Matt, sorry, but your piece wasn't all that informative about the new/revised legislation. Did you or Rich do an analysis of the original bill, and can you link to that? Without some context, there's no way to tell what the significance is of the "courtyard apartment" definition, let alone the impact of changing the definition from six to four units. Also, the headline of your post says the new bill "passe[d] with big changes," while your concluding sentence says it needs to pass the House by next week - which is it? (I realize someone else might have written the headline.)

Addressing infrastructure deficiencies when building housing seems like a good thing. To find fault with that is kind of weird.

Seattle is fortunate in that the electric distribution system is (generally) ridiculously overbuilt so there's plenty of capacity. But many of the sewer and water lines in neighborhoods that are transitioning from single-family homes to townhomes, etc are in desperate need of upgrading.

And the issue of fire hydrants is extremely important. The block to the north of Maison Vel-DuRay is going from one house to forty-four houses. Obviously, the city will need to upgrade the hydrant capacity.

Determination of whether there is sufficient water flow and pressure to meet fire protection requirements is a pretty simple engineering calculation. No delay there.

@4 "You can never build enough or fast enough to create affordable low income housing."

Bullshit. There are lots of cities that are far more affordable than Seattle. Holy shit, Tokyo -- the largest, most popular city on earth -- is more affordable. Not just Tokyo, but other cities in Japan as well. Cities in Germany are far more affordable than they are in Seattle. Different places have different systems, but they all have a few things in common:

1) They allow a lot more housing, everywhere.
2) The regulations to build housing are simple; the process for approval is quick.
3) They have public housing.

We already have that third one. But because building anything in the city is so fucking expensive, we build very little of it. Hell, even if we had the money to build a hundred thousand low income units, we couldn't, because of the zoning.

Arguments like yours miss the main point. You could say the same thing about any proposal. "You will never fully solve the hunger problem". "Vision Zero is stupid -- people will always be killed by cars".

Even if that is true, so fucking what? The point it to get more affordable housing, instead of less affordable housing. Reforming the historically racist, classist zoning rules will make housing more affordable. It is just basic economics. Zoning is essentially a cartel, which pushes prices up.

Just look around. Old houses are torn down, and in their place are put new McMansions, even though there is space for a small apartment, or rowhouses. New subdivisions in the city create big lots with big houses, since that is the only thing the developer can build. The people want more townhouses, condos and apartments, but those are only legal in a handful of places. All of this contributes to higher housing costs.

This unfortunately is a "one size fits all" bill. It sets a state wide standard for all cities and ignores the legitimate concerns of city planning.

Oddly enough, I suggest the biggest problem is the construction of row houses and back yard cottages as opposed to building larger scale buildings on arterials... where you get economy of scale and its more economical feasible to build more units at lower cost.

The real estate prices have increased drastically because interest rates are low. In the USA its not the price of the property, its how can it be financed. We saw the effect of that BS in 2007 and 2008... I suspect the population has a short memory.

@3, @5: Urban water supplies have always been ludicrously over-built, because the capacity of the mains gets determined by the amount of water necessary to extinguish a blazing house fire in a wooden structure. For modern codes, the building itself should provide sufficient protection against fire to make any further upgrades in the local water capacity unnecessary.

@4, @9: "I suspect the population has a short memory."

"In 2000, with 563,374 people, Seattle surpassed its previous population high of 557,087 in the 1960 Census." (https://www.seattle.gov/opcd/population-and-demographics/decennial-census)

That's right, it took forty years (!) for Seattle's population to exceed the number counted in 1960. In just a few years (2015-2018), Seattle's population increased by a number equivalent to the entire population of Bellevue. The long memory of negative/low/slow population growth left Seattle completely ill-equipped to handle the recent influx.