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A group of techies is using data skills to alter Seattle's housing affordability

142 points by clebio 8y ago

castlecrasher2 8y ago
I've recently wondered why cities don't tend to spring up on their own anymore. Either that's true or I just haven't heard about it. Has anyone looked into this? I was going to bring this up as an anecdote but looking at this (http://www.businessinsider.com/federal-government-land-map-oregon-militia-2016-1 http://www.businessinsider.com/federal-government-land-map-o...) it seems to be true; a relative of mine lives in a small city in Utah and says he wants a couple acres but the land surrounding the city is federally owned, limiting his options. How was this land released to citizens previously and how has that changed since? Was it really just doling it out to farmers who have since sold it?
- betaby 8y ago
  Where I live(d) government owned land is rarely sold because it has 'protected' status either because it a wilderness protected area or future/previously farmland. That means land is not for residential/commercial development.
- 0x4f3759df 8y ago
  There's a few master planned towns that spring into existence, Seaside, FL, Jakriborg, Sweden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jakriborg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jakriborg
- gnarcoregrizz 8y ago
  guess: because the government used to give land away in the homesteading act, to encourage people to settle the west https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_Acts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_Acts
- api 8y ago
  The market may be saturated. There are lots of cities already and many of them have affordable homes. Why found a new city when you could move to Cincinnati, Lexington, Pittsburgh, or Cleveland? If you want really cheap housing you could move to Detroit or St. Louis.
- aphextron 8y ago
  >Was it really just doling it out to farmers who have since sold it? Yes. For much of America's history, you could literally get in a wagon, head out west somewhere, plant a flag, and the land was yours. This was true all the way to 1976. "In all, more than 270 million acres of public land, or nearly 10% of the total area of the U.S., was given away free to 1.6 million homesteaders; most of the homesteads were west of the Mississippi River." [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_Acts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_Acts But that's not the whole story. Another 10% of the entire US land mass (~200,000,000 acres) was granted free of charge to various railroad companies[0], many of which are still the largest private landowners in their respective states. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Railroad_Acts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Railroad_Acts
  - zapita 8y ago
    > For much of America's history, you could literally get in a wagon, head out west somewhere, plant a flag, and the land was yours. You also had to band together with your fellow settlers into armed militias to kill the people whose land you were squatting. Those are the same militias which are protected in the second amendment. Their original purpose was "killing indians". The secondary purpose was to catch escaped slaves. It's always fun to remember where our real estate industry comes from. It's also interesting to see the hidden connections between America's passion for home ownership, its obsession with guns, and its racism.
    - aphextron 8y ago
      Founded on genocide, built by slavery, maintained with brutal force. The American Way™
      - RestlessMind 8y ago
        I don't see anything uniquely American about it. More like The Human Way™ :p (You do realize that all the societies are maintained with brutal force, right? And pick any country, go back a few centuries and you will find conflicts with as many casualties as American genocide).
- drewmate 8y ago
  Much of the land in the American West made its way into private hands through homesteading, where farmers earned the land by improving (i.e. farming) it. It's worth considering what modern homesteading could look like. Perhaps large development groups could make deals to plant dense neighborhood seeds (e.g. multi-use buildings in grids with a plan to expand into an actual community) and pay for connecting highways in exchange for exclusive rights to surrounding parcels of land. There is a lot of federal land in the west that is close to existing development. Could it be used to create healthier cities in those areas?
  - gnarcoregrizz 8y ago
    And we were all making fun of China's ghost cities not too long ago...
  - icebraining 8y ago
    If you have the money to build a bunch of buildings in the middle of nowhere, is the cost of the land really a big impediment?
    - xyzzyz 8y ago
      If you want to build houses of similar quality to those built by homesteaders, it's really, really cheap.
    - drewmate 8y ago
      That's a good point. It would have to be the right set of circumstances: with unused land in close proximity to an existing city that can't manage to scale up because of entrenched interests. I suspect such areas exist (perhaps around Salt Lake City, or Las Vegas) and there might be a chance to make a true dense city in those areas rather than the sprawl that has developed naturally.
- BryantD 8y ago
  Not all locations are equally good places for cities, particularly now that the Interstate highway system is already built. Still happens now and again, though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seaside,_Florida https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seaside,_Florida
- psyc 8y ago
  This might help: https://youtu.be/3PWWtqfwacQ https://youtu.be/3PWWtqfwacQ
- jhbadger 8y ago
  Actually there are quite a few, with the classic example being "edge cities" like Tysons Corners near Washington DC - what was originally just offices and shopping has become a real community. But to tie in the zoning issues mentioned, places like Tysons developed in response to the stricter zoning in DC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edge_city https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edge_city
  - dsfyu404ed 8y ago
    People only build elsewhere when distance costs less than cleaning up the regulatory pollution required to build. The problem is that the regulatory pollution (crappy zoning) is so bad in certain areas and improves so little as you get further out that building a little further away isn't actually a better value.
- burlesona 8y ago
  I think about this too. Building more cities seems like an obvious way to help, but it doesn’t happen for many complicated reasons which I don’t pretend to fully understand. YC was looking into this at some point, I don’t know where they went with it, though.
- AnimalMuppet 8y ago
  > How was this land released to citizens previously and how has that changed since? It was doled out via the Homestead Act. Anybody could take the land and farm it. And what land did they take? Land that they thought they could grow enough on to not starve. What land was that? Land with water. The land that didn't get taken was land that had no water - not enough to run a farm. And it probably still doesn't have enough water for a subdivision, at least not one with lawns.
slededit 8y ago
Seattle was a dying city 30 years ago. Comparing historical housing prices would be highly misleading.
- seanmcdirmid 8y ago
  More like 47 years ago when Boring busts were still a thing. Real estate hasn’t busted like that since then, with only a down tick in the 90s along with the rest of the west coast.
gaius 8y ago
“We can’t have it so you can’t either”
gregimba 8y ago
The closer I get to purchasing a house the more I find myself pushing against measures like this. NIMBY exists to protect most people's largest financial asset.
- Cau5tik 8y ago
  That's one of the main issues here. Houses should be about having a place to live, not your largest financial asset. The selfish protectionism that comes from treating housing as an investment is why so many cities are so broken.
  - gaius 8y ago
    How is it selfish? People have got to save for retirement somehow. Company final salary pensions are a thing of the past. Investments in shares can go down as well as up. The government can’t or won’t help. What do you expect people to do? Sacrifice their own wellbeing for your unearned benefit?
    - azernik 8y ago
      > Investments in shares can go down as well as up. So instead, homeowners vote for policies that make sure that they somehow get an asset that is guaranteed to go up. That's an unearned benefit, it's one that comes at our expense, and it's an expense that they sure as hell didn't have to deal with when they were getting established in the world.
      - gaius 8y ago
        they sure as hell didn't have to deal with when they were getting established in the world No. Those people built the communities you find so desirable to live in, sometimes from scratch, sometimes by regenerating a dilapidated area. The value you crave would not even exist if not for them. And now that the hard work is done, you expect to waltz in and have it for the taking? Millennials think they are the first generation ever to live through hard times. While raking in fortunes their parents and grandparents could only dream of, working for tech unicorns.
minikites 8y ago
>When homeowners say they’re fighting to protect neighborhood character, Lubarsky says, “it really feels to me like they just don’t want young people in their neighborhood.” This is also almost always coded language for not wanting to live near racial minorities. This whole article is yet another example of baby boomers pulling up the ladder behind them. The millennials I know are angry and there's going to be a reckoning in the near future as it comes to a head.
- JBReefer 8y ago
  I think people are going to get rid of Social Security at some point. I own my apartment in Manhattan, but my family is very lucky in that we had an extremely motivated seller in a very underappreciated area, and that I have a good job. The traditional paths to adulthood have been broken by NIMBYs and a complete lack of investment in infrastructure after it was good enough for the Boomers. Something is going to happen - you can't pull the ladder behind you, keep everyone you don't like out of your neighborhood, and reduce mobility to protect your assets without serious backlash.
  - dominotw 8y ago
    extremely motivated seller = unfortunate person backed into a corner financially ?
    - JBReefer 8y ago
      He was a very wealthy person who worked for Microsoft, but thanks for assuming.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
  - crdoconnor 8y ago
    >I think people are going to get rid of Social Security at some point. The propaganda output of 1%'er think tanks has been consistently stating that it's an unaffordable luxury that will bankrupt the nation for 30 odd years. They have several ulterior motives for saying this. It's not just that they want to free up money for tax cuts -- stripping people of social security benefits also makes them more dependent upon employers, which employers really like. Wall Street would like to see that multi-trillion dollar pot of money privatized so that they can manage it and cream off fees. These groups are the ones pushing for social security "reform". They tried pretty hard under Bush (who was willing) and pretty hard under Obama (likewise). Still no dice though - too many votes to be lost still.
