A group of techies is using data skills to alter Seattle's housing affordability

Check out this article. https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/04/where-yimbys-can-win/...

The idea that the "tech industry" created this problem is just plain nonsense. Sure, the tech industry attracts young folks to creative urban centers and pays them a bit of money. But their parents (my generation) gave them birth and gave them expectations of prosperity.It's selfish to then blame them for wanting to live where the good jobs are.

This problem was created by restrictive zoning. And it will be solved by changing zoning laws.

And the restrictive zoning laws come from people who say, "Oh no, those people moving into new apartments will crowd our schools and our streets. We can't have that!" Whose schools are they? Whose streets are they?

The phrase "affordable housing" has come to mean "cheap housing for poor people." That's stupid. Affordable housing is good for everybody. The basic law of supply and demand teaches us that increasing the supply of housing will lower the price. To address homelessness, build homes.

Government (who exist to serve people) can start to approach this problem by partly assessing property based on nominal beds per square foot. Higher taxes on lower density housing will give an economic incentive to build more housing on existing land.

Powerful companies should unapologetically press politicians, hard, for changes to these NIMBY zoning rules.

Interesting how that lines up so nicely with this headline/factoid:

For every 100 families living in poverty on the West Coast, there are no more than 30 affordable homes

https://www.geekwire.com/2018/every-100-families-living-pove...

Also, no doubt purely coincidentally:

(The Seattle area, the nation’s 22nd largest by population, has the third most homeless people, behind only Los Angeles and New York City.)

I sarcastically say purely coincidentally because of how often I get told that (a large portion of) homeless people are drug addicts, mentally ill etc, so lack of affordable housing is not why people are out on the street.

I was going to bring this up as an anecdote but looking at this (http://www.businessinsider.com/federal-government-land-map-o...) it seems to be true; a relative of mine lives in a small city in Utah and says he wants a couple acres but the land surrounding the city is federally owned, limiting his options. How was this land released to citizens previously and how has that changed since? Was it really just doling it out to farmers who have since sold it?

Since then, prices have doubled at least twice. I could never afford to move back to my old neighborhood.

Here's the thing: Wallingford will be valuable and therefore expensive no matter what kind of housing you build here. Literally anything. There are some crappy midcentury studio apartments that go for 2k a month not 10 blocks from here, because the location is great even if you don't have a house.

That means that basically everybody who doesn't develop property professionally is misdiagnosing the situation.

The NIMBYs say that rezoning will cause property values to crash. That's just not in line with available evidence from Ballard and similar, and flies in the face of reason besides. When your lot can be a beloved home to another family or a pile of income to a developer, math says the developer will eventually win the bidding war.

Most of the YIMBYs are wrong because housing prices just aren't going to come down that much here, and much of what comes in will be rentals. Those rentals will be luxury units because they can be, and will therefore be 2500+ a month. That's within a few hundred dollars of an existing mortgage (on one of the cheaper houses-- not the million dollar 3000+ sqft thing down the road) but without the potential upside.

- Suburb: Just roads are fine.

- Midpoint: Give a lane and make it dedicated for BRT. That's the only way people will take the bus seriously. When they see that bus zoom by while they are stuck in traffic, many will take the bus.

- City: Build rail and subway.

But high density development keeps happening without any of this. This just makes the NIMBY arguments stronger.

EDIT: Just thought of another possible solution for Midpoint: shutdown the bus system and use the funds to give everyone $X per month for Uber Pool/Lyft Line. Make using Pool/Line a requirement for using the money, since those provide the most benefit for increasing road capacity. Bus reputation is so bad in the US, something like this might be the only way.

I've worked to develop urban planning guidelines in my previous job, and in my experience environmental regulations like shading studies are heavily, heavily relied on as a quantitative way to post-rationalize NIMBY-ism's desire to stop construction. Why? Simply because there aren't a lot of other quantitative metrics to justify low-density development, and so the only real data-backed analysis that justifies building shorter buildings tends to be solar rights.

My current job is as a building energy researcher, and as I've gone about my job - which involves a lot of programming & calculating metrics for building energy (obviously), indoor/outdoor human comfort, daylighting thresholds - it's obvious that the urban argument that is made is a one-sided one that could be potentially undermined by demonstrating metrics that favor <i>less</i> solar access. Or, since the sun moves around the sky - metrics that give you equal solar access at different times, which can allow higher density. i.e what is the urban heat island consequence of exposed urban surfaces to sun, what is the comfort benefit of shade, the harm caused by direct UV, what is the building energy benefit of blocking direct solar gain etc.

This is not meant to (reductively) claim that less sun is a good thing - simply that there is more ambiguity then is captured by current zoning regulations or design standards, and as a result we are over-emphasizing solar access when in certain places it isn't benefiting us. At the very least, we shouldn't take the solar-access argument at face-value.

And I don't the planning officials and design professionals who are implementing this for the current state of environmental regulations. In my experience, given the impact their work has on the city, it's astonishing how little resources are expended to actually quantitatively study the effect of different typologies on the city, and as a result they tend to rely on community (NIMBY) feedback, and existing precedent for structuring cities. Better data-based tools could help them a lot make a progressive argument for higher-density.

Why not just ... move?

- why do we spend like 60-70%+ of federal housing dollars on high income earners / rich people?

- why is section 8 gutted to all hell?

I don't see why it's so shocking that there's no affordable housing, when some of the big old programs aimed at reducing that are a shadow of their former selves, and we spend most of our effort in housing just throwing cash at people who already make a lot of it.

Or maybe people like Zach mentioned in the article do think this stuff, but they're taking baby steps because the political capital necessary to actually stop the above points is probably huge.

