1. Luckily, as of 2016 our median household income is $83,500, so that's pretty close. I assume some people commute from outside of Seattle? http://www.city-data.com/income/income-S…
2. There are some strange numerology going on in this story. Monthly home payments jumps to $110k? That's quite a mortgage.
3. What does it mean if a median income family can't afford a median home? I think your (his) definition of "afford" might be wrong?

As usual, causality is backward. Housing prices go up iff both incomes can support high prices, demand is strong, and supply is weak. Slight modification of a Yogi Berra quote: nobody lives there - it's too crowded.

$170K in San Francisco/Oakland/Hayward. Maybe you all you pass a state income tax and bleed some surplus money out of your rich people?

Yea, I'm going to keep this up, cause you're still writing about things that aren't your regressive tax code.

TAX FOREIGN SPECULATORS NOW.

LOL these commenters that think housing only available to the median income is acceptable. Fuck the poors who are being forced out of the city, amirite?

Why Foreign Speculators? Tax Speculators *Period*. Seattle can not afford to have housing sitting empty right now, and at the end of the day, *Who* is doing the speculating is less important than the fact that we have speculators in the market at all.

@5 Some homes are cheaper than the median price. I'd say around half.

The core of this article is that incomes have grown substantially - not just among the richest, but at least all the way down to the median family income. This should be great news. Sadly, we haven't allowed housing supply to keep up, so it comes with the bad news of displacement for those whose incomes haven't kept up.

*this is what you get when you insist on having suburban-style zoning in what should be a city* Where are our row houses? Where are the large tracts of midrise apartments built for the less-than-rich? Why do we let single family homeowners run our city, leaving only 13% of our land zoned for multifamily?

@7 you realize the median income is still crazy high? You realize that's the median income because most poor people have already been priced out of the area? Incomes aren't going up, it's only that rich people can afford to live here.

@1, $110K is the income needed to support monthly house payments.

From what I've been told and read, you could have enough to qualify for a mortgage, you may even have 400 grand, 500 grand socked away, but you're bidding in many cases against 10 or so home seekers, many of whom that are willing to pay entirely in cash. So the next thing you know, you're looking for a home in places like Des Moines, Lakewood, Puyallup, South Everett, Arlington, much less Seattle or the Eastside. With giagantic pain in the butt commutes.

Shorter: Go be poor somewhere else

@8 Incomes are certainly going up. By definition. There are literally more, better paying jobs here. In most realities this would be excellent news. We should celebrating.

The only problem is we haven't built enough housing - this means the more-rich outbids the less-rich and they're displaced. What should be a success turns to a tragedy for many. And we're collectively doing *nothing* about it.

@9 It should also be pointed out that this is the price to *buy* a median home. This not only ignores renters, it also ignores people that already *own* a home. Your mortgage is not the same on year 20 as it was on day 1.

It's true that you can buy sub-$200K Bremerton properties with a yard and a water view... But a house won't be included.

The median Bremerton house price is closer to $300K, and that probably won't come with water views.

@12 "Your mortgage is not the same on year 20 as it was on day 1."

This is not at all what you'll see on an amortization table for a standard fixed-rate mortgage. What are you trying to say here?

@11, Incomes may be going up, but for some of us middle aged people who don't work in IT, the incomes are not going up as fast as the cost of living.

As a matter of fact, I know an IT grad that had a temp gig that he was recently released from who is having trouble finding a permanent gig. So it may be Bread and Roses for some, but I don't believe all the hype.

everyone dogs on Renton but its 15min from the city, has a sick park on the lake and as a city can fix potholes and fund a police/fire department. RENTON 4 LIFE

@10 - Exactly. But Seattle sure as shit wants us blue collar folk to drive into the city every day to keep it's infrastructure running and build and repair, all the while questioning the need for us common folk to have living wages, (and I'm not talking 15 an hour) while they practically give out free blow jobs to every six figure salaried techie moving here. Yeah, I'm not bitter.
@15 - We moved, (were shown the door) to Renton last year and bought our 1500 sf rambler for 300,000 with a big yard and the widest goddamn street I've ever seen. It's been an adjustment, but well worth working on. The hardest thing for us to come to terms with is the older conservative demographic. Next Door is a real eye opener sometimes for the "illegals!" rants.
We don't have the great walkable, ( RE restaurants, pubs, etc) neighborhoods like Seattle but if ya'll move here they will come!

@13 that is not at all true. We bought our house in Bremerton with water views in a really nice neighborhood for 205k in April. It is a starter home but that is way affordable for what we got where we got it.

@13 Sorry, you're right of course. But someone that bought their home 20 years ago does not have the same mortgage as someone buying today. I had been puzzling how the income required for the "median home" price doesn't equal the income the median household makes. The answer is that most households aren't buying their home today (and many others rent).

@4; @6- Scapegoating mythical foreign speculators is pointless and just plain factually wrong.

I'd like to see your evidence that there is any substantial number of houses sitting empty in Seattle (due to foreign speculators or any other reason). Why on earth would someone sink a lot of money into a house & then let it sit empty when they could be getting a return for renting it out? Hint-anyone who has been able to make enough $$ to "speculate" on a house is likely smarter than that.

@19 - So Speculation speculation? The worry is that speculative buying will in fact hit Seattle, as has happened in Silicon Valley and Vancouver BC.... And yeah, the houses in those places have often sat empty. The proposed solution involves taxing empty homes... So if you want to do speculative buying of Property here and not live here, then you would need to find renters. It is not so much a question of "Prove that there are empty houses owned by absentee landlords" as it is preventing the problem up front.

http://business.financialpost.com/real-e…

http://www.thestranger.com/features/2016…

@3@7 The median price is still high. Perhaps too high.

