My Generation is Never Going to Have That
April 28, 2018 9:10 AM Subscribe

Seattle’s red-hot tech economy, led by companies such as Amazon ... has filled the city with an army of well-paid workers bidding up the price of housing. But that tech-fueled demand has tended to overshadow the other driver: insufficient supply.

The Stranger: Seattle Housing Prices Continue to Soar, as Congress Prepares to Deregulate Banks

Crosscut: Seattle Bans Online Auctions for Rental Housing--for now

SeattleMet: Seattle Is Still a Seller’s Market. But Who Can Afford to Buy?

Seattle Magazine: Concern for Seattle's Housing Crisis is Rising

Seattle Times: Seattle-area home market heats up yet again, leading the country for 17th straight month

Cascadia Magazine: Three Cities, One Housing Crisis

Seattle Bubble Blog

These are the 5 worst housing markets for millennials

posted by MoonOrb (159 comments total) 29 users marked this as a favorite

My partner and I are Gen-Xers with a recently moved-back-in Millenial offspring, and with the proceeds from the sale of a suburban house rapidly losing purchasing price while we look for work and strata in Toronto, Canada's second most insane housing market, I feel this most acutely. We're having discussions like, "well if we tap the RRSP that'll be fine despite the tax hit because the equity in whatever place we get will more than make up for it" and "we'll probably have to start with a 25 year amortization to get a usable place but as soon as we can ratchet it down we will" and "I wonder how long she'll stay, but then we have to plan that she does because if we don't and she doesn't then things are going to get really tight."

I understand the answer isn't launch boomers into the sun but nnggghhhhhh so many of our societal ills are caused by the "got mine, fuck you" generation. Although in this case, apparently also offshore investors looking to build their wealth. And AirBnB. And. And I JUST WANT A PLACE TO PUT MY SHOES.
posted by seanmpuckett at 9:37 AM on April 28, 2018 [30 favorites]

Why are they the worst markets for Millennials as opposed to everyone else?
posted by bongo_x at 9:38 AM on April 28, 2018 [8 favorites]

Millennials probably want their own place as opposed to living with their parents as part of the whole growing up thing.
posted by seanmpuckett at 9:44 AM on April 28, 2018 [10 favorites]

I used to live in Seattle, and work in tech. I moved north to Snohomish County to buy a house, because there was no way I was going to be able to afford a house that I wanted in King County. I didn't want to get to retirement age (or more realistically, "the age at which I can no longer get jobs"), not have the house paid off, and end up old and homeless. Out here, I can double down, get the house paid off by the time I'm 65, and while I won't be able to travel the continent let alone the world, I'll have a place out of the rain that isn't an overpass.
posted by Tailkinker to-Ennien at 9:46 AM on April 28, 2018 [6 favorites]

Meanwhile, in Tacoma.
posted by halation at 9:47 AM on April 28, 2018 [8 favorites]

Why are they the worst markets for Millennials as opposed to everyone else?

That one is easily quantifiable, and in the article itself: because home ownership for millenials is insanely low at 29%, itself much lower than than the already low national average of 35%.

I'm part of a burgeoning political group in another city for upzoning. We are pushing for more density, and we're currently figuring out how to have these political discussions that clearly benefit developers in a way that shows that it also clearly benefits the rest of us. It's a tough needle to thread, but we're all hometown local kids who deeply believe that NIMBYism and the boomer mentality is what's causing our housing crisis to worsen. People talk about the importance of "neighborhood character" and "lines of sight" here, when what they really should be calling it is "privilege".
posted by weed donkey at 9:49 AM on April 28, 2018 [46 favorites]

The cut-throat nature of the Seattle housing market has had effects where I live in Central Washington. Housing prices have quadrupled since I arrived. Lower housing costs coupled with at the time a city safe enough for me to walk to work if I had to and for my kids to bus or walk to school vs San Francisco were reasons I could get a job and become mostly self - supporting. I had no way of affording San Francisco rents, plus San Francisco child care prices ( $ 700 a month for a lady who took all her charges to a neighborhood park all day). I would have lost medical benefits and possibly food stamps.
Moving north to Washington State but not Seattle my rent on the open market was lower, I was walking distance to most of what I needed and I made it work. If I’d come here in this era, there is no way I could have taken a just under full time minimum wage job and gotten off welfare.
Now HUD Secretary Ben Carson wants to raise public housing rents. It will be 6 years befor it hits me, but raising public housing rents by two thirds will do serious harm to people who have children.
Cities need to do a better job of making housing affordable all around, whether for families or for elderly and disabled people. I keep wondering what the breaking point is for the American people.
posted by Katjusa Roquette at 9:50 AM on April 28, 2018 [11 favorites]

The markets are worst for Millennials simply because that's currently the largest adult age cohort and also the cohort graduating from college and needing a place to live that isn't a college dorm or their parents' houses. If you have a big job market (as Seattle does) and you need people with current technical skills, your hiring pool contains a lot of Millennials and Xers. Some of the Xers, at least, have managed to buy houses already (*waves*) so they have less of an urgent need for net new housing. Even if you're relocating from somewhere else, if you own a house in the market you're leaving you have a better financial position than a Millennial with no equity in anything and no nest egg to turn into a down payment. Or you might have a retirement plan, if you're lucky, and you could turn that into a down payment in a crunch. Millennials don't have that, and they are priced out of homeownership in tight markets.

And speaking as an Xer who interviewed for a job in Seattle: Seattle's market has gone from being cheaper than DC's to being somewhat worse, in the span of about three years. We've got a fair chunk of equity in our house in DC now and we could sell it and buy a new place somewhere else, but housing supply in Seattle is so tight we'd basically be back to buying a starter home if we could find something at all. Either that or have a much higher amount of mortgage debt than is financially healthy. But at least we're in a position to consider it. Millennials with no savings and no equity are pretty much fucked.
posted by fedward at 9:56 AM on April 28, 2018 [4 favorites]

"because home ownership for millenials is insanely low at 29%, itself much lower than than the already low national average of 35%"

It's interesting to see how privilege is often invisible to those who have it. In my circle of friends (Gen X) owning your own home is the norm. Of my highschool group maybe a third rent. Of my work peer group almost no one rents. But if you ask us, hardly any of us would say we were economically privileged. We simply think of owning your own home as the standard baseline.

Of course, we clearly are privileged (most of us have retirement savings, too).
posted by oddman at 10:00 AM on April 28, 2018 [25 favorites]

lol i literally don't know a single person who ever expects to buy a home ever

frankly i'm trying to figure out how (or if) i will ever be able to afford an apartment on my own with zero roommates

maybe about a fourth of the people i know have any form of retirement savings
posted by halation at 10:05 AM on April 28, 2018 [47 favorites]

My homelessness and bike tour of doom was a pretty direct result of Amazon's campus in particular. I was even in a low/fixed income non-profit managed housing group and my rent nearly doubled in less than 3 years directly because of nearby spiking rent prices at nearby new luxury apartments because for whatever reason in their charter they had to link their rent prices to some given percentage of market rates.

I watched a ton of my neighbors get forced out over the years. It was incredibly toxic and stressful to be living in that building with that going on, because everyone there was effectively marginalized or on fixed SSI/SSDI or HUD incomes and vouchers.

It was like the building itself had a weird cancer where tenants were in a state of constant anxiety and walking on eggshells about the next quarterly rent increase.

Then when we'd go outside our 100+ year old vintage no-elevator apartment building, we were surrounded and confronted by an ever growing canyon of luxury apartment and condo towers, increasing food prices, the closure and death of a lot of working class businesses and even a tidal wave of increased vehicular traffic both from new affluent car-driving residents and a less and less walkable neighborhood.

And these people who had been living there for decades who had good access to the health care and services they needed are pushed out away from those services, and those services are stretched even thinner by these competing forces on all sides.

And the tech bros and Amazonians are left scratching their heads about why there's this sudden crisis in homelessness? Or the lack of home ownership? Oh, mercy.

Hey, tech bros? There's a non-zero chance that the guy sleeping in the doorway of your favorite bougie coffee shop used to live in an affordable apartment building, likely in the one that was torn down to build your "vertical community".

Interesting personal factoid: The hotel I stayed in for a bit over a month after my lung collapsed about 8 years ago and so many MeFites helped get me off the street is now Amazon HQ. You know, the shiny new building with Jeff's Balls on it. My room and bed would be about 20-30 feet east in front of where the security desk is on the third-ish floor entry lobby.
posted by loquacious at 10:21 AM on April 28, 2018 [69 favorites]

As part of the supposed "got mine, fuck you" generation, you know, if you didn't all insist on living in the same god damn place...

then maybe my family wouldn't be having our quality of life steadily squeezed out of us like juice in a cider press and turned into money to enrich a bunch of out of town developers. You know, the way it is right now.)
posted by Naberius at 10:39 AM on April 28, 2018 [6 favorites]

