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Comment by jandrewrogers | Hacker News Reader

This a great thing considering Seattle's insane, tech-driven population growth and the pressure it has put on housing supply. To the city's credit, they have not been shy about aggressively constructing new housing, both rental and for sale. Nonetheless, housing costs have been skyrocketing because the builders haven't been able to keep up with the demand rate. Hopefully this is a sign that they are finally catching up with Seattle's market demand and rental rates can come down a bit.

While it is difficult to grow an urban region this fast without side effects, I think Seattle has done a reasonably good job managing the crazy population growth compared to some cities like San Francisco.

The money quote:

"The city is on pace to see more apartments built this decade than in the previous 50 years combined"

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The problem isn't the builders, it's the city's fear of its own NIMBY residents. It takes 4-5 years to build an apartment building, but less than 1 of those years is actual construction. The rest is taken up by draconian regulatory compliance, permitting, and several community reviews where developers basically have to concede to every possible demand of current residents. And this is the best case scenario. If you need to rezone, you should be prepared to sit on empty land for ten years or more. If Seattle was more serious about increasing supply, that build cycle would be a lot closer to 1 year than 5...housing developers would love to respond more quickly to demand.

And because of this there is the YIMBY-movement: http://yimbytown.com/

:-)

Regarding the money quote: Doesn't it beg the question as of why exactly supply took so long for catching up with demand? Because I doubt the increase in citizens in the last years is also more than in the "last 50 years combined". Also, those new citizens surely didn't only moved to Seattle just because of the "amazon effect".

Is this the story of too much red-tape or the story of too low a demand to cut-through (costs of) red-tape? Seattle has seem to cut back on it by "allowing denser housing or rolling back requirements to build costly parking garages".

IMO, supply here isn't being built for the existing demand, because entry-level housing (cheap) isn't being built as much. Indicating a market interference to me. There (as in most cities) doesn't seem to be much done to make efficient housing construction possible. So for the less affluent ones: Scale down your housing-expectations per dollar, wait out until those new constructions have been worn down and the boom-buildings have seen their bust-caused ownership changes.

To my understanding, the initial big change in Seattle was about a decade ago when they massively overhauled the city planning and zoning restrictions to effectively eliminate height and density restrictions (and NIMBY drama related thereto) in the urban core, hence the explosion in residential high-rises as well as new office skyscrapers. Recently they've been making similar but more incremental changes further out. Removing the need to build for suburban assumptions in the urban core, like mandatory parking, also made things much more sensible e.g. most people that live in the core don't drive or even need a car much, so it was silly to mandate parking that few people used. Supposedly Seattle was a bit more like San Francisco before these changes were put in place but it was before I lived here. In hindsight, these sweeping regulatory changes may turn out to be an inflection point for the city over the long term.

I've only lived in Seattle since 2010 but I don't believe the "Amazon effect" explains all of it. Most of the people, at least in tech, that are moving to Seattle recently that I've talked to seem to have two main reasons for moving to Seattle: quality of life and low (no) taxes. If Seattle can keep housing costs in check while still preserving its quality of life and tax advantages, I expect the city to do well for the foreseeable future. It may never be "cheap" but it will probably be manageable.

It is a feature, not a bug, that American government moves slowly. Magnified by how much faster our world turns cmp to even 50 years ago.

This feature smoothes over the jagged lines of voters opinions. It also frustrates the righteous and unrighteous, because both desire bending to their values immediately.

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