Will Seattle figure out how to deal with its new wealth? | Hacker News Reader

Will Seattle figure out how to deal with its new wealth?

seattletimes.com

60 pointswallflower84 comments

The real question isn't about "its new wealth;" it's about whether the city will build enough housing to keep housing costs somewhat reasonable by building more housing, and whether it can accelerate its subway / light rail schedule: http://jakeseliger.com/2015/09/24/do-millennials-have-a-futu... . The housing issue is key, as California's failure to build enough housing has led to seemingly relentlessly increasing housing costs: https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/sf-housing .

I wonder if maybe there's a downside to making the housing affordable by building out. If you build out during the boom years, what happens when the boom subsides? You'll end up with a city full of run down infrastructure that the city can't support on a smaller tax base. It makes sense to me to expand housing, I'm just not sure how much.

I'm all for build-out, but you have an interesting point here. We need some sort of elastic build-out scheme, so that if/when people move out it doesn't turn into another Detroit.

Realistically I don't think it will happen in Seattle, I don't see a lot of people moving out. Even if there is a technology bust, where would those engineers go? I doubt there will be better jobs for them anywhere else...

Amazon should look into on-demand scalable housing solutions that you can pay for on a usage basis.

You're describing trailer park rentals. I'm in!

AHS - Amazon Housing Services (like AWS).

Multi-tenancy included :)

If ol' Jeff picks up the idea, he should give me and parent commenter a cut.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Seattle_since_1940#...

This sounds similar to the current dependency on Amazon in the city.

Build out has happened in Vancouver, and it really needs to focus on building up instead. Pushing working people into neighbouring communities in the metro area isn't the worst, but it's drifting farther and farther out. Whereas closer cities already had their own communities, I feel like too many people are flocking to towns that have no reason to exist other than their (relative) proximity to Vancouver.

Sure thing, I'm all for building up. Buildout does not have to be bad if you have public transport. I would take 60 minutes riding on a train over 30 minutes driving in a car.

> I would take 60 minutes riding on a train over 30 minutes driving in a car.

That's not precisely the case. Did you take into account the time it takes to get to the train, the waiting time, and the time it takes to get to work after you get off the train?

I was waiting 10 minutes (nominally from the train) from work. I had to drive 7 minutes to the train, wait 5 minutes (train was 10 minutes, and I like to get to the station 5 minutes before the train shows up) and the train is generally late. And then a 20 minute walk to my job.

I see your point.

I'll tell you where I'm coming from. Walking, in a pleasing environment, is fun, excersize and mind-clearing rest. Riding a train is reading time. Driving is neither and it's an addition stress of being on the lookout for potentially fatal events around you.

In theory. In practice I still drive. :/

You can walk around during most of those in between times. Not so when just driving.

Arguably, a city can avoid Detroit's fate by not relying too heavily on a single industry.

First step: not relying on a single company.

Would that be Boeing, Microsoft, or Amazon?

This isn't a situation like the North Dakota oil boom, where there's a massive spike on a small base that's clearly going to end. It would a long time to build out enough to have the potential problem, and a long time to decline enough to have it.

Detroit is overbuilt for its population now, but it got a good 50 years of use at that size.

I could get behind that position, but what factors make you think the boom is sustained? I'm not from Seattle, so I'm kind of in the peanut gallery, but if Seattle's economy is based on a few large companies or a single industry, that would be a problem. What does the economic composition of Seattle look like?

Amazon, Microsoft, Starbucks, Nordstrom, umbrellas.

1) It's pretty diversified. Medicine, Tech, Aerospace. The area has cheap electricity thanks to the Columbia River, which is good for the last two. 2) Even if it's not, we're not talking about 10x. We're talking about maybe 1.5x or 2x at the very most extreme end. It's not like Vegas where there's endless desert to fill, it would take time to build that much around Seattle.

You can end up with Las Vegas perhaps. There is certainly a challenge there, and places like Detroit, where a distributed population places an undue burden on services.