This is also almost always coded language for not wanting to live near racial minorities. This whole article is yet another example of baby boomers pulling up the ladder behind them. The millennials I know are angry and there's going to be a reckoning in the near future as it comes to a head.

Instead they should all move to the midwest, south, or NE, where cost of living is a small fraction of the west coast. They can pay off a very nice house in full for less than the cost of a downpayment in any trendy west coast city, and they can easily afford to live a stereotypical middle class lifestyle - house, cars, kids, vacations, a stay at home parent - on a reasonable income, something which is now increasingly difficult on the west coast where cost of living is extraordinarily high.

I sincerely hope that various companies start aggressively opening offices in middle America, the south, upstate NY, etc. Maybe someone should produce a few goofy TV shows about how 'quirky' and 'cool' and 'hip' those destinations are, turn them into the new cultural mecca for all the flighty trend chasers, and let the west coast housing mess take care of itself.

In New England, it boggles the mind that startups and giants like GE throw millions into building offices in Kendall and Seaport when they could build elsewhere in the region for much cheaper (Worcester, southern New Hampshire, Rhode Island/Fall River/New Bedford) and allow many of their employers to get reasonably priced homes. Many are served by commuter rail or bus systems, have nearby universities, and are within reasonable driving distance of Boston/Cambridge.

And then there's telecommuting. Automattic, Zapier and a few others have embraced it but they are the exception.

https://streets.mn/2018/03/14/fourplexes-everywhere-bold-ref...

It's striking how much the media is attempting to foment intergenerational strife over issues that are fundamentally about wealth inequality.

I knew it was bad, but didn't realize it's that bad. One Seattlite once told me there are a lot of homeless people because they refer to it as Freeattle, as they get lot of things for free - not sure if that is true. Anyone who is from Seattle know more?

As the young recent transplants build their savings and seek to plant roots and start families when they get into their 30s, they'll look at single family housing. But the natural beauty includes water on two sides of the city and there is basically no undeveloped land to add more single family houses. Combining these employment, demographic and geographic factors, I expect demand to continue surging forward and supply to remain constrained. Building up and new apartments coming online is starting to reduce pressure on soaring condo/apartment rent costs, and building up to increase supply is a valve that can continue to reduce rent pressure for those without families. But I don't see a way forward to increase single family housing inside the city limits - in fact supply will go down as more townhomes and apartment buildings go up.

It seems, as the article hints at but doesn't much explore, that American Millenial coastal urban dwellers will need to develop a new conception of family housing (that is not single family housing with a private yard). I think there are options here, and the conception of the American dream replete with single family housing around an urban core seems like a relatively recent post-war phenomenon. What does family housing in Tokyo look like? In dense European cities? Historically before the 20th century? What new forms could it take, especially as we build up and think about modern amenities? With new transportation options (ride sharing, better bike infra, soon self driving cars) garages are less necessary, with new meal delivery options kitchens are less necessary, and with the sharing economy we can cut down on storage space. I'd like to see some new creative approaches to modern US family housing.

In most of these discussions there is an implied moral stance that people have some level of "rights" about where they can live. I think all but the most stringent anarchists agree you don't have a moral right to live in a sprawling mansion on the coast, regardless of your contributions to society. And most agree that it's not right if someone working 40 hours a week can't afford a home anywhere in the United States.

But, between those two extremes is an interesting continuum. My belief is that most of us grew up in a culture that placed the "right" point on that continuum right between the city and neighborhood level of scale. Most people should have the right to live in the city of their choosing, regardless of your income level. But you don't have the right to pick your neighborhood. If you want to live in the most desireable neighborhood, then it's fair for you to have to pay for the luxury.

I think that's been a stable cultural point for a lot of cities in the US for many decades. New York is a good example of a city that supported people from the righest elites down to poverty-level working class.

But economic disparity has gotten so bad now that the affordability point on the continuum no longer aligns with our rightful point. If you are working class, there are no cities where the entire commutable region surrounding it is outside of your price point. San Francisco is one and Seattle is well on its way.

I think much of the anger we feel comes from those two points being out of alignment. We feel that people should be able to live in the metro area of their choosing, but the economic reality is that for some cities now, they can't.

I don't believe any simple supply and demand model of housing will fix this. Seattle is a highly desireable area and the demand is elastic. I think you'd see:

    Increase housing supply ->
    Prices go down ->
    City becomes more appealing for businesses ->
    Business grow and need more employees ->
    Demand goes up ->
    Prices return

I think the fundamental problem is that when you combine increasing wealth disparity, high mobility, and people sorting themselves economically, you naturally end up with large regions of the country that are only affordable by certain economic levels. And that spatial fact conflicts with our moral belief that no large region of the US should be effectively off limits to someone based on their wealth.

___

And woe to the millennial who dares dream of starting a family, warns Myra Lara, a 30-year-old architect and affordability advocate. Of her Seattle friends who have become parents, all but one has been exiled to the suburbs. “It sucks—I never see them,” says Lara. “But that’s what they have to do.”

__

Lol "woe" indeed. This is probably the ultimate first-world problem.

If you want a house like that, and you're not super wealthy, find a remote gig and move outside the big tech-boom cities. Here in the Rust Belt, houses like that are very affordably priced.

If enough people with tech-generated wealth start living and spending money here, it'll make progress solving the regional inequalities that are driving support for Donald Trump.

The problem to solve is distributing economic viability more widely across the country and then building more cities and towns in the density that supports family formation and doesn't dehumanize the occupants: single family homes on 5-12k square foot lots surrounding walkable commercial districts.

Allowing our population to naturally stabilize by restricting immigration would help too.