what it already has plenty of, market-rate units.

I remember when Charles used to be more or less sane on housing issues. It wasn't that long ago.

"I remember when Charles used to be more or less sane."

There, I fixed it for you.

Canadian PMILF and my back-up huzband JTru is meeting with Twitler today. I hope he has the ballz to bring up democracy and human rights.

Your affordable housing comments are spot-on, Charles.

Charles one thing to note about refugees fleeing to Canada through the states. Canada and the usa have an agreement that refugees must make a clam where they land first. People are starting to push Canada to revoke this agreement, but so far the liberals government hasn't. There's already refugees that are in the process of being deported due to this. Canada is not a safe haven for usa refugees.

so, roughly a 10:1 applicants to dwelling unit ratio. this is not how you provide social housing, let alone solve the homelessness crisis.

Vienna knows how to do it, but it takes federal funds that are not forthcoming in America as long as there are Republicans: http://www.shareable.net/blog/public-hou…

Meanwhile, Alabama's crops rot in the field for lack of immigrant labor: workers vanish to avoid crackdown

Your housing comments ignore the missing middle. Those middle-class, middle-income folks who can't afford market rate housing, but are too "rich" to qualify for subsidized ("affordable") housing. Their only option appears to be moving to the suburbs.

"The market will not fix this morally significant problem. The city's government must intervene, must do something about the housing crisis."

Stopping the market (with our insane and racist/classist zoning laws) will not solve this problem. The market can solve *most* of this problem if you let it. And yes, we need the government to fix the rest.

We do not have "plenty" of market-rate units. I think you misunderstand the word plenty.

@8 Holy shit I agree with RDPence. (falls off chair)

"I remember when Charles used to be more or less sane."

There, I fixed it for you.

No, his sanity, such as it was, was always confined to certain narrow topics.

@5, keep clam.

@7, that Guardian piece is from 5 years ago.

Coffee, people!

Oroville is what happens when you do infrastructure maintenance on a Prop 13 revenue model.

Ideally, there should not be a need for a "sanctuary" city. The right route is to change Federal law.

Well, builders are always interested in building things that have the highest ROI, not the things that are most needed by middle and low income residents. When they run out of people applying to live in expensive condos, they'll consider building affordable housing.

But, don't hold your breath.

@12 embarrassing to say the least. The worst part is that I have been fooled before reading an older piece on the Guardian website.

@16 I also didn't have an issue with harvesting tomato crops in February. It gets worse the more I think about it. I am going to drink coffee.

I've seen outdated articles and videos featured prominently a lot lately, like on NBC sites. Cyber-rot is a growing concern.

@14 Of course builders don't build for the middle or lower classes unless they make money at it. But you're looking only at *new* housing. What's important is the *total* number of housing units. Build new ones, and that's where the more-rich move. To move there, they move out of (or never move into, in the case of the new more-rich Seattlites) older housing making it less expensive.

@19: The more-rich move out of older housing and are then replaced by more almost-as-more-rich, who pay more for the place than that last occupant did. It takes a lot of surplus housing inventory before things open up for The Poors.

@20 That doesn't make any sense. The almost-as-more-rich pay more than the more-rich can pay? Unless you're talking about the price they paid in the past that's just backwards.

Think about what sets the cheapest rent in the city. It's the amount someone just priced out of the market can pay (the "marginal renter"). Adding units of any kind, anywhere in the city means this marginal renter and many more can now afford to live here. There's just physically more units in the city, which means more people can afford to live here. However you shuffle people around this has to happen. Which fundamentally means the rent on these cheapest units drops.

@22 Yes. Only 11% of our land area is set aside for multifamily buildings (with most of this being very limited in height and density). Compare that to single family zoning which is between 55% and 65% of our land area (depending on how you measure). Renters should be outraged by these policies, as should anyone that doesn't want to pay an outrageous amount for their home. And, honestly, the Stranger should be too.

@19:

Except that, in our current situation, that's not what's happening, for the simple reason that hundreds of people are arriving every day, many of whom are being offered six-figure salaries right out of the starting gate. So they're not moving out of older housing to take space in the newly built units, they're going to those FIRST. Meanwhile, there's a dearth of older housing in a range affordable to middle and lower-class workers, because THOSE landlords keep jacking up the rents in the hopes of attracting some of those new more-rich Seattleites. And the 10,000 new units expected to go on-market this year are all at market rate, so there's no downward pressure to keep older units affordable, because even that large number isn't even keeping up with demand.

