
Will Seattle figure out how to deal with its new wealth? - wallflower
http://www.seattletimes.com/pacific-nw-magazine/money-changes-everything-will-seattle-figure-out-how-to-deal-with-its-new-wealth/
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jseliger
The real question isn't about "its new wealth;" it's about whether the city
will build enough housing to keep housing costs somewhat reasonable by
building more housing, and whether it can accelerate its subway / light rail
schedule: [http://jakeseliger.com/2015/09/24/do-millennials-have-a-
futu...](http://jakeseliger.com/2015/09/24/do-millennials-have-a-future-in-
seattle-do-millennials-have-a-future-in-any-superstar-cities/) . The housing
issue is key, as California's failure to build enough housing has led to
seemingly relentlessly increasing housing costs:
[https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/sf-
housing](https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/sf-housing) .

~~~
jmcphers
Seattleite here. One of the reasons it's hard to "just build more" here is
that the city of Seattle is bounded on two sides by water (Lake Washington to
the east and Puget Sound to the west). This means that there are far fewer
square miles available for "bedroom communities" outside the city; this, in
turn, has caused massive pressure on rents and housing in those communities
that are still driving distance from the city (modulo Seattle's awful traffic,
which is itself driven in part by geography and is among the 10 worst in the
nation[0]). There's just not as much land to build on--and most of it is
already built on.

[0] [http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-
news/transportation/seat...](http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-
news/transportation/seattle-is-a-world-class-city-for-traffic-congestion/)

~~~
trome
The terribly restrictive zoning hasn't helped, if we got rid of the height
caps and parking minimums that kneecap growth, we would see many more
apartments and condos being built. Why should a 1 bedroom apartment be over a
grand in Ballard or Fremont?

~~~
shados
Not sure removing parking minimums is all that great an idea if the public
transit isn't keeping up though.

I'm also not very familiar with Seattle, but generally when cities just start
building nilly willy, traffic become a real problem, which then limits how far
from city center you can be while still having an acceptable commute, which
drastically raises prices since people are not willing to live further out.

~~~
trome
Parking minimums service a minority of the population of Seattle, while adding
15% to 20% onto the average rental price. Another angle is the road network in
Belltown is well beyond capacity, and is likely to only have safety and
pedestrian/biker friendliness improvements done moving forward (if not a road
diet or car ban), so how do you intend to service these empty spaces so they
can be usable?

There isn't more land to build roads on, and tunneling for roadways is
extremely expensive and prone to delays (eg. SR 99 tunnel), esp. compared to
our rail tunnels which have been repeatedly completed ahead of schedule and
under budget.

~~~
shados
I admittedly only have been in Seattle once, but it didn't feel very friendly
for people without cars (I don't drive myself, and it was a pain). It's better
than average, but average is not a very high bar.

Is it really a minority of people who have cars there? Even in NYC, while a
lot of people don't have cars, I'm not sure it's the minority.

Regardless of all that, if you build up without car infrastructure, you need
to up public transportation to keep up. If you do then there's no problem. Is
that happening in Seattle? In Boston/Cambridge people are also asking for
parking minimums to be done with, but the public transportation infrastructure
is getting worse and worse, so you have areas like around Cambridge's Alewife
that are becoming massive traffic bottlenecks as they're building up around
it. That's just not scalable.

~~~
chrismcb
In 2014 an Oregon live article claimed 17 percent of Seattlites didn't have a
car. So no car owners are not the minority, despite what the op wants you to
believe. Yes in the three years since that article had been published in sure
more people have given up cars, but they are still in the minority. Given how
poor public transportation is it will be a while yet before car owners are in
the minority

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tsukaisute
I'm a firm believer that Americans don't understand how to zone cities. In
Asia (e.g. Japan) you can have beautiful high-rises mixed with things useful
for daily life, be that small shops, restaurants, or convenience stores. Even
Ginza has useful things if you walk a couple of blocks.

On the other hand, if you take Seattle's Belltown, there will be art stores,
realtor offices, and other things you rarely ever ever need, and yet you have
to drive five minutes to buy a bottle of water.

~~~
seizethecheese
You don't have to drive 5 minutes to buy a bottle of water in Belltown. You
can do that in a 5 minute walk, and there are multiple grocery stores within a
5 minute drive.

~~~
bllguo
Could we not fixate on the choice of example? I'm not familiar with Belltown
and I don't really care, I'm much more interested in the parent's point and
whether it's true.

