How Seattle Can Create Affordability
Seattle is in a housing crisis, not a land crisis. With 84 square miles in it’s boundary, Seattle is twice the land mass as Paris France, but a third of their population. Paris fits 2 million people in 40 square miles because it’s designed as a real city. Seattle is not. Seattle is a downtown of towers where most people go to work, and then sprawls out into a sea of suburbanized planning disguised as “neighborhood charm”. From time to time you’ll find lovely historic dense apartments, but those predate the zoning dominance that started 100 years ago. Seattle used to build like a real city, it used to have enough housing, and it used to be affordable to everyone from an office worker to a construction worker.
Zoning Artificially Constrains Housing
In the mid 1920s Seattle adopted the newly defined “single family zoning”. I’ve gone over why this was the case in other posts, but let’s just say it became the neighborhood dujour of the 1930s Segregation Era. After World War II Seattle experienced a growth with the rest of the country and filled out the neighborhoods with more single family homes as people flocked here to be part of the Boeing Boom. It was a sustainable design for a long time because Seattle’s population soon burst and remained stagnant for about 40 years. The housing supply was adequate for the small rises and falls of the population from 1960–2000. But then it hit a tipping point.
After Seattle’s population exceeded 600,000 in the year 2000 with the rise of Microsoft, suddenly we didn’t quite have enough space to grow housing. Instead of the decades before, when a 21 year old electrician could buy a house in Queen Anne, suddenly they moved slightly further out as wealthier young professionals took over the more desirable neighborhoods closer to the city. We leveraged our pockets of density known as urban villages (also rooted in racist planning practices), which kept things a bit more stable for another 10 years. But these pockets of density were shoved to arterials and still reserved over 30 square miles of Seattle to be single family housing, a housing type that consumes so much land and doesn’t share the quiet residential streets.
The rise of Amazon, and the ripple effect on the economy that attracted more baristas, grocery workers, attorneys, architects, teachers and even more of their competition, lead to the one of the biggest population booms the city has ever seen. From 2010 to 2020 Seattle grew by nearly 25%, an additional 120,000 people moved here. At this point, the stability the urban villages provided the previous decade were gone and we entered a crisis that saw annual growth in housing costs that couldn’t keep up with demand.
Seattle now has 760,000 of us living in this city, a city that has not experienced housing growth on 30 square miles of the 40 square miles we can build housing on. To illustrate the problem, if we gave everyone in this city a chance to live in a single family home, we wouldn’t have enough land. In fact, since we only have 40 square miles to build housing on, we can only house 467,000 people if it were all single family homes. That’s only 60% of our current population. With Homes + Additional Dwelling Units (ADUs) we just barely get there but have no room to grow for the next population increase. It’s not until we look at a city zoned for rowhouses, sixplexes or low rise apartments do we finally have some breathing room to affordably house those here now and offer a chance for growth.
How To Make Seattle Housing Affordable
Take the basic concept of buying a new or used car. The new car always costs you more, and the reason it loses $10,000 the moment you drive it off the lot is because there are enough cars out there to devalue your asset because it’s no longer new. New things always cost more for everything in the American economy. They require labor costs, development costs, and all of that flows upward with inflation every year. The used car with 100,000 miles costs 1/4th the price of a new car because it requires more work, is an older style, has aging parts and pieces and wealthier people just prefer to buy something newer anyways.
Now imagine if every time a new or used car came up for sale, whether in mint condition or beat up with the muffler dragging, you still had to outbid 10 other buyers to get even that hunk of junk for 300% more than it should be valued? That’s the housing crisis we have created through artificial supply constraints. The price of land varies neighborhood to neighborhood, but it’s always going to cost a certain price. And construction labor is always going to cost a certain price as well. I once heard a great quote by an architect who specializes in a wide range of new housing construction “there is no discount store to buy cheaper labor, it’s going to cost you $300 a square foot in Seattle no matter what”. What developers do is build as much space as they’re allowed after buying land, then sell it off with a rough profit margin of $200,000. Yes, we need subsidized, government maintained, rent controlled, stable affordable housing. But we also need affordable market rate housing. The more units on a lot, the lower the cost is for the buyer as you split the cost of land purchase, utilities, construction, etc. This is how we get away from the market that sells a beat up, muffler dragging hunk of junk car for $30,000 and instead let it sell for it’s true devalued price, when a new model costs $40,000.
Seattle Can House 2 Million
Imagine the things your city can have if you can affordably, and comfortably, create a denser city that grows your population by 263%? Your busses will carry more people and eventually justify upgrades to rail, your storefronts will flourish with more customers who can’t wait to buy your products or eat off your delicious menu. Your neighborhoods can be less spread out and less car dependent, meaning you may see more kids playing baseball in the street and less Uber Eats driving around to drop off takeout. Doing these things will check every box every elected official and planner wants us to do. Sustainable cities, fewer traffic deaths, less driving, more biking, and creating a 15-Minute City.
We can create an affordable, sustainable, equitable city that doesn’t grapple with growth, but welcomes it. It will also fix Seattle’s identity crisis of pretending it’s a suburb when clearly it’s not. This will finally restore and build on what Seattle was doing 100 years ago, becoming a city.
