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Comment by mabbo | Hacker News Reader

> But median home prices have doubled in five years, to $700,000. This is not a good thing in a place where teachers and cops used to be able to afford a house with a water view.

This is a self-inflicted wound that Amazon shouldn't be held to blame for. Seattle refuses to add density- a common pattern on the west coast it seems. When supply is limited and demand increases, prices rise. This is basic economics. If Seattle wants all those juicy tax dollars of Amazonians working there, they either have to allow for the growth in homes, or accept that homes will get more expensive.

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Is it refusing to add density? I see twenty buildings going up from my window. Several districts were just zoned to allow taller buildings.

It seems growth is outpacing the density that's being added -- not that no one wants density. (Yes, there's some nimbyism about, but the buildings are going up at an insane clip.)

You hear the same complaint about Manhattan and presumably Brooklyn. Have they walked by Hudson Yards or seen the cranes all over other areas? Sure, you can always build incrementally more. But at some level it’s demand outstripping any reasonable near term increase in supply.

Outside of a small downtown core, it is literally illegal to build over 6 stories, and small lots are limited to 3 stories because cars are prioritized over people.

But these are replacing vast swaths of what used to be single family single or two story buildings with yards. I've lived in Seattle my whole life and I've seen it change a lot, but the rate of change has definitely skyrocketed. Everywhere I go I find myself walking through "only" 3-6 story urban ravines where 5 years ago I saw sky. It definitely changes the character of the place. And it's not like the downtown core isn't blowing up also.

Obviously! But, you have to actually engage the problem we're talking about here. A lot of people want to live in Seattle. So we've got to come up with some way to decide how many of them get to. That's just the actual problem stated plainly and unpolitically.

One possible answer: leave the single-family housing. Ration via high prices.

Another possible answer: build a lot more housing in an attempt to accept more people and drive down prices.

I guess you could also somehow try to reduce demand, but I suspect you'd regret that "solution." Just ask St. Louis or Cincinnati or Tulsa their thoughts on that.

If you just want to say, "I don't like any of those options!" then, I mean, OK, that's definitely a fair emotion to express. But it's not a legitimate policy position.

Seattle currently has more than 50% of the cranes nation wide.

That said, they're almost universally building apartments (exceptions being Insignia, LUMA, and Nexus, that I know of).

Yes, its much better than nothing, but it's also too little and too late.

> Seattle currently has more than 50% of the cranes nation wide.

Got a source for that? https://archpaper.com/2017/08/booming-seattle-dominates-nati... puts it closer to 20%, although that's only counting fixed cranes...

Wellllll, I can't edit it anymore, but yeah, got that totally wrong (original source was a real estate developer who's involved with a couple of the projects).

I suspect he took "about 60% more than any other city" and radically misinterpreted it (and I went and parroted him -- oops). Original conversation was right around when this article was published: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/seattle-ha...

Apologies for the error!

No worries, it happens - and it's still some pretty impressive stats I wasn't aware of before :).

Conveniently co-inciding with the overall housing boom nationwide.

<< Seattle refuses to add density- a common pattern on the west coast it seems.

This is utterly and preposterously false.

There are huge apartment and condominium complexes going up all over town. Ballard has been strip mined and turned into a virtual Las Vegas strip of luxury apartments. Capitol Hill has been strip mined and turned into block after block of luxury apartments.

I've visited the web sites of nearly all these buildings, and with the exception of projects by Capitol Hill Housing Authority, it's virtually all been built for people with high incomes.

The fact that so much housing has been built for solely for wealthy people is really, really, really central to the argument against gentrification.

Gentrification says "Hey, if your community doesn't have have money, it doesn't exist. If it doesn't exist, we don't even have to erase it. You'll just be gone and no one will care."

This is an incredibly destructive ( often totally racist ) message, and it's really at the heart of the problems that arise with income inequality.

Look to the east coast or even Vancouver to see what a "huge" building is.

Speaking of changing cities with “huge” buildings; the before pic is 1990 which is just incredible, to me anyway. http://www.businessinsider.com/shanghai-growth-gif-2014-11?r...

The tallest in the “now” image is this building. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_Tower

Not Vancouver. Vancouver's suburbs. In downtown Vancouver people are complaining that 30 floor condo towers are too tall, and outside of the downtown core even getting past 10 floors is rare; in Burnaby there's 30 towers of 45+ floors built or planned within a 1 km radius.

I'm glad you brought this up, as it lets me help clarify a few points of contention:

1) When a city has constrained housing supply, wealthy people compete in lower tiers of the housing market, driving up prices. Building more luxury homes allows those people to stop bidding up mid-tier homes, taking some of the pressure off the housing market at large. Thus, while it might not feel like it, those luxury homes are a good thing for Seattle's housing market. The concept is called "filtering" and you can read more about it here. [1][2]

2) While it seems like Seattle is awash with cranes and construction is running rampant, it's surprisingly not enough to keep up with population/job growth. There have been so many people showing up in the city that housing stock just hasn't been able to keep up. Something like 20K people in the last year and only ~6K housing units. This is a large part of the housing problem in general, and there's nothing to be done but build even more (and make it easier to build, through re-zoning and densification).

[1] http://cityobservatory.org/what-filtering-can-and-cant-do/

[2] http://cityobservatory.org/how-luxury-housing-becomes-afford...

I rented an apartment just last month and, at least for downtown Bellevue, the rental market is surprisingly weak because of all the new supply that has been coming online. Not enough to drive prices lower, but enough that rents weren't rising and many properties were even doing incentives. Not sure if this generalizes to Seattle, and it is downtown Bellevue, which isn't a very happening place.

The advantage to living in Bellevue is that, after 7pm Seattle is just 20 minutes away. (Before 7 it's about an hour away.) There certainly are luxury apartments in Bellevue for cheaper than Seattle + 520 tolling.

I have a baby, and getting to Seattle is just a dream so far. The only thing I've managed is to visit my aunt in West Seattle on a Sunday. Bellevue is boring as hell, but a great place to entertain and service a 9 month while staying close to job oppurtunities (though their is a lot more in Seattle these days then their ever was in the mid 90s when I was attending UW).

The person in the apartment above me has a kid, is that you? Are you on 12th?

It's been a dream of mine, since attending UW, to live and work in Seattle. It was amazing to do as a student, but since graduation I can only find work across the lake. I finally gave in and moved across last year.

Bellevue is boring, which makes for a great base of operations - I can hang out at home while traffic dies down (instead of networking at a bar), then goto other cities when highway demand is low. But yeah, people don't really live in this city, women don't really goto the expensive dive bars, and there's so much construction.

It feels like there are a lot more people over here than last year. How many other people are also moving across the lake?

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