Blogs Feb 11, 2014 at 8:24 am

Comments

1
Take Seattle and King County.

The biggest demographic group is single.

That says one or two bedroom apartment or small house or cottage.

Yet where are these except at exorbitant rates in a few restricted neighborhoods?

And at the same time, massive foreclosures on properties built for lifestyles lived half a century ago.

I disagree with your Socialism/Capitalism dialectic Mudede.

I think Capitalism can be a solution, but what we have is bad, bad, stupid Capitalism. To have Capitalism, you need intelligence...to see the market.

What we have is an out of control machine that builds and builds...for no one.
2
Charles, I know you love the blue instagram filter, but you really need to come to terms with the fact that it does not make your pictures look deep or otherworldy. It just makes them look like you have no idea how to light a picture.

Just get enough light and focus and it would look a lot better. Do you see how your obsession with making all your pictures blue destroys the detail and makes most of it a muddy, dark mess?

And not that I blame you for this since you are an amateur, but the wall you have included in the frame on the left basically destroys the entire image. Crop it out.
3
Develop non-profits that sell units to tenants. Gradually reduce homelessness and lift people up.
4
"yet another massive bubble to emerge (the bursting of which will hurt yet again the poor)"

No. Housing oversupply helps the poor, as housing becomes cheap. The only ones that will lose is land owners. In the last bubble that included a lot of middle-class in far suburban homes, which was the crisis. But if you're talking about building apartments downtown, the poor and middle class are the ones that win.
5
I imagine being a communist urbanist is a little tricky. The free market will happily supply plenty of the lifestyle you want, but you're against markets. Government is too cheap and powerless to build what you want. You know rent control goes against urban apartment building, so what are you left with? Subsidized projects paid for by a government that doesn't have the taxing authority to build more than a small fraction of the housing supply? That's not a terribly satisfying cause to fight for.

Try dropping the socialist bit in this context. You can pick it up for other things - housing the truly poor (we can surely find the funds for that), education, food supply. But let the market boom and bust and in the process build, build, build.
6
if you have a suggestion for how to create housing outside the "mind" of the real estate market, i'm listening.
7
Another problem with this, well represented by the picture you have posted here, is that rampant unchecked development means rampant unchecked destruction of the character and integrity of neighborhoods.

I know you are familiar with the concept of the flaneur. A real good question is: can you imagine a flaneur in Bellevue? With the progressive Bellevuization of Capitol Hill it often seems that every gain in urban density is a loss for urban ambiance and quality of life (not to mention affordability).

Developers are largely greedy cretins and should be kept on a very short leash. Much more aggressive preservation laws and incentives than we currently have in this city (do we really have any?) would no doubt help limit the scale and destructiveness of building bubbles.
8
There is plenty of cheap land available in the woods of north-central Washington which would allow one to build whatever type of housing they find desirable and would most certainly exist outside of the norms of the real estate market described here.
9
It would be nice to figure out some way to make common-sense, practical units that don't have laminate flooring and granite countertops (which somehow manage to double the value of the apartment), because the market isn't providing it, certainly not in Seattle.
10
Might want to get a handle on the number of parentheticals you include in these posts, Charles.
11
@9 It's not construction costs that make housing expensive, it's demand.
13
@11,

It's funny that you claim to be an engineer, but you have literally no idea how things work. Look up the construction costs for a new building, let's say 100 units, and get back to me on that.

Also, I am aware of how demand factors into it. There's high demand for "luxury" units that are the same old crap you get anywhere except with laminate flooring. Developers charge a premium for that shit.
14
@13 (sigh) Please click on my link. It uses data from 11,200 projects. Yes, you have to add in things like appliances, elevator, and parking, but the point is on a per unit basis it's cheaper to build a unit in a tall building compared to a short one because of land value.

@12 Always? When they bulldoze a mansion for the land and build hundreds of units are they each multi-million dollar units? Sure, new is generally worth more than old. And we can dive back into the supply/demand v. construction cost argument if you want. But the land value for Seattle homes is often significantly more than the value of the stuff you build on it. That comes from demand.
15
@12
New housing CAN cost more than what it replaces, depending on the density. Replacing a few houses with an apartment building creates more units, and hence the economics of scale kick in and housing prices for said units is cheaper than buying a house.
Those little houses all over Seattle are EXPENSIVE. I have never seen anything but luxury apartments that compare in price.
16
Wow...I am SHOCKED! Most of these comments are INTELLIGENT. Is this really the Stranger, or has someone hacked their IP address and redirected me?

Anyway, the issue is all the regulations on housing that go WAY beyond just ensuring safety. I read somewhere that there are COLORS YOU'RE NOT ALLOWED TO PAINT YOUR HOUSE IN SEATTLE.

We have all these regulations against high-density housing, which is by its nature cheaper than low density and better for the environment, and as a result what little high density apartments that are allowed to be built are very expensive.

Houston, however, has much lower rents because they don't have the crazy regulations Seattle has. If the city would just ease up on its regulations and allow high density housing everywhere in the city, we could slowly start to solve the housing problem.

And the housing bubble had little to do with housing itself and more to do with banks taking on risky mortgages because they knew, one way or another, the government would bail them out if things didn't turn out in their favor. If there was no promise of bailouts that would not have happened.

And rent control is illegal in Washington State. It has its pros and cons, but it is pointless to talk about because its illegal and it probably wont change any time soon. But the city could use tax incentives to encourage lower income housing development. That, plus easing regulations, should help a great deal.
17
And I just love how the author of this article just HAS to make fun of Houston.
There you can legally carry a plastic bag, have free speech rights, businesses are thriving, people are doing good for themselves and its none of the crap we have going on here in Seattle.
If the Stranger hates Houston, that is just one more reason for me to move there.
19
If America was not so obsessively and narrowly focused on the immediate, short-term result and if its markets were not indentured in the service of the remarkably uninspiring ideals of banks, the nation might actually realize the unity, creativity and freedom that has always been on its lips, but rarely sustained in its philosophy and actions.

Listening to conditioned minds spewing the fetid waste of a propaganda machine and wallowing in cultural indoctrination is a meaningless vanity, a pointless debate.

Americans are desperately in need of a philosophical revolution and a cultural evolution to break free of the shackles that so constrain their dialogues to mindless chatter.

A great difference exists between being informed by the past and being in the service of it.

Let go of your mothers' hands, step out of your fathers' shadows.

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