Off-sidewalk pedestrian island and transit loading at 4th and Pike, 1956. View looking east up Pike Street across 4th Avenue; compare with today. Item 53825, courtesy of the Seattle Municipal Archives.

Transit & Streets:

Housing & Land Use:

On Mexico City’s Cablebús lines:

Commentary & Other News:

This is an Open Thread.

101 Replies to “Midweek Roundup: Cablebús”

  1. Anybody have any idea when we’ll start to see ridership numbers for the new Link extension?

  2. The Cablebús article is jarring to someone who has lived in San Francisco. To us a “cable car” is the “Market and Wharves” or “California Street” car lines. IOW cable-propelled “trollies”.

    I like Martin’s use of the term “Gondola”, though that brings up an image of a guy poling a skinny boat while singing “Fiiiii-ga-ro!”

    I have a question for Martin, though. Every time I’ve ridden a Gondola — admittedly only five or six times — there has been a crew of (mostly) guys to hold the car while people board and alight. Since we are considering a multi-stop system, that sounds like there would have to be nearly twenty hour “manning” of all the stations.

    Presumably there would be windscreens, but a Gondola station can’t be entirely enclosed. Who is going to want to help riders board and alight at Delridge Station at 11:39 PM on a Sunday night? Is there some sort of robo-stabilizer available these days?

    Thanks in advance, Martin.

    1. I haven’t had a reason to ride the gondola in Portlandia yet but as far as I can see the stations don’t have staff dedicated to holding the cab in position during boarding and I haven’t ever seen anything like you describe at a ski area either.

      1. Portland Arial Tram isn’t really a gondola. It’s more like a funicular without track. Eg: it only has two cars that balance one another and are never separated from the cable. They do have a small staff, but it’s not large.

        The gondola systems you are thinking of operate at fairly high capacity. Eg, the one at Disney World has a three track boarding area, and the staff not only helps people board, but makes sure that if someone on one boarding track is a bit slow, one of the other cars on one of the other tracks is shoved out onto the rope so that no space on the rope is wasted. They can’t afford to do it any other way, because they’ve always got a hundred people in line and no space to spare on their 1960s era equipment.

        There’s no way to compare what the modern systems do to the way the 50 year old systems operate.

        However, even the 50 year old systems don’t necessarily need huge staff if the demand is low. The Disney World example could get by with one employee at each station, if the demand dropped to a car every 15 seconds or so.

      2. it only has two cars that balance one another and are never separated from the cable.

        That is a tram. Yeah, that is confusing too because another meaning for “tram” is streetcar, which is also light rail. Almost any technical discussion of transit has to spend a significant amount of time agreeing on the terms.

        It reminds me of the scene from The Simpsons. On a show called Municipal Roundtable a bunch of talking heads are in the middle of a debate and one of them says:

        “Well, let’s define our terms, ladies and gentlemen. Are we talking about redistricting or are we talking about reapportionment? “

      3. Ski areas are mostly chair lifts or trams like the one in Portland, and chair lifts always gave attendants to help people get in position to be scooped up.

        Martin says ski areas use Gondolas too, and he knows much more about them than I do. I don’t really see much advantage in having enclosed cars, though. Boarding and alighting from a chair lift is quite intuitive. Why have the hassle of taking a car off the rope, opening it, having people board with their skis in hand instead of on their boots, then reverse the process at the top?

    2. Tom,
      Modern gondola systems are fully automated and use sensors and cameras for AI based and/or remote safety monitoring. In particular ski systems get interrupted by skiers leaving skis or poles in the wrong place. That way a warning alarm or flashing lights are triggered and doors do not close until the issue has been addressed. On urban system this can also easily happen with wheel chairs, shopping bags, or bicycles not properly loaded. For details you can check out https://www.doppelmayr.com/en/technology/auro/
      Btw, the Paris gondola is also making good progress, it’s slated to open next year
      https://www.urban-transport-magazine.com/en/the-first-cable-car-in-the-ile-de-france-region-of-paris-is-nearing-completion/

      1. Most likely you would have at least one person at each station (for security, fare enforcement and to help people on or off if there is problem). But the same is true for a subway line. Essentially it is an automated mass transit system. You need people at the stations but you don’t need anyone to drive the vehicle.

    1. Thanks for the videos. I have read similar articles, and profit is one of the key factors. The investors have no intent to live in the buildings, or in the city. It used to be major buildings were named after the company they would house, like The Sears Tower, or Horton Building or Smith Tower, so design was important to the owner/builder and the owners lived in the city. It is why some cities have strong design commissions, although Seattle wants to eliminate design review.

      The best way to have older, more attractive concrete or brick buildings in a city is to preserve them. Since these are the cheapest to demolish, they are the first buildings developers look at to demolish and replace, especially if the new buildings can be taller (upzoning). Dismantling a steel and glass skyscraper is almost as expensive as building it, which is why today we see a lot of orphan office towers that were built in the 1970’s and 1980’s but the systems are obsolete and very expensive to upgrade, and prime tenants want the newest and most prestigious office buildings. Obviously work from home has hurt these orphan properties.

      Some cities like NYC and Portland have done a pretty good job retaining their historic buildings that would be way too expensive today to build today, especially with zoning codes that allow much more lot FAR which is why the new buildings are so boxy and intimidating. Recently I was in Naples, Italy, a poor city in a poor country that has gone through two world wars. The architecture is spectacular and could never be replicated today due to cost (we don’t use slave labor anymore) because Naples has some of the most restrictive zoning and design review in the world. There are some tall modern office buildings outside the main historic section, but the main section of Naples is obviously not tall since it was built so long ago and remarkably preserved for the last several hundred centuries despite the cost of maintaining that architecture and its low value per sf. One would think of sprawl when looking at the main historic section of Naples because they didn’t have the technology to build higher, but were smart enough to preserve their historic architecture although a lot looks run down because the city is poor.

      Seattle especially is a value-oriented city when it comes to design and building development. The office towers in the core were all built with economy in mind (many by Selig) and as the video notes multi-family construction in the city has been pretty terrible from a design standpoint, and those buildings will last 50 years.
      There are a few exceptions like Pioneer Square (which doesn’t have the soil base for large office towers) and the library although the Pioneer Square historical commission started chipping away at preservation for Paul Allen and buildings near the stadiums that are predictably value oriented and cheap looking, and then others, but whenever I travel I am reminded how ugly most architecture in Seattle is, which one would not expect because Seattle is a wealthy city, but that wealth is only recent. It was very poor in the 1970’s and through the 1990’s when a lot of the office buildings were built. Bellevue is no better, but it never had any historic buildings so everything is new, and mostly value engineered, and a lot of the buildings were built after the region became wealthy so are not quite so cheap looking. Plus I think the city figures these new multi-family buildings are mostly for the poor so why spend money on design and architecture.

      I am sure this ugly multi-family development is one of the reasons the SFH zones in Seattle resist any kind of upzoning so much, and with Seattle announcing it will suspend or eliminate design review for new housing buildings (as though there was any design to begin with) they probably have a point. In any case, future housing growth will go into existing dense/multi-family zones under 1220 rather than the SFH zones, and my guess is will be as ugly as ever because profit is allowed to drive the design, it is for the “poor”, and there is no real design review. I shudder to think what Duvall or Snoqualmie will build to meet their new housing targets, but it still will likely have a more attractive design than Seattle.

      Nothing amazes me more than to walk on the UW campus and see some of the most beautiful, preserved architecture from the past, and then walk around the multi-family buildings west of University Ave. under Mayor Murray’s expedited upzoning in 2017, and the newer multi-family buildings in the areas to the east near U. Village even though those units rent for $2000/mo. to $6000/mo. Same when I see the buildings ringing the new waterfront park and promenade.

      As someone in this business who probably won’t end up retiring here and wasn’t born here I can tell you that if you allow developers to build the lowest value and ugliest buildings because they make one more buck they will, which is what Seattle has done, and will be with us for the rest of our lives. It isn’t that much more expensive to require developers to include design in their buildings, if a city cares.

      1. I think the missing link is pride and investment. Companies built great buildings to show financial robustness…. a bank in a brick building with marble columns doesn’t look like it’s going broke. On the residential side, cites have a long term unspoken covenant with homeowners…. home owners pay long term mortgages and keep up houses for general good of the city. This is the grand bargain that made Seattle great and I’m afraid breaking it will not be good for the city in the long run.

        This blog should re-name itself.. “Other People’s Money”. There’s unlimited ideas around here about better transit and housing, but with no personal investment. Seattle is about to have a huge financial reckoning…. bloated costs for transit projects, public housing on the brink of failure and a public school system that’s already failed. Where is the money to fix all this going to come from?

        As a guy who has considerable investment in Tacoma…. can this be anything but bad news for the city? https://news.yahoo.com/news/bankrupt-tacoma-developer-apartment-property-120000298.html

        This is why we don’t tear down perfectly good family housing and let investors build whatever they think they can make the most money on.

      2. I think architecture is heavily affected by survivorship bias. Prettier buildings tend to get selectively preserved (like the Rainier Club building). On top of that, “ugly” buildings from 50-100 years ago often age well and look quaint and approachable today. The brownstones in Brooklyn, for instance, were widely derided as ugly, utilitarian, copy-paste housing, but are now considered unique and characteristic of the city. There are certainly plenty of older, ugly buildings though, like the brutalist ones in Red Square.

        I don’t think there’s been a major uptick in “high ROI” buildings. Where they haven’t been torn down, you can see plenty of old, ugly, utilitarian buildings in ID and Pioneer Square.

      3. “I think architecture is heavily affected by survivorship bias.”
        Pretty much, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

        People complain about why no one builds “pretty” homes anymore. We’re still building pretty homes. it’s just that architecture trends have changed as to what is in because of changes in materials used, construction techniques, architecture principles, design principles, building codes, etc over the last century.

        If people want a return to building said older styles of pretty homes, then you’ll need to cough up the cash to do so because all of that has to be custom made now as no one mass produces Victorian era house adornments anymore.

        The only reason why the older pretty architecture exist the way they do is because of the size and scale to mass produce the adornments at the time of building. See SFs painted ladies, 48,000 painted ladies were built over the span of 66 years during the Victorian and Edwardian eras of architecture and design. That’s about 725+ homes on average built per year, which means being able to mass produce adornments at a large scale, thus making them cheap to produce en mass.

        If people want a return to “pretty” then you need to invest in trades and making building codes that would make it easier to allow such adornments.

      5. There’s another factor: architects are biased for modernist style, or assume that’s what their clients want, and they assume that’s what the average tenant/buyer wants, and the rest of the city. But they don’t, because everyone thinks it’s ugly and they don’t want it on their block, which is what triggered the video in the first place. It’s just that nobody is willing to say the emperor has no clothes, or that it wouldn’t cost that much more to return to human-friendly warm aesthetics, and they’re not willing to take the chance of being the first.

        It’s not the materials or size and shape of the buildings that dooms them, it’s the aesthetics. Materials can be painted any color, so we could have more interesting colors and high contrast. Letters could just as easily be in traditional or art deco shapes and condensed (narrow) instead of block roboty shapes. Stripes above and below the windows to mimic moldings wouldn’t cost much and would dampen the depressing effect of so many gray metal frames. Vertical stripes could make one wide building look like three narrow buildings in traditional vertically-oriented proportions. Even if it’s obvious it’s just an effect, it still makes the building look more human-scaled and inviting. And enough with the simplest plain geometric shapes in both the building and the decorations.

        I read recently that the rise in interesting details and decorations in the late Victorian and art deco eras and the spate of beaux arts buildings wasn’t because developers started spending a fortune more on them: it’s because mass production made those items cheaper so ordinary builders could use them (not just church cathedrals or government civic centers). The rich could custom-make buildings as always, but everyone else could get off-the-shelf mass-produced moldings and decorations in a similar style, and paint things in any color.

        So it’s not really the cost of the old aesthetics, it’s a stylistic decision not to. Even if we can’t afford to go back to the exact pre-WWII detailing or we don’t want to, there’s vast room for architects, artists, and mass-producers to suggest contemporary interpretations of time-honored principles and aesthetics, and to drive the cost down while still making them look nice. They can even mix in some modernist elements, taking the best of what we’ve learned in the last eighty years. But not all modernist all the time everywhere.

        And make the colors bolder, more interesting, higher contrast, and more variations. Not the same schemes on hundreds of buildings.

        If we did that we’d have more satisfied tenants, buyers, and neighbors, and that’s got to translate to higher profits and less tensions between the public, developers, and governments. The built environment would also look and feel more human, more natural, less alienating and sterile, and that would decrease people’s stress and improve their health, which would lessen social tensions and medical costs.