OliverJones 8y ago
The YIMBY movement (Yes, in my back yard!) is starting to be visible. And about time. (And, I'm a boomer, fwiw.) Check out this article. https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/04/where-yimbys-can-win/559001/ https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/04/where-yimbys-can-win/... The idea that the "tech industry" created this problem is just plain nonsense. Sure, the tech industry attracts young folks to creative urban centers and pays them a bit of money. But their parents (my generation) gave them birth and gave them expectations of prosperity.It's selfish to then blame them for wanting to live where the good jobs are. This problem was created by restrictive zoning. And it will be solved by changing zoning laws. And the restrictive zoning laws come from people who say, "Oh no, those people moving into new apartments will crowd our schools and our streets. We can't have that!" Whose schools are they? Whose streets are they? The phrase "affordable housing" has come to mean "cheap housing for poor people." That's stupid. Affordable housing is good for everybody. The basic law of supply and demand teaches us that increasing the supply of housing will lower the price. To address homelessness, build homes. Government (who exist to serve people) can start to approach this problem by partly assessing property based on nominal beds per square foot. Higher taxes on lower density housing will give an economic incentive to build more housing on existing land. Powerful companies should unapologetically press politicians, hard, for changes to these NIMBY zoning rules.
- maxsilver 8y ago
  I agree with all of the above, but it's worth noting that YIMBY policies economically pollute the areas they upzone with an influx of investment that can have disasterous consequences in the short term. Obviously, we need more housing, which needs to get built. And in the very long term, "increasing the supply of housing will lower the price". But in the short term, increasing the supply of housing will raise the price of housing. And regular people still have to buy housing every single day, regardless of the daily price. YIMBYs have never had an answer for the short and medium term, and therefore like to ignore the short term and medium term, which causes them significant opposition from local communities at both ends of the spectrum. The wealthy people want to restrict zoning to inflate their wealth, but the poor/middle class people want careful applications of zoning, so as not to be displaced by the violent increase in 'market rate' for the next 5 to 20 years while we wait for the increased supply to lower the price. They can't just sit around for years while we all wait for the demand to fall -- they need housing to live in during that time, and have to pay for it at whatever the developer chooses to set 'market rate' as. YIMBYs have developer money behind them, so they will win this fight. But they have no answer for the short/medium-term economic pollution they cause, so they are hurting a lot of poor/middle class people they claim to support, and will continue to do so with each victory they achieve over the next decade or two.
notadoc 8y ago
The irony is all the people piling into the west coast complaining about the problem are causing the problem they then are complaining about. Instead they should all move to the midwest, south, or NE, where cost of living is a small fraction of the west coast. They can pay off a very nice house in full for less than the cost of a downpayment in any trendy west coast city, and they can easily afford to live a stereotypical middle class lifestyle - house, cars, kids, vacations, a stay at home parent - on a reasonable income, something which is now increasingly difficult on the west coast where cost of living is extraordinarily high. I sincerely hope that various companies start aggressively opening offices in middle America, the south, upstate NY, etc. Maybe someone should produce a few goofy TV shows about how 'quirky' and 'cool' and 'hip' those destinations are, turn them into the new cultural mecca for all the flighty trend chasers, and let the west coast housing mess take care of itself.
- deadmetheny 8y ago
  >I sincerely hope that various companies start aggressively opening offices in middle America, the south, upstate NY, etc. Maybe someone should produce a few goofy TV shows about how 'quirky' and 'cool' and 'hip' those destinations are, turn them into the new cultural mecca for all the flighty trend chasers, and let the west coast housing mess take care of itself. God, I hope not. California can stay in California, keep it out of the Midwest.
  - wu_tang_chris 8y ago
    Well it's probably not natives who'd be moving out there. Think of it as a polite invitation to transplants to go home.
  - alonmower 8y ago
    Man, fuck this sentiment. It's just as bad as the whole "get these foreigners out of here!" anti immigration sentiment that's taking hold all over. There's an exceedingly high likelihood that your family moved to the Midwest from somewhere else at some point in time. Cities and regions change over time, people move to where there's an opportunity for them to have a better life. Just because you were born somewhere doesn't entitle you to that place staying unchanged.
wiredfool 8y ago
20 years ago, Craftsman houses in Seattle were already unaffordable unless they were totally trashed, far north, or in a 'bad' neighborhood. They were, size for size, the most expensive form of housing on the market. Generally 1000sf, 2 bedroom, and 1 bath, I don't think I saw one under 225k. I wound up buying a skinny for 20% less money and 20% more space. (Observations from 1998-9, when I bought a house a mile or so from there). Since then, prices have doubled at least twice. I could never afford to move back to my old neighborhood.
- tjr225 8y ago
  Moved out here last year. I actually commute from down south...I want so badly to feel comfortable planting roots here but staring down the barrel of this housing market makes me feel like a tourist simply enjoying the high pay and natural beauty until I decide I want to buy a home back east. I am glad I am here but there is definitely an internal conflict I have to tolerate to do so.
csense 8y ago
> a housing market so expensive it’s throttling one of America’s biggest urban success stories. Decades ago, these tidy homes were cheap enough for schoolteachers and firefighters. Today, most cost at least a million dollars, and what was once a proudly middle-class neighborhood has morphed into a financially gated community If you want a house like that, and you're not super wealthy, find a remote gig and move outside the big tech-boom cities. Here in the Rust Belt, houses like that are very affordably priced. If enough people with tech-generated wealth start living and spending money here, it'll make progress solving the regional inequalities that are driving support for Donald Trump.
- majewsky 8y ago
  Later in the article, the point is made that many young people move to the cities because they actually want to live there. I can see that: I would hate living in a suburb where the amenities are miles apart and nothing can be reached by foot or bike.
  - kthejoker2 8y ago
    Detroit? Salt Lake City? El Paso? All I'm seeing is people demanding to be accommodated to live exactly where they want, even at the expense of the people who were there before they wanted to be there, even as there are plenty of viable options to go around. But oh no, they don't have Seattle's views? Cry me a river.
- phillipcarter 8y ago
  But I don't like that area. A house like that is not worth giving up the incredible outdoors lifestyle that the Seattle region offers. I'm happy to live in a well-built, quiet condo that I pay a bit more for than "standard" condos or whatever. Don't really need a house. But even these are nearly impossible to come by. There's practically zero inventory.
  - realbarack 8y ago
    FWIW if "incredible outdoors lifestyle" is what you seek and remote work is an option there are a number of better, cheaper places to live than Seattle.
0x4f3759df 8y ago
Fourplex upzoning also proposed in Minneapolis https://streets.mn/2018/03/14/fourplexes-everywhere-bold-reform-proposed-in-minneapolis/ https://streets.mn/2018/03/14/fourplexes-everywhere-bold-ref...
crdoconnor 8y ago
Somebody from his generation is going to have that one day. They'll be rich too. It's striking how much the media is attempting to foment intergenerational strife over issues that are fundamentally about wealth inequality.
kthejoker2 8y ago
It never fails to boggle my mind that we have cities all over the Rust Belt with ample real estate, state investment funding, and all the incentives in the world to attract people away from Seattle, SF, SJ, etc. - and instead the response is "let's ruin Seattle." Why not just ... move?
- WorldMaker 8y ago
  Same reason Y Combinator doesn't have a bigger presence in the "Rust Belt"? Network effects. If all the people are already on the West Coast what incentive is there to encourage relocation away from the West Coast as opposed to the continual brain drain from the rest of the country out to the West Coast?
  - gitgreen 8y ago
    Coastal cities have other advantages too. Better weather, favorable access to trade, better access to travel. Software could arguably be made anywhere but that severely discounts the importance of face to face communication. It's "only" a 4 hour flight from SF to Kansas City but if you're in KC and trying to work with partners in Asia that's an extra 8 hours of travel for each trip which effectively costs you a day. Make that trip several times a year and that cost becomes untenable.
  - rhapsodic 8y ago
    >If all the people are already on the West Coast what incentive is there to encourage relocation away from the West Coast as opposed to the continual brain drain from the rest of the country out to the West Coast? Well, it's not true that "all the people are already on the West Coast", but even if it were, YC might awaken to the obvious truth that rapid population growth in west coast cities is not sustainable for much longer. Then, as a forward-looking, long-term thinking company, they might see fit to establish footprints in some of the less crowded, less expensive inland cities before someone else beats them to it. Personally, I don't understand why people who have skills that are marketable in virtually any city in the first world choose to live with roommates in crappy century-old homes or tiny apartments in a handful of coastal cities. To each their own, I guess.
quantumofmalice 8y ago
The solution to expensive neighborhoods isn't destroying those neighborhoods with high density housing. Most humans don't want to live in hives. The problem to solve is distributing economic viability more widely across the country and then building more cities and towns in the density that supports family formation and doesn't dehumanize the occupants: single family homes on 5-12k square foot lots surrounding walkable commercial districts. Allowing our population to naturally stabilize by restricting immigration would help too.
- dredmorbius 8y ago
  How do you propose distributing that opportunity?
  - quantumofmalice 8y ago
    Things like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_credit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_credit
