Will Seattle figure out how to deal with its new wealth?

http://www.seattletimes.com/pacific-nw-magazine/money-changes-everything-will-seattle-figure-out-how-to-deal-with-its-new-wealth/

by wallflower • 9 years ago

60 84 9 years ago

seattletimes.com

jseliger2• 9 years ago

The real question isn't about "its new wealth;" it's about whether the city will build enough housing to keep housing costs somewhat reasonable by building more housing, and whether it can accelerate its subway / light rail schedule: http://jakeseliger.com/2015/09/24/do-millennials-have-a-futu... . The housing issue is key, as California's failure to build enough housing has led to seemingly relentlessly increasing housing costs: https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/sf-housing .

sbaoufbasfub2• 9 years ago

I wonder if maybe there's a downside to making the housing affordable by building out. If you build out during the boom years, what happens when the boom subsides? You'll end up with a city full of run down infrastructure that the city can't support on a smaller tax base. It makes sense to me to expand housing, I'm just not sure how much.

DenisM3• 9 years ago

I'm all for build-out, but you have an interesting point here. We need some sort of elastic build-out scheme, so that if/when people move out it doesn't turn into another Detroit.

Realistically I don't think it will happen in Seattle, I don't see a lot of people moving out. Even if there is a technology bust, where would those engineers go? I doubt there will be better jobs for them anywhere else...

ProfessorLayton• 9 years ago

Arguably, a city can avoid Detroit's fate by not relying too heavily on a single industry.

patmcguire2• 9 years ago

This isn't a situation like the North Dakota oil boom, where there's a massive spike on a small base that's clearly going to end. It would a long time to build out enough to have the potential problem, and a long time to decline enough to have it.

Detroit is overbuilt for its population now, but it got a good 50 years of use at that size.

ChuckMcM2• 9 years ago

You can end up with Las Vegas perhaps. There is certainly a challenge there, and places like Detroit, where a distributed population places an undue burden on services.

Analemma_2• 9 years ago

I don't have enough context to know if it's enough or how much better we could be doing, but there actually are a lot of new housing projects in progress, and new ones getting started all the time. So we're doing better than the Bay at least.

But mostly they're coming from lots that were previously either parking lots or low-earning commercial property (for example, the McDonalds on Madison and Minor just got torn down a few weeks ago for a new apartment complex). Eventually those will run out and the only thing left will be to cannibalize Seattle's large and very unhelpful supply of low-density single-family housing. That's when the real problems and political fights are going to start, if the real estate market hasn't cooled off by then.

kgc2• 9 years ago

The problem with much of the single family housing is that it's fully packed in already as defined by the zoning laws. If they could build up, they would do it in a heartbeat.

jmcphers• 9 years ago

Seattleite here. One of the reasons it's hard to "just build more" here is that the city of Seattle is bounded on two sides by water (Lake Washington to the east and Puget Sound to the west). This means that there are far fewer square miles available for "bedroom communities" outside the city; this, in turn, has caused massive pressure on rents and housing in those communities that are still driving distance from the city (modulo Seattle's awful traffic, which is itself driven in part by geography and is among the 10 worst in the nation[0]). There's just not as much land to build on--and most of it is already built on.

[0] http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/seat...

trome4• 9 years ago

The terribly restrictive zoning hasn't helped, if we got rid of the height caps and parking minimums that kneecap growth, we would see many more apartments and condos being built. Why should a 1 bedroom apartment be over a grand in Ballard or Fremont?

saosebastiao3• 9 years ago

Seattle could increase its housing stock by 4x by building at the density of Brooklyn. It doesn't even need to do that much to become affordable. That isn't hard, it's just a matter of allowing it to happen.

tmh792• 9 years ago

it is not bounded vertically. What Seattle needs to do is limit SFH (single family home) zoning, which right now covers ~80% of the city.

walrus016• 9 years ago

being bounded on multiple sides by water/geographical restrictions is not really unique to seattle, however. Vancouver BC is bounded by the fraser river, burrard inlet and the ocean on 3 sides. The problem in Vancouver is not so much geography and lack of space, but the combination of massive foreign investment distorting the market and the fact that 90%+ of the city's residential land area is still zoned for single family houses. The 15% foreign resident home buyers' tax in BC has recently resulted in a lot of the mainland Chinese capital coming to buy homes in the Seattle area instead.

tzs• 9 years ago

If companies would consistently allow hours other than 9ish to 5ish, so that workers can commute outside of the morning or evening rush hours, then there is plenty of much less expensive housing available a ferry ride plus a short drive from Seattle over on the other side of Puget Sound.

If you have to travel to Seattle during the morning rush or home from Seattle during the evening rush, the ferry is terrible. There can be long waits for a boat and terrible traffic near the terminal. But if you can travel outside those hours it is pretty reasonable. Get up, drive on to the ferry, then take a nap, or read, or play around on your computer, or go up and have breakfast or a snack or read or enjoy the view.

