Bellevue lacks dense development? Renton lacks dense development? Seriously, both are going through downtown densification spurts, particularly downtown Bellevue.

Postings like these that make my eyes roll. People in Seattle really do need to broaden their horizons and take that occasional field trip to the *gasp* suburbs: it's just not the same to peer and sneer at the shiny new buildings across the lake.

P.S. Today, from downtown Seattle, you can get to Bellevue on public transit in 28 minutes. Try it now, rather than waiting decades for your light rail train to arrive, if ever.

It's basic supply and demand. If you want lower cost housing, or even stable cost housing, you have to build more housing to equal the demand.

I don't know why so many poor apartment renters hate big blocks of condos going up, it is what keeps their rent low.

@2,

Not when their apartments are torn down to make room for them, it doesn't (and, in fact, this has happened to literally THOUSANDS of actual people).

You can build a shit load of $1300/month apartments at the mid to high end of the market, but it doesn't do a thing for those of us who rent (unsubsidized, I would add) at the bottom of the housing market. Not a damn thing.

Mr X

All thiving central city housing becomes very desirible - and rent - go way up

Maybe demand? Not mystery. Solution, long term lease, share the space and in the end, find the cheap neighborhood.

Sorry but your angst does not change the pattern.

Rents are tied to income since there is no fancy financing available to cover your monthly rent. Landlords often stipulate that rent not exceed a certain percentage of your monthly income. This used to be the case with mortgages as well, until banks relaxed their lending standards, creating the fast run-up in housing prices. Now that the false demand (people qualifying for more mortgage than they can actually afford) is evaporating, expect housing prices to fall back to more realistic levels. It's already happening. I think I saw an article about this somewhere... oh yeah, here... http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/bu…
Even though the experts in the article disagree, here in reality rent and purchase prices will fall back to affordable levels. Period. Higher density alone does not equate to higher prices. So let the idiot builders keep building, and let them build dense. It means more competition for your dollar as a renter or buyer. For all but the people who spent more than they could afford on a house, depreciating house prices are a good thing.

@3

It means your rent wasn't meeting the valuation of the property.

The landowner is going to get his value out of what he owns. If it isn't redevelop, it is refurb. Either way, whoever lives there goes to the curb.

Suggestion: buy a condo, get into a create a co-op. If you can afford rent, you can afford to buy. It might mean changes to your lifestyle to move out of a hipster neighborhood. With a fixed interest rate, your "rent" will never go up.

@5, while it's true that the principles you summarize are in play, remember that John Fox and Carolee Coulter are focused on displacement dangers to current residents and businesses. Not future ones.

It'd be cold comfort to a displaced Seattle mom that she might be able to move her family back from Tukwila after a few years.

And many small business owners in southeast operate on a shoestring with little access to credit - if they lose their spot, there might be no reopening the business. Their employees lose their jobs, and the owners have to go jobhunting themselves. In a tight labor market.

I really appreciate all the feedback Fox and friend are getting. It'll help sharpen their focus in using the green idea to fight displacement.

Do we need any more proof that John Fox is a complete idiot?

@6 Yes then we can by in...Marysville. We will have to buy a car. Then you're talking more and more $$$. Most of us pay astronomical rent because we can't afford to commute. Plus the dense-neighborhood amenities are very important to us. It's just not worth it. All we can do is make rent, count on a cost of living raise every year.

Supply and demand isn't nearly as simple as your corporate masters taught you in freshman Econ 101.

Let them buy condos?

Are these people for real?

"Today, from downtown Seattle, you can get to Bellevue on public transit in 28 minutes."

Wonderful. But who would want to go to Bellevue? Bellevue is for morons and poseurs who can't afford Seattle.

@10. What are you 15 years old? Corporate masters ? Really? Grow up.

I love John Fox on a personal level, he's a great guy, but this is just a bunch of twaddle.

Want to reduce your carbon impact? There are three big things you can do (the rest mostly don't matter):

1. Move to a big urban city - reduces carbon impact to 1/10th.

2. Stop eating beef (1/10th) or switch to local WA-grown organic beefalo/bison (1/6th).

3. Get rid of your car (1/10th).

All the rest is inconsequential.

Now, go buy a place NOW near one of the light rail stations before the housing prices go up. Because you know they will within 2 years.

@13,

Aw, did someone strike a nerve?

This bill marks a significant shift in the state’s Growth Management Act. Up until now, cities have been required to accommodate growth targets, but had discretion for how to meet that growth. In other words, where to locate the density. This bill mandates the location of minimum density.

What do the affected cities think of this?

John Fox fought the good fight to stop the Seattle Commons. His argument was that if we put a big public park - three or four city blocks large - in the South Lake Union neighborhood then all of the small businesses and cheap housing would be driven out by condos and office towers.

As a result of his efforts there is no park, but there are condos and office high rises. The worst of both worlds, thanks the the enormous failure that is John Fox.

Why, oh why do people listen to him?

@17, the displacement of small businesses and cheap housing became one hell of a lot longer process without the Commons. Helping people keeping the modest work and homes they have for awhile is not a terrible thing.

RE: "which is it, John? Do you want "an increasing portion" of our region's population to live in car-dependent exurbs? Or do you want to increase the supply of affordable housing in the city?"

