We've had this song and dance blown up our asses here in Seattle for 20 years with a series of Stranger writers cheering it on.

And look where we are now. So here's the spoiler: this will kill the last bits of cheap housing we have left in Seattle. Deal with it and move to Kent!

@1 Whatever, as a poor person, may I say: microhousing should be fucking illegal. Every person should have the right to a fucking complete kitchen in their goddamn apartment. It's not. that. fucking. expensive. If all we have are Micro-apartments, we are still going to lose a ton of people to Kent, especially families. We can't all afford monetarily and healthwise to live on frozen food, you asshole.

ROTFL! Libetards have been talking the shell game of “affordable housing” for 20 years while promoting their identity politics, “scream and the sky events” and “resist campaigns” all the while being on the verge of homelessness themselves. At this rate it won’t be long before Stranger articles are written on public library computers by homeless folk. Maybe Ed Murray or Hillary Clinton can help- not like they are doing anything at the moment.

@1 Cato the Younger Younger: What good is moving to Kent if there aren't enough sustainable wage jobs and affordable housing available, and crumbling infrastructure issues aren't properly addressed let alone funded by King County there, either, upon your highly recommended "Deal with it and move to Kent!" diatribe to incoming tidal wave of priced out ex-Seattleites? How many ex-Seattleites can live on pumping gas or working drive-thru at McDonald's? Good luck making the rent there in Southeast King County, too.
@2 kasa: 20 years later, after a one-bedroom with one garage parking space ($560 /month, way back when) in Ballard, I can't imagine living in micro-housing! What has become of Seattle is beyond sad.

Missing from this article are any actual statistics on how many multi-bedroom rental units are currently available, planned, etc. (I'm typing this from my two-bedroom apartment in Belltown, where our complex alone has several multi-bedroom apartments on offer right now.) After that, the article gets the hate on apodments, because gawd forbid we get creative with our housing solutions in the midst of a housing crisis*.

...use a market driven approach to get a desire result...ergo a tax credit...

A "tax credit" is not a "market driven approach," it's simply another way for government to prefer one outcome over another.

*Usage note: this is not the world-wide definition of "crisis", wherein immediate threat to human health or safety is implied. This is the American definition, meaning, "some white people have been slightly inconvenienced, even though they did not commit the crime of being poor."

A "targeted tax credit" is just another way of the government motivating the market to do something. (Paving roads is another example, since more development tends to occur along paved roads than along the unpaved kind.)

My entirely nonscientific observation on Seattle's current state of housing says our biggest constraint is the worldwide supply of construction cranes, since we seem to have most of them employed here in town right now. Maybe the free market can get in on that action, tax credits or no. :-)

@5 mistral: I disagree with your argument to deregulate the current Seattle building code. Revise it, but otherwise deregulation is a bad idea. Currently, what with all the luxury condos going in at rapid speed @ $2+ million a pop downtown, the only direction is up, up, up and in more ways than one. This is a glaring contribution to why only the wealthy can afford housing in Seattle. $750,000.00 for the most basic single-family home is nothing but profiteering capitalist bullshit.