    - dredmorbius 8y ago
      Several of those refer to redistribution of wealth. A Georgian LVT applies to high-cost, high-employment metropolises which have underprovisioned housing and exacerbated sprawl, but not really to low-cost, underperforming failed cities such as Detroit or Pittsburg. Clarifying my question: how do you propose to create economic opportunities where housing is cheap but prospects are few, particularly as economic activity seems to want to concentrate.
      - quantumofmalice 8y ago
        I would distribute sovereignty more broadly, allow the smaller units of sovereignty to practice mercantilism to protect internal industries (i.e. productive capacity) and remove usury as the basis of the money supply to avoid wealth concentration in money centers. Wealth redistribution is inevitable at this point, ideally in the form of debt jubilee but, given the political power of the banking class, more likely via something more chaotic.
kthejoker2 8y ago
Quote: ___ And woe to the millennial who dares dream of starting a family, warns Myra Lara, a 30-year-old architect and affordability advocate. Of her Seattle friends who have become parents, all but one has been exiled to the suburbs. “It sucks—I never see them,” says Lara. “But that’s what they have to do.” __ Lol "woe" indeed. This is probably the ultimate first-world problem.
- mfringel 8y ago
  There are a couple of things mentioned in that sentence. Can you say which one you think is the "ultimate first-world problem?"
  - rhapsodic 8y ago
    >There are a couple of things mentioned in that sentence. Can you say which one you think is the "ultimate first-world problem?" Not the GP, but I think GP was referring to the dismay expressed over having one's friends move away to the suburbs.
  - ummonk 8y ago
    I mean, we would love to have affordable suburban houses within easy commuting distance of tech jobs in the Bay Area. So it certainly seems like a rather enviable "problem" that families in Seattle are able to move from the urban core to the suburbs...
- c22 8y ago
  I live in the Central District in Seattle, which is like a 10 minute bike ride from the downtown core. Before moving here I lived in Wallingford for twenty years. I have two children now, both under 5 years old and I can attest that I never see my friends, even the one that lives two blocks away. I'm pretty sure this is an effect of parenthood in general, not geography. We'll probably move north to Shoreline soon, not because the city has exiled us, but because it would be nice for our kids to have a yard to play in and we don't frequent the nearby bars and restaurants nearly as often as we used to.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
DoreenMichele 8y ago
Since the end of the financial crisis, Lubarsky says, Seattle has added roughly 100,000 jobs, but barely 32,000 new homes and apartment units. “We’ve underbuilt every year since 2010,” Interesting how that lines up so nicely with this headline/factoid: For every 100 families living in poverty on the West Coast, there are no more than 30 affordable homes https://www.geekwire.com/2018/every-100-families-living-poverty-west-coast-no-30-affordable-homes/ https://www.geekwire.com/2018/every-100-families-living-pove... Also, no doubt purely coincidentally: (The Seattle area, the nation’s 22nd largest by population, has the third most homeless people, behind only Los Angeles and New York City.) I sarcastically say purely coincidentally because of how often I get told that (a large portion of) homeless people are drug addicts, mentally ill etc, so lack of affordable housing is not why people are out on the street.
- fiter 8y ago
  Are the people telling you that many homeless are drug addicts or mentally ill professionals on the subject? It's well regarded that both types of people are over-represented in the homeless population. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_and_mental_health https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_and_mental_heal... https://www.va.gov/homeless/nchav/research/population-based-research/mental-illness.asp https://www.va.gov/homeless/nchav/research/population-based-...
  - DoreenMichele 8y ago
    I don't believe they are. I've had a college class on Homelessness and Public Policy. I spent 5.7 years homeless and got myself off the street a few months ago. I am author of the San Diego Homeless Survival Guide. Because of that site, I've been interviewed by reporters a few times. So I'm something of a SME on the topic of homelessness. In a nutshell, there are housed people who drink heavily or have mental health issues. Simply having a substance abuse problem or a mental health issue does not per se cause homelessness. Homelessness occurs when an individual has too many problems and too few resources or options. The difference between a homeless person and a housed person can be one more problem or one less resource. There is a longstanding and dire shortage of affordable housing in the US. Dismissing that as a contributing root cause of the homeless problem in this country sounds like crazy talk to me. It sounds to me like someone really reaching to wash their hands of the problem and chalk it up to personal failure rather than acknowledging the systemic issues that are causing enormous stress for a great many Americans of all kinds of income levels and demographics. Saying that mental illness and substance abuse are the cause of homelessness, so much so that we can totally ignore the issue of housing affordability whole cloth and dismiss it entirely as not pertinent to the subject of homelessness looks ludicrous on the face of it to me. But I keep hearing it over and over and over. The best guess I have is that it is a narrative that serves a desire to wash one's hands of the problem and pretend that well known systemic issues are not relevant as homeless people are "just a few losers with unsolvable personal problems and they would be homeless even if our country didn't have a dire shortage of affordable housing."
stcredzero 8y ago
I met this young man from Stanford who was part of a project where people would buy a shipping container home, plant it in their backyard as a "Mother in Law Unit" and rent it out. That would be a way to show in action that you think, "Yes, in my Back Yard!"
debatem1 8y ago
So, I live in Wallingford (the community mentioned here). In one of those Craftsman houses, no less. Here's the thing: Wallingford will be valuable and therefore expensive no matter what kind of housing you build here. Literally anything. There are some crappy midcentury studio apartments that go for 2k a month not 10 blocks from here, because the location is great even if you don't have a house. That means that basically everybody who doesn't develop property professionally is misdiagnosing the situation. The NIMBYs say that rezoning will cause property values to crash. That's just not in line with available evidence from Ballard and similar, and flies in the face of reason besides. When your lot can be a beloved home to another family or a pile of income to a developer, math says the developer will eventually win the bidding war. Most of the YIMBYs are wrong because housing prices just aren't going to come down that much here, and much of what comes in will be rentals. Those rentals will be luxury units because they can be, and will therefore be 2500+ a month. That's within a few hundred dollars of an existing mortgage (on one of the cheaper houses-- not the million dollar 3000+ sqft thing down the road) but without the potential upside.
- chrischen 8y ago
  Housing prices not coming down from increased unit implies some sort of market-resistant magical mumbo jumbo in that area. That doesn't sound plausible. Everything reacts to changing supply and demand, and increasing supply will always drop prices, somewhere. Increasing luxury units will mean a vacating of those non-luxury units currently occupied by luxury dwellers.
  - iamcasen 8y ago
    I think what you and others don't understand is that, there is SO MUCH demand, and SO MUCH money that no matter how much you build, the prices simply won't go down. From a developer's perspective, building a brand new apartment building is ludicrously expensive, you simply MUST charge very high rent, or your whole project is not feasible.
    - lazyasciiart 8y ago
saeranv 8y ago
I'm glad they're doing this, and I think there are more ways to use data to make this political argument for increasing housing supply. Specifically, I think one potential application of data to break up zoning limitations & NIMBY-ism is the use of energy and environmental simulation to argue against right-to-light/solar access rights get used to protect low-density housing. I've worked to develop urban planning guidelines in my previous job, and in my experience environmental regulations like shading studies are heavily, heavily relied on as a quantitative way to post-rationalize NIMBY-ism's desire to stop construction. Why? Simply because there aren't a lot of other quantitative metrics to justify low-density development, and so the only real data-backed analysis that justifies building shorter buildings tends to be solar rights. My current job is as a building energy researcher, and as I've gone about my job - which involves a lot of programming & calculating metrics for building energy (obviously), indoor/outdoor human comfort, daylighting thresholds - it's obvious that the urban argument that is made is a one-sided one that could be potentially undermined by demonstrating metrics that favor <i>less</i> solar access. Or, since the sun moves around the sky - metrics that give you equal solar access at different times, which can allow higher density. i.e what is the urban heat island consequence of exposed urban surfaces to sun, what is the comfort benefit of shade, the harm caused by direct UV, what is the building energy benefit of blocking direct solar gain etc. This is not meant to (reductively) claim that less sun is a good thing - simply that there is more ambiguity then is captured by current zoning regulations or design standards, and as a result we are over-emphasizing solar access when in certain places it isn't benefiting us. At the very least, we shouldn't take the solar-access argument at face-value. And I don't the planning officials and design professionals who are implementing this for the current state of environmental regulations. In my experience, given the impact their work has on the city, it's astonishing how little resources are expended to actually quantitatively study the effect of different typologies on the city, and as a result they tend to rely on community (NIMBY) feedback, and existing precedent for structuring cities. Better data-based tools could help them a lot make a progressive argument for higher-density.
bit_logic 8y ago
There is one argument, perhaps the most powerful one, from NIMBY that I agree with and it's about traffic. The way we handle roads and transit simply can't absorb the increase from high density. Serious transit investment must follow density when density reaches a certain point. The progression should be - Suburb: Just roads are fine. - Midpoint: Give a lane and make it dedicated for BRT. That's the only way people will take the bus seriously. When they see that bus zoom by while they are stuck in traffic, many will take the bus. - City: Build rail and subway. But high density development keeps happening without any of this. This just makes the NIMBY arguments stronger. EDIT: Just thought of another possible solution for Midpoint: shutdown the bus system and use the funds to give everyone $X per month for Uber Pool/Lyft Line. Make using Pool/Line a requirement for using the money, since those provide the most benefit for increasing road capacity. Bus reputation is so bad in the US, something like this might be the only way.