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influx
I've seen a bunch of single family homes that were zoned in multifamily areas
turned into townhomes. Seattle is becoming more dense, and not just in
downtown. We're not San Francisco, thank god.

~~~
sitkack
Give it 3 years.

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Analemma_
This guy bugs me:

> “It’s concerning that we’re ripping down part of our heritage and building
> glass boxes,”

You can't complain about rising rents with one side of your mouth and say crap
with this with the other. Rents in Seattle are still rising fast (even after
the Bay Area is starting to cool off a bit), and the only reason it's not
significantly worse is because there actually are a crap-ton of new dense
housing developments in progress, even if it's not enough.

~~~
PhasmaFelis
I can understand his practical concerns ("Those glass boxes won’t have a Dan’s
Belltown Grocery, a little pizza joint; you’ll miss out on the divey bars, the
dress sellers"), and I agree, but people need affordable housing _first_.
Charming neighborhood businesses are awesome and I hope there's a way to
preserve them, but if only the rich can afford to live near those businesses,
it's just another kind of elitism.

~~~
gizmo686
>Those glass boxes won’t have a Dan’s Belltown Grocery, a little pizza joint;
you’ll miss out on the divey bars, the dress sellers"

Why shouldn't they? There is no reason you can't give the ground floor to
bussinesses, and have living units upstairs.

~~~
PhasmaFelis
I don't know the market forces involved, but I would expect fancy high-rises
to have mostly major chains in their retail slots, not local businesses.

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balls187
Foreign investors buying up single family dwellings and turning them into
managed AirBNB rentals is also a problem.

~~~
balls187
And with all this new wealth in Seattle, Seattle Public Schools are still
garbage.

At least with Redmond, Bellevue, Issaquah, and Sammamish, they invested in
their public schools.

~~~
notyourwork
Anyone with that wealth would probably send them to private school so I doubt
they are concerned about the public school system.

~~~
tyoverby
For Microsoft at least, most of my coworkers send their kids to public school.

------
EdgarVerona
As a Seattle resident, I'd really love to see telecommuting become more widely
used. I can understand the connection that comes with meeting in person, but
as our teleconferencing, online communication, and even Virtual Reality
technology matures, it would be great to see businesses embrace it and let you
live and work wherever you want. It would reduce the financial pressure - both
to employees and to residents of currently congested areas.

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mnm1
Did SF/Valley figure out how to deal with its new wealth? That same answer
applies here. The exact same thing that happened in SF and the valley is and
has been happening in Seattle for quite some time, just on a slightly lesser
scale. Hell, even the geography of the two places is extremely similar. Of
course the results are similar. If I want to see Seattle's future, I look at
SF's present.

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smaili
Most scary statistic (to me):

> 63 percent: Increase in the number of suburban residents living in poverty
> in metro Seattle between 2000 and 2015.

Also: _Add to that the fact there’s no state or Seattle income tax, making
wages and investment income stretch further._

Who's to say this will last? Once the gov begins to make larger plans
requiring larger budgets, this nice benefit could easily be reconsidered.

~~~
walrus01
there's no state income tax or seattle income tax, but the sales tax rate is
very regressive and quite high (10.1% in city of seattle borders right now).
This is burdensome to low income families since you pay income tax on almost
all basic consumer necessities. State income tax that would scale to higher
tiers for high-income individuals ($160k+/year gross) would be a much fairer
system.

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matt_wulfeck
> _In Vancouver, B.C. [..] mainly Chinese buyers drove the average home price
> to $1.038 million in January 2016._

> _by January 2017, the average home price in Vancouver had plunged to
> $878,242 [...] in the wake of the B.C. government’s 15-percent foreign-buyer
> tax on home purchases_

It seems to me you have a clear way to keep the market affordable for
residents.

~~~
saosebastiao
$878k is still not affordable, and Seattle is still not Vancouver.

~~~
walrus01
also, $878k is the median "home" price, which includes bachelor/1BD size
condos, which skew down the price. The median price for a small single family
detached home in Vancouver is still way higher than $1.4m. People are buying
teardowns in the Kerrisdale neighborhood for just the value in the lot, 50 ft
wide, at $2.1m.

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uiri
This article reads like it is about Chinese immigrants (or their American
children) who are moving to Seattle because San Francisco and Vancouver real
estate have peaked. This wealth is only incidentally connected to Seattle.

This phenomenon doesn't really have much to do with the influx of
Amazon/Microsoft/etc. tech workers.

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clock_tower
Finally, a case where Betteridge's Law of Headlines might not apply!
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines))

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vesrah
This article reads like trashy bragging to me. I must be getting old.