Some of this YIMBY stuff is probably good for me personally, but I'm really not sure I believe "good for developers and good for the rest of us" is a thing, except for limited definitions of "the rest of us."
posted by atoxyl at 10:40 AM on April 28, 2018 [14 favorites]

Observations from the trenches here in Seattle:

Seattle is building new 1- and 2- bedroom apartments at a staggering rate, but not fast enough to meet demand. In this respect it is quite different from, say, San Francisco.
The new ones are almost all apartments for rent, not condos for sale, because (1) builders see the sky-rocketing real estate market as a good investment, and (2) expensive lawsuits in the 90's and aughts from condo owner associations made building and selling condo buildings into a liability. (this one might just be an excuse from builders)
There are very few 3-bedroom or larger apartments. Single family homes and townhouses are the only option for those who cling to the notion that raising a family needs at least 3 bedrooms.
It's going to get much worse. The tech boom continues to bring in highly-compensated 20-somethings. Many of them are content to rent apartments right now, but within the next 10 years they will be starting families, and they will leverage themselves to the hilt in order to afford a house. Amazon hired a shit-ton of people in the last four years, and the greater part of this wave has not yet hit the housing market.
A lot of this problem is zero-sum. The parts of the solution that are not zero-sum: transit and density.
Transit increases supply: The geographic constraint here is not measured in miles, it's measured in minutes to downtown Seattle. We need to double down on buses, dedicated bus lanes, signal priority, and express routes. Our transit agencies are trying to do this, but they are hitting scalability problems: Not enough buses, can't hire drivers fast enough, etc.

posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 10:48 AM on April 28, 2018 [30 favorites]

As part of the supposed "got mine, fuck you" generation, you know, if you didn't all insist on living in the same god damn place...

You mean where the jobs are?
posted by Pope Guilty at 10:49 AM on April 28, 2018 [103 favorites]

I live in a similar neighborhood and the supply side of this equation is infuriating. The zoning and market make it much more feasible to put up $2M mansions instead of townhouses or small lot subdivision which would be 4 or 5x the density. “Locals” (read: people wealthy enough to afford the houses) complain about traffic or claim that higher density housing is bad for the environment because there isn’t enough water to support a higher population [involuntary strangle hands]. So my street is rapidly graying and whatever-is-above-gentrifying (lordifying?) and everyone my age is moving elsewhere.
I understand that this is small potatoes compared to the situation further down the economic scale but that doesn’t make it good.
posted by q*ben at 10:55 AM on April 28, 2018 [7 favorites]

(2) expensive lawsuits in the 90's and aughts from condo owner associations made building and selling condo buildings into a liability. (this one might just be an excuse from builders)
Can confirm this is a real thing, condos are the one thing my design firm won’t do because our insurance costs would double. Probably abetted by the market though bc if condos were more profitable by a wide margin developers would find some idiots somewhere to design and build them.
posted by q*ben at 10:57 AM on April 28, 2018 [2 favorites]

On the flip, here in TO it is all condos, because you can spend three years building 400 or 800 or 1200 units and get $800-1000/sqft for them (this year) and you walk away with hundreds of millions of dollars.
posted by seanmpuckett at 11:02 AM on April 28, 2018 [1 favorite]

I'm part of a burgeoning political group in another city for upzoning. We are pushing for more density, and we're currently figuring out how to have these political discussions that clearly benefit developers in a way that shows that it also clearly benefits the rest of us. It's a tough needle to thread, but we're all hometown local kids who deeply believe that NIMBYism and the boomer mentality is what's causing our housing crisis to worsen.

push for affordable housing requirements. new orleans had this, before the city council stripped it away. but it was a solid policy, that developers have to have a certain number of units below market rate.

the more places do this, the more politically viable it will be
posted by eustatic at 11:08 AM on April 28, 2018 [13 favorites]

after the comments about transportation, i agree that build out of high speed rail would have helped avoid a good bit of this
posted by eustatic at 11:10 AM on April 28, 2018 [5 favorites]

Holy crap! All three of the houses pictured near the top of the article are within a block of my house! We bought our place 15 years ago for less than half its current value. Our neighbors are two retired teachers that live on a huge corner lot in a gorgeous century old craftsman they bought in the 60s for 20K. They’re really aging and not keeping up with the maintenance a house like this requires and the land they occupy could easily fit six town houses, which is exactly what’s going to happen when they sell. And really, it will be sad to see the historic house go and construction and density will make my life more painful, but all things considered it’s still an excellent trade off for the benefits of living in the best investment of my life and being in a city with a booming economy.