        “Design review” doesn’t really get into this; it’s more an opportunity for nimbys to block or delay buildings or drive up the cost. That’s why design review has to go, and why exceptions to it to get more housing are good. City commission are perfectly capable of doing this review, and politicians could set policies favoring more human-friendly aesthetics and designs. Even if the public at design-review panels are well-intentioned and not just nimbys, they often don’t know a better aesthetic is possible or what to ask for, because there are no widespread experts or examples they can point to, or they’ve internalized the belief that more traditional designs are just too expensive.

        The building regulations are at fault too. Parking minimums, FAR limitations, setbacks, etc, limit the possible designs and practically force large boxy projects or cookie-cutter townhouses, because multifamily development is squeezed into such a small portion of the land and that overwhelms smaller, less-boxy projects.

        I noticed Fact Check and Tacomee ignored/avoided the part of the video at 0:56 that said 40% of Seattle’s land is single-family and almost all of the mixed-use/multifamily development is going into 15% of the land, and “we desperately need more housing” (i.e., the housing shortage).

        It seems to make perfect sense to me to convert some of those single-family lots to multifamily/commercial allowed, especially around existing urban villages. That’s the single biggest thing we could do to relieve the housing supply pressure. And if somebody can’t afford or can barely afford a multifamily unit, they can even less afford a single-family house that costs more.

      6. The irony is that design review leads to designs that are really boring. There is no value in trying anything new or unusual. It is much cheaper to just build something similar to what was just built down the street, knowing that it is highly likely your building will be approved.

        The same is true with other zoning rules. Setbacks and FAR rules dramatically limit what can be built — so much so that things start looking the same. A few months back Dan Savage noted how boring our skyline looks from the north (the result of caps on skyscraper height implemented years ago). At a much smaller level you have parking minimums for duplexes, which led to some really ugly looking places back in the 1980s (housing in back, parking in front, a couple rhodys for landscaping). Now you have the bizarre looking triplexes popping up (because of the ADU/DADU rules). The first few were at least novel — now they are boring and fundamentally inelegant; the form doesn’t follow function, it follows the arbitrary regulations. Thus rules designed to make the neighborhood more attractive have once again done the opposite.

        That doesn’t mean there aren’t nice buildings being built or interesting new neighborhoods. (I think the architecture at the Cascade neighborhood is especially nice.) Nor are the ugly and boring buildings completely the fault of the regulations. But the regulations are making it worse.

      7. Mike Orr,

        My brother and I still own a classic house (currently a triplex) in Tacoma. It’s always made money… enough money for us. I’d live there and I might in the future. We have an emotional connection to the place, stronger than profit margins of the investment.
        REITs and investors are not emotionally connected to the “investments” they make. First off, the greater Seattle rental market is currently flat or sinking. There’s enough room for many more crappy “pack and stack” apartments with current zoning. Second of all, you know a lot about urban planning! But investors don’t care about it whatsoever. It’s all about return on investment. Nothing else.
        There’s nothing greater force in America than owner occupied housing. That’s the gold standard we, as a nation, strive for. Transit advocates need to wake up and smell the coffee here.

      8. “I noticed Fact Check and Tacomee ignored/avoided the part of the video at 0:56 that said 40% of Seattle’s land is single-family and almost all of the mixed-use/multifamily development is going into 15% of the land, and “we desperately need more housing” (i.e., the housing shortage)”.

        Mike, I enjoyed reading your post, but I didn’t “ignore” the part of the video that said 40% of Seattle’s land is single family (I thought the percentage was higher actually. Some on this blog use 80% as the percentage).

        At the risk of repeating myself, the Growth Management Planning Council determined in 2022 that King Co. has existing zoning to accommodate 800,000 new residents, King Co.’s population growth has been flat since 2020, and King Co. has determined nearly all of that new housing must go in existing dense zones near walkable transit and retail so it has at least the possibility of being affordable to someone earning less then 100% of the AMI and they don’t have to own a car.

        So I thought the part about what percentage of Seattle is zoned for single family homes was irrelevant to a discussion about the disappointing multi-family architecture in Seattle, which the video never discussed for the single-family zones. The video was about the disappointing designs for new multi-family construction, which I agree with.

        About the only relevance I saw re: the single-family zone is I think this ugly multi-family design and construction is one reason people living in the single-family zones are so opposed to allowing multi-family housing in the single-family zone. But considering very few if any cities are talking about increasing regulatory limits in the SFH zone (height, FAR, setbacks) under HB 1110 the kind of multi-family construction we see today in Seattle would not be possible in the SFH zone, even if the “use” zoning is changed to multi-family, and the cost of the units if more than one or two would be too expensive to count toward a city’s affordable housing capacity mandate from King Co.

        Whether Seattle eliminates design review for multi-family construction or not I don’t think it matters because obviously the design review is not working. As Tacomee, the video and I point out, the current design of market rate new multi-family construction in Seattle has to do with economics and profit, so eliminating design review will simply give you the same designs we see today. For affordable multi-family housing I think it is a given among progressives that it must be ugly.

        Seattle no doubt has talented and imaginative architects, but they don’t determine the design. The investors do. As a result, Seattle is one of the most beautiful cities when it comes to its natural setting with some of the ugliest architecture I have seen around the world, especially for a wealthy city. I guess it is what it is, and I am not holding my breath that suddenly Seattle architecture will look like Barcelona, a much poorer city but with strict design review.

      9. Expanding the multifamily area would allow smaller local developers with more ties in the community to build buildings in the lots the Wall Street firms pass over. Right now there’s too much competition for scarce multifamily land, so it’s like musical chairs with an advantage toward the large players.

        Your small triplex is nice but that’s not what most of the single-family buildings are. It’s only a solution for a few people who can fit in them, not a solution for everybody or the majority of people.

      10. “the Growth Management Planning Council determined in 2022 that King Co. has existing zoning to accommodate 800,000 new residents,”

        And we know that just because zoning is raised from two to four stories, it’s not enough to justify tearing down a productive two-story building for two more stories. But raise it up further, and there it goes. We also know that not all owners will choose to redevelop their land. So not all that theoretical capacity will be used, and so there will be less actual capacity than 800,000. But if you increase the land area, it allows more owners to develop if they want to.

        “King Co. has determined nearly all of that new housing must go in existing dense zones”

        That’s not a prohibition against Seattle upzoning shoulder areas. It’s just where the “quota” housing has to go. And that rule has problems too, because it perpetuates the bifurcation of very high density and very low density and ignores the middle. It’s trying to prevent isolated sprawl in far-flung areas, but it also has the effect of overlooking shoulder areas and missing-middle housing. And because too many cities have single-family areas right next to village centers, it reinforces the power of nimbys to block growth in those adjacent areas — where it would make as much sense as in the existing dense zones, and in some ways would make more sense because the buildings would be smaller on average.

      11. “Seattle is one of the most beautiful cities when it comes to its natural setting with some of the ugliest architecture I have seen around the world”

        Beauty is in the eye of the beholder

      12. Those are valid points Mike. It is always a discretionary call where to designate zoning lines, and mostly was arbitrary when the zones were first adopted.

        However, people buy properties based on those zoning demarcations and rely upon them when purchasing the properties, including upzones and downzones, so the burden is on the proponents of any zoning change to show a compelling need for the change, and that the zoning change will achieve that goal.

        A very similar bill in CA to WA’s HB 1110 was struck down in the three counties that appealed the state’s rezone on the basis the goal — more affordable housing — would not be achieved by upzoning the single-family zones in CA. When you complain about
        “nimby’s” opposing zoning changes, the law in fact favors them, and places the burden on the proponents of an upzone, especially any kind of site specific or spot zone. Zoning really does not recognize a “shoulder” principle in which zones gradually change. There is one zone, and right next to it another zone with completely different uses and regulatory limits. For example, First Hill has I think a 40 story height limit but Broadway has a 7 story height limit, which makes no sense to me. As a spectator on this issue, it makes much more sense to me to upzone Broadway to 40 stories than to upzone Duvall and Snoqualmie a small amount.

        https://www.latimes.com/homeless-housing/story/2024-04-29/law-that-ended-single-family-zoning-is-struck-down-for-five-southern-california-cities

        So far, I have been surprised no city or county in WA has appealed HB 1110 (maybe because its implementation is not required until June 2025), except that some smaller cities are appealing the underlying reasons for 1110 and 1220 by questioning the OFM’s future population growth estimates which really underpin all the state upzoning bills.

        HB 1110 was predicated almost entirely on the need to create affordable housing, but counties like King Co. under 1220 have rejected that idea and found nothing in the SFH zone will ever be affordable to someone earning 60% AMI and below. Duvall and Snoqualmie are attacking 1110 and 1220 based on the flawed OFM estimates. Their arguments, like the counties’ arguments in the CA case, are that if the upzoning law is not needed to meet accurate population growth estimates, more zoning capacity is not needed (although more housing may be needed but that is a different issue), and that upzoning the SFH zones cannot create truly affordable housing, the state does not have the jurisdiction to FORCE those upzones on cities, or even neighborhoods.

        The reason the GMPC disfavors upzoning beyond a city’s housing and jobs growth targets is the GMPC wants to spread those around the region. Every city wants good jobs because it creates tax revenue (and work from home has created a lot of revenue for the smaller cities where these workers live) but some cities are naturally going to be more attractive if there is no allocation.

        When it comes to housing, the GMPC wants to spread housing so every city helps out, and wants more people to live, work and meet their daily needs close to home. They want to get away from everyone living in SFH zones on the eastside and commuting to downtown Seattle to work, shop and dine, although that was fantastic for Seattle from a tax revenue standpoint.

        So cities like Duvall and Snoqualmie are arguing that upzoning their single family zones is unneeded, as are the affordable housing capacity mandates from King Co., and those are good cities to bring these appeals because just on the face of it is seems ridiculous to address affordable housing or more housing in Duvall and Snoqualmie that are so far out from the jobs centers and have so little transit or in city retail while capping Broadway at 7 stories.

        My work tends to move me to cities that are growing and becoming more wealthy, like Seattle almost 12 years ago. Usually the builders arrive at the same time or a little before or after me. In every city housing prices increase as the residents overall become wealthier and no matter what a city or state does the housing prices never come back down.

        Builders just don’t build new affordable market rate housing, and new construction is always the most expensive per sf. Suddenly a city, county or state — that love the development tax revenue — suddenly discover those builders have been buying the oldest and most affordable housing to demolish and rebuild, usually after most of that older affordable housing is gone and is never coming back. Seattle is no different.

      13. I don’t think anyone believes that Seattle’s “Neighborhood Residential” zones will ever be affordable to someone earning 60% AMI. I also can’t see new housing prices ever coming down dramatically. But that isn’t the point. The point is that Seattle absorbing wealthy families is a good thing for the rest of the region. Every additional expensive, market-rate unit sold in Seattle takes some of the housing pressure off of the surrounding area.

        Duvall has seen home prices rise by 50% in the last 5 years. That is a direct result of larger cities (Seattle and Bellevue especially) failing to accommodate for housing demand.

      14. John D,

        The average price of a house in Snoqualmie and Duvall is higher than in Seattle. Housing prices spiked over the last 10 years like all housing prices in the region, and were more dramatic in Snoqualmie and Duvall during and after the pandemic because wealthy Seattle workers who had to live in Seattle because they worked there could now move because of work from home.

        Every city wants to “absorb wealthy families”. That isn’t the goal of the legislation or OneSeattle Plan (which still has to go through the council and my guess will be scaled back, but Harrell can tell the progressives he tried) is about creating more affordable housing by creating more market rate housing that is smaller, not something wealthy families are usually interested in.

        The irony is GMPC housing allocations are designed to require cities to provide a mix of housing based on income to share the housing burden. The OneSeattle plan attempts to do this in the R zone by increasing FAR limits based on the number of units (and affordable units) on the lot, from 1:1 to 1.2 or 1.4.

        Most Eastside cities probably won’t increase regulatory limits based on dwellings per lot, so their housing will remain expensive in the SFH zone attracting wealthy families, including from Seattle who want the more traditional SFH neighborhood. Since HB 1110 bases number of dwellings per lot on a city’s population look for smaller Eastside city housing prices to jump as wealthy Seattleite move there.

        Just like work from home the OneSeattle plan will work to disperse the wealthy from Seattle to other cities in the region. This is probably a good thing because for decades Seattle has had the lion’s share of high paying jobs and wealthy families that are now dispersing throughout the region.