If the company needs people to overlap, make a 9 to 5 shift for people living on the Seattle side and a noon to 8 shift for people on the other side, and that should provide enough overlap almost all of the time.

If a lot of people end up living across the Sound, it might even be worth considering opening a satellite office in Bremerton or Poulsbo or Silverdale. I'm not sure about Bremerton, but Silverdale and Poulsbo are full of office space that became vacant during the recession and has stayed that way. (BTW, commuting from a home in Seattle to an office across Puget Sound is fine even during rush hour, so if someone from the main office occasionally needs to work for a while in the satellite office it should not be much of a hardship).

chrismcb3• 9 years ago

Neither of those bodies of water are really that large.

Analemma_2• 9 years ago

This guy bugs me:

“It’s concerning that we’re ripping down part of our heritage and building glass boxes,”

You can't complain about rising rents with one side of your mouth and say crap with this with the other. Rents in Seattle are still rising fast (even after the Bay Area is starting to cool off a bit), and the only reason it's not significantly worse is because there actually are a crap-ton of new dense housing developments in progress, even if it's not enough.

btym• 9 years ago

Yeah, what exactly are developers supposed to do if not this? Seattle is not built in the best place for growth, we're surrounded by water. It's either denser housing or hour-plus commutes.

idlewords2• 9 years ago

A lot of the heritage buildings are not designed to survive the kind of earthquakes that Seattle is prone to. So you can either tear them down now for development, or let the Big One do it later, with great loss of life.

walrus016• 9 years ago

heritage brick buildings look quaint and cute, sure, but dying crushed to death by bricks and mortar in a 7.7 earthquake seems like a pretty bad way to go. There are ways to structurally retrofit them to modern standards, a lot of the 100+ year old buildings in Vancouver's gastown have internal X-bracing of steel beams and earthquake retrofits, but it's not cheap.

PhasmaFelis2• 9 years ago

I can understand his practical concerns ("Those glass boxes won’t have a Dan’s Belltown Grocery, a little pizza joint; you’ll miss out on the divey bars, the dress sellers"), and I agree, but people need affordable housing first. Charming neighborhood businesses are awesome and I hope there's a way to preserve them, but if only the rich can afford to live near those businesses, it's just another kind of elitism.

njarboe3• 9 years ago

I think this could be possible in the glass boxes if they had many small spaces of retail on the ground floor or two and sold them to business owners (like condos). I wish they would do that in Oakland. I like increased density and we need the housing, but it is a bit sad to see 20 individual lots get eaten up by huge condo projects. Even sadder to see the new construction go up in smoke though.

gizmo686• 9 years ago

Those glass boxes won’t have a Dan’s Belltown Grocery, a little pizza joint; you’ll miss out on the divey bars, the dress sellers"

Why shouldn't they? There is no reason you can't give the ground floor to bussinesses, and have living units upstairs.

influx• 9 years ago

I've seen a bunch of single family homes that were zoned in multifamily areas turned into townhomes. Seattle is becoming more dense, and not just in downtown. We're not San Francisco, thank god.

sitkack3• 9 years ago

Give it 3 years.

balls1874• 9 years ago

Foreign investors buying up single family dwellings and turning them into managed AirBNB rentals is also a problem.

balls1874• 9 years ago

And with all this new wealth in Seattle, Seattle Public Schools are still garbage.

At least with Redmond, Bellevue, Issaquah, and Sammamish, they invested in their public schools.

ksenzee• 9 years ago

Do you have data showing that the schools are worse than similar schools elsewhere with the same demographics? The districts you list have been full of rich white people since forever.

notyourwork• 9 years ago

Anyone with that wealth would probably send them to private school so I doubt they are concerned about the public school system.

ryuker16• 9 years ago

As a former airbnb host, I feel these problems are due to existing bad policies on new construction or zoning unless the city has a huge boom in tourism and not enough hotels.

It's a reflection easily corrected though(more hotels).

I've lived in one that did that and watched the demand tank some everytime a new hotel went up. City had removed limits on downtown building a a few years ago....prior to that airbnbs did so good that city told hotels to screw off because they needed them to meet high tourism demand...even legalized them!

vesrah• 9 years ago

This article reads like trashy bragging to me. I must be getting old.

clock_tower• 9 years ago

Finally, a case where Betteridge's Law of Headlines might not apply! (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines)

tsukaisute• 9 years ago

I'm a firm believer that Americans don't understand how to zone cities. In Asia (e.g. Japan) you can have beautiful high-rises mixed with things useful for daily life, be that small shops, restaurants, or convenience stores. Even Ginza has useful things if you walk a couple of blocks.