- burlesona 8y ago
  The gap in density between most city neighborhoods and where you have to have transit is enormous. Look at the density in old SF, the Sunset or Richmond, or in the inner city Montrose neighborhood of Houston, or many other examples. These places have several times the population per acre of typical post-war suburbs while still consisting mostly of detached houses and townhomes. They have poor transit, and people get by. I’m not saying it’s utopia, but the idea that the roads can’t take any more people is, in most places, baloney.
- ummonk 8y ago
  This is why you target high density development close to where the jobs are, and close to public transit stations. What increases traffic more: people living an hour away from work and commuting in because they can't afford living near work, or people living close to work because sufficient high density housing is built near the workplace?
- Kalium 8y ago
  > The way we handle roads and transit simply can't absorb the increase from high density. Serious transit investment must follow density when density reaches a certain point. You're absolutely correct. This must happen. Realistically, it happens when the residents of a newly dense neighborhood push for it to happen. It's rarely politically workable to build transit first.
ilamont 8y ago
I would like to see the bosses of these techies consider basing their headquarters and satellite offices not smack-dab in the middle of the hottest tech towns but rather in cities where there is lots of housing and room for commercial development, which are often former industrial areas. In New England, it boggles the mind that startups and giants like GE throw millions into building offices in Kendall and Seaport when they could build elsewhere in the region for much cheaper (Worcester, southern New Hampshire, Rhode Island/Fall River/New Bedford) and allow many of their employers to get reasonably priced homes. Many are served by commuter rail or bus systems, have nearby universities, and are within reasonable driving distance of Boston/Cambridge. And then there's telecommuting. Automattic, Zapier and a few others have embraced it but they are the exception.
- slothario 8y ago
  Actually, I started to type "I don't know why a company is willing to pay twice as much for an engineer in Silicon Valley than for one in Houston," but as I was typing that I had an epiphany. What they're REALLY paying for is knowledge from other companies. A person who has worked at Google and other innovative shops has (hopefully) learned a bunch of great processes, and will (hopefully) implement them at their new workplace. So an area like the Bay Area is filled with collective knowledge because there are great companies there, and all that talent is jostling around.
dmoy 8y ago
Seemingly missing from this entire discussion, - why do we spend like 60-70%+ of federal housing dollars on high income earners / rich people? - why is section 8 gutted to all hell? I don't see why it's so shocking that there's no affordable housing, when some of the big old programs aimed at reducing that are a shadow of their former selves, and we spend most of our effort in housing just throwing cash at people who already make a lot of it. Or maybe people like Zach mentioned in the article do think this stuff, but they're taking baby steps because the political capital necessary to actually stop the above points is probably huge.
kerng 8y ago
>>The Seattle area, the nation’s 22nd largest by population, has the third most homeless people, behind only Los Angeles and New York City. I knew it was bad, but didn't realize it's that bad. One Seattlite once told me there are a lot of homeless people because they refer to it as Freeattle, as they get lot of things for free - not sure if that is true. Anyone who is from Seattle know more?
- lazyasciiart 8y ago
  For all useful purposes, it's false. A detailed in-person survey of homeless people in King County found that 10% of them said that homeless services were part of the reason they moved to Seattle, and it's more likely that they moved from other parts of Washington than from far away. Homelessness rates in Seattle track rising (and falling! lol) rents very closely, which is a difficult-to-explain coincidence for anyone who really believes that the cause is actually random people from all over America catching a bus to Seattle to get into a shelter. summary piece for reading - https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/homeless/king-countys-former-homeless-czar-on-homelessness-the-causes-are-far-more-complex-than-i-even-knew/ https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/homeless/king-coun... the survey mentioned - https://thecisforcrank.com/tag/applied-survey-research/ https://thecisforcrank.com/tag/applied-survey-research/ - https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3480319-City-of-Seattle-Homeless-Needs-Assessment-March.html https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3480319-City-of-Seat...
  - kerng 8y ago
    Thanks for the informative response. Appreciate the insights.
munificent 8y ago
One thing I never see come up in these discussions is the overall increasingly wealth disparity in the US. In most of these discussions there is an implied moral stance that people have some level of "rights" about where they can live. I think all but the most stringent anarchists agree you don't have a moral right to live in a sprawling mansion on the coast, regardless of your contributions to society. And most agree that it's not right if someone working 40 hours a week can't afford a home anywhere in the United States. But, between those two extremes is an interesting continuum. My belief is that most of us grew up in a culture that placed the "right" point on that continuum right between the city and neighborhood level of scale. Most people should have the right to live in the city of their choosing, regardless of your income level. But you don't have the right to pick your neighborhood. If you want to live in the most desireable neighborhood, then it's fair for you to have to pay for the luxury. I think that's been a stable cultural point for a lot of cities in the US for many decades. New York is a good example of a city that supported people from the righest elites down to poverty-level working class. But economic disparity has gotten so bad now that the affordability point on the continuum no longer aligns with our rightful point. If you are working class, there are no cities where the entire commutable region surrounding it is outside of your price point. San Francisco is one and Seattle is well on its way. I think much of the anger we feel comes from those two points being out of alignment. We feel that people should be able to live in the metro area of their choosing, but the economic reality is that for some cities now, they can't. I don't believe any simple supply and demand model of housing will fix this. Seattle is a highly desireable area and the demand is elastic. I think you'd see: Increase housing supply -> Prices go down -> City becomes more appealing for businesses -> Business grow and need more employees -> Demand goes up -> Prices return You'll end up with just as many $800k houses (or apartments), but now with comparatively worse infrastructure because it wasn't designed for higher density. There are plenty enough high paid tech employees in the US and the world at large to absorb any additional housing Seattle has to offer. I think the fundamental problem is that when you combine increasing wealth disparity, high mobility, and people sorting themselves economically, you naturally end up with large regions of the country that are only affordable by certain economic levels. And that spatial fact conflicts with our moral belief that no large region of the US should be effectively off limits to someone based on their wealth.
crtlaltdel 8y ago
quick poll: raise your hand if you've been either homeless or on public assistance AND are an American/live in America. I'm just curious about the demographics of this conversation.
rdlecler1 8y ago
The kicker is that the baby boomers also want the younger generation (who can’t afford homes) to pay for their entitlements. It’s like going to dinner with your rich uncle and he stiffs you on the bill. Housing is the biggest problem of this generation. Exorbitant rent seeking sucks up all marginal resources, leading to greater inequality and less of a means to fund entitlements. The irony.
YorkianTones 8y ago
I think the demand side for single family housing will increase in Seattle over the near future. There has been a recent boom in tech company positions and equity (especially Amazon and Microsoft, but others as well such as Tableau, Facebook, etc.). There is a relatively (compared to SF) nascent startup and VC scene developing, and more tech companies are opening or expanding branch offices here as they observe the talent pool that's now well above critical mass. And many employees of these companies are young (in their 20s), recent transplants from around the country, or on temporary work visas and in the process of getting green cards / citizenship. Seattle is also a place people tend to want to plant roots (for the great career options, the natural beauty, and the culture). As the young recent transplants build their savings and seek to plant roots and start families when they get into their 30s, they'll look at single family housing. But the natural beauty includes water on two sides of the city and there is basically no undeveloped land to add more single family houses. Combining these employment, demographic and geographic factors, I expect demand to continue surging forward and supply to remain constrained. Building up and new apartments coming online is starting to reduce pressure on soaring condo/apartment rent costs, and building up to increase supply is a valve that can continue to reduce rent pressure for those without families. But I don't see a way forward to increase single family housing inside the city limits - in fact supply will go down as more townhomes and apartment buildings go up. It seems, as the article hints at but doesn't much explore, that American Millenial coastal urban dwellers will need to develop a new conception of family housing (that is not single family housing with a private yard). I think there are options here, and the conception of the American dream replete with single family housing around an urban core seems like a relatively recent post-war phenomenon. What does family housing in Tokyo look like? In dense European cities? Historically before the 20th century? What new forms could it take, especially as we build up and think about modern amenities? With new transportation options (ride sharing, better bike infra, soon self driving cars) garages are less necessary, with new meal delivery options kitchens are less necessary, and with the sharing economy we can cut down on storage space. I'd like to see some new creative approaches to modern US family housing.