The Displacement Coalition has always left the fight to "increase the supply of affordable housing" to the non-profit development and advocacy orgs, that's why they are called the Displacement Coalition, not the Low Income Housing Development Coalition - the focus being to try and limit "the continuing loss of low income housing in our city to demolition, abandonment, conversion, speculative sale and increased rents."

I only say so here, because where it's fair to take a look at John's analysis of the impact of displacement on the overall supply of affordable housing, I don't think it's fair to suggest he's somehow contradicting himself.

Density advocates can greenwash trickle-down economics all they like, but it's still the same old supply-side Reaganomics - you've simply replaced his mantra about the wonders of tax cuts with density-at-all-costs boosterism that rationalizes upscale new development and the displacement of affordable housing.

A market awash in easy money and the resulting speculative bubble had a huge role in artificially driving housing prices up - the sacred "free market" cited by density advocates is anything but.

@14,

So does that mean everyone who lives in Seattle and commutes to the Eastside should move over there? After all, Seattle commuters are emitting just as many greenhouse gases as Eastsiders driving into the City to get to their jobs are.

@16, excellent point - and the City of Seattle is exceeding its GMA-mandated density goals by orders of magnitude (even if it is failing dismally to fund infrastructure and amenities concurrently except by increasing the tax burden on existing citizens. The idea that "growth pays for growth" in Seattle is, to say the least, a myth)

@ 17 - sizable majorities of Seattle voters twice defeated the Commons at the polls because they thought the City had about 1000 better uses for $400 million tax dollars, and that Paul Allen's development projects ought to pay their own way rather than having the rest of us subsidize them (oh, yeah, and the counterpoint to that is that Commons supporters said no one would ever build in SLU if the public didn't pony up for the Commons).

Oh, and I would hardly call South Lake Union Park "no park" - lots of public money is being invested there, and most Commons opponents always said that the waterfront park was a worthy project (the $200+ million plan to reconfigure Mercer/Valley Streets to Paul Allen's liking, though, not so much)

John Fox responds:
Our point is that you cannot just consider the alleged positive benefits of promoting these levels of unmanaged growth whether around TOD's (Transit Oriented Development areas) or in other existing built-up urban areas without also factoring in and giving consideration to conditions on the ground within these areas and associated costs including environmental. No such analysis has been done by the proponents of HB 1490 who read in a book somewhere that 50 units per acre is a "tipping point" to reduce VMT (vehicle miles traveled) and on that basis they want to impose a one size fits all 50 units per acre. Check it out, these rail stops don't have capacity to support that density.... that's not responsible planning and even serves to push VMT the wrong way.

We're not saying clustering isn't good. It just has to be tailored to conditions in each area, and managed to encourage responsible levels that infrastructure can support and mitigation measures put in place first to prevent displacement, loss of trees, and preserve streams, and open space. These areas must grow to be sure but modestly as they are doing now (meeting their growth targets needed to support rail stops in fact) but with more not less resident involvement and tools in place that reinforce rather than destroys existing character. We think that's a better way to serve the environment (including the human environment) than slapping excessive one-size fits all holier than though density mandates on our communities.

There is something inherently wrong, inherently anti-environmental in the argument being made by the proponents of the Futurewise bill(and a few of your bloggers who dismiss the environmental costs we've cited in our most recent column) who tell us (lecture us in fact) that in order to save farmland, wilderness, forests, prevent sprawl, and now reduce are carbon footprint and save our planet - that in order to achieve those critically important values out there, those very things must be sacrifice here in our own urban communities. We must give up our urban tree canopy, embodied energy of older affordable housing and historic buildings, open space, urban streams, our cities affordability, its existing low income housing stock, long time small businesses, first generation immigrant shops...whatever it takes - all must be sacrificed... With the zeal of a fundamentalist preacher, that's pretty much what I was told by a Futurewise representative at last nights debate on this bill. It's blind faith without the science and its arrogant and being done at the expense and no regard for our communities. Heck, to them, all that other stuff just gets in the way. They're on a mission.

Ten years ago, there would have been no debate about the Futurewise Bill, it'd be called what it is - a pro-developer pro-development special interest piece of legislation...and a giveaway at our expense.

There is an alternative to sprawl on the one hand and excessive density mandates for Seattle with no regard to its impact on our communities. It's a poly-centered or multi-activity centered approach to growth. Half the downtown office workforce lives in the burb's and will continue to do so and one third to one half of those folks will continue to take their cars no matter what we do. Let's limit office expansion in the core - relocate some of those jobs to the other underutilized activity centers around the region and closer to where those folks are choosing to live anyway. Lets say no to carbon emitting gas guzzling 520 expansion(why aren't the anti-parking get-people-out-of their-car-enviro's joining the nabe's in this important fight or our fight against Mercer expansion - strikes me as hypocritical)... Then lets plan and spend more to provide flexible vans and buses and other mass transit alternatives to and from these other activity centers and at the region's margins so they have a real choice other than driving - flexible small scale service that would go where people are choosing to live and increasingly work (far from rail and our urban environs where we are trying to literally force them to live). Then we might also get land use patterns out there aligned with those transit routes running to those activity centers. The greatest cost to a transportation system - and the most energy consumptive is the cost of moving people longer and longer distances from home to work and this condition may actually be exacerbated if in the process of cramming too much growth in Seattle, pouring what funding we have for transportation systems serving them with none left over for everyone else and the bulk of the regions commuters. There is nothing more gas consuming and carbon emitting and less sustainable than land use patterns and "transportation choices" like these.