We still need the heavy hand of government with respect to affordable dense housing and rent control. I can live with density and traffic. I don’t want to live in a place where the school teachers and police officers and grocery store clerks aren’t also walking to work.
posted by Slarty Bartfast at 11:13 AM on April 28, 2018 [11 favorites]

This is me really hoping that my city "loses" the Amazon HQ hunger game and that we don't become the next Seattle.
posted by octothorpe at 11:13 AM on April 28, 2018 [19 favorites]

I'm really not sure I believe "good for developers and good for the rest of us" is a thing, except for limited definitions of "the rest of us."

So what you're saying is that you're opposed to new construction and density.

Otherwise, my honest follow up question is: who constructs new buildings if not developers?
posted by weed donkey at 11:21 AM on April 28, 2018 [6 favorites]

Move to Milwaukee. Plenty of cheap craftsmen bungalows here.
posted by fridayinjune at 11:22 AM on April 28, 2018 [7 favorites]

I just sit here in Vancouver reading about housing problems caused by increasing wages, and wish that high incomes were a problem here.
posted by good in a vacuum at 11:23 AM on April 28, 2018 [11 favorites]

Otherwise, my honest follow up question is: who constructs new buildings if not developers?
posted by weed donkey at 11:21 AM on April 28 [+] [!]

there are developers, and then there are Grifters. how can we make sure developers live up to their name, and develop housing, fairly; rather than robbing the city / state, and leaving us in the same housing crisis as when we started?
posted by eustatic at 11:29 AM on April 28, 2018 [5 favorites]

I bought my current house two years ago, and could almost certainly sell it in under 24 hours for about twice of what I owe on the mortgage. That’s bananas. Completely bananas. If you look at what I had to pay for the downpayment (my mortgage bill is less than local rent for an equivalent property) as an investment, I’d be getting a >6x return in two years.

...I mean, I’m not complaining but that’s pretty insane. We need to increase density and improve transit throughout the entire region, yesterday.
posted by aramaic at 11:29 AM on April 28, 2018 [3 favorites]

I'm in Toronto, right where the van attack happened. The houses here were all originally built in the 50s and all detached single family residential except for a few pockets that are semi-detached and 6-plexes. What has been happening here for the last 30 years is that someone would buy a house and then tear it down to build the biggest thing they could. The remaining original houses go for somewhere around $1.5-2 million and that is with the knowledge that they're just going to be torn down. Judging by the amount of in-use side, rear and garage entry doors a lot of the new houses are currently housing multiple families because how else do you afford a $3 million house? If they were to change the zoning here to allow legal duplexes and three storey houses then the value of the older houses would significantly increase so it would be good for them. The builders could make more money building duplexes or triplexes instead of single 3500 square foot houses. The city would then have more places for people to live in that weren't condos or illegal basement apartments. So there are situations where everyone can win.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 11:33 AM on April 28, 2018 [3 favorites]

Solution: Tiny Houses Stacked Up.
posted by sammyo at 11:35 AM on April 28, 2018

Meanwhile, these cities are never going to do what's necessary and retool for growth, because there are always Portland's and Austin's for people fed up with housing prices to move to-

Bloomberg: "Why Invest in Cities? There's Always Another Boise"

NYPost: "New Yorkers are flocking to this Midwest sanctuary"
posted by Apocryphon at 11:45 AM on April 28, 2018 [5 favorites]

I'm one of those people who actually grew up in Seattle. The street I grew up on was mostly doctors, lawyers, and engineers. Wealthy, but not crazy wealthy. I moved away long ago but I recently did some googling and property searches of people who live on the same block. Literally every single house is owned by an executive at a tech company. CEOs at small companies, or VPs at huge companies. Even regular level software engineers and managers are completely priced out. And it's far from the nicest neighborhood in Seattle. It's really astonishing to think about gentrification pushing out already-wealthy people.

I've mentioned this many times, but I moved to Minneapolis, where I can have a nice house in a walkable, diverse, neighborhood for an extremely reasonable price. Most of my friends aren't in tech and that's great! Hard to imagine ever moving back.
posted by miyabo at 11:46 AM on April 28, 2018 [9 favorites]

As part of the supposed "got mine, fuck you" generation, you know, if you didn't all insist on living in the same god damn place...
You mean where the jobs are?

Also where the people making those hiring and management decisions are older and presumably homeowners and simultaneously contributing to both sides of the problem by fighting upzoning and insisting everybody move there?