On the other hand, if you take Seattle's Belltown, there will be art stores, realtor offices, and other things you rarely ever ever need, and yet you have to drive five minutes to buy a bottle of water.

seizethecheese• 9 years ago

You don't have to drive 5 minutes to buy a bottle of water in Belltown. You can do that in a 5 minute walk, and there are multiple grocery stores within a 5 minute drive.

bllguo• 9 years ago

Could we not fixate on the choice of example? I'm not familiar with Belltown and I don't really care, I'm much more interested in the parent's point and whether it's true.

hunterwerlla• 9 years ago

I can walk across the street from my apartment in Bellevue and get food, furniture, and groceries but this is the exception even in Bellevue: outside of downtown areas many apartment complexes require getting in a car or bus to get anything.

trome4• 9 years ago

The point is development in Belltown has been highly restricted for decades, preventing dense, multi-purpose buildings from being built in that neighborhood.

Even the newer buildings being built right on Denny and Queen Anne Ave N in Belltown are entirely the creation of zoning, as they are height capped and forced to subsidize parking (which rents for $0.XX per sqft a month) over usable space that rents for dollars a square foot. Most of the people living and working in that area are using transit, with 70% not driving: https://www.seattle.gov/transportation/docs/2014TrafficRepor...

lunch• 9 years ago

I'll bite; Belltown has barely any bodegas and no grocery stores. The closest grocery store is Whole Foods in SLU or QFC in Lower Queen Anne.

However I think the real takeaway from the parent comment is that US cities are not designed for pedestrians[0].

[0] http://www.newurbanism.org/pedestrian.html

jseliger2• 9 years ago

I'm a firm believer that Americans don't understand how to zone cities. In Asia (e.g. Japan)

Your observation is astute: https://www.vox.com/2016/8/8/12390048/san-francisco-housing-...

shados3• 9 years ago

The big difference between most of America and Japan is that people on this side don't give a shit about each other. So if you want to be able to sleep at night without dealing with constant frat parties and the police telling you to just deal with it, your only option is to live in a low density area, with no shop around, on a small dead end street.

So people get very opinionated when it comes to zoning, and it ends up done sub optimally.

Put some teeth on laws that make it so a single person can make 200 others miserable with no repercussion, and all of a sudden most resistance to proper zoning will go away.

wil421• 9 years ago

You're saying Americans don't understand zoning because of one part of Seattle?

matt_wulfeck• 9 years ago

In Vancouver, B.C. [..] mainly Chinese buyers drove the average home price to $1.038 million in January 2016.
by January 2017, the average home price in Vancouver had plunged to $878,242 [...] in the wake of the B.C. government’s 15-percent foreign-buyer tax on home purchases

It seems to me you have a clear way to keep the market affordable for residents.

saosebastiao3• 9 years ago

$878k is still not affordable, and Seattle is still not Vancouver.

walrus016• 9 years ago

also, $878k is the median "home" price, which includes bachelor/1BD size condos, which skew down the price. The median price for a small single family detached home in Vancouver is still way higher than $1.4m. People are buying teardowns in the Kerrisdale neighborhood for just the value in the lot, 50 ft wide, at $2.1m.

smaili• 9 years ago

Most scary statistic (to me):

63 percent: Increase in the number of suburban residents living in poverty in metro Seattle between 2000 and 2015.

Also: Add to that the fact there’s no state or Seattle income tax, making wages and investment income stretch further.

Who's to say this will last? Once the gov begins to make larger plans requiring larger budgets, this nice benefit could easily be reconsidered.

walrus016• 9 years ago

there's no state income tax or seattle income tax, but the sales tax rate is very regressive and quite high (10.1% in city of seattle borders right now). This is burdensome to low income families since you pay income tax on almost all basic consumer necessities. State income tax that would scale to higher tiers for high-income individuals ($160k+/year gross) would be a much fairer system.

uiri• 9 years ago

This article reads like it is about Chinese immigrants (or their American children) who are moving to Seattle because San Francisco and Vancouver real estate have peaked. This wealth is only incidentally connected to Seattle.

This phenomenon doesn't really have much to do with the influx of Amazon/Microsoft/etc. tech workers.

mnm1• 9 years ago

Did SF/Valley figure out how to deal with its new wealth? That same answer applies here. The exact same thing that happened in SF and the valley is and has been happening in Seattle for quite some time, just on a slightly lesser scale. Hell, even the geography of the two places is extremely similar. Of course the results are similar. If I want to see Seattle's future, I look at SF's present.

EdgarVerona• 9 years ago

As a Seattle resident, I'd really love to see telecommuting become more widely used. I can understand the connection that comes with meeting in person, but as our teleconferencing, online communication, and even Virtual Reality technology matures, it would be great to see businesses embrace it and let you live and work wherever you want. It would reduce the financial pressure - both to employees and to residents of currently congested areas.

Will Seattle figure out how to deal with its new wealth?

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