        The only downside is Seattle is going to have to cut its general fund budget pretty steeply due to the loss of tax revenue — which again is helping out other regional cities that are now getting that tax revenue — or raise tax rates which is tricky with Seattle already having a head tax and no other city having a head tax, and high property taxes which affect rents and housing affordability set to increase significantly due the housing levy, transportation levy, and shift in property taxes from office buildings to residential properties.

        Look for housing prices in Duvall and Snoqualmie to keep rising because they are lovely places to live if you don’t have to commute while according to the city of Seattle housing prices in Seattle will drop as more smaller market rate housing is built in the single family zone.

        It is an age old tool to try and address housing prices in cities through the market: make the housing smaller and smaller, not something wealthy families want in their housing or the housing next to them. No one in Laurelhurst buys a house there to have a three story three building with rental love with one parking stall per 2 units next to them.

        Look for houses in some of Seattle’s most expensive single family zones to hit the market over the next few years and the gap between prices for a house in Seattle (ten years ago 1:1 but now 1:1.6) and the Eastside to increase. Seattle and Duvall/Snoqualmie today are about 1:1 when it comes to the price of a house which no one would have believed 20 years ago but will likely end up 1:1.6 like the rest of the Eastside.

        I think this new plan will have less effect than some think based on Seattle’s 2017 upzone, but along with work from home, lower taxes in neighboring cities, and changes to the traditional SFH neighborhood Seattle will continue to see a loss of wealthy residents.

      15. Mike Orr,

        I avoid working on anything that even resembles “affordable housing”. I semi-retired now and picky about what I work on, but the pecking order goes like this.
        1. High end remodels
        2. Middle priced remodels
        3. New construction …high end new homes.
        4. Commercial buildings.
        I know lots of small general contractors and they’re not going to flip single family homes into affordable triplexes. There’s just not enough money in it.

      16. @Frank

        There’s clearly still very high demand to live in Seattle that isn’t being met. Homes are selling after about two weeks on the market (see: Zillow or Redfin).

        Anecdotally I know more than a few families that have bought in places like Bothell, Carnation, and Everett after looking for months in Seattle/Bellevue

      17. I don’t think anyone believes that Seattle’s “Neighborhood Residential” zones will ever be affordable to someone earning 60% AMI.

        If you changed the regulations then apartments and condos would definitely be affordable to people making that kind of money. Whether we adopt the type of zoning that other cities have is the question.

      19. > REITs and investors are not emotionally connected to the “investments” they make. First off, the greater Seattle rental market is currently flat or sinking. There’s enough room for many more crappy “pack and stack” apartments with current zoning. Second of all, you know a lot about urban planning! But investors don’t care about it whatsoever. It’s all about return on investment. Nothing else.

        Well yes that is the nice thing about upzoning. The city doesn’t even need to spend much capital to fix the housing situation — the private market is the one that funds the construction of the apartments.

      20. “the burden is on the proponents of any zoning change to show a compelling need for the change”

        Relaxing zoning can be justified simply by freedom and removing arbitrary and unnecessary restrictions. If’s not like upzoning forces owners to densify their buildings. And neighbors who relied on the zoning never changing don’t really have a right to prevent their neighbors from doing things. If they don’t want any of the block to change, they should buy the whole block.

        By “shoulder” I just meant the areas around urban villages. In fact, I just read a Times article that that’s exactly what Harrell’s proposal is doing in some cases: upzoning just beyond the edge of some villages, thus expanding the villages. It’s not as much as I’d like but it’s a step in the right direction.

        I never mentioned “affordable housing”: I’m expecting market-rate units in the areas I’m suggesting upzoning. That won’t bring it down to affordable for those making less than $70K, because that would require a 50% rent decrease which is unrealistic. The point is that the more total area allows denser housing and the more housing is built, the less upward pressure there will be on the market-rate curve because it will be diluted over more area and units.

        “Affordable housing” is a separate issue. Only government subsidies and various nonprofit pursuits can create it. If we’d kept zoning loose for the last twenty years, market-rate prices wouldn’t have risen as much and we wouldn’t have such a large acute need of below-market units. But we let it run away so far (I’ve mentioned that Seattle rents have gone up 45% in just the past twelve years) that we can’t fully reverse it with just market-rate reforms. We need a large ton of subsidized housing for those who’ve been thrown out of the market-rate system.

        But “affordable housing” has little to do with the upzones I’m advocating. The reason for the upzones is: (1) To have more market-rate units, and thus dilute the upward price pressure on market rates. (2) To let more people live within walking distance of our existing transit-priority corridors and commercial centers. Even if they’re all upper-income people, it’s still a higher percent of total people who are living in walkable areas and may downsize their number of cars, and that may reduce the number of nimbys. (3) Walkable neighborhoods are more convenient than unwalkable neighborhoods.

      21. @Fact Check

        > However, people buy properties based on those zoning demarcations and rely upon them when purchasing the properties, including upzones and downzones, so the burden is on the proponents of any zoning change to show a compelling need for the change, and that the zoning change will achieve that goal.

        There was no such requirement made with the original downzoning in the first place, I’m not sure why you made up this requirement now for the upzoning.

        Anyways at the end of the day what exactly are you and tacommee advocating for?

        No major metropolitan city throughout all of America ever build apartments/townhouses just single family homes only? It’s just ludicrous if one thinks about it for more than a couple seconds.

      22. John D, I too know more than a few families that have bought in places like Bothell and Carnation after looking for months in Seattle/Bellevue. Usually because they could not afford the more expensive parts of Bellevue (which are actually separate cities) like Medina, Clyde Hill, Yarrow Point, Beaux Arts, Hunts Point, and so on, or want really large lots, or didn’t want to buy in South Seattle.

        These are very small cities and so under HB 1110 have very low dwellings per lot requirements under 1110, mostly 2 (Hunts Point does not allow DADU’s/ADU’s currently and Bellevue does not allow ADU’s but allows 5% more GFAR per lot so will probably just allow ADU’s but lower GFAR 5%) so I doubt their SFH neighborhoods will change at all. They plan to do everything they can to mitigate the impact of 1110, and it was their political clout that led to 1110 having graduated dwelling requirements for lots based on a city’s formal population so 1110 doesn’t really apply to them, especially those that already allow an ADU.

        According to realtor.com there are 443 houses/condos for sale today in this area. Houses are pretty expensive until you get to Bonney Lake or farther away.

        Single family listings are tight right now depending on price. People are not selling because they don’t want to buy another house with a high interest rate and because a lot of owners have very low 30-year rates that would double if they sold and purchased another house. Boomers are not downsizing as expected, and Millennials now want a house and often have two incomes.

        I agree that “There’s clearly still very high demand to live in Seattle that isn’t being met”, except it is being met if you are wealthy, and Seattle is a huge and diverse city while the buyers are interested in the northern half.

        Wealthy people who want to live in a house in Seattle can find what they want pretty easily. Same on the eastside. The OneSeattle Plan is not about them. The OneSeattle Plan is designed to increase the number of dwellings on a single-family lot by making them smaller, which really doesn’t increase housing compared to a single house with 4-5 people living in it, and I imagine condominiumizing them if selling them.

        Those won’t be single family homes. They will be effectively condos, some stacked on one another with shared walls, with only 20% of the lot “open space”, not even green vegetated space. Very urban. By comparison some eastside cities require a lot retain 60% of its area as vegetated green space, have strict tree retention policies, big setbacks, with a FAR closer to 0.4 rather than 1 — 1.4 under the OneSeattle Plan. So those eastside neighborhoods look like parks. Lovely to live in but very expensive.

        If you have a lot of money and want a single-family neighborhood and house you are going to buy the 12,000 sf lot with a 0.4 FAR in a neighborhood with the same. It is why houses in Medina, Mercer Island, Clyde Hill, Hunts Point and so on go for $5 million and up. Laurelhurst has large lots and low FAR and lots of trees and those houses cost $5 million and up, unless people start putting three rental dwellings on a lot with no onsite parking. Then those folks will move. I agree with Tacomee few builders can make money paying $5 million for a house, building three new dwellings on the lot, and selling them.

        It isn’t very hard to figure out what rich people want for their housing. Three dwelling units on a 5000 sf lot with no trees or vegetation and 20% “open space” isn’t it. HB 1110 and OneSeattle are about creating market rate affordable housing by making it small, or I guess more affordable housing because these units if new will still cost $750,000 to $1.5 million based on conversions to three dwellings under Seattle’s 2017 upzone.

        If you have $5 million or $10 million or $2 million to spend on a house it won’t be one of these with shared walls and no trees and no parking when eastside houses come with three stall covered garages, often required (although state law not prohibits requiring covered parking minimums, which is great if you don’t mind all your stuff getting stolen).

        You won’t be seeing these “dwellings” on Houses Of The Rich And Famous, and that was not the goal. You won’t be seeing Democrat candidates for President flying in for a fundraiser in one of these “houses” either. This housing will not attract the wealthy to Seattle and is not designed to do so.

        My hunch is that if there is a pull back in prices for single family homes in Seattle on traditional lots with yards and trees there will be very few conversions under HB 1110 because the cost of new construction will make the cost of these new small units on a lot with 20% open space and no garage too close to a traditional SFH a little farther north. I think Tacomee makes a good point many urbanists don’t understand. There is a deep American desire to own a single family home with a yard and some trees and garage and no shared.

        These smaller houses like the three dwelling remodels under Seattle’s 2017 upzoning are really condos, with I imagine some kind of cost sharing for common spaces and uses. You don’t see condos flying off the shelves in Seattle these days. These units remind me of houseboats when I was younger and prices were lower. Double income couples lived there and enjoyed the urban city until they got pregnant and off it was to the Eastside and a proper house. These new dwellings will be too expensive except for two income couples until they have kids.

        I think this new zoning made more sense before it became so expensive to build anything around here because of new building codes, labor and materials. These units really need to come in around $500,000 per unit to work, but the builder can’t do it new for that price so the builder’s new units — because upzoning needs new construction to work — will be like condos almost the price of single family homes. I don’t see it pencilling out for the builder.

      23. the burden is on the proponents of any zoning change to show a compelling need for the change

        The case in Seattle is rather obvious. The area has unusually high housing costs (due to the zoning).

      24. @Frank K

        I don’t think we are talking about the same type of wealthy. What I mean is that I expect households making comfortably above AMI with a comfortable amount of down payment (as an example, maybe 200k+ joint income and 100k+ down payment) to be able to afford a home somewhere they would like to live within Seattle.

      25. “the burden is on the proponents of any zoning change to show a compelling need for the change The case in Seattle is rather obvious. The area has unusually high housing costs (due to the zoning)”.

        In the California appeal the three counties were able to prove the upzoning would not reduce high housing costs. That is the key. A change in zoning needs to show it can solve the problem it is intended to solve.

        Some believe just more market rate new construction will lower housing costs. King Co. rejected that approach. Some think more new market rate construction actually exacerbates housing unaffordability because builders always buy the oldest and most affordable housing to demolish and replace with new construction which today is very pricey per sf. At least that is what King Co. now believes which is why nothing zoned in the SFH zone counts toward a city’s affordable housing mandates.

        Personally, I believe that housing costs almost always mirror a city’s average median income. Seattle has a ton of housing today and much more housing capacity under current zoning. At least according to the GMPC.

        Seattle is at least the third city I have seen housing prices soar as AMI soared. No matter what those other cities did housing prices never came down.

        Housing affordability is determined not by the cost of the housing but the percentage of gross income necessary to buy or rent housing. Seattle might have unusually high housing costs although many cities have similar housing costs. What Seattle and those other cities have are very high AMI’s. You want housing costs to go down in Seattle, then in my opinion you need an economic downturn in Seattle.

      26. @Fact check

        > Some believe just more market rate new construction will lower housing costs. King Co. rejected that approach. Some think more new market rate construction actually exacerbates housing unaffordability because builders always buy the oldest and most affordable housing to demolish and replace with new construction which today is very pricey per sf. At least that is what King Co. now believes which is why nothing zoned in the SFH zone counts toward a city’s affordable housing mandates.

        again you conflate two different items. Yes if you only upzone and approve apartments on existing medium density zones then it can replace older stock — that is precisely why we should upzone single family zones as it displaces the least number of people.

        You take a couple facts and then twist it over and over again to protect single family homes no matter the leaps in logic

      27. Here’s the big question I have about land use and transit.

        Who said new houses have to be in Seattle? Let’s take the latest gawd awful bullshit cost estimates for light rail to Ballard and West Seattle. How many billons?? Now let’s take that money to empty land out by Yakama and build the infrastructure for a whole new city. Building a light rail line on empty land costs pennies in the dollar to what Sound Transit plans on spending. Build some new roads, utilities, plat out a 100,000 in population growth. All for the same money as a stupid subway. With the right mix of apartments, town homes and smaller houses… 20,000 people per square mile isn’t hard plan for, with a mix of 65%– 35% of homeowners to renters. This isn’t rocket science…much of Europe was rebuilt this after WWII.

        Need the land? Have the Governor call the President (doesn’t matter who wins this November) and get some free Federal land. There’s plenty of solutions to water and energy as well.

        Need jobs in the new city? Amazon, Boeing, all the big players can easily do that… because they need room to grow.

        I love Seattle, but it is what it is. Subways and zoning changes will not change the nature of the city. Only the free market can do that.

      28. “Now let’s take that money to empty land out by Yakama and build the infrastructure for a whole new city.”

        That’s just leapfrogging over the single-family areas to build something a hundred fifty miles away. Why not just convert some single-family neighborhoods and build it in King County? (And not as far as Snoqualmie or Enumclaw?) It’s not like there won’t be beaucoup tons of single-family houses even after it.

        And Yakima doesn’t have enough jobs to support all those people, especially high-paying jobs. You can’t just make a new town create jobs so easily. And they’d be a hundred and fifty miles away from the range of services and activities available in Pugetopolis that aren’t in Yakima County.

      29. “In the California appeal the three counties were able to prove the upzoning would not reduce high housing costs. That is the key. A change in zoning needs to show it can solve the problem it is intended to solve.”

        That’s in California in different legal jurisdictions, different case law accumulated, and a different constitution. And the legislators may have made a mistake by making it dependent on lowering housing prices. They could have said it was for freedom, or just cuz.

      30. @tacommeee

        We’ve been this over and over again. The zoning crisis is about how there is insufficient housing built nearby where the jobs are.

        Let’s say even if you were successful with Yakima. Then ten years down the line you’ll run into the same problem if you don’t let that city build more housing relative to how many jobs there are.

        Again America has already tried basically every alternative except unbanning apartments that it originally forbid nearby its city centers

      31. I’m not categorically opposed to new towns in other parts of the state, but this is a lame justification for them.

        The most important thing is, wherever the new or old town is located, it must be walkable and have an appropriate level of transit (frequency, coverage). “Appropriate” for Seattle means two or three times what it currently has. Appropriate for a new town would be maybe four times what typical American towns that size have. And it should have at least an hourly bus to the nearest major cities (Seattle and Spokane). Not just once a day or a few times a day, or not on weekends.

      32. “In every city housing prices increase as the residents overall become wealthier and no matter what a city or state does the housing prices never come back down.”

        Almost every American city has very restrictive zoning, reserves 50-80% of the land for single-family, and doesn’t allow the housing supply to increase to match population and job growth. So it’s no wonder housing becomes more expensive there when AMI increases because there’s a housing shortage and they’re competing for artificially scarce units and it’s getting worse and worse. In an alternate world things would be like Dallas or Houston or Chicago or Tokyo where housing is allowed to grow to match population and job growth, so it remains as affordable as it was, and people can safe their wealth increases or spend it on other things.

        Another issue is inequality. What’s really happening is some people are becoming much richer and other people are becoming poorer. If everybody had the same wealth, then in a musical-chairs situation with more buyers/renters than units, the people who get one or don’t get one would random or distinguished by something other than wealth. (Hopefully nottheir appearance or ancestry.) But when there’s high inequality and a significant number of wealthy people, the units go to the wealthy people and the lower-income people are shut out. So the problem of lower-income people not having good housing options is a symptom of both high inequality and a housing shortage. And we should be reducing the inequality so that it’s insignficant, not making lower-income people suffer greatly.

        Some cities allow only single-family by default. They still have some multifamily and commercial buildings, but each of them has to go through a zoning variance and be arbitrarily approved or not, and a lot of them aren’t approved. Luckily Pugetopolis isn’t that bad.

      33. Mike Orr,

        Companies like Amazon need to grow. Either Washington State provides the housing or Texas will. It’s that simple. If the Washington State Governor had any common sense whatsoever…. they’s be working on a deal to give Amazon free Federal land to build a new campus on in Eastern Washington.

        Sound Transit is spending billons for a crappy subway. Billons! Talk about lousy value for money. Stupidest idea in the history of the city. Rezoning? Just do the math here. Tearing down a house to build apartments costs an over a million…. before construction even starts. How can ever pencil out?

        WL,

        Two thirds of America own their own home. And most of the other third wants to. Apartments just aren’t popular in America. We’re not going to try some large “urbanization” project to force people into housing that don’t want.

        In my life in the little house in Tacoma…. two people died (our parents), a baby was born, kids were raised, there were some hard economic times and lot of joy. I don’t tell other people how to live. I choose a house with a shop and garden because that’s what I want. I’ve also been married for 35 years. Not for everybody… but honestly 80% of people maybe?

        Most of what I hear from people younger than me is bitterness about not having the life I have (starting with a the house). And they’re 100% right. You deserve the life that makes you happy…. and that includes owning house I’m guessing? In my world view you should have one if you want. My family grows our own food, we ride bikes, we use public transit…. My “personal space” I’ve lived in my whole life is something 400 square ft. I’d add up the resources I’ve used against anybody living by themselves in an apartment over the last 20 years.

        But that’s not really the point here. Because I owned a house, I could provide shelter and support to people I loved over the years. Apartments aren’t good at that. Right now I’m looking at building basement apartment in my house, so when I’m really old, some relative can come look after me. And when I die, they can have the house! and raise kids in it! This is life on earth for thousands of years.

        How to better transit and land use fit into this “circle of life”? That’s the real question .

      34. “In my life in the little house in Tacoma”

        Would your little house be legal to build now? Is your lot size below the minimum size for new lots? Would developers build two houses your size or one house twice the size? Are owners tearing down their house that size and building one twice the size, or the other way round? How much do parking minimums and other restrictions limit the kind of house you can build and how you can design the lot now? Wouldn’t it be better to prohibit ultra-large McMansions instead of apartment buildings. rather than ending up with more McMansions because that’s the only thing allowed for somebody with money to burn to build, and it encourages the worst conspicuous consumers to build McMansions?

        Even if everybody wanted a little small-lot streetcar-suburb house like the pre-1950s ones, that’s only a small fraction of the house stock, and newer cities don’t have any of them. So again, it’s only something a small fraction of the population can do, so it’s not a general solution.

      35. > Two thirds of America own their own home. And most of the other third wants to. Apartments just aren’t popular in America. We’re not going to try some large “urbanization” project to force people into housing that don’t want.

        Why not let the free market decide that you always talk about? If people don’t want to live in apartments/condos they will choose not to rent or buy them and the market will not build them.

      36. Mike Orr,

        Those are all good questions. My answer would be if Seattle doesn’t have the right sort of housing stock, why live there? The desire for small bungalows is off the charts in every real estate market. They are easily the most popular form of housing in the free marketplace. The reason huge houses get built is because there’s so much money in catering to the top 10% of the market. If you could build 500 small houses in Seattle… you could sell every one on Saturday for 500K each.

        I most real estate markets across the USA, sub 1200 sq ft homes sell for more per sq ft than most bigger homes. We could change the zoning and permit rules to help builders kick more if we wanted to. Not in Seattle of course, because there is no land left, but there’s plenty of empty land all over the State. I do think we need to have another building boom, but only in ground up, planned communities. Sprawl is how we got where we are today. Building a new town takes a lot more political courage.

        WL,

        The markets have spoken about housing in Seattle. Investors are already scaling back the number of new projects being built to make sure rent prices on newer one bedroom apartments stay in that $1600 to $2000 range. Why on earth would investors want to build a glut of units and drop rent prices? What the zoning is doesn’t matter. Investors aren’t stupid…. and they view renters as “the product” to managed for as much profit as possible. Can you honestly see renting for 30 to 40 years as a life choice?

      37. @tacommee

        Either way if that is true then why exactly is the single family zoning enforced in the first place? You keep saying two contradictions that 1) we need the single family zoning to stop it from being built. 2) even if there wasn’t single family zoning the apartments wouldn’t be built.

        It’s either one or the other they can’t both be simultaneously true

      38. > The markets have spoken about housing in Seattle. Investors are already scaling back the number of new projects being built to make sure rent prices on newer one bedroom apartments stay in that $1600 to $2000 range.

        Single family homes are very expensive as well, I don’t see you or ‘fact check’ calling for banning the construction of new ones

      39. The reason huge houses get built is because there’s so much money in catering to the top 10% of the market.

        No. There are basically three reasons:

        1) Demand for housing remains very high. Land is not cheap.
        2) Zoning.
        3) Building a big house doesn’t cost a lot more than building a small house.

        For example, consider this new house. It is part of a new subdivision (that used to be a church). Consider this apartment building not that far away . The housing subdivision and apartment building take up roughly the same amount of land.

        So why didn’t they build luxury houses (catering to the top 10%) in both places? Because there is less money in it. You are better off building an apartment. Why then, didn’t they build an apartment in both places? Because it would have been illegal. By law you could only build houses in the area that became a subdivision. Not only that, but the lots had to be huge.

        Here is where we get into the reason they built large houses. A small house would get almost as much money as a big house. The lot is huge, so you might as well build as big as you can (and they did).

        It is easy to assume that wealthy people are simply outbidding the poor. Someone wants to put up an apartment but Mr. Money Bags comes along and buys up the land and puts down a mansion. Except it is the other way around. The city won’t allow an apartment to be built. They won’t allow a house on a small lot. They have basically outlawed inexpensive housing. There is nothing stopping someone from building a luxury house in an area zoned for apartments. It never happens. Nor do people build large houses in an area zoned for townhouses. People build huge houses because the city has manipulated the market to encourage it.

      40. Why on earth would investors want to build a glut of units and drop rent prices?

        Because there is money in it. Prices can go down and you can still make money. As a developer you really don’t care that existing landlords would be dropping their prices. This is just standard economics. Computers got cheaper and cheaper and companies kept making more and more computers. It happens in housing as well. In Minneapolis for example they’ve seen a huge boom in housing units at the same time they’ve seen prices get lower. https://onefinaleffort.com/blog/a-detailed-look-at-minneapolis-housing-supply-reforms. (Minneapolis is a leader in zoning reform.)

        At some point the prices drop to the point where it is no longer worth building. The “marginal, physical costs of new construction” is too high. But clearly we are nowhere near that point — “zoning and other land use controls play the dominant role in making housing expensive”. (I am quoting from this: https://law.yale.edu/sites/default/files/documents/pdf/hier1948.pdf). It is worth noting that it isn’t just what people would consider “zoning”, but other regulations (like design review) that add to the cost.

      41. In addition to Ross’ comment, I would also add that house size remains huge because people aren’t given a choice. You either get to live in a tent on the sidewalk, or you live in a place that’s much larger and more expensive than what you want. What little remains of affordable housing gets demolished upon sale to build much larger homes.

        Builders like to spend other people’s money too. Resident’s money is treated as an unlimited resource since they aren’t the ones stuck with little choice in where to live.

      42. To clarify, when I talk about rezones and the CA appeal, cities have wide latitude to voluntarily upzone. The issue is when the state passes rezoning regulations that cities don’t want to implement. Then the state has the burden to show the upzone is necessary and will address the problem. In the case of HB 1110, the issue was framed as housing affordability, and the solution new market rate housing.

        Maybe we should go back to before the GMPC began allocating housing targets. Let those cities that want greater density such as Redmond, Bellevue and MLT zone for it. The reason the most recent GMPC targets were so noncontroversial when released, compared to the fighting before being released, is because every city had existing zoning to meet those targets. The GMPC housing targets meant nothing through 2044, and many cities thought the OFM estimates would turn out to be inflated (the 2030 census by the Census Bureau will clarify any discrepancies between the OFM and Bureau in favor of the Bureau) so every city in King Co. except Sammamish felt the GMPC housing targets would not require any kind of upzone until probably 2064, if then. Based on county population since 2020 upzoning will never be required.

        I am not opposed to upzoning the SFH zone in principle. I live in Belltown and am an avowed urbanist in a city of suburbanists. I would rather see new housing in dense “urban” zones because we have very little of that, and so our urban area in downtown Seattle is suffering. Sending any new population growth to the suburbs in Seattle or Duvall disappoints me because I realize: 1. Residents in this area are not urbanists and don’t understand urbanism, from housing to billions for transit to remote parts of the region, so 2. we will never have good urbanism (or good urban transit); I just find it ironic The Urbanist uses that title when their policies are so suburban. Wallingford is not urbanism.

        Here are seven misunderstandings I see on this blog about upzoning under HB 1110.

        1. WL claims we have a “zoning crisis”. This just isn’t true. The video on Seattle’s website for OneSeattle notes Seattle has existing zoning to accommodate 161,000 new housing units. This is almost three times the GMPC housing allocation for Seattle through 2044, based on the OFM future population growth projections. All of King Co. has existing zoning to accommodate 800,000 new residents. So housing affordability is not a zoning issue in Seattle or King Co.

        Tacomee’s idea of a planned city of 100,000 in Yakima makes no sense when you understand Seattle already has zoning 1.6X more than the new city in Yakima would have.

        2. Mike states Seattle housing prices are “unusually” high. Not really when you understand housing affordability is based on the ratio between housing prices and average median income. We have gone through this exercise for Houston, Montreal, Minneapolis, Muncie, Tokyo, San Diego, Dallas, Chicago, Paris. The ratio between AMI and housing prices is remarkably similar in each city.

        Seattle has one of the highest AMI’s in the world. So do San Francisco, San Jose, NY (with 15% of the city zoned SFH), and San Diego, and not surprisingly they have the highest housing prices, but basically the same housing cost to AMI ratio as all the other cities. The real problem in wealthy cities like Seattle is the spread between those above 100% AMI and those below is much larger, which is why King Co.’s policies for affordable housing are geared toward those earning 60% AMI and less.

        3. Mike laments that Seattle does not have zoning like Dallas and Chicago because Seattle is zoned nearly 80% SFH (for some reason the video used 40%). In fact, Dallas is 81% SFH zoned, and Chicago 79%. One difference about Dallas is it is 385 sq. miles not including Fort Worth, all flat land. If you have been to Dallas it is miles and miles and miles of single-family homes. Housing prices are around half of those in Seattle, but then so is AMI in Dallas.

        The reason Chicago seems dense to visitors is because despite being 234 sq. miles Chicago completely densified its urban core before upzoning the “shoulders” of the urban core so it seems very urban and vibrant even though its SFH zoning percentage is the same as Seattle. That is how you achieve urbanism through zoning: from the center out. If Seattle had the urban vibrancy and density of Chicago I would support upzoning the “shoulders” or in city neighborhoods too, but I would not then disperse that density to the 79% of Chicago that is zoned SFH.

        4. HB 1110 will create affordable housing. I think this is the biggest myth, unless like John D. your targeted customer is a couple making $200k+ with $100,000 in the bank for a down payment for a condo in the suburbs. The last development I saw listed in 2021 under Seattle’s 2017 upzone had three units ranging in price based on size from around $700k, $1 million, and $1.3 million for new construction. Since that project was built construction costs in this area have soared.

        Assuming the couple puts 20% down to avoid mortgage insurance, has great credit (which means you have had a mortgage before) and gets a 6% interest rate, that is around $3500/mo, plus around $800/month property tax if the transportation levy passes, $3000 insurance with the new higher rates, and maybe $200/mo. HOA for the common areas. For the smallest condo that will be very tall and narrow which rules out the elderly and disabled with no onsite parking or storage or yard. So $4750/mo. Condos in this area don’t appreciate very quickly so if the buyers sell within 10 years (i.e. pregnancy) they will pay 8.5% for selling costs and end up losing money on the purchase.

        Meanwhile I live in a pretty large one level apartment in Belltown with no HOA for less than $3500/mo. with secured parking and storage because apartments in a building this large cost around half the cost to build of the lowest cost condo on the residential lot.

        5. According to Zach, new expensive construction benefits lower incomes renters/buyers because when the higher income people move into the new unit they free up their old unit and the price then goes down, called “filtering”. I have never seen any data on this. Every time I have seen a lease roll over in this area the new rent has gone up. What I and King Co. HAVE seen, however, is data on “displacement”.

        Builders buy the oldest and cheapest housing because they plan to tear it down and build new. So this region is destroying all its older, existing, more affordable housing and replacing it with new construction which is much more expensive per sf.

        6. WL writes that it is better to upzone the SFH zone because any construction there will displace fewer people, especially poor people. Except the SFH zone is not monolithic.

        If we are talking about Laurelhurst I would agree with WL, but what builder can afford to pay $6 million for a house in Laurelhurst to tear it down and built three new units? The cheapest housing in Seattle today is to rent a room in a single family house. There are many SFH with large families living in them, from 4 to 6 to even 8. These tend to be poorer minority families in South Seattle, and their rental housing is exactly what builders are looking for to tear down and rebuild. The actual amount of housing (either number of bedrooms or occupants) won’t really increase, just the number of dwellings, but the new units will be unaffordable for the poorer people who once lived in the SFH. Where do they go?

        One good thing is builders generally don’t like building these developments in S. Seattle, unless in an area like Columbia City that is rapidly gentrifying and becoming much more white and affluent.

        7. At least OneSeattle increases FAR based on the number of dwellings per lot, although that means each will be larger than currently allowed under the 2017 upzone so more expensive. But in 2017, to allow more dwellings per residential lot Seattle increased gross floor area to lot area ratios to 50%, which then and now applies to single family homes. So Seattle saw many more out of scale McMansions and lost a ton of neighborhood trees due to the larger GFAR. The proposed GFAR under One Seattle for a single family house is 50% larger than on the Eastside so of course they look out of scale.

        As Ross notes, as the allowed house size increases to allow multiple units on the lot the SFH becomes a better risk and profit for the builder if there are a shortage of SFH homes which are traditionally the most coveted housing among wealthy buyers.

        Personally based on the market, cost of financing, cost of construction, I just don’t see many developers buying a SFH lot and building three new units it must then condominiumize to sell to avoid carrying the loan forever unless the house is a tear down, which of course means the poorest live in it.

        In summary, I think we will look back and see neither 1220 nor 1110 did anything to lower housing costs or slow the increase in housing costs if Seattle keeps growing even at a small pace but AMI keeps going up each year, to now $121,000 for the AVERAGE median income.

        No one will build the affordable housing under 1220 King Co. envisions, and I don’t think builders will risk millions on converting a SFH to three small tall condos with no yard or garage in the suburbs. It is hard enough to sell condos downtown or on Broadway. On this issue I think Tacomee is correct. He lists the order of projects he takes today, which is the same for every builder because of risk and profit: high end remodels, high end new construction, commercial. What all of these have in common is someone other than the builder owns the land and takes all the risk on the financing and outcome.

        Every city wants to see AMI increase while housing remains affordable. I am telling you having lived in some fast growing cities with fast growing AMI’s you will never solve that conundrum with new construction. Otherwise a Harlem would still be Black.

      43. [Moderator] @Fact Check, your 1,700+ word comment was caught in the spam filter, most likely due to its length. While there’s no explicit rule against verbosity, extremely long comments like this are hard to follow and harder to meaningfully reply to.

        Please consider separating comments covering multiple subjects (such as discussing seven supposed misconceptions) into multiple threads, so people may respond in kind.

      44. @Fact check

        The zoning versus what is practically buildable is very different as tacommee loves to talk about. If you have a five story building and it is zoned for 6 stories that capacity is unlikely to ever be used as demolishing the building to build just one more story is not worth it.

        At the end of the day again upzoning is just the permission to build apartments. We go discuss all of these other reasons why it might not be feasible — but even on plots of lands where it is feasible as long as the zoning does not allow it then an apartment cannot be built. And developers do still build apartments once upzoned so the reasons you cite why they don’t get built are conflicting with the reality where they actually are built.

      45. @Fact Check

        Housing supply reducing housing prices (in the longer term) is not controversial at all (links below).

        Income levels affect the prices of homes, but Seattle is near the top of “home price to income” ratio cities (link below). We are not nearly as bad as cities like San Francisco or San Jose, but it would certainly be unfortunate to move further in that direction.

        By the way, NYC is so expensive because the city has stopped building new housing. NYC has stringent regulatory constraints on what can be built, which restricts the supply of new housing (sound familiar?). The median structure was built in 1952 (once again, links below).

        Housing supply reduces housing prices:
        https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4629628
        https://direct.mit.edu/rest/article-abstract/105/2/359/100977/Local-Effects-of-Large-New-Apartment-Buildings-in
        https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/articles/2023/04/17/more-flexible-zoning-helps-contain-rising-rents

        Seattle is near the top of home price-to-income ratio cities:
        https://constructioncoverage.com/research/cities-with-highest-home-price-to-income-ratios

        NYC has stopped building new housing
        https://censusreporter.org/data/table/?table=B25035&geo_ids=16000US3651000%2C16000US0667000&primary_geo_id=16000US3651000
        https://manhattan.institute/article/why-is-manhattan-so-expensive

      46. > Builders buy the oldest and cheapest housing because they plan to tear it down and build new. So this region is destroying all its older, existing, more affordable housing and replacing it with new construction which is much more expensive per sf.

        That is exactly why upzoning single family homes is least likely to displace people. Especially as you and tacomme like to talk about the ownership aspect, no one is forcing them to sell if they do not want to.

        You keep pretending these dual scenarios that cannot exist at the same time. As if these single family homes are simultaneously both rich and all owned and also poor renters. And also that apartments are cheap that no one would want and that also developers are building them for high rent.

        If you’re going to make a story/argument at least stay consistent.

        Again as I said from the very beginning you keep trying to contort the facts to somehow end up defending single family zoning throughout the entire seattle metro area. And again these are apartments — America will not crumble because of five over ones being built.

      47. I’m not sure it’s as expensive to do now as one might think. Yes it is certainly more though and most developers see no reason to spend a dime more than they need to because it’s all about return for their investors.
        There’s also a lot of developers and land owners that are willing to spend more and yet they still put up hideous buildings (MoPOP, some new UW buildings, etc.)

      48. If you were to ask most people, a starter home is a bungalow or something similar, yes. But a lot of people including some in the bungalow category would also say a condo or townhouse (row home) is the other option if they don’t want to consider going out to the suburbs and want to stay in the city or the suburban-urban inner ring.

        Saving up for a condo is where I’m at, because it’s the most accessible option money wise for my needs as someone who’s transit dependent and a young professional. A bungalow would be nice, but there’s a lot of costs associated like lawn care and maintaining an old home that I’m not interested in doing compared to a condo maintenance. Which is usually a single monthly building fee which usually includes maintenance costs built into the fee.

        My parents 1920s home is exhausting enough to deal with as I’m now helping them with various little maintenance projects for things they needed to do ages ago. Old homes are great but they’re exhausting to deal with their quirks and that’s not really something I want to do on a yearly basis.

        I get the whole nostalgia for the white picket fence, lawn, and backyard some people have and its nice, but its not for me and there’s many others who don’t want that lifestyle. Having a decently sized balcony to sit, have a cup of tea, and chat with a friend while we watch the world go by is nice. Being able to easily walk to a local Cafe or restaurant, the grocery store, drugstore, parks, public spaces, etc. Some keep calling them “shoeboxes”, I really don’t. It’s a home and the snobbery towards apartments and condos is honestly downright silly.

        Another reason new housing big and small (in paticular) is good is it filters the market.

        https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filtering_(housing)

        What is new becomes old eventually and moves down the housing rungs as it becomes older, and what’s old becomes new again as it’s renovated and desired. Having plenty of new housing means there’s less people fighting for housing on the lower rungs, which drives up prices for everyone.

        Minneapolis got rid of most zoning rules and has led to lowering/stableizing of rent and house prices as more people are able to afford to rent and own. Homeowners and renters are in a symbiotic relationship with each other as they live together in the same city or town. As they both benefit from having each other.

      49. Interesting you find the architecture here ugly. One night we took aunts visiting from New York, a city with incredible architecture, out to eat in Fremont. When we were driving on southbound I-5 between the U District and 520, the Seattle nighttime skyline popped up, with the Space Needle in the foreground. One aunt said in amazement, “That is absolutely gorgeous.” So there’s that.

      50. Thanks John D., those are very interesting links.

        Seattle is number 10 in income to housing price ratios, about where I would have predicted, but not unusually high as Mike suggested. Bellevue has a higher ratio. The common factor in the top 15 cities was not high housing prices but very high incomes from tech or finance. The other common factor is CA, which has 40 million residents, a lot of them very wealthy.

        The one link on NYC only noted the age of the buildings which I assume has to do with better preservation because NYC has a lot of pretty older buildings, from the Empire State Building to Brownstones. The other article about lack of construction in NYC is from 2003 and looks at a point in time when NYC was really down on its luck. Only 15% of NYC is zoned SFH so this is really a multi-family issue. Having lived in NYC I know there has been a long simmering dispute between developers who think the Brownstones should be upzoned which they call the Trumpsters, and the communities that think they are historic. Certainly Manhattan is dense.

        As the article notes, “0% or more of the total price of the median Manhattan condominium—or $200+/ft2—is attributable to the zoning tax. For cooperative units the zoning tax is $110/ft2 for the median unit, and $182/ft2 at the mean. This translates into a tax of 25% and 48%, respectively”. From what I can tell from the main article (it makes a lot of assumptions), the issue the authors are discussing is building height limits which the authors correlate to a “zoning tax”. I agree that in the urban core there should be no building height limits, whether commercial or multi-family. That is where I think housing should go. In the urban core. As high as the developers want.

        The filtering effect apparently requires many years or decades to work. Displacement is immediate. Go to The Coconut Grove or Overton, both once mainly low-income Black communities in Miami today. Lots and lots of displacement but not much filtering I ever saw having lived there.

        I don’t have any serious objection to OneSeattle’s plan or HB1110 or 1220. I don’t think, however, they will achieve their stated goal, which is to create more “affordable” housing, and I agree with King Co. that gentrification and displacement are the biggest issues in Seattle at this time. For the same reason I doubt any of the cities in the top 15 in housing costs to income ratios will build their way out of the top 15. The one way to lower housing costs is to have average incomes drop.

        Some argue what is the harm even if I am right and 1110 and 1220 don’t create affordable housing.

        With 1220 no harm really. It’s a nice dream. It reminds me of Harrell’s and Constantine’s dream of an urban oasis at CID N/S Some believe that , some of us don’t. When you are in the development game you become jaded.

        I just don’t see developers building new multi-family construction affordable to those earning 60% AMI and below. Some cities plan to require a large percentage of units at 60% AMI or even 50% AMI to take advantage of the upzoning under 1220, but that just means they won’t get built. King Co. knows this, which is why 1220 requires upzoning for the CAPACITY of affordable housing, not affordability mandates. Some cities know that by adding 60% AMI affordability mandates it negates 1220, but how can the County argue since the County is pitching the myth that new market rate construction under 1220 will create affordable housing?

        With 1110, again I doubt many units will get built. 1110 really is just condominiumizing the SFH zone, they won’t be affordable just because land is expensive it is so damn expensive to build anything today, and I don’t think filtering will do anything. It hasn’t yet in Seattle and Seattle has been on a multi-family building craze for 20 years and Seattle is still number 10 in housing to income ratio.

        The harm is that by disbursing future population and housing growth throughout King Co. and to Seattle’s suburbs we are forever suburbanizing Seattle, especially its downtown core.

        The other issue is gentrification and displacement. But if Seattle’s 2017 upzone is any indication few conversions will happen, and Seattle has to address crime issues in the downtown core before housing can ever revitalize downtown.

        Sometimes I get the feeling this is political posturing. Mayors like Harrell and some mayors on the Eastside know that with the right regulatory limits and affordability mandates nothing will get built under the upzoning. I’ve seen this upzoning rodeo in other cities before (including some of the top 15 cities for housing to AMI ratios).

      51. Michael, the video said modern construction in Seattle is ugly, and attempted to explain why. I simply agreed and attempted to explain how profit today determines design by people who don’t live in the city.

        I like The Space Needle and see it every time I leave my building. It was built in 1961 before I was born. I wish Seattle and developers did more designs like The Space Needle. Maybe Seattle needs another Worlds Fair or Olympics to rekindle its architectural imagination.

        Most cities with tall buildings look dramatic lit up at night. You really can’t judge architecture at night

      52. Zach B

        I’ve heard Minneapolis brought up as an example for good housing on this blog over and over. I like it there. If you think Minnesota gives you a leg up on housing, just move there. Years turn into decades fast enough. Lock in a 30 year mortgage “up north” and build a life.

        Is Seattle’s housing problem really zoning? Or is it just too many damn people wanting to live there? And many of those people are high income.

        Want affordable housing in walkable neighborhood? Well here you go!
        https://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-detail/1764-Dayton-Ave_Saint-Paul_MN_55104_M73951-74052?from=srp-map

        I’ve hung out on Grand Ave, St. Paul. It’s near perfect for urban living.

        Now I know I’m going to get a huge pushback here for even suggesting moving away from the Emerald City, but hey! I didn’t bring up Minnesota.

        Why do nicer urban houses in St. Paul sell for $350K and the same house in Seattle for 900K? It’s not zoning. It’s because there are a whole lot of people who want to live in Seattle have a spare million to buy a home with. St. Paul? Not so many.

        Looking at just the cold hard numbers…. Seattle’s housing prices will never come down under the current demand.

      53. Ahh yes the easy why don’t they move elsewhere solution. Sf and the Bay Area definitely showed how workable of a solution that is.

        Again these are apartments we’re talking about, Seattle and American society will survive just fine townhouses and five over ones being built

      54. I’ve heard Minneapolis brought up as an example for good housing on this blog over and over. I like it there. If you think Minnesota gives you a leg up on housing, just move there.

        What??? You completely miss the point. We bring up Minneapolis because it is yet another example of how zoning matters. I think the argument has gotten absurd:

        “Zoning doesn’t matter”

        [We provide numerous studies to show that it does. You provide no counter-evidence.]

        “Yeah, but not in the real world. No city has cheap housing because of zoning.”

        [We cite cities in Germany and Japan.]

        “Yeah, but those are foreign countries. That doesn’t apply here.

        [We mention Minneapolis because it is one of the few U. S. cities that has a zoning code that got substantially liberal a few years ago.]

        “Well if you like Minneapolis you should just move there.”

        Huh? You miss the point. If Minneapolis can do it, so can we. There is no good reason why Minneapolis (or Spokane) has a more liberal zoning code than Seattle. It is simply a matter of this city being way too conservative when it comes to land use.

        This is why housing is so expensive. This is why there are so many homeless in this city. Again, you have provided not one bit of evidence to support your (counter-intuitive) theory, whereas we’ve provided so much evidence that Wikipedia complains about excessive citations. We provide examples across the globe, from Australia to Japan to Europe and even in the United Freakin’ States of America. You have nothing to support your argument and now you are basically saying we should just move.

      55. Tacomee, the average median income in St. Paul is a little over $38,000/yr. In Seattle it is $121,000/yr. The key metric is the ratio between AMI and housing costs which are fairly similar among most U. S. cities. In Minneapolis AMI IS $42,000/yr. Minneapolis’s upzoning is only a few years old and has little effect yet (plus Minneapolis adopted but never implemented rent caps that depressed construction).

        It would be nice if someone could move to St. Paul but bring their Seattle income with them but it doesn’t work that way, although residents selling a house in a high AMI city and moving to a lower AMI city will have more purchasing power. We saw this in Seattle from CA over the last 20 years although Seattle has caught up in housing prices or is getting close to CA.

      56. @ Fact Check

        I don’t understand this supply-side skepticism to be honest. If there is a glut of new cars, then used car prices drop. The exact same thing happens with housing, except over a longer time frame.

        Again, this isn’t controversial. This is a very hot area of research due to the recent spike in housing costs.

        Linking the below once again:
        https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4629628
        https://direct.mit.edu/rest/article-abstract/105/2/359/100977/Local-Effects-of-Large-New-Apartment-Buildings-in
        https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/articles/2023/04/17/more-flexible-zoning-helps-contain-rising-rents

        And more papers can easily be found with very little effort:
        https://www.lewis.ucla.edu/research/market-rate-development-impacts/
        https://research.upjohn.org/up_policybriefs/13/
        https://www.urbandisplacement.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/udp_research_brief_052316.pdf
        https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/ERP-2024-CHAPTER-4.pdf

      57. Tacomee, the average median income in St. Paul is a little over $38,000/yr. In Seattle it is $121,000/yr.

        Because people have been priced out of the market! It is like complaining that only rich people buy Ferraris. Yeah, no shit. They hella expensive.

        You keep coming with up bullshit excuses for why zoning doesn’t matter even when presented with case after case and study after study that it does. You call yourself “Fact Check” and you seem to ignore the facts. Just look at the charts: https://onefinaleffort.com/blog/a-detailed-look-at-minneapolis-housing-supply-reforms. Minneapolis saw a huge increase in housing once they reformed their zoning rules. They are building way more units than peer cities (Columbus, etc.). It is the only city where rents have actually gone down! Think about that for a second. More places are being built than the other cities, and yet prices are much lower than the other cities. WTF? How can that be? What is the key?

        ZONING! Obviously. Just read the conclusion:

        Overall, Minneapolis’s experience with housing supply reforms is a complex one, and one that requires a reasonably sophisticated understanding of local factors to understand. But, at the end of the day, the conclusion is simple: the city has found a way to build a lot of housing in recent years, and affordability has improved considerably as a result.

        Given the fact that housing costs are much higher in Seattle than in Minneapolis, why the hell is our zoning so much more restrictive?

      58. Fact Check,

        Oh yeah, I completely understand how housing prices are chained to family AMI. For some tech workers, Seattle and San Francisco are a natural fit. For public school teachers? Nope. Seattle housing is just unreasonably expensive. Time to move to a market that matches your income.

        Lucky for me, my lack of any formal education protects me from the sort of “housing entitlement” that’s currently beating down many people in Seattle.

        Of course there’s all the horsepucky talk about “urbanism” and “walkable neighborhoods” but St. Paul has all that, with way cheaper housing prices. And many other great locations in the Midwest as well. Nobody cares if I can’t afford a place to live… that’s my business and my burden.

        The idea that Seattle’s housing market could be changed with zoning! Wow! Like it’s so easy to trick those greedy investor types.

      59. https://www.axios.com/local/twin-cities/2024/05/15/twin-cities-construction-boom-rent-increases

        I don’t know if you subscribe to Axios Ross but apartment construction in Minneapolis has crashed after two years, and most of the new units that were built are on the high end. Minneapolis’s housing cost to AMI ratio has barely budged after the upzone.

        The two people on this blog who have any actual experience in building or developing are skeptical, although we are a skeptical lot. Sure if you sit in a bedroom with a keyboard and Google articles about development, zoning, building you are certain. What do you lose if you are wrong? Nothing.

        Upzoning SFH zones as a way to create affordable housing is a pretty recent concept. Even Chicago is still 79% SFH.

        Ten years ago — or just 2017 in Seattle — it was all about upzoning the multi-family zone under Murray. Do you remember that? So the UW around U Village got 2000 new units that rent for $2000 to $6000/mo. and replaced housing that cost 1/3 that.

        As I said, I am not opposed to 1220 and 1110, but based on my experience in several cities that went through what Seattle is going through I don’t think either will create affordable housing. You are certain but have no real experience and don’t know how developers or builders think.

        But hey, I’m in the same boat as most of you. I rent. I wish I had bought a SFH on the Eastside when I first arrived 11 years ago but like San Francisco everyone said prices can’t keep going up forever (until they fucked up the city). The “market” will correct it. Over the last 10 years Seattle has built many times the number of apartments built in Minneapolis but prices only go up. So now we are going to condominiumize the SFH and those new units will be affordable. Ok.

        I also have no desire to live in suburbia whether Seattle or the Eastside or Lynnwood, certainly in a condo, but I didn’t know that in 2024 suburbia would be all this area had or Bellevue would have more retail vibrancy and density than downtown Seattle.

        So let’s see if 1220 and 1110 reduce housing costs when the folks who actually build housing don’t want housing to be affordable, and neither do the 2/3 in the region who own, or most of the cities. They were wrong in 2017 that upzoning the multi-family zone would create affordable housing but maybe they will be right this time.

        The truth is among the people I work with and friends in Seattle who are pretty well off they don’t give a shit about people moaning about their housing costs. I get the idea Tacomee doesn’t really give a shit. I kind of do, which is why I feel despair at these political “upzoning “ bills I don’t think will work because the people drafting them like Harrell don’t know anything about development or building. Otherwise Seattle wouldn’t be such a mess.

        All we can do is wait, like after the 2017 upzone, for housing prices to decline under 1220 and 1110 as AMI keeps going up 5%/year. Let’s not get personal or animated about it because it is out of our hands. 1220 and 1110 rely upon “the market” to create the magical affordable housing which will be up to people like Tacomee and developers I know who hate affordable anything.

      60. Fact Check,

        Actually I’m pro up zoning for the most part. And I do give a shit about people. When I post links to real estate in the Midwest, it’s just to prove there are options, ways forward. If I was 22 again, I’d load up the car and drive to Muncie or St. Paul and not look back. How do you think I ended up buying a house in East Tacoma? Seattle was out of reach for me in the 1980s. Half the people reading this need to pack up and move on.

        As far as flipping houses into apartment buildings…. Places like East Kent, Skyway and Rainer Beach will take it in the shorts. It’s always works that way. I happen to like those places and the people currently living there. When the State messes with zoning, all I can say is “God help Tacoma”. First I-5 chops up her South and East side ‘hoods… now developers trash what’s left. I love Oakland, the Mighty Eastside and the Lincoln District. Go Abes!!!

        What pisses me off is the endless Leftist drivel about zoning, or social housing, or rent control making a difference in working people’s lives. Even if zoning changes made Seattle real estate more affordable, it wouldn’t drop the prices that much and would take a decade or more. The Urbanist, Publicola and this blog are selling false hope.

        As far as Sound Transit…. those clowns release rising subway construction costs (in the billions) about the same time Seattle Public Schools announce closing 21 schools due to lack of funds. So yeah, I’m all in on social justice, just not drinking the Urbanist cool-aid. If you care about affordable housing or public education…. is spending billions on trains the way forward now?

      61. @Fact Check

        The article you linked states that “[f]or the past 16 months, wage growth in the Twin Cities has outpaced rent growth” (in contrast with the rest of the country), and that the expensive new apartments “have filtered renters out of lower-priced units, creating vacancies in more affordable units.” Those two things are exactly what relaxed zoning is trying to achieve.

        With that said, upzoning is not a silver bullet that will magically solve housing affordability. The end goal is housing supply, which takes many years to fully materialize. Zoning regulations are upstream of that, and (as I’m sure you are aware) there are plenty of other things getting in the way of construction. But zoning is one part of the system that is very obviously artificially constraining housing supply, and even if it is not the only problem it still needs to be solved before we can meaningfully address housing affordability.

      62. “I’ve heard Minneapolis brought up as an example for good housing on this blog over and over. I like it there. If you think Minnesota gives you a leg up on housing, just move there. Years turn into decades fast enough. Lock in a 30 year mortgage “up north” and build a life.”

        Despite my continued insistence to you that AGAIN FOR THE FIFTH OR SIXTH TIME at this point, I’m not leaving Seattle for a variety of reasons and that I’m staying here dude, end of story. So please stop trying to give me unsolicited advice like you seem to believe in your head that I need to hear.

        If you want to continue to ignore what I said because it doesn’t fit what you believe, go right ahead I won’t stop you. But again as I’ve said before, I am not you and I 100% know what my needs are.

        But I ain’t leaving no matter what you keep telling me, because this is where my family and friends are. I’m not moving to whatever Midwest town you’re going to keep going on about this week that you believe is better than the place I wanna be of my own volition.

        Do more listening, build empathy, admit your wrong at times, and less needing to have in the last word. You’ll get more people to genuinely take you seriously.

      63. Our schools should absolutely require a course in statistical inference.

        Correlation does NOT imply causation. Just because AMI and expensive housing are correlated, doesn’t imply AMI causes expensive housing. It’s the reverse. Statistical ignorance drives me nuts.

      64. > The two people on this blog who have any actual experience in building or developing are skeptical, although we are a skeptical lot. Sure if you sit in a bedroom with a keyboard and Google articles about development, zoning, building you are certain.

        Does the average violin maker know much about why the violin prices go up or down, supermarket manager know about their goods going up or down or the farmer know much about agricultural economics?

        @fact check you’ve stated so many falsehoods and continue to think you know about housing economics. Just because you are a housing builder does not make you actually smarter in this topic.

        In any case as I’ve stated many times you are just starting from trying to avoid building apartments. Perhaps I’ll call it “stacked” single family homes and you’ll start to understand the point.

      65. Upzoning SFH zones as a way to create affordable housing is a pretty recent concept

        Not really. This study came out twenty years ago. Matt Yglesias wrote his “The Rent is too Damn High” book in 2012. Megan McArdle wrote her article about that book in The Atlantic the same year (this is where I found out about the subject). The intro in that article deals with this very idea:

        The most important policy debates are often the ones no one is having. Some issues–abortion, tax policy, health care–have been debated ad nauseum for decades. The arguments on each side are well-rehearsed, and even people who aren’t very politically active often have an opinion about them.

        On the other hand, there are policy issues that, until recently, weren’t considered “issues” at all. Until the 1980s, for example, only a small minority of gay rights activists thought marriage equality was even an issue worth debating. The rest of the electorate had barely given the topic any thought.

        Over the last half-century, we’ve had a similar situation with housing policy.

        Again, that was ten years ago. So yeah, ten years ago it was probably only academics who gave much thought to the issue. Oh, I’m sure there were people who had lived in Tokyo (and noticed that rent was so much cheaper there than in New York City) and maybe some of them connected the dots. But most people just ignored the issue. The article changed things. (Worth noting: this was in the print version of The Atlantic back when lots of people got their information from print.)

        I think there are a lot of similarities with the issue and the legalization of cannabis. It cuts across traditional left-right lines. Libertarians and leftists often find themselves on the same page. People in academia have been arguing for change for decades. We can look to other countries and see that it works there (the Netherlands in the case of cannabis and Japan as far as zoning). There are trade-offs for sure, but it works. Yet nothing much happened in this country for decades. Then a few areas experiment and find that it works in this country too.

        Of course there are differences. One of the big reasons why zoning is a much bigger issue now than it was twenty years ago (or fifty years ago) is because there are more places that are hurt by it. To understand why we have to consider the history of cities in the post-war era. In the 1970s we saw a “white flight” to the suburbs. Then in the 1980s there was a huge increase in suburban office development. In 1994 Utne Reader (a left-wing readers digest if you will) had an issue entitled “Cities Don’t Suck”. I agree, but you shouldn’t have to write that (no one ever wrote an article “Tacos Don’t Suck”). By the late 1990s though, it was clear that cities had become increasingly popular. I personally think the TV show Friends helped a lot. Cities were often portrayed as tough places in cop shows (Streets of San Fransisco, Hill Street Blues, etc.). Sitcoms often took place in happy suburbs. But with Friends you had a mindless little comedy with extremely attractive people (white people I might add) living their dreams *in the city*.

        In any event many cities that had shrunk or were given up for lost turned it around. They started growing again. Cities that had never really shrunk grew very quickly. As a result an issue (high cost of housing) that would effect only a fairly small number of people started to effect people all across the country. That has added to the momentum surrounding the issue.

      66. I didn’t just mean the Space Needle. She was also looking at the Columbia Center, the Rainer Building and the various other skyscrapers. Even if there were no Space Needle, she would’ve thought we had a spectacular skyline. It can’t compare to NYC’s, of course, but that’s apples and oranges given the sizes of the two cities.

        If the rest of our architecture were considered ugly, like the SFH, mixed-use buildings and townhouses, that’s another discussion.

    2. “ As someone in this business who probably won’t end up retiring here and wasn’t born here I can tell you that if you allow developers to build the lowest value and ugliest buildings because they make one more buck they will, which is what Seattle has done, and will be with us for the rest of our lives. It isn’t that much more expensive to require developers to include design in their buildings, if a city cares.”

      Yes I tend to agree. If zoning envelopes are boxes, the buildings will be boxes. If the top five floors are wood framed construction, the windows can’t be more expansive like steel framed buildings either. Plus, balconies run the risk of being too close to power lines.

      Building and taxation can affect things. That’s how Paris got mansard roofs (not counted in height and not taxed as additional square feet).

      But the challenge becomes how to establish regulatory incentives to make a building more attractive.

      If bay windows are encouraged to overhang sidewalks through regulation incentives, there would be more apartment buildings with bay windows. If a building’s extra floor can be added if it’s recessed from the street, there would be penthouses with roof terraces or building “hats” like mansard roofs at the top. If the regulations measured FARs with less focus than on height, developers may look to building taller, skinnier buildings with larger spaces between the buildings. If unused FAR can be sold to nearby developers to add more FAR in a building, we would see variations in building heights from one building to the next.

      As long as our zoning mainly promotes boxes, developers will just keep building boxes — and distinguish buildings solely with materials and paint color on the blank sides. In other words, by not incentivizing interesting buildings the zoning laws literally encourage the blocky aesthetic we are getting by default.

  4. The video linked below got me thinking about a Seattle transit speed run. Speed running Link wouldn’t be super interesting, but speed running the Rapid Ride routes could be neat. Without looking at schedules, I think the following route would be pretty quick:
    E: Aurora Village to downtown.
    D: Downtown to Crown Hill
    40: Crown Hill to Northgate
    Link: Northgate to UW Station
    542: UW Station to Redmond TC
    B: Redmond TC to Bellevue TC
    560: Bellevue TC to Renton Landing
    F: Renton Landing to Tukwilla Int’l Blvd Station (TIBS)
    A: TIBS to Federal Way TC
    A: Federal Way to TIBS (transfer to Link at Angle Lake if it’s faster)
    F: TIBS to Burien TC
    H: Burien TC to downtown
    G: downtown to Madison Valley
    8: Madison Valley to SLU (Denny)
    70/C/Streetcar: SLU (Denny) to SLU (Valley)
    C: SLU to Westwood Village

    Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5ap30oYwyM

    1. To make it more interesting (and longer/more challenging), maybe stipulate that every RapidRide route must be ridden end to end (you pick the direction). So, not cheating by riding the C, D, and E for one block each down 3rd Ave.

    2. I don’t see the point in these speed runs to maximize the number of routes or modes in a time period. What matters is people’s typical trips, not artificial unrealistic trips.

      Real trips including stopping at several places along the way for shopping or activities. So you can put together a real useful chain trip, but it has to stop at real destinations somebody would typically do. You can omit the actual stopovers (pretend they take zero minutes), but the stop locations have to be realistic. Or you can have people describe their real chain trips.

      1. There is no point except for the fun of it! Maybe there are some observations to be made about speed and connectivity, but ultimately it’s just an artificial challenge to spark creative planning and to explore a transit system.

    3. Here are examples of real chain trips I do, although I might not pack all of them into one round trip:

      – Work (at undisclosed location). Stop on the Ave for dinner, writing supplies, and/or a magazine, pop into H-Mart. Stop at the downtown library to return or pick up a book, and an ATM for cash. Stop on Capitol Hill and walk through Cal Anderson Park on the way home.

      – A full grocery-shopping day. Take a Pine Street bus to 5th, stop at an ATM, pick up medications at Walgreen’s, return a book at the library (and avoid the “worst bus stop in Seattle”). Take the 131/132 to Cosctco. Return and, if my bags aren’t too heavy (otherwise I’d take them home and go back out), stop in Chinatown for Uwajimaya. Take any bus/Link to Pike Street, stop at Pike Place Market for produce, tea/spices, and/or jam. Take the 10/12 to Trader Joe’s and Central Co-Op. Take the 10/12/G back.

      – West Seattle excursion #1. Take the C to Lincoln Park. Take it back to the Junction, stop at Husky Deli or Bakery Nouveau. Take the C or 50+Link home. Can combine it with a tour of the H or 21 via Westwood Village.

      – West Seattle excursion #2. Take the C+50 to Alki plus Schmitz Preserve Park. Take the 50 back to the Junction (see previous), Can stop at Uwajimaya on the way home.

  5. Link broke down – again. And in the usual spot around UW. It happened midday last Friday. Thankfully it lasted about an hour or so but it was enough to throw off service and frustrate a buncha riders. I got on at SODO and quickly realized that the busway was a better option to get to Cap Hill. The 594 picked up about a couple dozen riders at Stadium, which the driver was perplexed by.

    1. ST PR says the failure was a mechanical failure in a trailing car of the consist and the train was eventually able to move again under its own power, but due to the (apparently coincidental) location of the failure, they took the time to make sure the catenary wire hadn’t broken again.

      Apparently the 10MPH slow order around UW station will be in place until they can find a weekend to schedule a single-track weekend event to fully repair the catenary system.

    1. Your comment got caught in the spam filter; sorry! There will be a few links regarding the new draft zoning plan in tomorrow’s “weekend roundup”.

  7. What are we going to do about Metro’s fiscal cliff? Passing a levy can help, but doesn’t really solve the root problem that the cost per service hour is going up faster than sales tax revenue, so the tax rates have to continually increase just to provide the same level of service.

    Redirecting electrification money into basic “keep the buses we already have on the road” money seems like a place to start. But, that money will run out in a few years. And, it begs the question of how a big capital project like bus electrification can ever be afforded if the long term state of things is every available dollar keeping the basic service running, with nothing to spare.

    1. The root problem is that Metro hasn’t had an expansion in service hours since the 2000s (except that which came on the coattails of population growth or economic boom), Seattle lowered its TBD rate, the driver shortage, and increasing traffic congestion.

      Traffic congestion gets overlooked too easily: when buses get bogged down in congestion, they become late and unreliable. There are two ways to fix this: transit-lane priority, or more buses. More buses is how Metro improved reliability in the mid 2010s: one bus can make up for another one better, overall waits are shorter even if a bus is delayed, and extra standby buses can swoop in if a regular bus gets stuck or broken. So the first batch of new service hours would go to reliability, and then the next batch could go to more frequency. That’s what Metro can’t do now with its limited resources.

      Transit-lane priority is the purview of DOTs: Metro has no control or authority over it. Other cities like Paris explicitly prioritize transit/bike/walking first and cars last, so they get rapidly-improving transit levels and ridership. Seattle keeps shying away from that. It puts a few bits of bus lanes here and there — mostly at stops and queue jumps — and one mile of center lanes for the G, and then just sits back and pretends it has solved the problem, when 95% of the problem is still there. Or it waits for a Link extension to fix it, when the extension won’t open for 5 years or 15 years and then gets delayed another 2-3 years. If SDOT and other DOTs would pursue aggressive improvements that speed up bus routes 50%, that would give more frequency and capacity for practically free. Or 40% or 30%, but they need to think big like that, and not let the projects get watered down.

      Adding to that is the new fare policies that don’t keep up with the 20-30% fare recovery window the county used to have, but is keeping fares low and with laxer enforcement for equity. But people often blow this out of proportion: fares are a minor part of the expense/revenue total.

      If you’re really serious that rising expenses will eat up everything, then the only solution is to just give up and not try to provide transit service beyond what Link and the streetcars can do. That’s not a solution, and it would leave the county’s mobility and economy much worse off.

      Bus electrification does not have to be such a large capital project. Instead of buying all new buses and charging facilities up front, do it gradually as existing buses reach their end of life, and then you can use the money that’s already budgeted anyway to replace that bus. And in the near term, look at hybrid buses again. And take a more serious look at trolley route expansion.

      1. I agree. We have less service and more congestion. The two go together as slower buses cost more to operate. Given a driver shortage it is quite reasonable to shift money towards capital projects. We could look at congestion from the stand point of operations (not necessarily ridership). What areas of congestion are costing Metro the most money (and which of these are cheapest to fix).

        As you wrote, one of the big problems is that the county runs the buses but doesn’t maintain a lot of the roads (cities do). However, Seattle is in a unique position because it pays extra for transit. I would also guess a high proportion of the areas I mentioned in the first paragraph are in Seattle. Thus it would be quite reasonable for Seattle to spend additional money on projects to speed up the buses (since they have trouble spending it on service).

        I agree that neither the county nor the city should spend a bunch of money trying to electrify the network. We should evolve towards a system like that, but the longer we wait, the cheaper it gets. There is little to be gained by moving early. In contrast the sooner we add transit right-of-way the better.

      2. I agree, Mike and Ross, bus lanes help to reduce the need for more buses. The faster the bus reaches its destination, then sooner they can turn around, meaning we need less buses. Yes, the battery buses here in the States are still not ready for a large rollout, so why focus on it? We may still want to invest in our proven trolley network. Yes, it may require further overhead wire investments, but at least they don’t lose service hours recharging. As we need to replace our existing hybrid fleet, may be we can do that with BEBs. But for that to be an option, we also need to invest in the charging/power infrastructure, all that takes time.

  8. I believe this is what Metro and ST operators get paid. (I still need to verify this with some people who work there). I also believe this wage is being increased soon due to a new contract.

    Starting pay:
    $30.18 per hour.
    After 12 months: $34:49 per hour.
    After 12 months: $38.80 per hour.
    After 6 month: $40.96 per hour.
    After 6 months: $43.12 per hour. (top step)
    At top step, overtime is $64.68 per hour.
    At bottom step, yearly income is $62,774.
    At top step, yearly income is $89,689.
    At top step, 44 hours per week = $100K/year.
    If anyone else has info on operator pay, feel free to share.

    1. One thing I learned from this pay progression is, contrary to the idea that only the highest seniority or longest tenured employees make the top scale wage, an employee actually reaches the top scale after just three years.

      1. I believe the main value in seniority comes in being given increasing priority when picking runs/blocks to operate.

      2. Nathan, you are correct. However, I mentioned the pay progression in response to some misinformation I read here the other day. A commenter said that he knew that the Link operator position was desirable to Metro operators with high seniority, because many of the Metro employees that were applying for the Link operator position were making top scale. His conclusion was incorrect, because a Metro driver can be very low seniority, and be at the top pay scale.

      3. Sam, do you know how the application process works for Metro operators wanting to go to Sound Transit? Does someone have to be a Metro employee to work as a driver or mechanic for Sound Transit or for Link? Are there any requirements that you have worked for Metro for a certain period of time? Do drivers for both get paid the same depending on seniority? Does Sound Transit have to take the most senior driver who applies no matter how bad a driver they are? Do you or anyone know how many applications Sound Transit gets for each opening as a Link driver? Has Sound Transit ever had problems getting Metro workers to transfer to Link?

        I am not a driver and don’t work for Metro or Sound Transit, but I do take Metro and Link pretty regularly. I think I would rather drive a train than a bus if the pay and benefits were the same. But I don’t think that means Sound Transit or Link is better than Metro or buses.

        Both are important. I just think it would be easier and more pleasant to drive a train. Quieter for one thing. Probably smells better than a bus. No traffic, no dealing with the public, clean private driver compartment, a lot fewer stops, don’t have to deal with fares, don’t have to worry about driving in rain or snow, same route day in and out, probably easier to shift positions while working which is good for the back and circulation.

        BTW who said that being a Link operator was desirable for Metro drivers and why don’t you believe them? And why does it matter?

      4. @Sam — There is also the pension. It kicks in after five years and gets better the longer you stay.

      5. Hi Not a Metro Driver,

        Those are way too many question for me to try to answer, and I’ve listed before what I thought the pros and cons to each job were. In the end, it’s a matter of personal preference. I also think it would be more pleasant to operate a light rail train, but a couple of deal-breakers for me might be: 1, Lack of variety. Just two lines. 2, trip length. In a couple of years, both lines will be … idk what … 80+ minutes from end to end? Deal-breakers for driving for Metro for me would be all the rough roads. Also, I wouldn’t want to have to drive some of the more troubled-filled routes.

  9. I’d like to add my thoughts if possible.

    Despite what Fact Check thinks he and Tacomee are not the only people on this blog familiar with building. I was a builder for many years before becoming an inspector, and there is a big difference between those swinging a hammer and the suits. I hope the length of this post does not get me in trouble with Nathan.

    First. The OneSeattle Plan is only Harrell’s draft. He beefed it up for the progressives so the council could very well go back to his earlier draft and pin that on him if they feel he is grandstanding. The council doesn’t have much time before the end of the year but I am sure there will be changes.

    Second. Most cities don’t like these upzoning bills. Eastside cities think they are a Seattle solution for a Seattle problem, and Seattle is not very popular on the Eastside these days. If any of these upzoning bills (including 1337) are going to work the city will have to want them to work. Duvall and Snoqualmie’s appeal show many don’t, and I can tell you builders believe the Census estimates which is why applications for anything on spec or rentals are way down.

    Third. 1220 requires a city to have a certain zoning capacity in its town center for those earning 60% of AMI and below. AMI on a city like Mercer island is $141,000/yr. 50% AMI still leaves around $1700/mo. for rent for one. Most Eastside cities already have affordability set aside mandates in new mixed use or multi-family construction. Plus unlike the MFTE in Seattle the setasides are forever not 12 years. Seattle is set to lose a lot of affordable housing over the next five years as affordable units built under the MFTE reach their 12 year expiration and convert to market rate.

    Cities just don’t like to be told by King Co. what to do. Plus since these affordability targets are close to their (probably inflated) GMPC future housing growth targets and they don’t want to do both.

    Cities know that if they add some tough PERMANENT affordability mandates under 1220 like 20% of units at 50% AMI builders won’t build because they can’t afford to. Some cities want more development in their town centers, some don’t, and King Co. can’t complain about affordability mandates in affordable housing capacity requirements.

    I agree with Fact Check that 1220 will produce very little affordable housing over today’s setasides and may even hurt.

    Fourth. HB 1110 requires cities to allow additional dwellings in the single family zones, which many on this blog like because it is the evil single family zone where rich people live. Builders tend to like rich people.

    The first key is the number of dwellings per lot depends on the size of the city. Some small cities will have one plus ADU and wealthy people building large homes don’t build ADU’s to rent. Seattle must allow 4, or 6 within 1/4 mile of RR or Link station. But a property owner doesn’t have to build more than one dwelling and around 90% don’t in the SFH zone.

    The second key is cities still control the regulatory limits although they can’t be less for multiple dwellings than a SFH. But they don’t have to be more like in Harrell’s draft.

    So let’s look at that.

    Single family lots in Seattle are small. But generally expensive. Yes, if you have a big piece of flat land 50 miles outside Dallas and are building fifty identical homes you can do it for $400,000. In Seattle it costs $500,000 to build a modest DADU WHEN THE LAND IS FREE.

    Construction costs since 2019 are through the roof. Labor with new minimum wage, especially subs, materials, the new international building code, green mandates, insurance including the warranty on new construction, make it tough to build anything for less than $500/sf including land costs. Closer to $1000/sf on the Eastside for a high build.

    I don’t see many six dwelling lots happening in Seattle even with increased FAR. Just six kitchens and bathrooms are tough. The units become too small to attract buyers who have $600,000 or $700,000 for a studio. A lot of potential buyers don’t like or can’t live in tall skinny housing.

    I don’t see a lot of rentals either. The loan rate would be high and the builder would have to carry the loan forever. The risk is too great. Someone else with a large lot in the multi-family zone can build 50 units at 60% your cost per unit, maybe 50%. Same with condos.

    Plus you never want to rent out brand new construction. Too much depreciation.

    Seattle already allows three dwellings per SFH lot so what we are really talking about is going from 3 to 4 dwellings when construction costs since Seattle’s 2017 upzone are up 50% and so are land costs.

    So what are we talking about?

    Four units on a 6000 sf lot with 20% open space. It would be risky not building at least one garage per unit because the cost of these new units suggest a two income fairly affluent couple and Seattle has so much theft and car prowls. Plus these units in the SFH zone won’t have good transit even for the 10% of Seattleites who use transit so the buyers will likely have two cars.

    On the other hand you have the same Amazon couple bidding on the lot against you wanting to build a SFH because that is what every woman wants. If you are the builder you want them to buy the lot and hire you to build it which has zero risk. Plus the Amazon couple will want a very expensive build which is where the profit is. Building four small units on the same lot while carrying the loan and all the risk doesn’t sound very attractive to me. I disagree with those who don’t think housing costs rise as AMI increases, but there is no debate that when the cost to build increases so do new housing costs.

    I can’t really say until the OneSeattle plan is finalized and some time has passed whether 1110 makes any difference in the cost of housing in Seattle, and it could take decades and who knows where Seattle will be as a city then. The last five years have been brutal. . Based on history since 2017 and how rapidly the cost to build has gone up I would say no, even if a city really wants 1110 to work. The cost of new housing has to go up because it costs so much more today to build.

    On the Eastside I don’t think 1110 will work at all because those cities don’t want it to. They will keep regulatory limits for a SFH and several dwellings the same and require the maximum 2 uncovered parking stalls per unit when those cities require 50% to 60% of the lot to be impervious. Very few builders build on spec. in these cities or build rentals because of the cost but instead compete for the build contract with the property owner doing the financing and wanting a very expensive build.

    In S. King Co. there just isn’t a market for 1110 type housing and there is plenty of land.

    In the end despite some heated emotions on this blog I see very little change in the amount of new housing built or its costs, but I suppose it’s worth trying in Seattle.

    1. Redmond and Bellevue have gone further than Seattle in terms of upzoning, especially in comparison to the original draft plan. Part of this is due to the new light rail line (there are some major upzones around each station area), but the two cities have also signaled that they are likely to go past the requirements of HB 1110. Redmond is planning to allow 6 units per lot by right (and 8 with affordable housing), and Bellevue has been looking into increased allowable density near growth centers.

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