those on the street
way ahead of ya
there guesty.

@1 Take that to its logical conclusion, and eventually the people who stock the shelves and fix the sewers and wipe our asses for us when we get old won't be able to live close enough to the well-heeled to do any of that for them at all.

In the meantime we can just keep buying more comfortable cars to crawl along in on our choked interstates, I guess.

We are already doing that, prof_hizterial

"Many of these people are still homeless and, for the most part, excluded from local and national discourses on affordability."

The studies you cited were first published in 2006 and 2007. How do you know "many of these people are still homeless" 14-15 years later? Especially given the disclaimer one of the papers has, right there in the Abstract: "This study uses data from one HOPE VI development and may not generalize to a larger population, especially given the amount of racial and ethic diversity within this particular development." (Abstract citation from original publication, 2006, not 2010 digital republication. If you have a Seattle Public Library card, the journal is Housing Policy Debate, Volume 17, Issue 2.)

@10: Seattle's population declined rapidly at the end of the 1960s, due to the Boeing Slump. It did not return to 1960 level until the 2000 census -- and just barely, at that. That is the long period of low rents to which @6 referred, and their cause. That it came after the nationwide investments you mentioned simply strengthened their effect here.

@9: "...the first of its kind in decades. A wage increase then copied by cities all over the country."

The $15/hour minimum wage premiered in SeaTac, not Seattle. Very few persons in Seattle even talked about it until after voters in SeaTac enacted it. Also, Washington State's minmum wage was already very high by national standards.

Seattle has a reputation for progressive innovation, but that reputation is not always earned.