142 points by clebio 8y ago

I've recently wondered why cities don't tend to spring up on their own anymore. Either that's true or I just haven't heard about it. Has anyone looked into this? I was going to bring this up as an anecdote but looking at this (http://www.businessinsider.com/federal-government-land-map-oregon-militia-2016-1 http://www.businessinsider.com/federal-government-land-map-o...) it seems to be true; a relative of mine lives in a small city in Utah and says he wants a couple acres but the land surrounding the city is federally owned, limiting his options. How was this land released to citizens previously and how has that changed since? Was it really just doling it out to farmers who have since sold it?

betaby 8y ago
Where I live(d) government owned land is rarely sold because it has 'protected' status either because it a wilderness protected area or future/previously farmland. That means land is not for residential/commercial development.
0x4f3759df 8y ago
There's a few master planned towns that spring into existence, Seaside, FL, Jakriborg, Sweden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jakriborg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jakriborg
gnarcoregrizz 8y ago
guess: because the government used to give land away in the homesteading act, to encourage people to settle the west https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_Acts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_Acts
api 8y ago
The market may be saturated. There are lots of cities already and many of them have affordable homes. Why found a new city when you could move to Cincinnati, Lexington, Pittsburgh, or Cleveland? If you want really cheap housing you could move to Detroit or St. Louis.
aphextron 8y ago
>Was it really just doling it out to farmers who have since sold it? Yes. For much of America's history, you could literally get in a wagon, head out west somewhere, plant a flag, and the land was yours. This was true all the way to 1976. "In all, more than 270 million acres of public land, or nearly 10% of the total area of the U.S., was given away free to 1.6 million homesteaders; most of the homesteads were west of the Mississippi River." [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_Acts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_Acts But that's not the whole story. Another 10% of the entire US land mass (~200,000,000 acres) was granted free of charge to various railroad companies[0], many of which are still the largest private landowners in their respective states. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Railroad_Acts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Railroad_Acts
- zapita 8y ago
  > For much of America's history, you could literally get in a wagon, head out west somewhere, plant a flag, and the land was yours. You also had to band together with your fellow settlers into armed militias to kill the people whose land you were squatting. Those are the same militias which are protected in the second amendment. Their original purpose was "killing indians". The secondary purpose was to catch escaped slaves. It's always fun to remember where our real estate industry comes from. It's also interesting to see the hidden connections between America's passion for home ownership, its obsession with guns, and its racism.
  - aphextron 8y ago
    Founded on genocide, built by slavery, maintained with brutal force. The American Way™
    - RestlessMind 8y ago
      I don't see anything uniquely American about it. More like The Human Way™ :p (You do realize that all the societies are maintained with brutal force, right? And pick any country, go back a few centuries and you will find conflicts with as many casualties as American genocide).
drewmate 8y ago
Much of the land in the American West made its way into private hands through homesteading, where farmers earned the land by improving (i.e. farming) it. It's worth considering what modern homesteading could look like. Perhaps large development groups could make deals to plant dense neighborhood seeds (e.g. multi-use buildings in grids with a plan to expand into an actual community) and pay for connecting highways in exchange for exclusive rights to surrounding parcels of land. There is a lot of federal land in the west that is close to existing development. Could it be used to create healthier cities in those areas?
- gnarcoregrizz 8y ago
  And we were all making fun of China's ghost cities not too long ago...
- icebraining 8y ago
  If you have the money to build a bunch of buildings in the middle of nowhere, is the cost of the land really a big impediment?
  - xyzzyz 8y ago
    If you want to build houses of similar quality to those built by homesteaders, it's really, really cheap.
  - drewmate 8y ago
    That's a good point. It would have to be the right set of circumstances: with unused land in close proximity to an existing city that can't manage to scale up because of entrenched interests. I suspect such areas exist (perhaps around Salt Lake City, or Las Vegas) and there might be a chance to make a true dense city in those areas rather than the sprawl that has developed naturally.
BryantD 8y ago
Not all locations are equally good places for cities, particularly now that the Interstate highway system is already built. Still happens now and again, though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seaside,_Florida https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seaside,_Florida
psyc 8y ago
This might help: https://youtu.be/3PWWtqfwacQ https://youtu.be/3PWWtqfwacQ
jhbadger 8y ago
Actually there are quite a few, with the classic example being "edge cities" like Tysons Corners near Washington DC - what was originally just offices and shopping has become a real community. But to tie in the zoning issues mentioned, places like Tysons developed in response to the stricter zoning in DC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edge_city https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edge_city
- dsfyu404ed 8y ago
  People only build elsewhere when distance costs less than cleaning up the regulatory pollution required to build. The problem is that the regulatory pollution (crappy zoning) is so bad in certain areas and improves so little as you get further out that building a little further away isn't actually a better value.
burlesona 8y ago
I think about this too. Building more cities seems like an obvious way to help, but it doesn’t happen for many complicated reasons which I don’t pretend to fully understand. YC was looking into this at some point, I don’t know where they went with it, though.
AnimalMuppet 8y ago
> How was this land released to citizens previously and how has that changed since? It was doled out via the Homestead Act. Anybody could take the land and farm it. And what land did they take? Land that they thought they could grow enough on to not starve. What land was that? Land with water. The land that didn't get taken was land that had no water - not enough to run a farm. And it probably still doesn't have enough water for a subdivision, at least not one with lawns.

slededit 8y ago

Seattle was a dying city 30 years ago. Comparing historical housing prices would be highly misleading.

seanmcdirmid 8y ago
More like 47 years ago when Boring busts were still a thing. Real estate hasn’t busted like that since then, with only a down tick in the 90s along with the rest of the west coast.

gaius 8y ago

“We can’t have it so you can’t either”

gregimba 8y ago

The closer I get to purchasing a house the more I find myself pushing against measures like this. NIMBY exists to protect most people's largest financial asset.

Cau5tik 8y ago
That's one of the main issues here. Houses should be about having a place to live, not your largest financial asset. The selfish protectionism that comes from treating housing as an investment is why so many cities are so broken.
- gaius 8y ago
  How is it selfish? People have got to save for retirement somehow. Company final salary pensions are a thing of the past. Investments in shares can go down as well as up. The government can’t or won’t help. What do you expect people to do? Sacrifice their own wellbeing for your unearned benefit?
  - azernik 8y ago
    > Investments in shares can go down as well as up. So instead, homeowners vote for policies that make sure that they somehow get an asset that is guaranteed to go up. That's an unearned benefit, it's one that comes at our expense, and it's an expense that they sure as hell didn't have to deal with when they were getting established in the world.
    - gaius 8y ago
      they sure as hell didn't have to deal with when they were getting established in the world No. Those people built the communities you find so desirable to live in, sometimes from scratch, sometimes by regenerating a dilapidated area. The value you crave would not even exist if not for them. And now that the hard work is done, you expect to waltz in and have it for the taking? Millennials think they are the first generation ever to live through hard times. While raking in fortunes their parents and grandparents could only dream of, working for tech unicorns.

minikites 8y ago

>When homeowners say they’re fighting to protect neighborhood character, Lubarsky says, “it really feels to me like they just don’t want young people in their neighborhood.” This is also almost always coded language for not wanting to live near racial minorities. This whole article is yet another example of baby boomers pulling up the ladder behind them. The millennials I know are angry and there's going to be a reckoning in the near future as it comes to a head.

JBReefer 8y ago
I think people are going to get rid of Social Security at some point. I own my apartment in Manhattan, but my family is very lucky in that we had an extremely motivated seller in a very underappreciated area, and that I have a good job. The traditional paths to adulthood have been broken by NIMBYs and a complete lack of investment in infrastructure after it was good enough for the Boomers. Something is going to happen - you can't pull the ladder behind you, keep everyone you don't like out of your neighborhood, and reduce mobility to protect your assets without serious backlash.
- dominotw 8y ago
  extremely motivated seller = unfortunate person backed into a corner financially ?
  - JBReefer 8y ago
    He was a very wealthy person who worked for Microsoft, but thanks for assuming.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
- crdoconnor 8y ago
  >I think people are going to get rid of Social Security at some point. The propaganda output of 1%'er think tanks has been consistently stating that it's an unaffordable luxury that will bankrupt the nation for 30 odd years. They have several ulterior motives for saying this. It's not just that they want to free up money for tax cuts -- stripping people of social security benefits also makes them more dependent upon employers, which employers really like. Wall Street would like to see that multi-trillion dollar pot of money privatized so that they can manage it and cream off fees. These groups are the ones pushing for social security "reform". They tried pretty hard under Bush (who was willing) and pretty hard under Obama (likewise). Still no dice though - too many votes to be lost still.

