Probably 300 hours a week to live on Queen Anne in a with a view and a nice deck.

capitalismsucks

No one is entitled to live in Seattle. That's why we have public transportation to the suburbs. Can't afford to live in Seattle then move to Everett or Auburn. Rent's are cheaper there.

But one just has to look back at The Stranger promising us all that if we built lots and lots of housing then rents would become more affordable. Remember that line of shit we were all fed?

It's too bad two of the recommendations (vouchers, and rental assistance) will do almost nothing. Without new housing supply you're just choosing who gets displaced. The only ones that win are the landlords, as these vouchers and assistance push up rents.

Every new unit built keeps a family from being displaced. Every other solution than increased housing stock is a band-aid.

"this process, known as filtering, does not produce enough affordable rental homes to serve extremely low income renters" Let's look more closely at this. Why doesn't it produce enough affordable housing? Because homeowners in cities lock down supply. Allow enough supply, and housing prices drop - and so do rents.

Let's do some simple math. 1/3 of $24/hr = $1387 per month. That's a significant mortgage for an apartment, certainly enough to justify building supply on its own if there were land available for building. The problem is our council is allowing only single family homes on 80% of the land where it's legal to build housing. And guess what - we aren't building any more SF homes in our city. So demand keeps increasing, but the only supply we're allowed to add is on that remaining 20%.

@5 Have you looked at the Seattle skyline at any point in the past 10 years? What you'll notice are the striking number of construction cranes, which are primarily engaged in building housing.

Yes, it is true that Seattle retains a large percentage of residential areas that are zoned for single family housing. But, despite that, we've brought on record numbers of new units in each of the last 3 years, adding 40,000 units since 2014, with something like 30,000 more units in the pipeline.

A single earner on minimum wage versus the cost of a 2 bedroom apartment is not a valid comparison, nor is a statewide figure for rent. Please use rational comparisons or I'll assume from the jump that you're attempting to be deceptive.

@4 Spot on, I couldn't afford to live in Seattle so I moved to Renton until I could. Now Im in Shoreline. #livingwhereyouwantwithoutthemoneyisnotreality

Sigh, we're SF, without the cultural perks

Why is a 2-bedroom the standard measure for someone earning minimum wage? Wouldn't a studio or 1-bedroom be the analogous size to minimum wage? Or would that not make the "results" as dramatic.
Fact is, most people earning minimum wage live in a studio or basement apartment if they have to live alone, or they get a roommate to help share costs, or they live with their parents because they're still in school. This 2-bedroom-standard, for a single minimum wage earner living alone, is a red herring. What's the second bedroom for, anyway?

"Wouldn't a studio or 1-bedroom be the analogous size to minimum wage?"

Or your parent's basement

@8 We've been adding jobs much faster than housing.

@4- If we HAD built a shitload of housing, we might be able to evaluate its effect. But we've built very little, and the zoning laws in place guarantee that what is built will be expensive. So there's no way to know whether we were fed "a line of shit" or not.

@6 is absolutely right. without increasing the supply, things like vouchers or rent control only re-jigger who is living in our rental stock but don't solve the problem. By discouraging people from moving out of their subsidized/rent controlled places, it makes it even harder for new renters to find a place. Increasing supply might not solve all of our problems tomorrow, but it is a necessary component of a solution.

And I kind of have to agree that a single minimum wage earner v. a 2-bedroom apartment is not a sensible metric. I realize the article also talked about other situations, but hey, they did use it in the headline which is kinda supposed to give you the gist of the story. I, and a lot of other people I know, didn't have our own places (2-bed, 1-bed, studio, or otherwise) until we were into our 30s and had gotten into a position to make a reasonable living. Having roommates didn't kill any of us.

I suppose we can have a debate about whether minimum wage is really supposed to support families permanently or to be something you do until you get some skills (and maybe we should). But I think the article is setting up a bogus comparison.

gosh, how terrible......oh snap, wouldn't this mean a minimum wage worker could just share a 2 bedroom apartment with someone else and just work 45 hours per week like everybody else?

@1 - capitalism sucks, it just sucks less than every other system

And how many hours would a minimum wage worker need to work to afford a two bedroom apartment in San Francisco, NYC?

Probably as much or more. Seattle is a big expensive city now. There are inexpensive big cities to live in, as well as inexpensive small cities, and even more inexpensive villages and towns, for those who prefer them.

"wouldn't this mean a minimum wage worker could just share a 2 bedroom apartment with someone else and just work 45 hours per week like everybody else?"

Yes, but they still wouldn't have a water view and in-house gym, because capitalism sucks.

@19

Well, Seattle is certainly an expensive city now, but I don't think I'd agree it's a big one. At all.

It's got less than a million residents. It's less than half the size of San Antonio or Guadalajara. Never mind global comparisons, Seattle is a small city even when compared only to other North American cities.

"some people have children"

Why would you have kids and no spouse to help pay the rent, while only having the skills for a minimum wage job and then also insist on living in a place you clearly can't afford?

Oh that's right, we can't ask those kinds of common sense questions.