You can't blame Millennials and insist they get off your lawn for doing what the Boomers running the job market literally require them to do in order to get a paycheck, any paycheck, that isn't just driving for Uber or something.
posted by fedward at 11:48 AM on April 28, 2018 [34 favorites]

I'm in favor of more density but I'm a but put off by the framing of the FA around Wallingford. Oh no! I can't afford to live in one of the most expensive neighborhoods in Seattle! Woe is me! I might have to buy a house in the suburbs! Or god forbid White Center!
posted by bq at 11:49 AM on April 28, 2018 [6 favorites]

If Amazon announces HQ2 for Montgomery County, Maryland, the vultures will descend on my street within weeks.

MoCo is already facing a housing shortage and (related) inequality crisis; our block is one of vanishingly few that is (a) accessible to Metro and (b) affordable to working class families. Most are renters, but a few families on our block managed to hold onto their homes through the 2008 collapse and beyond. Ours is an anachronistic suburban block of tiny single-family, single-story attached row homes flanked by McMansions in the affluent neighborhood to the west and lots of new Metro-adjacent condo & apartment developments to the east, with new luxury condos breaking ground on a regular basis to the north and south.

If Amazon moves here, the pressure to bulldoze our block and erase any memory of it in favor of luxury developments will be intense, and the few old-timers who still own their homes on my block will immediately be pushed into buyouts that will appear generous until home values double, then triple within a couple of years.
posted by duffell at 11:50 AM on April 28, 2018 [7 favorites]

We already have a Ballard, not sure turning Wallingford into another Ballard is going to make that much of a difference. If you're going to build anything build transport, spread things out.
posted by Artw at 11:51 AM on April 28, 2018

(Speaking from experience as a born-and-bred Seattleite who thought he'd escaped Bezos' balls)
posted by duffell at 11:52 AM on April 28, 2018 [1 favorite]

how can we make sure developers live up to their name, and develop housing, fairly; rather than robbing the city / state, and leaving us in the same housing crisis as when we started?

Yeah! Exactly. That's the key - the problem isn't developers, the problem are the rules and building codes that allow them to get away with this.

Especially in the PNW, it's a very common knee-jerk reaction to say "fuck developers", but ignore the fact that developers live and die by city codes, and this problem is not one solved by either nihilism or capitalism, but by democracy. If you want to fuck developers, do what SF does and don't let them develop. But that's how you get SF's problems. The real solution needs to be upzoning, with mandates for affordable housing.

An important rule to me is getting rid of parking requirements for new construction, and replacing it with affordable housing requirements. It's a brilliant way of killing 2 birds with one stone - we reduce the car ownership in a neighborhood, while promoting affordable housing - aaand developers are actually incentivized to build like this. Developers hate adding parking, because it's expensive to build and doesn't really add much value. Replace those parking lots with reduced income housing, and it's win-win-win.

This is what I meant by policies that benefit developers while also benefiting the rest of us. Developers need incentives to build affordable housing, and we need places to live. This is a policy problem, and it's only going to get worse - unless we get cities to put in place density-oriented building codes.
posted by weed donkey at 11:55 AM on April 28, 2018 [29 favorites]

Also, shout-out to the several other DC people in this thread who aren't entirely looking forward to HQ2, which local press is trying very hard to make feel inevitable. The housing market and the commutes here are already terrible. HQ2 would make them so much worse.

The HQ2 thing started after I was already in the Amazon interview process, and the job I was up for would have required me to relocate to Seattle. We thought about what it might mean and whether it would actually make sense to sell the house to relocate, or try to hang on for a while in case they did select DC and we could put in for a move back. But I didn't get an offer so the point was more or less moot. I do wonder if they'll approach me again if they do put HQ2 here, but wondering about that doesn't pay my mortgage now.
posted by fedward at 12:05 PM on April 28, 2018 [3 favorites]

Other data-driven efforts have been more controversial. Last fall, Lubarsky published a critique of a proposal to require that a quarter of the units in any new housing development be rented at below-market rates, in exchange for allowing taller buildings. Housing advocates say the proposal, which goes well beyond the city’s current requirement, offers a way to generate affordable units with fewer public dollars. But according to Lubarsky’s analysis, such a steep requirement simply isn’t economically plausible. To compensate for the lost income, he says, landlords would need to raise rents on the remaining units by 10 percent or more, which “would make a lot of projects—most projects in fact—not pencil out.” For similar reasons, Lubarsky has also been skeptical of calls by some Seattle housing advocates for rent control, which he believes would likewise kill developers’ incentives in building much-needed housing.