@24 Try to think of things comparatively. If 10k of these more-rich people get new jobs and move here next year, which scenario is better for the existing renter? The one where we add 10k housing units to the city, or not building these units? In the first case you're adding as many new homes as there are new people, which means they won't need to touch those existing homes. In the second case are they just going to give up and move away? Of course not - they have high-paying jobs here. They'll rent/buy the older units.

Because the cheapest rent is set by that "marginal renter" that can't quite afford rent here, and since you've displaced 10k households with those 10k new residents, this new cheapest rent is set at the price that the person 10k people up the income curve can pay compared to our "marginal renter".

@25 except building new housing usually means the tear down of a low rent producing structure. So you can build 10k new units that will be priced at the upper end of the market but ~5k low end units will be destroyed in the process.

@25:

Except that your order of magnitude is off - by quite a bit. Roughly 240 people PER DAY are moving into the Seattle area; that comes out to more than 85,000 per year, which is actually slightly less than the 86,000-plus who moved here between April 2015 and April 2016, according to the article. We're the the fourth most rapidly growing city in the nation, increasing our population by around 2.4% each year. Given that reality,10,000 units of new, market rate housing, while certainly better than nothing, only makes a mere dent in the supply-side of the equation, and doesn't come anywhere close to meeting the demand-side, so there's continuous UPWARD pressure on the market. as the gap between the number of people moving in and the number of available units - at any price, but most definitely predominately on the higher-end - continues to widen. We literally cannot build units quickly enough to satisfy the insatiable demand, so the amount your "marginal renter" is required to pay in order to stay competitive in the market keeps going up, not down.

@28 -- It doesn't have to be that way. People could build tens of thousands of new units without destroying an old one, if you allowed them to. These, by their very nature, are very cheap to build, since they don't require getting rid of old units and construction costs are relatively cheap. As a result, it makes sense to build them even if rents are low. We could see a lot of them. All it would take is a change of the law.

It is only a bizarre set of laws that result in getting rid of old apartments. Even the oldest, cheapest apartment out there is worth something (as anyone who rents can tell you). Why would you throw away that money, just to build a new set of apartments? Why not start by building on empty lots, or next to houses. For that matter, why tear down a small house and replace it with a huge house, when you would make way more money building townhouses, or a dozen apartments? The answer is because you aren't allowed to! The city puts restrictions on density in most of the city, and the result is only a handful of places where you can build. Thus people tear down small apartment buildings because it is the old available land.

The market is demanding more units, not the conversion of small units to luxury units. That is why Apodments are illegal. Otherwise, why outlaw them? If it really was the case that wealth -- not overall demand -- was the biggest problem, then developers wouldn't built out to maximum density. You would see new buildings with one unit per floor, or old apartment buildings being replaced by houses. None of that is happening -- despite laws that encourage it -- because what is driving the market more than anything is simply large spread demand.

I don't know why Charles won't call this what it is: an anti-competitive trust. A monopoly, if you will, of home owners. I own my own house, but I can't build apartments next to it, even if those apartments are smaller than my neighbor's house. The result is pretty much what you would expect from any monopoly: High prices, attempts made to skirt the law, frustration, a lottery system (for the poor) and people either putting up with it, or avoiding the market entirely.

Oops, that was supposed to be @26, although the comment can be applied more generally -- the law is stifling supply, which is why (given the high demand) costs keep going up. Change the law and allow a lot more units to be built and they will be built, and rents won't go up as quickly (or will actually drop).

@26 The ratio is actually around 1:10 for demolished:new units. That said, it doesn't matter the number of demolished units - what matters to affordability is the number of added units (new - demolished). That's the only thing that will decide which renter is the new "marginal renter".

@27 Sorry if I implied I was using real numbers - I certainly wasn't, it was a thought experiment.

I think we're close to agreeing on the fundamentals. We both seem to agree that the reason rents have been shooting upward is that people are moving in faster than we are building units. Excellent.