It's almost as if their parents didn't explain life to them so they insist on becoming wards of the state.

@23 there aren't many cities bigger than Seattle. San Antonio metro area population is roughly 1/3rd lower than Seattle's; Seattle is the countries 15th largest metro.

Regardless, there are other huge issues with this study: Average rent is a terrible metric; both mean and median rents don't resemble the market facing low income workers. Furthermore, the "1/3rd of income should go to housing" metric was simply made up 50 years ago and people have been using it ever since. There's no logical reason for this to be the case.

Rhetorical Question: In the era where homebuilding was subsidized only by developer profits, we somehow kept housing costs low. What changed?

@22

What I have trouble wrapping my head around is a kid just sitting patiently in that second bedroom for 40 hours a week while Minimum Wage Single Parent is out earning rent.

I mean, even if the rent were slashed 70%, I'm still having a hard time seeing how that household would make ends meet without other forms of assistance.

Welcome to Seattle's favorite parlor game, "Who's gonna pay my rent?"!!

Welcome contestant number one. Who's gonna pay your rent?

Your mommy
Your Daddy
The government
or
You!

You have 30 seconds to write down your answer. Try not to embarrass your parents.

@25

The city council didn't pass and then revoke a tax on the metro area, they passed and revoked a tax on Seattle.

The "Metro Area" of Seattle includes Tacoma, for heaven's sake. "Metro Areas" are a bureaucratic fiction. There are a few places where the US census bureau's Metro Area correspond fairly well with what the locals regard as Pretty Much The City Basically, but Seattle is definitely not one of those places.

"life doesn’t always work out the way you planned "

Then wear two condoms.

" there are jobs in seattle that don’t pay enough for people to afford rent."

Give me one of those jobs and I can guarantee I can find a way to pay the rent. It's called roommates and longer commutes. Did it for a solid ten years without needing to become a ward of the state.

Plus I know how to use condoms, but that's just my white privilege at work.

@25

"In the era where homebuilding was subsidized only by developer profits"

I hope you're not referring to the postwar housing boom there, that was financed via massive government subsidies from the FHA and the VA Home Loans program.

15: No, you WEREN'T told that $15/hour would solve everything. It was something that had to be done, because it's indecent to pay people LESS than that, but having it was never presented as the moment Utopia would be created.

We're better off with $15. But we need to get rid of the statewide bans on income tax and rent control, and set up a state co-op bank so working people can come together and create jobs for themselves in workplaces they actually control, and we also need proportional representation in state legislative elections so that real political choice becomes a thing everywhere in the state. But even without those things, the fight over $15 is over, it was proved to necessary, and it would be a tragedy if it was taken away. But you knew all that.

Sniff.....

@34

Fascist!

@14:
No, it's not really addressed at all... never does it say why 2-bedroom is the stat of choice, or why living with parents, the most likely circumstance, isn't an acceptable option (or getting a roommate). This isn't an article, it's propaganda. There might have been a point, if it didn't overreach so badly. Minimum wage has never been enough to afford a 2-bedroom apartment, and that's always been fine, because minimum isn't aimed at heads of households.

@31 those are buyer side programs. Subsidies to be sure, but they didn't require builders to jump through hoops - they built and people bought at market prices. In the past I helped developers and non-profits apply for and maintain Low Income Housing Block Grant money - it's a regulatory hassle that is simply too onerous for many small-time builders; functionally it requires you hire additional staff just to deal with it.

In any case, it's obvious that the current system is not encouraging builders to build, and barely encouraging densification. We can continue down this path, watch rents continue to rise as higher and higher salaried workers are pitted against middle-wage earners... or we can try a different tack. You make the call.

I have never been able to afford a 2-bedroom apartment on my own. For that matter, I couldn't afford more than a 1-bedroom suburban fixer-upper when I bought my condo in 1995 (during a recession). When I was younger and moved to SF in the early 1980s it was very expensive and everyone knew you had to have a roommate if you wanted to live in a nice neighborhood. What's the problem? Just like Seattle is now. People have had roommates forever. You live in a shitty neighborhood if you want to live alone and if you want a nice neighborhood you get a roommate. That's life for us working stiffs.

@37

Massive subsidies on the financing side are still massive subsidies; you seem bright enough to understand that.

Private construction in Seattle is currently churning out huge numbers of new units. We'd probably be fine if something hadn't happened ten years ago to freeze out new construction-- something which had nothing to do with local zoning, and everything to do with the availability of loans.

There are acres upon acres of empty land in Seattle zoned for multifamily housing, just sitting behind chain-link fences holding gravel. The reason private developers aren't building on them has nothing to do with zoning, and everything to do with the fact that the land is in the poor neighborhoods south of I5, where developers are going to realize lower margins.

Nobody is going to break ground on any of that land until every last former auto body shop on Capitol Hill has been hollowed out, stuffed with six stories of high-rise condos, and sold to the computers-diddling children of the upper middle class.

And the poor will gradually trickle into the remaining older housing stock... right next door to chain-link fenced lots choked with the kind of weeds that can eventually take root even in gravel.