That's the Biltmore, Dan. It was constructed as a hotel (like Stadium High School in Tacoma originally was), and was quite tall for it's time. I want to say it was finished in the 1930s. Most contemporary apartment and condo buildings are built to be about four or five stories because developers are cheap and only the pricey units move quickly on the open market, thus ensuring a timely return on investment. Min-maxing at its best. Good 'ol Game Theory.

The so-called ‘Grand Bargain’ does NOT require developers to build more affordable housing!

It requires developers to either build affordable housing into their project OR pay into the city’s affordable housing fund.

Guess what developers are doing?

In my neighborhood, they’re tearing down older homes and apartments and replacing them with million-dollar townhomes and high-six-figure condos. There are a few newer apartment buildings, but with rents doubled of the units they’re replacing.

We’re getting density; we’re not getting affordability

Actually Hacksaw, the developers are building to the zoning height limits. Land is expensive and no developer leaves buildable volume unutilized.

Keep in mind that with our current codes, buildings exceeding a certain height (can't recall if that's 75 feet or 8 stories, but it's close enough to not matter) are considered highrises and are subject to added requirements - more expensive fire alarm systems, standby power in the form of generators (instead of tap-ahead-of-the-main which we utilize for midrises), etc. Bumping a new building up two or three floors often requires an out-of-proportion increase in building costs and infrastructure.

Additionally, there are issues with SCL and their piece-meal system and onerous vault rules, requiring developers to give up large portions of prime grade-level space for transformer access - which gets larger the more housing units you build.

Yes, we need more hoghrises. Yes, we lost a lot of ground with additional units which could have been built, but it's just not as easy to slap on a few extra levels to a midrise if we're not willing to look at some of the building codes and figure out ways to cut down costs.

This is great, except we're only talking 6,000 units, and that's like maybe two months of population growth.

The only thing we are missing are thousands of AirBnB units, or empty speculative properties. Vancouver Canada tried to build their way out of their housing crisis, they actually built more units than needed for the number of people that moved there, it didn't make one bit of difference in affordability. The only way to make housing affordable is to ... make housing affordable.

@5 I was going to make the same point. Over 75 ft is considered a high rise (that is the length of a typical firetruck ladder in Seattle) so making high rise's affordable is impossible unless you can get someone to foot the bill.

No No No No NO! High rises are not by themselves enough. NYC has plenty of high rises and yet 1 in 10 kids in public school was homeless / in a shelter just in the last year:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/nyregion/homeless-students-nyc-schools-record.html

You've gotta do more than build up. You have to build affordable. Public housing, tax the billionaires, subsidize affordable construction.

5 and #9: i would be fascinated to learn of any (reasonably) recent development projects that did not build out their zoning height.

@2 Yes it's correct that the developers have a choice between directly providing affordable housing or paying the city to do it.

I have to disagree that the developers who choose the latter option are doing something wrong, or that the city is wrong to provide this option. The collected fees are likely to build much more housing because they can be combined with federal tax credits and other sources of funding, while the affordable units included by developers in their buildings do not get that benefit.

The Seattle Times last week had a profile of three affordable developments built in part with city funding (https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/seattles-upzones-would-direct-millions-to-affordable-housing-what-does-that-look-like/). Every dollar of city funding was matched with $2-4 of other funding.

In my neighborhood, which is classified as a "medium" area in the MHA legislation, a developer has the choice between providing 6% of their units at subsidized rates, or paying a fee of $14.07 per square foot (http://www.seattle.gov/Documents/Departments/HALA/Policy/How_MHA_Works.pdf).

Let's suppose a developer wants to make a building with 100 one-bedroom apartments, 500 square feet each. They could set aside 6 of these apartments for low-income residents, or they could pay 100 * 500 * $14.07 = $703,500 in fees to the city. That amounts to over a tenth of the $6.8 million the city kicked in to construct the Arbora Court development in the U District. This building contains 133 apartments, nearly half being two-bedroom and three-bedroom units.

So under MHA the developer could choose to provide six one-bedroom apartments directly, or they could provide cash that leads to the construction of 13 apartments, several of which would be big enough for families.

Tell me again why it's so bad that we're giving developers the option to pay a tax as an alternative to managing low-income housing themselves?

I still think that fewer people through encouraging half replacement rate procreation (if I could make people gay, I would, for the planet) is the better option, for literally thousands of particular reasons (but primarily because I hate most people), but given the people we have, I'm all for high-density living. Of course, NIMBY Liberals don't give two shits about global warming (which is why they killed nuclear power forty years ago - not a good option for Seattle, specifically, given the fault line that's going to drop the entire West Coast into the ocean at some point between tomorrow and 500 years from now and its proximity to the earthquake radius of the Yellowstone Supervolcano, but a good option in many cases - and why the Democrats haven't proposed effective policy to stop global warming at any point between 1970 and 2018), so we still sadly have a minority actually intereated in solving the problem. And extra unfortunately, it's an overwhelmingly young minority, which means people with less wealth, fewer positions of influence, and of other forms of institutional power. This is why the youngs love AOC, and Bernie Sanders, for that matter - we're fighting for the survival of ourselves and our species, compared to people worried about whether marginal tax rates and market performance in their retirement years mean they can own a vacation home or travel in Europe.