Wait, Renton and Kent and stuff are higher rent than Seattle?

Rentonians, is this real? And why?

Rent for NEW units would be cheaper if we had fewer single-family homes and more NEW apartment buildings.

Bellevue’s the place with the huge residential towers, after all.

Easy solution: remove all parking requirements for all new buildings, rezone all SFH zones to the original 6 story MFH zoning, and replace all arterial parking lanes with bike/transit lanes. Allow fast permitting for 3 basic structural designs for MFH multi-income apartment buildings (full block, half block, and quarter block), which come complete with solar roofs (allow some variety in which solar roof install you choose - deck with solar to south, full solar with access common room - lanai exit with full solar).

And remove all design review for those three structural designs.

I like it. A report comes out finding that rents are growing slower in Seattle than elsewhere in the country, and the Stranger commentariat leaps into action to find a solution for this troubling development.

So easy Will!

Except for all the people who like their city the way it is.

Maybe you'll have those people sent to urbanist reeducation camps? Or shot if they fail to reeducate themselves?

So easy Will.

Carry on.

@3- Seattle would end up looking like East Berlin without any kind of design review and only three apartment building designs. Also, eliminating parking requirements will guarantee a lawsuit for every proposed new building.

another form of statistical gymnastics i would like to see is the following. A) I grant that the new construction units come onto the market at or near peak prices. that said, my question is because of that are we seeing the more humble units sliding down? I guess my point is looking at the lazy average, we arent seeing the distribution and raw numbers of units in what price range. I don't know, is that a useful consideration? to me it is

@8, I'm pretty sure East Berlin had design review; maybe a tad too much?

To add to Mistral's point - Seattle's new "tenant-friendly" policies are a major disincentive to offering lower-priced rentals. Where the revenues are lower, the extra costs imposed by city policies are relatively higher. Also, tenants renting more expensive places are much more likely to be able to pay the rent (i.e., less chance that an eviction would arise) and more likely to be able to pay the full deposit up front so that the landlord actually has some protection (which is, after all, the entire purpose of a deposit).

There is simply more business risk in renting to the low end of the market. Like it or not, that is where people are more likely to become unable to pay the rent. Landlords have traditionally had things like deposit requirements, or in the worst case the eviction process, to protect themselves against this increased risk. The City seems hell-bent on giving landlords reasons NOT to serve the more marginal renters.

@10 - agreed. Everything had to look the same. My point is that if you give developers a very limited choice of what they can build, it'll all look the same. And I bet we won't like it.