Vancouver, WA median index sits at just under $300k.
Seattle, WA median index sits at 730k.

That's a +$400k difference and about half of the homeowners in Vancouver work in Portland, so they're not cut off from a big city by any means where there are a multitude of tech opportunities. If you take away the adjustment that the tech sector contributes to the average income in Seattle, its still hovering between $50-60k which is about where it was several years ago.

The available housing inventories are in areas of Seattle that aren't desirable (bad location, locations with too many scary brown and black people, the houses themselves are shitpiles that will need additional $100k in rehab or some combination of this) or they're on the fringes of the Metro, so sure you can buy something in Federal Way or Kent but you'll be spending 2-3 hours (each way!) commuting to your job.

@20- I looked up the Vancouver study re empty homes. See http://vancouver.ca/news-calendar/city-r…

Among other things, they found that "overall, there has been no change in the percentage of empty homes since 2002" and " Census data shows that the percentage of empty apartment and condo units in Vancouver is about the same as other large Canadian cities."

From the summary of the study's findings:

The analysis of electricity consumption data in the City of Vancouver (CoV) between 2002 and 2014 reveals:
o The Non-Occupancy rate1 across all CoV housing units has been flat (4.9% in 2002, 4.8% in 2014)
o The CoV’s Non-Occupancy rate is consistent with and tracks the Non-Occupancy rate for the rest of the Greater Vancouver Regional District (not including the CoV)
o The number of Non-Occupied housing units has grown from 8,400 in 2002 to 10,800 in 2014. This increase has been driven entirely from the growth in the overall housing stock
o Apartments, which represent 60% of CoV’s residential housing mix, are driving Non-Occupancy in the City at 7.2% in 2014
o The Non-Occupancy rate for Apartments has been consistently 2% higher in the CoV than in the rest of the GVRD
o Single Family and Duplex Housing Units show low and relatively stable Non-Occupancy rates of 1% between 2002 and 2014
o The CoV rate is in-line with the rate for the rest of the GVRD
o Similarly, Rowhouses also show low and relatively stable Non-Occupancy rates of 1%
o The CoV rate is in-line with the rate for the rest of the GVRD
o All five of the city geographic sectors analyzed show similar rates of Non-Occupancy by housing type, with no significant divergence over time with the exception of the Downtown Peninsula that has seen a drop in Non-Occupancy from 6.9% in 2002 to 6.0% in 2014
o Non-Occupancy rates increase as the period of Non-Occupancy shortens from 12 months (4.8%) to 4 months (6.0%) to 2 months (10.3%)
o The non-Occupancy rates for each of these periods has remained stable between 2002 and 2014
o An analysis of Non-Occupancy intensity (days per month that a unit is unoccupied) shows that there are 2x as many units that are unoccupied at least 15 days per month over 12 months as there are units unoccupied for at least 25 days per month

I would note that this last point strongly suggests that a lot of the non-occupied places are second homes, not vacant homes.

This is hardly a picture of a city suddenly facing a crisis, and does not support the idea that there is a sudden influx of foreigners nefariously snapping up housing no one will live in and freezing out the locals. I am sure that if there in fact is an increased demand from foreign buyers, it would contribute to the increase in prices, but I don't think it is the whole answer. Again, here in Seattle, I have not seen any data that suggests this is even an issue.

As far as the situation in Vancouver goers, also remember that it was a hell of a lot easier for people from Hong Kong to get into Canada than the US ahead of the 1997 handover to Beijing, and many did so and brought their money with them. That is likely to be what contributed to the influx of foreign money. I have read (anecdotally) that many of these people don't live full-time in Canada, but go back and forth (which makes sense in light of the number of homes that are occupied part-time; see above).

My point is that we ought not to be wasting time addressing what is likely a non-issue (and that has the potential to whip up hysteria against "foreigners") when we could actually be doing something about affordability (like building more housing). .

@17, April was seven months ago and before the fast ferry started running. The word is out!

@11 - incomes are not going up in all industries. New jobs are being created, but we are importing people to fill them. As someone who has lived in Seattle for 12 years, i can tell you that the pay in most industries has been damn fucking steady. Just because a ton of new tech jobs are being created, it doesnt mean any seattle residents are seeing the benefit of that. Seattle only had so many techies to start with, so if those jobs increase we are effectively importing rich people into the city, which is uh, a problem.

@3 actually it doesn’t, the bottom half could all be price at media - $1

@7 the median is just the dividing line, it tells you nothing about how the data clusters around that line. Could be that the house prices cluster very close whereas income doesn’t

Please stay the fuck out of Bremerton.

@24 Unless we get enough tech workers to fill more than half the city, the median indicates that incomes are rising for people that aren't just tech workers. It's certainly true that some jobs aren't increasing in wages, but we're a prosperous city with a lot of jobs and a limited labor force - that tends to rise incomes, which is exactly what we're seeing.

Of course if we built enough damn housing it wouldn't matter anyway - someone with an unchanging income could continue to afford the same home, as new high-wage workers buy the shiny new ones. But we aren't keeping up.

@29 dude,
Year one - (100, 110, 120 130, 1, 2, 3) - median 100
Year two - (200, 210, 500, 110, 1, 1, 1) - median 110

What does the median tell you about the data around the median? Nothing other than half is on one side and half is on the other.

Thats why there’s other measures such as standard diviation that helps describe the data set further.