OliverJones 8y ago

The YIMBY movement (Yes, in my back yard!) is starting to be visible. And about time. (And, I'm a boomer, fwiw.) Check out this article. https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/04/where-yimbys-can-win/559001/ https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/04/where-yimbys-can-win/... The idea that the "tech industry" created this problem is just plain nonsense. Sure, the tech industry attracts young folks to creative urban centers and pays them a bit of money. But their parents (my generation) gave them birth and gave them expectations of prosperity.It's selfish to then blame them for wanting to live where the good jobs are. This problem was created by restrictive zoning. And it will be solved by changing zoning laws. And the restrictive zoning laws come from people who say, "Oh no, those people moving into new apartments will crowd our schools and our streets. We can't have that!" Whose schools are they? Whose streets are they? The phrase "affordable housing" has come to mean "cheap housing for poor people." That's stupid. Affordable housing is good for everybody. The basic law of supply and demand teaches us that increasing the supply of housing will lower the price. To address homelessness, build homes. Government (who exist to serve people) can start to approach this problem by partly assessing property based on nominal beds per square foot. Higher taxes on lower density housing will give an economic incentive to build more housing on existing land. Powerful companies should unapologetically press politicians, hard, for changes to these NIMBY zoning rules.

maxsilver 8y ago
I agree with all of the above, but it's worth noting that YIMBY policies economically pollute the areas they upzone with an influx of investment that can have disasterous consequences in the short term. Obviously, we need more housing, which needs to get built. And in the very long term, "increasing the supply of housing will lower the price". But in the short term, increasing the supply of housing will raise the price of housing. And regular people still have to buy housing every single day, regardless of the daily price. YIMBYs have never had an answer for the short and medium term, and therefore like to ignore the short term and medium term, which causes them significant opposition from local communities at both ends of the spectrum. The wealthy people want to restrict zoning to inflate their wealth, but the poor/middle class people want careful applications of zoning, so as not to be displaced by the violent increase in 'market rate' for the next 5 to 20 years while we wait for the increased supply to lower the price. They can't just sit around for years while we all wait for the demand to fall -- they need housing to live in during that time, and have to pay for it at whatever the developer chooses to set 'market rate' as. YIMBYs have developer money behind them, so they will win this fight. But they have no answer for the short/medium-term economic pollution they cause, so they are hurting a lot of poor/middle class people they claim to support, and will continue to do so with each victory they achieve over the next decade or two.

notadoc 8y ago

The irony is all the people piling into the west coast complaining about the problem are causing the problem they then are complaining about. Instead they should all move to the midwest, south, or NE, where cost of living is a small fraction of the west coast. They can pay off a very nice house in full for less than the cost of a downpayment in any trendy west coast city, and they can easily afford to live a stereotypical middle class lifestyle - house, cars, kids, vacations, a stay at home parent - on a reasonable income, something which is now increasingly difficult on the west coast where cost of living is extraordinarily high. I sincerely hope that various companies start aggressively opening offices in middle America, the south, upstate NY, etc. Maybe someone should produce a few goofy TV shows about how 'quirky' and 'cool' and 'hip' those destinations are, turn them into the new cultural mecca for all the flighty trend chasers, and let the west coast housing mess take care of itself.

deadmetheny 8y ago
>I sincerely hope that various companies start aggressively opening offices in middle America, the south, upstate NY, etc. Maybe someone should produce a few goofy TV shows about how 'quirky' and 'cool' and 'hip' those destinations are, turn them into the new cultural mecca for all the flighty trend chasers, and let the west coast housing mess take care of itself. God, I hope not. California can stay in California, keep it out of the Midwest.
- wu_tang_chris 8y ago
  Well it's probably not natives who'd be moving out there. Think of it as a polite invitation to transplants to go home.
- alonmower 8y ago
  Man, fuck this sentiment. It's just as bad as the whole "get these foreigners out of here!" anti immigration sentiment that's taking hold all over. There's an exceedingly high likelihood that your family moved to the Midwest from somewhere else at some point in time. Cities and regions change over time, people move to where there's an opportunity for them to have a better life. Just because you were born somewhere doesn't entitle you to that place staying unchanged.

wiredfool 8y ago

20 years ago, Craftsman houses in Seattle were already unaffordable unless they were totally trashed, far north, or in a 'bad' neighborhood. They were, size for size, the most expensive form of housing on the market. Generally 1000sf, 2 bedroom, and 1 bath, I don't think I saw one under 225k. I wound up buying a skinny for 20% less money and 20% more space. (Observations from 1998-9, when I bought a house a mile or so from there). Since then, prices have doubled at least twice. I could never afford to move back to my old neighborhood.

tjr225 8y ago
Moved out here last year. I actually commute from down south...I want so badly to feel comfortable planting roots here but staring down the barrel of this housing market makes me feel like a tourist simply enjoying the high pay and natural beauty until I decide I want to buy a home back east. I am glad I am here but there is definitely an internal conflict I have to tolerate to do so.

csense 8y ago

> a housing market so expensive it’s throttling one of America’s biggest urban success stories. Decades ago, these tidy homes were cheap enough for schoolteachers and firefighters. Today, most cost at least a million dollars, and what was once a proudly middle-class neighborhood has morphed into a financially gated community If you want a house like that, and you're not super wealthy, find a remote gig and move outside the big tech-boom cities. Here in the Rust Belt, houses like that are very affordably priced. If enough people with tech-generated wealth start living and spending money here, it'll make progress solving the regional inequalities that are driving support for Donald Trump.

majewsky 8y ago
Later in the article, the point is made that many young people move to the cities because they actually want to live there. I can see that: I would hate living in a suburb where the amenities are miles apart and nothing can be reached by foot or bike.
- kthejoker2 8y ago
  Detroit? Salt Lake City? El Paso? All I'm seeing is people demanding to be accommodated to live exactly where they want, even at the expense of the people who were there before they wanted to be there, even as there are plenty of viable options to go around. But oh no, they don't have Seattle's views? Cry me a river.
phillipcarter 8y ago
But I don't like that area. A house like that is not worth giving up the incredible outdoors lifestyle that the Seattle region offers. I'm happy to live in a well-built, quiet condo that I pay a bit more for than "standard" condos or whatever. Don't really need a house. But even these are nearly impossible to come by. There's practically zero inventory.
- realbarack 8y ago
  FWIW if "incredible outdoors lifestyle" is what you seek and remote work is an option there are a number of better, cheaper places to live than Seattle.

0x4f3759df 8y ago

Fourplex upzoning also proposed in Minneapolis https://streets.mn/2018/03/14/fourplexes-everywhere-bold-reform-proposed-in-minneapolis/ https://streets.mn/2018/03/14/fourplexes-everywhere-bold-ref...

crdoconnor 8y ago

Somebody from his generation is going to have that one day. They'll be rich too. It's striking how much the media is attempting to foment intergenerational strife over issues that are fundamentally about wealth inequality.

kthejoker2 8y ago

It never fails to boggle my mind that we have cities all over the Rust Belt with ample real estate, state investment funding, and all the incentives in the world to attract people away from Seattle, SF, SJ, etc. - and instead the response is "let's ruin Seattle." Why not just ... move?

WorldMaker 8y ago
Same reason Y Combinator doesn't have a bigger presence in the "Rust Belt"? Network effects. If all the people are already on the West Coast what incentive is there to encourage relocation away from the West Coast as opposed to the continual brain drain from the rest of the country out to the West Coast?
- gitgreen 8y ago
  Coastal cities have other advantages too. Better weather, favorable access to trade, better access to travel. Software could arguably be made anywhere but that severely discounts the importance of face to face communication. It's "only" a 4 hour flight from SF to Kansas City but if you're in KC and trying to work with partners in Asia that's an extra 8 hours of travel for each trip which effectively costs you a day. Make that trip several times a year and that cost becomes untenable.
- rhapsodic 8y ago
  >If all the people are already on the West Coast what incentive is there to encourage relocation away from the West Coast as opposed to the continual brain drain from the rest of the country out to the West Coast? Well, it's not true that "all the people are already on the West Coast", but even if it were, YC might awaken to the obvious truth that rapid population growth in west coast cities is not sustainable for much longer. Then, as a forward-looking, long-term thinking company, they might see fit to establish footprints in some of the less crowded, less expensive inland cities before someone else beats them to it. Personally, I don't understand why people who have skills that are marketable in virtually any city in the first world choose to live with roommates in crappy century-old homes or tiny apartments in a handful of coastal cities. To each their own, I guess.

quantumofmalice 8y ago

The solution to expensive neighborhoods isn't destroying those neighborhoods with high density housing. Most humans don't want to live in hives. The problem to solve is distributing economic viability more widely across the country and then building more cities and towns in the density that supports family formation and doesn't dehumanize the occupants: single family homes on 5-12k square foot lots surrounding walkable commercial districts. Allowing our population to naturally stabilize by restricting immigration would help too.

