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Comment by hacknat | Hacker News Reader

To all the people dissing this plan from afar you have no idea how bad Seattle has gotten in the last three years. Over 100k people have moved into the metro area every year for three years.

My commute times changed noticeably over the course of one year. It went from consistently 30 minutes over the 90 bridge to consistently an hour (we're talking 18 miles, door to door).

This thing should have been built in the 70s.

My wife and I actually moved back to the Midwest 2 months ago after living in Seattle for 8 years, despite my comfortable Senior Engineer salary, because all of our closest friends moved away in the span of a year, because they could no longer afford to live in the city (none of them worked in tech).

I wish Seattle good things from afar, and it will always hold a special place in my heart, but I'm glad I'm not living through these infrastructure growing pains that should have been addressed years ago.

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I think that economics will sort out the cost-of-living issues. Seattle doesn't seem to have the NIMBYism of the Bay Area, and Washington State actually requires that communities plan for growth under the state Growth Management Act. I'm not sure how this compares to California (witness the unencumbered sprawl of LA, or the inability to build anything in the Bay Area), but from what I've seen, local Washington governments are not pretending that population growth is a fantasy. Seattle's growth plan specifically mentions "directing growth to existing urban centers and villages", so I can see how the proposed Sound Transit line extensions would help facilitate urbanization.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_State_Growth_Manage...

http://www.seattle.gov/dpd/cityplanning/completeprojectslist...

I hope so.

Seattle, Vancouver, SF, etc need to upzone, to permit more development, so that supply can meet demand. As I understand it, that upzoning is not happening nearly fast enough.

Public transit initiatives trigger (begats?) upzoning. This is an end run around the regressive restrictions on property taxes and entrenched NIMBYism.

I fully support it. Whatever works. I wish my peeps working on affordability, homelessness, economic justice would put less emphasis on set asides, protecting older listings, etc, and place more emphasis on increasing inventory.

One potential monkeywrench of increasing supply is absentee landlords. I just read something like 1/3rd of Vancouver properties are owned by Chinese investors. Which I'm totally cool with so long as the units are mostly occupied.

Seattle does have plenty of stupid people like every other place. People that vote against all road building because they only want bike lanes or transit. People that vote against transit because they don't want poor people coming where they are (really this happens, search for Kemper Freeman initiatives to keep the poor people out of bellevue).

We have to do increase all modes of transportation. The problem with this proposal is that it will take 25+ years. We need a 10 year version of this plan. Charge us rich programmers more, we can afford it.

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