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Will Seattle figure out how to deal with its new wealth?
- jseliger 9y agoThe 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-future-in-seattle-do-millennials-have-a-future-in-any-superstar-cities/ 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 https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/sf-housing .
- sbaoufbasfub 9y agoI 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.
- DenisM 9y agoI'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...
- kgc 9y agoAmazon should look into on-demand scalable housing solutions that you can pay for on a usage basis.
- burger_moon 9y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Seattle_since_1940#Boeing_bust:_1970_-_1985 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Seattle_since_1940#... This sounds similar to the current dependency on Amazon in the city.
- dacox 9y agoBuild out has happened in Vancouver, and it really needs to focus on building up instead. Pushing working people into neighbouring communities in the metro area isn't the worst, but it's drifting farther and farther out. Whereas closer cities already had their own communities, I feel like too many people are flocking to towns that have no reason to exist other than their (relative) proximity to Vancouver.
- DenisM 9y agoSure thing, I'm all for building up. Buildout does not have to be bad if you have public transport. I would take 60 minutes riding on a train over 30 minutes driving in a car.
- jimmywanger 9y ago> I would take 60 minutes riding on a train over 30 minutes driving in a car. That's not precisely the case. Did you take into account the time it takes to get to the train, the waiting time, and the time it takes to get to work after you get off the train? I was waiting 10 minutes (nominally from the train) from work. I had to drive 7 minutes to the train, wait 5 minutes (train was 10 minutes, and I like to get to the station 5 minutes before the train shows up) and the train is generally late. And then a 20 minute walk to my job.
- skinnymuch 9y agoYou can walk around during most of those in between times. Not so when just driving.
- DenisM 9y agoI see your point. I'll tell you where I'm coming from. Walking, in a pleasing environment, is fun, excersize and mind-clearing rest. Riding a train is reading time. Driving is neither and it's an addition stress of being on the lookout for potentially fatal events around you. In theory. In practice I still drive. :/
- ProfessorLayton 9y agoArguably, a city can avoid Detroit's fate by not relying too heavily on a single industry.
- saosebastiao 9y agoFirst step: not relying on a single company.
- njarboe 9y agoWould that be Boeing, Microsoft, or Amazon?
- patmcguire 9y agoThis 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.
- sbaoufbasfub 9y agoI could get behind that position, but what factors make you think the boom is sustained? I'm not from Seattle, so I'm kind of in the peanut gallery, but if Seattle's economy is based on a few large companies or a single industry, that would be a problem. What does the economic composition of Seattle look like?
- patmcguire 9y ago1) It's pretty diversified. Medicine, Tech, Aerospace. The area has cheap electricity thanks to the Columbia River, which is good for the last two. 2) Even if it's not, we're not talking about 10x. We're talking about maybe 1.5x or 2x at the very most extreme end. It's not like Vegas where there's endless desert to fill, it would take time to build that much around Seattle.
- freyir 9y agoAmazon, Microsoft, Starbucks, Nordstrom, umbrellas.
- ChuckMcM 9y agoYou 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.
- sitkack 9y agoDetroit died because US automanufacturing rapidly automated and stagnated at the same time, cutting a huge number of jobs. The city of Detroit had become addicted to the property taxes those jobs brought in, and never adjusted taxes to match the employment levels. People that owned their homes just picked up and left the city. While Seattle is tech heavy, esp in Cloud Computing, it does have diversification.
- chrismcb 9y agoWhat is the issue with Las Vegas? Other that it spreading out?
- ChuckMcM 9y agoLas Vegas with its collection of townships, the two cities (Las Vegas and North Las Vegas), the multiple jurisdictions and overlap of agencies, it isn't "wrong" per-se, it is just inefficient.
- Analemma_ 9y agoI 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.
- jmcphers 9y agoSeattleite 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/seattle-is-a-world-class-city-for-traffic-congestion/ http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/seat...
- tmh79 9y agoit is not bounded vertically. What Seattle needs to do is limit SFH (single family home) zoning, which right now covers ~80% of the city.
- jrs235 9y agoSounds like a georgist land value tax might work to fix the poor use of land in Seattle.
- trome 9y agoThe 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?
- shados 9y agoNot sure removing parking minimums is all that great an idea if the public transit isn't keeping up though. I'm also not very familiar with Seattle, but generally when cities just start building nilly willy, traffic become a real problem, which then limits how far from city center you can be while still having an acceptable commute, which drastically raises prices since people are not willing to live further out.
- Analemma_ 9y agoThis 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 9y agoYeah, 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.
- idlewords 9y agoA 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.
- walrus01 9y agoheritage 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.
- idlewords 9y agoSeattle and Vancouver need to plan for 8+ earthquakes. There shouldn't be a single brick building in either city.
- njarboe 9y agoThere have been seven large Cascadia subduction zone earthquakes in the last 3500 yrs or so. About a 500 year repeat interval. The last one was in precisely 1700, known from historical records. So, on average, the next one would be in 200 yrs (but could come tomorrow or even further into the future). Building new construction to survive such a quake is probably a good idea, but tearing down old ones seems like not the best investment in resources given such a low probability event.
- influx 9y agoI'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.
- sitkack 9y agoGive it 3 years.
- balls187 9y agoForeign investors buying up single family dwellings and turning them into managed AirBNB rentals is also a problem.
- balls187 9y agoAnd 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 9y agoDo 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.
- balls187 9y agoDo you have data showing that those districts are rich white people, and without large pockets of Chinese and SE Asian families? Median home price in Seattle is $722k (src: http://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/more-records-fall-median-home-price-hits-722000-in-seattle-and-880000-on-eastside/ http://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/more-record...) Median home price in Eastside is $880k (same source) Home prices have direct correlation to school test scores.
- walrus01 9y agoFor those who haven't been to Bellevue, this about sums it up: http://i.imgur.com/y1a7ZsV.jpg http://i.imgur.com/y1a7ZsV.jpg
- balls187 9y agoFunny enough Amazon has turned Seattle into that, but much worse. Small family run restaurants have been replaced by restaurants run by business-minded chefs serving overpriced and mediocre fare. There still exists some of seattle's former self, however Seattle is trending towards the bland and generic eastside, just without the parking and good schools.
- vesrah 9y agoThis article reads like trashy bragging to me. I must be getting old.
- clock_tower 9y agoFinally, a case where Betteridge's Law of Headlines might not apply! (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines)
- tsukaisute 9y agoI'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 9y agoYou 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.
- trome 9y agoThe 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/2014TrafficReport.pdf https://www.seattle.gov/transportation/docs/2014TrafficRepor...
- bllguo 9y agoCould 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.
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- matt_wulfeck 9y 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.
- saosebastiao 9y ago$878k is still not affordable, and Seattle is still not Vancouver.
- walrus01 9y agoalso, $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 9y agoMost 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.
- walrus01 9y agothere'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 9y agoThis 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 9y agoDid 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 9y agoAs 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.