This dude is not your friend.
posted by Artw at 12:06 PM on April 28, 2018 [9 favorites]

This dude is not your friend.

This is the guy who "helps" you with your job by automating a lot of it, and then you lose your job because his code replaced you. Oops.

Is there a reason we don't demand that STEM people get some kind of fucking training in philosophy or the liberals arts so we don't end up with this data-driven wankery that stares right past obvious issues that are looking them right in the face?
posted by deadaluspark at 12:29 PM on April 28, 2018 [12 favorites]

This dude is not your friend.

He's not necessarily wrong. You would have to look at the numbers.

If some of the apartments are rented at below market rates, someone has to pay for that. That means the other tenants would have to pay above market rates. If you can't find enough tenants willing to pay higher rents, the project will fail.

If you do have subsidized, below market apartments, who gets them? Are they assigned by lottery? What if you are not one of the lottery winners?
posted by JackFlash at 12:40 PM on April 28, 2018 [12 favorites]

Yeah, I hate the twisted logic that building luxury apartments somehow makes prices go up. In the universe where there are no luxury apartments... where do you think the rich people live? In the normal apartments. And of course they'll out-bid normal people for those apartments. And the normal people will live in the slum apartments, and the people who would live in the slum apartments would be homeless. Not to mention the fact that these "luxury" apartments are usually regular apartments with an extra $1000 spent on slightly nicer countertops and appliances.
posted by miyabo at 12:45 PM on April 28, 2018 [26 favorites]

Is there a reason we don't demand that STEM people get some kind of fucking training in philosophy or the liberals arts so we don't end up with this data-driven wankery that stares right past obvious issues that are looking them right in the face?

Virtue, alas, is a tricky thing to teach. Data-driven wankery pays extraordinarily well, and philosophy does not; the Thucydides of the world will shell out hella coin to have their kids trained in what is profitable, but they're not going to pay for how-not-to-be-an-asshole training, and employers are less likely to hire non-assholes. It is not employers' interest for their employees to take Aristotle even a little bit seriously, after all.

and, frankly, even those who *do* get trained in the liberal arts forget all of that, once they become hedge-fund managers or whatever; they come back and sit on the boards of their alma maters and make deeply unethical choices regarding the operating budgets of the very schools that, ostensibly, taught them to strive for σωφροσύνη
posted by halation at 12:51 PM on April 28, 2018 [18 favorites]

So at what point can housing crises be declared emergency situations and eminent domain be used to force through housing construction? For government employees like teachers, at least.
posted by Apocryphon at 12:51 PM on April 28, 2018 [2 favorites]

So at what point can housing crises be declared emergency situations and eminent domain be used to force through housing construction?

So are you proposing that the government force grandmothers out of their bungalows to put up 6-story condos? There aren't easy answers.
posted by JackFlash at 1:02 PM on April 28, 2018 [7 favorites]

I might have to buy a house in the suburbs!

Well, if living in the suburbs is going to substantially increase your commute, that's going to have a huge impact on quality of life beyond just not living in a desirable neighborhood.
posted by ghost phoneme at 1:03 PM on April 28, 2018 [11 favorites]

Red Queen Race Reality: we’ll get you to the latest undiscovered regional city at least 6 months before the Vampire capitalists do! 10th move is on us!
posted by The Whelk at 1:04 PM on April 28, 2018 [9 favorites]

So are you proposing that the government force grandmothers out of their bungalows to put up 6-story condos? There aren't easy answers.

When you put it that way, how much would it cost to house a grandmother in a hotel for a year while their bungalow gets replaced by 50 housing units, and then just give her one of the new units for a net gain of 49 housing units?
posted by the agents of KAOS at 1:10 PM on April 28, 2018 [13 favorites]

Right? Why is the desire of one grandmother for a lawn with a white picket fence more important than the desire of 30 just-starting-out millenials and 20 gen-xers with families to have an affordable place to live within walking distance of jobs, shopping and social opportunities.
posted by seanmpuckett at 1:14 PM on April 28, 2018 [15 favorites]

I think I like the functioning mass transit plan better than being the bad guys from Up.
posted by Artw at 1:15 PM on April 28, 2018 [29 favorites]

I think most of us would be happy with reasonable access to reliable public transit that gets us to jobs, shopping, etc.
posted by ghost phoneme at 1:19 PM on April 28, 2018 [2 favorites]

Why is the desire of one grandmother for a lawn with a white picket fence more important than the desire of 30 just-starting-out millenials and 20 gen-xers with families to have an affordable place to live within walking distance of jobs, shopping and social opportunities.