Detroit died because US automanufacturing rapidly automated and stagnated at the same time, cutting a huge number of jobs. The city of Detroit had become addicted to the property taxes those jobs brought in, and never adjusted taxes to match the employment levels. People that owned their homes just picked up and left the city.

While Seattle is tech heavy, esp in Cloud Computing, it does have diversification.

What is the issue with Las Vegas? Other that it spreading out?

Las Vegas with its collection of townships, the two cities (Las Vegas and North Las Vegas), the multiple jurisdictions and overlap of agencies, it isn't "wrong" per-se, it is just inefficient.

I don't have enough context to know if it's enough or how much better we could be doing, but there actually are a lot of new housing projects in progress, and new ones getting started all the time. So we're doing better than the Bay at least.

But mostly they're coming from lots that were previously either parking lots or low-earning commercial property (for example, the McDonalds on Madison and Minor just got torn down a few weeks ago for a new apartment complex). Eventually those will run out and the only thing left will be to cannibalize Seattle's large and very unhelpful supply of low-density single-family housing. That's when the real problems and political fights are going to start, if the real estate market hasn't cooled off by then.

The problem with much of the single family housing is that it's fully packed in already as defined by the zoning laws. If they could build up, they would do it in a heartbeat.

they "can" build up, zoning laws are not an immutable fact of nature.

Seattleite here. One of the reasons it's hard to "just build more" here is that the city of Seattle is bounded on two sides by water (Lake Washington to the east and Puget Sound to the west). This means that there are far fewer square miles available for "bedroom communities" outside the city; this, in turn, has caused massive pressure on rents and housing in those communities that are still driving distance from the city (modulo Seattle's awful traffic, which is itself driven in part by geography and is among the 10 worst in the nation[0]). There's just not as much land to build on--and most of it is already built on.

[0] http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/seat...

The terribly restrictive zoning hasn't helped, if we got rid of the height caps and parking minimums that kneecap growth, we would see many more apartments and condos being built. Why should a 1 bedroom apartment be over a grand in Ballard or Fremont?

Not sure removing parking minimums is all that great an idea if the public transit isn't keeping up though.

I'm also not very familiar with Seattle, but generally when cities just start building nilly willy, traffic become a real problem, which then limits how far from city center you can be while still having an acceptable commute, which drastically raises prices since people are not willing to live further out.

Parking minimums service a minority of the population of Seattle, while adding 15% to 20% onto the average rental price. Another angle is the road network in Belltown is well beyond capacity, and is likely to only have safety and pedestrian/biker friendliness improvements done moving forward (if not a road diet or car ban), so how do you intend to service these empty spaces so they can be usable?

There isn't more land to build roads on, and tunneling for roadways is extremely expensive and prone to delays (eg. SR 99 tunnel), esp. compared to our rail tunnels which have been repeatedly completed ahead of schedule and under budget.

I admittedly only have been in Seattle once, but it didn't feel very friendly for people without cars (I don't drive myself, and it was a pain). It's better than average, but average is not a very high bar.

Is it really a minority of people who have cars there? Even in NYC, while a lot of people don't have cars, I'm not sure it's the minority.

Regardless of all that, if you build up without car infrastructure, you need to up public transportation to keep up. If you do then there's no problem. Is that happening in Seattle? In Boston/Cambridge people are also asking for parking minimums to be done with, but the public transportation infrastructure is getting worse and worse, so you have areas like around Cambridge's Alewife that are becoming massive traffic bottlenecks as they're building up around it. That's just not scalable.

In 2014 an Oregon live article claimed 17 percent of Seattlites didn't have a car. So no car owners are not the minority, despite what the op wants you to believe. Yes in the three years since that article had been published in sure more people have given up cars, but they are still in the minority. Given how poor public transportation is it will be a while yet before car owners are in the minority

On the other hand, bus transit service gets cut if the passenger numbers aren't there to support it. Better to drive more people to transit and let Metro/Sound Transit catch up, rather than wait for them to improve service just in case.

Seattle could increase its housing stock by 4x by building at the density of Brooklyn. It doesn't even need to do that much to become affordable. That isn't hard, it's just a matter of allowing it to happen.