Now I need to convince you of another fundamental: the reason we can't build as much as we need is that we're only allowed to build on that little 11% of our land area. The reason we aren't building even faster isn't because we only have so many cranes or so many construction workers, but because we've put a hard ceiling over most of the city, legally stopping us from building as much as we need to. Every new construction project is the result of a high-priced bidding war over the last scraps of land left in our multifamily zones. This is requiring higher and higher prices to start the next project, and to get higher prices they have to wait for rents or sales prices to increase enough to pay back for the land. Upzone a large amount of area and land prices for multifamily projects would drop off a cliff. Far more projects would start up, adding to the number of units available and comparatively drops prices. Upzone enough and you'll more than comparatively drop prices, you'll drop them concretely.

@28:

If that were the case, then would could also pose the question: why tear down a perfectly good SFD in order to build a new one? The short answer I suspect is: because there's very little profit to be made with reselling an existing older home or apartment building compared to putting up a new one, even with the added construction costs. What I'm seeing is the new development that's occurring tends to drop four or even six SFD's onto the footprint that used to be occupied by a single home: they're narrower, taller, and have essentially zero yard space per unit, so it increases density, while at the same time providing the developer with multiple profit centers, as opposed to just one per lot..

Apartment buildings constructed for the rental market may be a little different in this regard, but part of what we're seeing is the same increase in the number of units, only this time it's maybe 20 new units replacing the, say, eight older ones, and with each going for much more money, therefore increasing the likelihood of a larger profit margin per-unit.

@30:

Yes, I think we're mostly in agreement on this. And it's true that most of the land here is off-the-table development-wise, which certainly doesn't help the situation. But, given the huge influx of new residents, one has to wonder whether it would be even be possible to span the gap if zoning laws were changed city-wide to allow for more density. I mean, has ANY major metropolitan area ever attempted to build out on this magnitude? We would need two to three times the amount of current construction just to keep pace. And even if laws were changed tomorrow, it would still take many years of massive, on-going development for the market to grow to the point of achieving something along the lines of equilibrium between the supply and demand sides.

@12- i am calm, this is a legit issue, it keeps coming ip on cbc

http://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.3979364?client=s…

It is so rich how the Seattle's smug Leftists assure us they are so enlightened and special have the answers and yet they can't manage to house the working middle class or find anywhere for the homeless except gutters living in their own feces; or even fairly and equitably educate the tiny population of children of colour in their paradise.
The nation is in awe....

Charles still toiling away at the Stranger after decades when most move on after a few years. It is kinda sad that he has no other options and is stuck there after so long

@37: Well, the Leftists have plenty of solutions, but the conservatives keep voting down the solutions since they require new funding.

39
Conservatives;
In Seattle?
Are you joking? we can't tell.
Do you know what percent of Seattle city voters voted for Trump?
Sorry;
You'll have to find someone else to blame...

@41:

How about we start with you? I don't see you offering any solutions, so I can only conclude that makes you part of the problem.

@34 Cities have grown much, much faster than Seattle is. Look to cities throughout China for a recent example - some now overbuilt such that rent is cheap (not intending to say we could reproduce the overbuilding part completely - that was often government subsidized to boost the yuan). And that was during a national boom, not a regional one like we have. There are some temporary bottlenecks when it comes to construction resources, but I've known construction workers that cross the country and live in trailers to work a job. And as an engineer I've designed projects in Dubai from a Seattle office without ever leaving the country.

The fastest we can solve this problem, whether by private or publicly financing, is the time it takes to design and build buildings. Nothing will solve it faster, as we need more roofs to house more people.

I think everyone is crazy as hell to spend that kind of money to live in Seattle. I was born and raised there and moved eight years ago because saw this insanity coming. You have Cloudy sky 9 months of the year. I still struggle with major depression episodes because I was born and raised under a gray Seattle sky. You are in a subduction zone and there are major earthquake faults crawling through downtown Seattle. I'm laughing my ass off that people will pay that money for it! Good looking out when you get the big earthquake and/or Rainier blows. The year that I was born; there was a sign outside of Seattle that read "last one out please turn out the lights." This is hilarious to me.
it will definitely keep going up if China men keep coming into Seattle with suitcases of cash and outbidding your local byer. You're being sold out. China is buying Seattle. You need to put a law to stop it.