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In Midst of a Tech Boom, Seattle Tries To Keep Its Soul
HughPickens.com writes: Nick Wingfield has an interesting article in the NYT about how Seattle, Austin, Boulder, Portland, and other tech hubs around the country are seeking not to emulate San Francisco where wealth has created a widely envied economy, but housing costs have skyrocketed, and the region's economic divisions have deepened with rent for a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco at more than $3,500 a month, the highest in the country. "Seattle has wanted to be San Francisco for so long," says Knute Berger. "Now it's figuring out maybe that it isn't what we want to be." The core of the debate is over affordable housing and the worry that San Francisco is losing artists, teachers and its once-vibrant counterculture. "It's not that we don't want to be a thriving tech center — we do," says Alan Durning. "It's that the San Francisco and Silicon Valley communities have gotten themselves into a trap where preservationists and local politics have basically guaranteed buying a house will cost at least $1 million. Already in Seattle, it costs half-a-million, so we're well on our way."
Seattle mayor Ed Murray says he wants to keep the working-class roots of Seattle, a city with a major port, fishing fleet and even a steel mill. After taking office last year, Murray made the minimum-wage increase a priority, reassured representatives of the city's manufacturing and maritime industries that Seattle needed them., and has set a goal of creating 50,000 homes — 40 percent of them affordable for low-income residents — over the next decade. "We can hopefully create enough affordable housing so we don't find ourselves as skewed by who lives in the city as San Francisco is," says Murray. "We're at a crossroads," says Roger Valdez. "One path leads to San Francisco, where you have an incredibly regulated and stagnant housing economy that can't keep up with demand. The other path is something different, the Seattle way."
Seattle mayor Ed Murray says he wants to keep the working-class roots of Seattle, a city with a major port, fishing fleet and even a steel mill. After taking office last year, Murray made the minimum-wage increase a priority, reassured representatives of the city's manufacturing and maritime industries that Seattle needed them., and has set a goal of creating 50,000 homes — 40 percent of them affordable for low-income residents — over the next decade. "We can hopefully create enough affordable housing so we don't find ourselves as skewed by who lives in the city as San Francisco is," says Murray. "We're at a crossroads," says Roger Valdez. "One path leads to San Francisco, where you have an incredibly regulated and stagnant housing economy that can't keep up with demand. The other path is something different, the Seattle way."
Putting "light rail" at-grade wasn't a very smart move. Neither is using rail in a city with grades that cannot be climbed by rail. Bus Rapid Transit with dedicated lanes would have been the smart move: lower cost, faster to roll out, and when the next big one hits (and it will) you can route buses around damaged lines - not so easy to do with tunnels hundreds of feet underground. But Seattle wanted to be a "world class city" and were blinded by rail (to the tune of nearly $200,000,000 per mile).
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
I've been looking in to this lately. Apparently in the late 70s early 80s they passed a law that says property taxes can only increase at a MAX of 2% per year. Inflation is 4% per year so over 10 years your effective taxes drop by HALF. This means you can't pay for infrastructure improvements as density increases, and there's no incentive for people to sell, which means there's no property to develop in to higher density residential stuff... if you can even get the local city council to approve such a project. Everything between SF and San Jose is basically suburban sprawl that backs up in to the mountains and marshland. There is PLENTY of land to build 35 story condos with 300 units of 2000 sq ft flats. There is no shortage of land to build huge, relatively cheap housing options for workers if you zone for it. But the locals there and local government is just totally broken and has zero incentive to improve housing. So you have a bajillion 22 and 23 year old programmers living in 600 sq ft efficiency over people's garages in the suburbs or five kids sharing a 2 million dollar house because the housing isn't there and local government won't zone to build it. It's nuts. I want to move to Mountain View or Palo Alto (because SF is too expensive so people are renting in the suburbs and commuting via Caltrain) but there is literally no 2 bedroom apartment available for less than $5000 a month(!) In Dallas I pay barely $1000 a month. I don't know how you can realistically survive within 2 hours of SF without making at least $70,000 a year, and even then you'd have to rely on public transit and eat ramen.
If there were a ferry between Oakland and Mountain View that would really open up the real estate market but there's no way I'm taking the ferry from Oakland to SF, and then a 45 minute "baby bullet" train from SF to Mountain view to save $1000 a month.
There's more jobs than housing, and that keeps pushing the rent higher and higher. Eventually either more housing is going to have to be built, or companies are going to have to move out of the area. But right now this is not sustainable with the majority of housing being 1 or 2 story 4 and 5 bedroom suburban houses.
moox. for a new generation.
After living in Seattle for 40+ years, I can tell you that this place lost its "soul" a long time ago.
There are still remnants here and there but they're being cleaned up as quickly as possible.
And as bad as it is in many ways, it's still one of the better places to live on the west coast.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
You're doing something wrong. If you don't have any income, you should qualify for Medicaid. ObamaCare is for people who actually have an income.
The irony is that many of the products under development are expected to be used in every corner of the world.
But somehow they can only be developed by bringing people all together in one place.
????
People in Chicago are laughing at you.
Yea, I've been in Chicago (last week actually) and I'm chuckling too, mostly at you. Yea the "EL" is there and folks do ride the thing, but to get around the windy city and the suburbs, the bulk of people take the extensive number of toll ways in their cars. There is a reason the number of I-Pass holders exceeds the number of public transit riders by an order of magnitude or two. Apart from not wanting to get shot in the grand "gun free zone" folks generally find a car trip to their destination a better option. Personally, I chose to drive myself while I was there...
Not that I oppose public transportation. It's just EXPENSIVE and the fares collected simply cannot pay the development and operation costs of most systems.
Plus, as others have pointed out, such subway/elevated systems cost more to operate than they can collect in fares. Deepening the debt loads of the major cities who choose to "invest" in such systems. This is universally true for every major system I know of in the USA and abroad.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
You can't really get a decent place for $500k in Seattle.
Now if only we would permit Tiny Houses in the driveways of retired SFH zoned properties, so they could keep their house, and rent/lease the land, people could easily buy a Tiny House for $30k and have equity in the actual house. This would double population but allow people to keep their older giant houses with unused garages that they no longer use.
Most of use use transit, bike, or walk to work here. Car driving is something the suburbanites do.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --