Dense and appealing cities with diverse and high-end economies are expensive for homebuyers or renters. This is especially true in an era of high interest rates, particularly because of the Trump administration’s tariff fetish and soaring costs of construction materials.
Even when cities, such as Seattle, provide incentives for more housing, progress is far from guaranteed.
As my colleague Heidi Groover wrote, Seattle can’t expect a significant increase in development despite a state law requiring up to four houses to be constructed on most city lots formerly intended for generally more expensive single-family properties.
In addition to the impediments listed above, many potential buyers are not participating in the market, further slowing sales and construction. Applications to build new housing fell while most new projects have stagnated. New apartments are keeping rental prices relatively flat.
Zoning changes alone in Seattle’s residential neighborhoods won’t be enough to beat these impediments, according to developers.
“You’re not going to see the floodgates open,” said Seattle-area homebuilder Erich Armbruster. “The market’s just too crappy right now.”
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, there were only 474 new private housing units authorized by building permits for the Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue metropolitan area in May, compared with 1,611 in November of 1989 and 1,649 in the same month of 2005. The housing crash two years later — which I called, resulting in me being booted from a Phoenix newspaper — was a gut punch for the sector. It has struggled to recover from the resulting Great Recession and slow recovery.
Seen another way, data from the National Association of Realtors and vetted by analysts at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, showed nearly 8,000 active listings in King County as of May.
The state law, passed in 2023, required nearly every city to legalize units of two, four and six in formerly single-family neighborhoods, as the Legislature saw projections of the need for more than a million new houses by 2044 — more if climate refugees from the southwest head this way (Phoenix clocked in at 116 degrees on Monday, which in my experience means up to 140 on unshaded pavement).
It’s not only far-right Republican-controlled legislatures that override local control (say, on outlawing plastic bags); Democratic-held bodies can do the same — although nationally, the Democrats still believe in the rule of law and, since 1861, haven’t attempted an insurrection.
So, in Washington, the state law passed two years ago quashed most cities’ power to cap land to only single-family houses. Some (many wealthy) areas are exempt.
Now, Seattle’s City Council is considering a zoning revamp to comply with the state law, debating the implementation of a wider 20-year growth plan and permanent changes to zoning. The plan would focus on 24 parts of Seattle. The changes include creating “urban centers” in such places as Columbia City — close to light rail — and Ballard, unfortunately not for years. The ambition is to create more so-called 15-minute neighborhoods, where people can find their basic needs within that time and distance from home.
Belltown, where I live, is already one.
In 2020, Microsoft pledged $500 million to affordable housing, including in the Seattle region, something the company continues to fund (with an additional $250 million). Last year, Amazon committed $1.4 billion to the endeavor, an initiative the company launched in 2021.
Urban scholar Richard Florida, who was born in Newark, N.J., native and is now a professor at the University of Toronto, makes the case for such areas and family-friendly cities in an interview with Vital City journal.
“The really interesting thing in the United States today is that we are having a debate between two kinds of places. There is the 15-minute city, which I think a lot of people desire to live in — a neighborhood where you can walk your kids to school and walk to the grocery store and walk to the sandwich shop and walk to whatever religious organization you belong to, walk to the ball field or maybe take your bike or a short car commute.”
The other is what Florida described as the “one-minute city,” where people live in suburban homes with all their needs inside the house. With all due respect for a man who reintroduced us to the urbanism of Jane Jacobs and wrote such influential books as “The Rise of the Creative Class” and “The New Urban Crisis,” this latter arrangement isn’t conducive to a real city.
Florida described the new urban crisis as one “of success, and its dimensions are increasing housing unaffordability, increasing economic inequality and increasing geographic inequality or segregation, the decline of the middle class and the separation of areas of concentrated advantage imprinted on much larger spans of concentrated disadvantage.”
Housing shortages and affordability problems are affecting most advanced nations.
The Wall Street Journal reported on the way soaring housing prices are affecting advanced nations around the world. For example, in Vancouver, B.C., the $1.1 million median house price is 17 times the median income as of spring 2024.
Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell, facing reelection, is under pressure to deliver results. The worst outcome for the city would be another inexperienced mayor, such as Jenny “Summer of Love” Durkan, who was in office during the disastrous Capitol Hill Organized Protest.
But Seattleites shouldn’t be naive about easy fixes.
The new zoning will be slow to change many neighborhoods.
Not all home sellers will choose to sell to an investor or builder. With the rezoning, City Hall is targeting higher priced neighborhoods with larger lots, so in some cases, adding detached accessory dwelling units might be expensive.
Few may be considered “affordable,” without aggressive government intervention, which might have the unintended consequence of lowering the housing inventory.
For example, homeowners who live in a newly rezoned area may be bombarded with letters from investors or builders offering to make it easy to sell, by saving them money on closing costs, and selling as is.
The city must be mindful of accidentally targeting relatively affordable rental houses; if the council makes it more difficult for small landlords with new tenant regulations, they’ll be tempted to sell them to builders who demolish them, in favor of more expensive developments.
If the city wants to maximize density, it needs a better, faster approach to building more abundant transit to the denser areas while protecting and enhancing the tree canopy.
I’m suspicious of those who promise panaceas for quickly fixing housing challenges.
The late Steve Jobs put it best: “The axis today is not liberal and conservative, the axis is constructive-destructive.”