dredmorbius 8y ago
How do you propose distributing that opportunity?
- quantumofmalice 8y ago
  Things like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_credit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_credit
  - dredmorbius 8y ago
    Several of those refer to redistribution of wealth. A Georgian LVT applies to high-cost, high-employment metropolises which have underprovisioned housing and exacerbated sprawl, but not really to low-cost, underperforming failed cities such as Detroit or Pittsburg. Clarifying my question: how do you propose to create economic opportunities where housing is cheap but prospects are few, particularly as economic activity seems to want to concentrate.
    - quantumofmalice 8y ago
      I would distribute sovereignty more broadly, allow the smaller units of sovereignty to practice mercantilism to protect internal industries (i.e. productive capacity) and remove usury as the basis of the money supply to avoid wealth concentration in money centers. Wealth redistribution is inevitable at this point, ideally in the form of debt jubilee but, given the political power of the banking class, more likely via something more chaotic.

kthejoker2 8y ago

Quote: ___ And woe to the millennial who dares dream of starting a family, warns Myra Lara, a 30-year-old architect and affordability advocate. Of her Seattle friends who have become parents, all but one has been exiled to the suburbs. “It sucks—I never see them,” says Lara. “But that’s what they have to do.” __ Lol "woe" indeed. This is probably the ultimate first-world problem.

mfringel 8y ago
There are a couple of things mentioned in that sentence. Can you say which one you think is the "ultimate first-world problem?"
- rhapsodic 8y ago
  >There are a couple of things mentioned in that sentence. Can you say which one you think is the "ultimate first-world problem?" Not the GP, but I think GP was referring to the dismay expressed over having one's friends move away to the suburbs.
- ummonk 8y ago
  I mean, we would love to have affordable suburban houses within easy commuting distance of tech jobs in the Bay Area. So it certainly seems like a rather enviable "problem" that families in Seattle are able to move from the urban core to the suburbs...
c22 8y ago
I live in the Central District in Seattle, which is like a 10 minute bike ride from the downtown core. Before moving here I lived in Wallingford for twenty years. I have two children now, both under 5 years old and I can attest that I never see my friends, even the one that lives two blocks away. I'm pretty sure this is an effect of parenthood in general, not geography. We'll probably move north to Shoreline soon, not because the city has exiled us, but because it would be nice for our kids to have a yard to play in and we don't frequent the nearby bars and restaurants nearly as often as we used to.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

DoreenMichele 8y ago

Since the end of the financial crisis, Lubarsky says, Seattle has added roughly 100,000 jobs, but barely 32,000 new homes and apartment units. “We’ve underbuilt every year since 2010,” Interesting how that lines up so nicely with this headline/factoid: For every 100 families living in poverty on the West Coast, there are no more than 30 affordable homes https://www.geekwire.com/2018/every-100-families-living-poverty-west-coast-no-30-affordable-homes/ https://www.geekwire.com/2018/every-100-families-living-pove... Also, no doubt purely coincidentally: (The Seattle area, the nation’s 22nd largest by population, has the third most homeless people, behind only Los Angeles and New York City.) I sarcastically say purely coincidentally because of how often I get told that (a large portion of) homeless people are drug addicts, mentally ill etc, so lack of affordable housing is not why people are out on the street.

fiter 8y ago
Are the people telling you that many homeless are drug addicts or mentally ill professionals on the subject? It's well regarded that both types of people are over-represented in the homeless population. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_and_mental_health https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_and_mental_heal... https://www.va.gov/homeless/nchav/research/population-based-research/mental-illness.asp https://www.va.gov/homeless/nchav/research/population-based-...
- DoreenMichele 8y ago
  I don't believe they are. I've had a college class on Homelessness and Public Policy. I spent 5.7 years homeless and got myself off the street a few months ago. I am author of the San Diego Homeless Survival Guide. Because of that site, I've been interviewed by reporters a few times. So I'm something of a SME on the topic of homelessness. In a nutshell, there are housed people who drink heavily or have mental health issues. Simply having a substance abuse problem or a mental health issue does not per se cause homelessness. Homelessness occurs when an individual has too many problems and too few resources or options. The difference between a homeless person and a housed person can be one more problem or one less resource. There is a longstanding and dire shortage of affordable housing in the US. Dismissing that as a contributing root cause of the homeless problem in this country sounds like crazy talk to me. It sounds to me like someone really reaching to wash their hands of the problem and chalk it up to personal failure rather than acknowledging the systemic issues that are causing enormous stress for a great many Americans of all kinds of income levels and demographics. Saying that mental illness and substance abuse are the cause of homelessness, so much so that we can totally ignore the issue of housing affordability whole cloth and dismiss it entirely as not pertinent to the subject of homelessness looks ludicrous on the face of it to me. But I keep hearing it over and over and over. The best guess I have is that it is a narrative that serves a desire to wash one's hands of the problem and pretend that well known systemic issues are not relevant as homeless people are "just a few losers with unsolvable personal problems and they would be homeless even if our country didn't have a dire shortage of affordable housing."

stcredzero 8y ago

I met this young man from Stanford who was part of a project where people would buy a shipping container home, plant it in their backyard as a "Mother in Law Unit" and rent it out. That would be a way to show in action that you think, "Yes, in my Back Yard!"

debatem1 8y ago

So, I live in Wallingford (the community mentioned here). In one of those Craftsman houses, no less. Here's the thing: Wallingford will be valuable and therefore expensive no matter what kind of housing you build here. Literally anything. There are some crappy midcentury studio apartments that go for 2k a month not 10 blocks from here, because the location is great even if you don't have a house. That means that basically everybody who doesn't develop property professionally is misdiagnosing the situation. The NIMBYs say that rezoning will cause property values to crash. That's just not in line with available evidence from Ballard and similar, and flies in the face of reason besides. When your lot can be a beloved home to another family or a pile of income to a developer, math says the developer will eventually win the bidding war. Most of the YIMBYs are wrong because housing prices just aren't going to come down that much here, and much of what comes in will be rentals. Those rentals will be luxury units because they can be, and will therefore be 2500+ a month. That's within a few hundred dollars of an existing mortgage (on one of the cheaper houses-- not the million dollar 3000+ sqft thing down the road) but without the potential upside.

chrischen 8y ago
Housing prices not coming down from increased unit implies some sort of market-resistant magical mumbo jumbo in that area. That doesn't sound plausible. Everything reacts to changing supply and demand, and increasing supply will always drop prices, somewhere. Increasing luxury units will mean a vacating of those non-luxury units currently occupied by luxury dwellers.
- iamcasen 8y ago
  I think what you and others don't understand is that, there is SO MUCH demand, and SO MUCH money that no matter how much you build, the prices simply won't go down. From a developer's perspective, building a brand new apartment building is ludicrously expensive, you simply MUST charge very high rent, or your whole project is not feasible.
  - lazyasciiart 8y ago

saeranv 8y ago

I'm glad they're doing this, and I think there are more ways to use data to make this political argument for increasing housing supply. Specifically, I think one potential application of data to break up zoning limitations & NIMBY-ism is the use of energy and environmental simulation to argue against right-to-light/solar access rights get used to protect low-density housing. I've worked to develop urban planning guidelines in my previous job, and in my experience environmental regulations like shading studies are heavily, heavily relied on as a quantitative way to post-rationalize NIMBY-ism's desire to stop construction. Why? Simply because there aren't a lot of other quantitative metrics to justify low-density development, and so the only real data-backed analysis that justifies building shorter buildings tends to be solar rights. My current job is as a building energy researcher, and as I've gone about my job - which involves a lot of programming & calculating metrics for building energy (obviously), indoor/outdoor human comfort, daylighting thresholds - it's obvious that the urban argument that is made is a one-sided one that could be potentially undermined by demonstrating metrics that favor <i>less</i> solar access. Or, since the sun moves around the sky - metrics that give you equal solar access at different times, which can allow higher density. i.e what is the urban heat island consequence of exposed urban surfaces to sun, what is the comfort benefit of shade, the harm caused by direct UV, what is the building energy benefit of blocking direct solar gain etc. This is not meant to (reductively) claim that less sun is a good thing - simply that there is more ambiguity then is captured by current zoning regulations or design standards, and as a result we are over-emphasizing solar access when in certain places it isn't benefiting us. At the very least, we shouldn't take the solar-access argument at face-value. And I don't the planning officials and design professionals who are implementing this for the current state of environmental regulations. In my experience, given the impact their work has on the city, it's astonishing how little resources are expended to actually quantitatively study the effect of different typologies on the city, and as a result they tend to rely on community (NIMBY) feedback, and existing precedent for structuring cities. Better data-based tools could help them a lot make a progressive argument for higher-density.

