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While it's hard to quantify the impacts of speculation and foreign investment, the raw statistics of population growth demonstrate that we'd be having a huge pr

• closeparen 9y ago
  Although twenty-something tech workers may almost always live alone (or want to), this isn't true of people in general. If all 142k people were members of 3-person nuclear family hosueholds, for example, 56k units would be more than sufficient. I think it's insane to claim that any level of housing production is sufficient until rental prices approach maintenance costs, but it's important to remember that a 1:1 person:household ratio only applies if we're talking about adults who are not in intimate relationships.
• dionidium 9y ago
  Every single big, forgotten, rust-belt city underwent similar growth periods and somehow figured it out. This isn't an unprecedented or technically difficult problem to solve. Take a look a Detroit's population boom at the beginning of the last century: - 1900 285,704 - 1910 465,766 - 1920 993,678 - 1930 1,568,662 And you think 21st-century Seattle can't absorb 142,252 people? How did Detroit do it? They built vast tracts of densely-situated multi-story apartment buildings. Did that change the character of those neighborhoods? Obviously. So what? There is no mystery here.