abroad
- Burnham planned Manila and Baguio a century ago and the plans outlived the war. A new International section collects the ideas for taking the civic-restoration model overseas, from the export compact to the Gulf. Jul 4, 2026
- ✉ Viva Voce: Public Voting in America
- Citizens used to vote out loud, in front of their neighbors. Athens, Rome, Jefferson's Virginia, Kentucky until 1891. Cicero spent his career fighting the secret ballot. So did John Stuart Mill. Jun 4, 2026
- ✉ WA Supreme Court Income Tax Case (2026)
- Five of nine WA Supreme Court seats are on the 2026 ballot. The court reads seven to two against the 1933 Culliton rule. Bloom, O'Donnell, Larson, Edwards, Stevens. May 25, 2026
- ✉ The Century Gate
- A federal classical arch for the American 250th, restoring civic ambition to federal architecture. May 25, 2026
- ✉ EO 14344 and the Parthenon Marbles
- The White House declared American democracy descends from Athens, then mandated Greek architecture for federal buildings. The connection to the Parthenon Marbles sitting in London had gone unmade. May 25, 2026
- ✉ The Heritage Materials Standard
- If you mandate classical architecture without mandating materials, you get fiberglass columns. Stone, marble, brass, and copper are the materials half of EO 14344. May 25, 2026
- ✉ The Lewis and Clark Argonath
- A pair of monumental statues at the Gates of the Mountains on the Missouri River: civic ambition that reaches the scale of the landscape. The idea drew 1.3M+ views on X. May 24, 2026
- ✉ Washington County Organizing Network
- The Stamp Act crisis was solved when towns started writing each other. We are building the same network across Washington for the 2026 court vote. May 6, 2026
- ✉ 1893 Columbian Exposition (Chicago)
- In 1893 Burnham built a city of 200 buildings on a Chicago swamp in 26 months and drew 27 million visits. The founding event of American civic architecture. May 6, 2026
- ✉ Burnham's Plan for Manila
- In 1905 Burnham planned Manila for the Taft administration. Most of it was destroyed in the 1945 Battle of Manila. The plan is still on the public record. May 6, 2026
- ✉ Burnham's Plan for Baguio
- Burnham's hill town for 25,000 on a Cordillera plateau was drawn in ten days and mostly built, and it is still the summer capital of the Republic. May 6, 2026
- ✉ The American Revolution Playbook
- The Founders ran an eleven-year information operation: twelve documents and five thousand committee members across thirteen colonies. They started with a mailing list. Apr 30, 2026
- ✉ Federal Levers
- The consent decree, the federal grants, and the infrastructure control points where Washington's accountability fight actually moves. Apr 26, 2026
- ✉ Gasworks
- The park, the contamination, and the civic argument over what the lakefront should become. Mar 22, 2026
- ✉ SDOT Accountability
- Six deliverables holding SDOT accountable on budget, bike lane usage, business impact, parking removal, advocacy influence, and emergency access. Mar 21, 2026
- ✉ The Bogue Plan: Deep Dive
- Full analysis of Virgil Bogue's 1911 plan of Seattle, what got built, what didn't, and what the city looks like now if it had. Mar 20, 2026
- ✉ Wacker's Manual: Deep Dive
- In 1911 Chicago gave every 8th grader a book about how their city worked. Full analysis of the original manual and what a national rollout looks like. Mar 20, 2026
- ✉ TBC Requests Seat at Vance Fraud Task Force
- The White House established a Task Force to Eliminate Fraud targeting federal benefit programs. TBC sent its KCRHA/SHA accountability package to the VP and FTC Chairman. Mar 16, 2026
- ✉ Seattle Permitting Problems (SDCI)
- It takes 18 months to get a building permit in Seattle, inspectors don't show up, and contractors leave. The data on how SDCI broke the building pipeline. Mar 16, 2026
- ✉ Seattle Police Staffing Shortage
- Washington State ranks dead last in police staffing for the 15th year. Here is what Tokyo, Singapore, and Dubai do differently, and what it would take to get there. Mar 16, 2026
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