I don't know why you're being downvoted, most of the sqft limitation is due to severe height and building restrictions in zoning outside of the downtown core. That's just fact.

it is not bounded vertically. What Seattle needs to do is limit SFH (single family home) zoning, which right now covers ~80% of the city.

Sounds like a georgist land value tax might work to fix the poor use of land in Seattle.

being bounded on multiple sides by water/geographical restrictions is not really unique to seattle, however. Vancouver BC is bounded by the fraser river, burrard inlet and the ocean on 3 sides. The problem in Vancouver is not so much geography and lack of space, but the combination of massive foreign investment distorting the market and the fact that 90%+ of the city's residential land area is still zoned for single family houses. The 15% foreign resident home buyers' tax in BC has recently resulted in a lot of the mainland Chinese capital coming to buy homes in the Seattle area instead.

If companies would consistently allow hours other than 9ish to 5ish, so that workers can commute outside of the morning or evening rush hours, then there is plenty of much less expensive housing available a ferry ride plus a short drive from Seattle over on the other side of Puget Sound.

If you have to travel to Seattle during the morning rush or home from Seattle during the evening rush, the ferry is terrible. There can be long waits for a boat and terrible traffic near the terminal. But if you can travel outside those hours it is pretty reasonable. Get up, drive on to the ferry, then take a nap, or read, or play around on your computer, or go up and have breakfast or a snack or read or enjoy the view.

If the company needs people to overlap, make a 9 to 5 shift for people living on the Seattle side and a noon to 8 shift for people on the other side, and that should provide enough overlap almost all of the time.

If a lot of people end up living across the Sound, it might even be worth considering opening a satellite office in Bremerton or Poulsbo or Silverdale. I'm not sure about Bremerton, but Silverdale and Poulsbo are full of office space that became vacant during the recession and has stayed that way. (BTW, commuting from a home in Seattle to an office across Puget Sound is fine even during rush hour, so if someone from the main office occasionally needs to work for a while in the satellite office it should not be much of a hardship).

What is your job cause my software engineer co-workers and I have very lax hour requirements as long as you get your work done.

Neither of those bodies of water are really that large.

I'm a firm believer that Americans don't understand how to zone cities. In Asia (e.g. Japan) you can have beautiful high-rises mixed with things useful for daily life, be that small shops, restaurants, or convenience stores. Even Ginza has useful things if you walk a couple of blocks.

On the other hand, if you take Seattle's Belltown, there will be art stores, realtor offices, and other things you rarely ever ever need, and yet you have to drive five minutes to buy a bottle of water.

You don't have to drive 5 minutes to buy a bottle of water in Belltown. You can do that in a 5 minute walk, and there are multiple grocery stores within a 5 minute drive.

Could we not fixate on the choice of example? I'm not familiar with Belltown and I don't really care, I'm much more interested in the parent's point and whether it's true.

I can walk across the street from my apartment in Bellevue and get food, furniture, and groceries but this is the exception even in Bellevue: outside of downtown areas many apartment complexes require getting in a car or bus to get anything.

The point is development in Belltown has been highly restricted for decades, preventing dense, multi-purpose buildings from being built in that neighborhood.

Even the newer buildings being built right on Denny and Queen Anne Ave N in Belltown are entirely the creation of zoning, as they are height capped and forced to subsidize parking (which rents for $0.XX per sqft a month) over usable space that rents for dollars a square foot. Most of the people living and working in that area are using transit, with 70% not driving: https://www.seattle.gov/transportation/docs/2014TrafficRepor...

I'll bite; Belltown has barely any bodegas and no grocery stores. The closest grocery store is Whole Foods in SLU or QFC in Lower Queen Anne.

However I think the real takeaway from the parent comment is that US cities are not designed for pedestrians[0].

[0] http://www.newurbanism.org/pedestrian.html

There is an IGA on 3rd below Pike. But yes Belltown has (mostly) always been a wasteland. There used to be a pretty good grocery store kitty-corner from the Cinerama.

I'm a firm believer that Americans don't understand how to zone cities. In Asia (e.g. Japan)

Your observation is astute: https://www.vox.com/2016/8/8/12390048/san-francisco-housing-...

The big difference between most of America and Japan is that people on this side don't give a shit about each other. So if you want to be able to sleep at night without dealing with constant frat parties and the police telling you to just deal with it, your only option is to live in a low density area, with no shop around, on a small dead end street.

So people get very opinionated when it comes to zoning, and it ends up done sub optimally.

Put some teeth on laws that make it so a single person can make 200 others miserable with no repercussion, and all of a sudden most resistance to proper zoning will go away.

You're saying Americans don't understand zoning because of one part of Seattle?

I've seen a bunch of single family homes that were zoned in multifamily areas turned into townhomes. Seattle is becoming more dense, and not just in downtown. We're not San Francisco, thank god.

Give it 3 years.

This guy bugs me:

> “It’s concerning that we’re ripping down part of our heritage and building glass boxes,”

You can't complain about rising rents with one side of your mouth and say crap with this with the other. Rents in Seattle are still rising fast (even after the Bay Area is starting to cool off a bit), and the only reason it's not significantly worse is because there actually are a crap-ton of new dense housing developments in progress, even if it's not enough.

Yeah, what exactly are developers supposed to do if not this? Seattle is not built in the best place for growth, we're surrounded by water. It's either denser housing or hour-plus commutes.

A lot of the heritage buildings are not designed to survive the kind of earthquakes that Seattle is prone to. So you can either tear them down now for development, or let the Big One do it later, with great loss of life.

heritage brick buildings look quaint and cute, sure, but dying crushed to death by bricks and mortar in a 7.7 earthquake seems like a pretty bad way to go. There are ways to structurally retrofit them to modern standards, a lot of the 100+ year old buildings in Vancouver's gastown have internal X-bracing of steel beams and earthquake retrofits, but it's not cheap.

Seattle and Vancouver need to plan for 8+ earthquakes. There shouldn't be a single brick building in either city.

There have been seven large Cascadia subduction zone earthquakes in the last 3500 yrs or so. About a 500 year repeat interval. The last one was in precisely 1700, known from historical records. So, on average, the next one would be in 200 yrs (but could come tomorrow or even further into the future). Building new construction to survive such a quake is probably a good idea, but tearing down old ones seems like not the best investment in resources given such a low probability event.

I can understand his practical concerns ("Those glass boxes won’t have a Dan’s Belltown Grocery, a little pizza joint; you’ll miss out on the divey bars, the dress sellers"), and I agree, but people need affordable housing first. Charming neighborhood businesses are awesome and I hope there's a way to preserve them, but if only the rich can afford to live near those businesses, it's just another kind of elitism.

I think this could be possible in the glass boxes if they had many small spaces of retail on the ground floor or two and sold them to business owners (like condos). I wish they would do that in Oakland. I like increased density and we need the housing, but it is a bit sad to see 20 individual lots get eaten up by huge condo projects. Even sadder to see the new construction go up in smoke though.

>Those glass boxes won’t have a Dan’s Belltown Grocery, a little pizza joint; you’ll miss out on the divey bars, the dress sellers"

Why shouldn't they? There is no reason you can't give the ground floor to bussinesses, and have living units upstairs.

I don't know the market forces involved, but I would expect fancy high-rises to have mostly major chains in their retail slots, not local businesses.

Foreign investors buying up single family dwellings and turning them into managed AirBNB rentals is also a problem.

And with all this new wealth in Seattle, Seattle Public Schools are still garbage.

At least with Redmond, Bellevue, Issaquah, and Sammamish, they invested in their public schools.

Do you have data showing that the schools are worse than similar schools elsewhere with the same demographics? The districts you list have been full of rich white people since forever.

For those who haven't been to Bellevue, this about sums it up: http://i.imgur.com/y1a7ZsV.jpg

Funny enough Amazon has turned Seattle into that, but much worse.