bit_logic 8y ago

There is one argument, perhaps the most powerful one, from NIMBY that I agree with and it's about traffic. The way we handle roads and transit simply can't absorb the increase from high density. Serious transit investment must follow density when density reaches a certain point. The progression should be - Suburb: Just roads are fine. - Midpoint: Give a lane and make it dedicated for BRT. That's the only way people will take the bus seriously. When they see that bus zoom by while they are stuck in traffic, many will take the bus. - City: Build rail and subway. But high density development keeps happening without any of this. This just makes the NIMBY arguments stronger. EDIT: Just thought of another possible solution for Midpoint: shutdown the bus system and use the funds to give everyone $X per month for Uber Pool/Lyft Line. Make using Pool/Line a requirement for using the money, since those provide the most benefit for increasing road capacity. Bus reputation is so bad in the US, something like this might be the only way.

burlesona 8y ago
The gap in density between most city neighborhoods and where you have to have transit is enormous. Look at the density in old SF, the Sunset or Richmond, or in the inner city Montrose neighborhood of Houston, or many other examples. These places have several times the population per acre of typical post-war suburbs while still consisting mostly of detached houses and townhomes. They have poor transit, and people get by. I’m not saying it’s utopia, but the idea that the roads can’t take any more people is, in most places, baloney.
ummonk 8y ago
This is why you target high density development close to where the jobs are, and close to public transit stations. What increases traffic more: people living an hour away from work and commuting in because they can't afford living near work, or people living close to work because sufficient high density housing is built near the workplace?
Kalium 8y ago
> The way we handle roads and transit simply can't absorb the increase from high density. Serious transit investment must follow density when density reaches a certain point. You're absolutely correct. This must happen. Realistically, it happens when the residents of a newly dense neighborhood push for it to happen. It's rarely politically workable to build transit first.

ilamont 8y ago

I would like to see the bosses of these techies consider basing their headquarters and satellite offices not smack-dab in the middle of the hottest tech towns but rather in cities where there is lots of housing and room for commercial development, which are often former industrial areas. In New England, it boggles the mind that startups and giants like GE throw millions into building offices in Kendall and Seaport when they could build elsewhere in the region for much cheaper (Worcester, southern New Hampshire, Rhode Island/Fall River/New Bedford) and allow many of their employers to get reasonably priced homes. Many are served by commuter rail or bus systems, have nearby universities, and are within reasonable driving distance of Boston/Cambridge. And then there's telecommuting. Automattic, Zapier and a few others have embraced it but they are the exception.

slothario 8y ago
Actually, I started to type "I don't know why a company is willing to pay twice as much for an engineer in Silicon Valley than for one in Houston," but as I was typing that I had an epiphany. What they're REALLY paying for is knowledge from other companies. A person who has worked at Google and other innovative shops has (hopefully) learned a bunch of great processes, and will (hopefully) implement them at their new workplace. So an area like the Bay Area is filled with collective knowledge because there are great companies there, and all that talent is jostling around.

dmoy 8y ago

Seemingly missing from this entire discussion, - why do we spend like 60-70%+ of federal housing dollars on high income earners / rich people? - why is section 8 gutted to all hell? I don't see why it's so shocking that there's no affordable housing, when some of the big old programs aimed at reducing that are a shadow of their former selves, and we spend most of our effort in housing just throwing cash at people who already make a lot of it. Or maybe people like Zach mentioned in the article do think this stuff, but they're taking baby steps because the political capital necessary to actually stop the above points is probably huge.

kerng 8y ago

>>The Seattle area, the nation’s 22nd largest by population, has the third most homeless people, behind only Los Angeles and New York City. I knew it was bad, but didn't realize it's that bad. One Seattlite once told me there are a lot of homeless people because they refer to it as Freeattle, as they get lot of things for free - not sure if that is true. Anyone who is from Seattle know more?

lazyasciiart 8y ago
For all useful purposes, it's false. A detailed in-person survey of homeless people in King County found that 10% of them said that homeless services were part of the reason they moved to Seattle, and it's more likely that they moved from other parts of Washington than from far away. Homelessness rates in Seattle track rising (and falling! lol) rents very closely, which is a difficult-to-explain coincidence for anyone who really believes that the cause is actually random people from all over America catching a bus to Seattle to get into a shelter. summary piece for reading - https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/homeless/king-countys-former-homeless-czar-on-homelessness-the-causes-are-far-more-complex-than-i-even-knew/ https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/homeless/king-coun... the survey mentioned - https://thecisforcrank.com/tag/applied-survey-research/ https://thecisforcrank.com/tag/applied-survey-research/ - https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3480319-City-of-Seattle-Homeless-Needs-Assessment-March.html https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3480319-City-of-Seat...
- kerng 8y ago
  Thanks for the informative response. Appreciate the insights.

munificent 8y ago

One thing I never see come up in these discussions is the overall increasingly wealth disparity in the US. In most of these discussions there is an implied moral stance that people have some level of "rights" about where they can live. I think all but the most stringent anarchists agree you don't have a moral right to live in a sprawling mansion on the coast, regardless of your contributions to society. And most agree that it's not right if someone working 40 hours a week can't afford a home anywhere in the United States. But, between those two extremes is an interesting continuum. My belief is that most of us grew up in a culture that placed the "right" point on that continuum right between the city and neighborhood level of scale. Most people should have the right to live in the city of their choosing, regardless of your income level. But you don't have the right to pick your neighborhood. If you want to live in the most desireable neighborhood, then it's fair for you to have to pay for the luxury. I think that's been a stable cultural point for a lot of cities in the US for many decades. New York is a good example of a city that supported people from the righest elites down to poverty-level working class. But economic disparity has gotten so bad now that the affordability point on the continuum no longer aligns with our rightful point. If you are working class, there are no cities where the entire commutable region surrounding it is outside of your price point. San Francisco is one and Seattle is well on its way. I think much of the anger we feel comes from those two points being out of alignment. We feel that people should be able to live in the metro area of their choosing, but the economic reality is that for some cities now, they can't. I don't believe any simple supply and demand model of housing will fix this. Seattle is a highly desireable area and the demand is elastic. I think you'd see: Increase housing supply -> Prices go down -> City becomes more appealing for businesses -> Business grow and need more employees -> Demand goes up -> Prices return You'll end up with just as many $800k houses (or apartments), but now with comparatively worse infrastructure because it wasn't designed for higher density. There are plenty enough high paid tech employees in the US and the world at large to absorb any additional housing Seattle has to offer. I think the fundamental problem is that when you combine increasing wealth disparity, high mobility, and people sorting themselves economically, you naturally end up with large regions of the country that are only affordable by certain economic levels. And that spatial fact conflicts with our moral belief that no large region of the US should be effectively off limits to someone based on their wealth.

crtlaltdel 8y ago

quick poll: raise your hand if you've been either homeless or on public assistance AND are an American/live in America. I'm just curious about the demographics of this conversation.

rdlecler1 8y ago

The kicker is that the baby boomers also want the younger generation (who can’t afford homes) to pay for their entitlements. It’s like going to dinner with your rich uncle and he stiffs you on the bill. Housing is the biggest problem of this generation. Exorbitant rent seeking sucks up all marginal resources, leading to greater inequality and less of a means to fund entitlements. The irony.

YorkianTones 8y ago

I think the demand side for single family housing will increase in Seattle over the near future. There has been a recent boom in tech company positions and equity (especially Amazon and Microsoft, but others as well such as Tableau, Facebook, etc.). There is a relatively (compared to SF) nascent startup and VC scene developing, and more tech companies are opening or expanding branch offices here as they observe the talent pool that's now well above critical mass. And many employees of these companies are young (in their 20s), recent transplants from around the country, or on temporary work visas and in the process of getting green cards / citizenship. Seattle is also a place people tend to want to plant roots (for the great career options, the natural beauty, and the culture). As the young recent transplants build their savings and seek to plant roots and start families when they get into their 30s, they'll look at single family housing. But the natural beauty includes water on two sides of the city and there is basically no undeveloped land to add more single family houses. Combining these employment, demographic and geographic factors, I expect demand to continue surging forward and supply to remain constrained. Building up and new apartments coming online is starting to reduce pressure on soaring condo/apartment rent costs, and building up to increase supply is a valve that can continue to reduce rent pressure for those without families. But I don't see a way forward to increase single family housing inside the city limits - in fact supply will go down as more townhomes and apartment buildings go up. It seems, as the article hints at but doesn't much explore, that American Millenial coastal urban dwellers will need to develop a new conception of family housing (that is not single family housing with a private yard). I think there are options here, and the conception of the American dream replete with single family housing around an urban core seems like a relatively recent post-war phenomenon. What does family housing in Tokyo look like? In dense European cities? Historically before the 20th century? What new forms could it take, especially as we build up and think about modern amenities? With new transportation options (ride sharing, better bike infra, soon self driving cars) garages are less necessary, with new meal delivery options kitchens are less necessary, and with the sharing economy we can cut down on storage space. I'd like to see some new creative approaches to modern US family housing.