Whoa. You might step back for just a second and look at what you are advocating here.

You could also say what right do a bunch of millenials have to move in and take away a home from someone who has lived there for 50 years. Where does that right come from?
posted by JackFlash at 1:21 PM on April 28, 2018 [21 favorites]

It is not feasible to have functioning mass transit in a city made of bungalows with a yard. Effective mass transit requires density so that lots of people are within walking distance of each stop.
posted by the agents of KAOS at 1:23 PM on April 28, 2018 [15 favorites]

Why is the desire of one grandmother for a lawn with a white picket fence more important than the desire of 30 just-starting-out millenials and 20 gen-xers with families to have an affordable place to live within walking distance of jobs, shopping and social opportunities.

That's literally what totalitarian governments do, like China.

There rules, laws, and legal cases that give home owners rights in the USA. You are proposing to remove those rights, some of which are ensconced in the founding documents on this country, and which are predominantly used to help protected-class citizens such as in the FHA.

That kind of argument is either willfully ignorant, or scarily totalitarian. In the reality of American politics, you're going to have to do better if you want people to take you seriously.
posted by weed donkey at 1:25 PM on April 28, 2018 [15 favorites]

Where does that right come from?

Kelo v City of New London
posted by 922257033c4a0f3cecdbd819a46d626999d1af4a at 1:25 PM on April 28, 2018 [7 favorites]

I mean
Maybe can we put aside the whole 'oh no grandmother's bungalow!' argument and focus on the actual happening-in-many-places-right-now issue of developers buying up properties and 'renovicting' tenants, often with little notice, and often putting them onto the streets in rental markets where they have no hope of finding anything affordable?
posted by halation at 1:27 PM on April 28, 2018 [23 favorites]

As long as we conflate the housing market with the investment property market, I doubt "the market" will do much about the housing crisis. We may have an increasing supply of vacant or near-vacant luxury apartments, though.
posted by pernoctalian at 1:27 PM on April 28, 2018 [9 favorites]

That's literally what totalitarian governments do, like China.

China is definitely totalitarian but it's actually famous for not doing that.
posted by miyabo at 1:27 PM on April 28, 2018 [7 favorites]

Where does that right come from?
...
There rules, laws, and legal cases that give home owners rights in the USA.

You act like we just said let's kill everyone who owns a home. Who's talking about rights? Are you really arguing that US 'laws' prohibit a land tax system that would make it more attractive for a grandmother to let someone replace her house with an apartment building, if she got to stay there? In the reality of anywhere, you'll have to be a little more willing to actually read what other people are saying and less eager to jump off a straw cliff you built.
posted by the agents of KAOS at 1:28 PM on April 28, 2018 [9 favorites]

Like I know I already linked this article upthread, but it's absurd to dicker over hypothetical-grandmothers-versus-millennials when real people are being made homeless right now and not even being offered any form of meaningful assistance or compensation
posted by halation at 1:29 PM on April 28, 2018 [17 favorites]

At the root of Seattle housing cost is that they have been creating high paying jobs at a faster rate than they have created housing.

One solution would be to put a freeze on business development until the housing situation improves. It has long been customary to require builders create a certain number of parking spaces per unit of housing. It might also make sense to require builders create a certain number of housing units per 100 square feet of new office space. This new housing could be in the same building, in adjacent areas, or credits could be bought and traded from other builders like carbon credits.
posted by JackFlash at 1:29 PM on April 28, 2018 [5 favorites]

Why would it be useful to only talk about renters and not homeowners?
posted by the agents of KAOS at 1:33 PM on April 28, 2018 [1 favorite]

I mean the problem is that the tech companies want their labor pools all in one hyper concentrated place and that's kind of terrible for both the people who grew up there and the millenials who want to make decent money at a tech job.

Honestly, cities are kind of screwed. They don't really have the power to stop the massive influx of people. And ... like where does it end? Because to some degree, building more housing and making cost of living cheaper is only going to make a city more attractive to move to and make more people to come until things reach the breaking point. There needs to be a larger scale policy to spread jobs out more, geographically - have more small but prosperous cities rather than a few tech hubs that are straining to handle the sudden change.
posted by Zalzidrax at 1:37 PM on April 28, 2018 [12 favorites]

protected-class citizens such as in the FHA.

