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Comment by jseliger | Hacker News Reader

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 .

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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 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.

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.

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