Small family run restaurants have been replaced by restaurants run by business-minded chefs serving overpriced and mediocre fare. There still exists some of seattle's former self, however Seattle is trending towards the bland and generic eastside, just without the parking and good schools.

Do you have data showing that those districts are rich white people, and without large pockets of Chinese and SE Asian families?

Median home price in Seattle is $722k (src: http://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/more-record...)

Median home price in Eastside is $880k (same source)

Home prices have direct correlation to school test scores.

Anyone with that wealth would probably send them to private school so I doubt they are concerned about the public school system.

For Microsoft at least, most of my coworkers send their kids to public school.

LOL, the private schools here are anti-vaxxer havens, when you hear about kids dying of whooping cough or similar in this state, it nearly always is at a private school. Also, its a non-union gig that pays a few grand less than SPS or the other public school districts. What your paying for with private schools in the region is to be in an upper crust social circle.

The Archdiocese of the Seattle Catholic Church needs to crack down on that, as they run the majority of the private schools in the city.

Wealthy people send their kids to the Mercer Island public school system all the time, but that island is a uniquely wealthy insular suburb community. If there was anything wrong with the quality of education received by its students, you absolutely know there would be a revolt of several hundred wealthy homeowners on the island, who would overthrow their city government.

As a former airbnb host, I feel these problems are due to existing bad policies on new construction or zoning unless the city has a huge boom in tourism and not enough hotels.

It's a reflection easily corrected though(more hotels).

I've lived in one that did that and watched the demand tank some everytime a new hotel went up. City had removed limits on downtown building a a few years ago....prior to that airbnbs did so good that city told hotels to screw off because they needed them to meet high tourism demand...even legalized them!

As a Seattle resident, I'd really love to see telecommuting become more widely used. I can understand the connection that comes with meeting in person, but as our teleconferencing, online communication, and even Virtual Reality technology matures, it would be great to see businesses embrace it and let you live and work wherever you want. It would reduce the financial pressure - both to employees and to residents of currently congested areas.

Did SF/Valley figure out how to deal with its new wealth? That same answer applies here. The exact same thing that happened in SF and the valley is and has been happening in Seattle for quite some time, just on a slightly lesser scale. Hell, even the geography of the two places is extremely similar. Of course the results are similar. If I want to see Seattle's future, I look at SF's present.

Most scary statistic (to me):

> 63 percent: Increase in the number of suburban residents living in poverty in metro Seattle between 2000 and 2015.

Also: Add to that the fact there’s no state or Seattle income tax, making wages and investment income stretch further.

Who's to say this will last? Once the gov begins to make larger plans requiring larger budgets, this nice benefit could easily be reconsidered.

there's no state income tax or seattle income tax, but the sales tax rate is very regressive and quite high (10.1% in city of seattle borders right now). This is burdensome to low income families since you pay income tax on almost all basic consumer necessities. State income tax that would scale to higher tiers for high-income individuals ($160k+/year gross) would be a much fairer system.

> In Vancouver, B.C. [..] mainly Chinese buyers drove the average home price to $1.038 million in January 2016.

> by January 2017, the average home price in Vancouver had plunged to $878,242 [...] in the wake of the B.C. government’s 15-percent foreign-buyer tax on home purchases

It seems to me you have a clear way to keep the market affordable for residents.

$878k is still not affordable, and Seattle is still not Vancouver.

also, $878k is the median "home" price, which includes bachelor/1BD size condos, which skew down the price. The median price for a small single family detached home in Vancouver is still way higher than $1.4m. People are buying teardowns in the Kerrisdale neighborhood for just the value in the lot, 50 ft wide, at $2.1m.

This article reads like it is about Chinese immigrants (or their American children) who are moving to Seattle because San Francisco and Vancouver real estate have peaked. This wealth is only incidentally connected to Seattle.

This phenomenon doesn't really have much to do with the influx of Amazon/Microsoft/etc. tech workers.

Finally, a case where Betteridge's Law of Headlines might not apply! (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines)

This article reads like trashy bragging to me. I must be getting old.

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