There are no "protected-class citizens" in US law. FHA and the rest of civil rights law has protected categories, like race, sex, disability, etc, along which it is illegal to discriminate. No one class of people is more protected than another. The idea that civil rights law deems certain classes of people "protected" stems from right-wing anti-civil rights disinformation.
posted by andrewpcone at 1:48 PM on April 28, 2018 [11 favorites]

Millennials who think they're too cool to live in the suburbs is not a public policy problem.

Venture capitalists and FAANG executives insisting on doing 90% of their US hiring in Seattle, the Bay Area, New York and Austin (and LA? I can never figure out if LA counts) maybe has some character of a public policy problem, although not sure what the solution is.

Home-owner-control over neighborhood land use planning is one of the core defenses of home values which constitute 75%-200% of the net worth of most middle class people. Perhaps this involuntary re-zoning concept happens to increase property values, but the next one could crush them.

Property development is not Seattle's problem. Developers there are moving as aggressively to add housing as anyone prudently could. Tech companies' hiring cycle is based upon anticipated demand or funding out 3-6 months. Real estate developers' decisions have to be based on demand out 3-6 years and any real estate developer who has any sense stresses their models for the intervention of a recession -- the kinds of recession that would trigger a massive slowdown in employment and housing demand.
posted by MattD at 1:52 PM on April 28, 2018 [6 favorites]

Are you really arguing that US 'laws' prohibit a land tax system that would make it more attractive for a grandmother to let someone replace her house with an apartment building, if she got to stay there?

I am really arguing for these types of policy based solutions. Realistic, enactable, motivational policies that give people incentives to work towards dense, public transit oriented environments. If you read my other comments, you'll see that is exactly what I am really arguing. As I've already stated that in my other comments, I'll just end with one more quote from yours.

you'll have to be a little more willing to actually read what other people are saying and less eager to jump off a straw cliff you built.

posted by weed donkey at 1:54 PM on April 28, 2018

we need to distribute jobs more evenly throughout the country - it's insane to crowd all the high-tech high paying jobs in limited areas of the country while other areas are lucky to get a new dollar general

if i was a professional millennial, i'd be asking myself if the high cost of having a career in one of the west coast cities is really worth it - you can live in the midwest a lot cheaper

and i also foresee a split coming in the democratic coalition - so called blue cities like san francisco and seattle seem to be forcibly exporting their poor so the privileged can keep their benefits

that's not progressive politics in action, is it?
posted by pyramid termite at 2:00 PM on April 28, 2018 [9 favorites]

Classing my desire not to spend two hours commuting each way as being too cool to live in the suburbs is a pretty awful way to put things.
If we wanted to pay people for their transit time and build it into their working day length, then I'm happy to live in woop woop. Until then, you're just demanding I spend my life travelling at significant expense.
posted by AnhydrousLove at 2:06 PM on April 28, 2018 [42 favorites]

The problem isn't that my mom won't sell her bungalow, it's that even if she does, it's illegal for the buyer to tear it down and build a multi-family dwelling.

Of course I'm not advocating an armed housing militia forcibly relocating people. I am advocating against the NIMBY-centric zoning system to be replaced with something that actually benefits the common good, rather than the status quo. It's just that it's the politicians are in the same age cohort as the aging single-family home dwellers (and often ARE them), and getting the laws and regulations to change is going to take sustained activity from people with a broader, more community-oriented world view.

Which is the subject of TFA.
posted by seanmpuckett at 2:13 PM on April 28, 2018 [28 favorites]

Housing prices are spiraling up (in most big cities). Salaries are spiraling up -- I just got an offer for 50% more than my already-decent salary. At what point do we just admit that there's significant inflation going on, at least in certain pockets, that isn't getting captured by CPI.

Wow that's great but this plebe in DC isn't getting that and I'm actively looking for a better paying job. Not everyone is getting spiraling salaries unfortunately.

Evenly distributed tech jobs would be great! Awesome! I would love that and would love living in the burbs or the midwest. Except the trend (from my simple and limited observations/experience) is that companies are moving towards being more and more co-located than not. I'm on the admin side of project management and our company/teams have moved completely to agile development and you just can't have anyone teleworking or not be in the same floor or room. The hiring managers and higher ups don't want anyone to telework, despite investing so much god damn money upgrading our systems to be able to.

I grew up in DC. Chinatown specifically. I can barely even afford to live out in the suburbs of the DMV like Falls Church. The only people I know who don't roommates are the ones who don't mind living completely paycheck to paycheck. I know there are people who can afford to do so, but I don't know them and they're probably moneyed lawyers or like pharma sales people. My circle is full of corporate drones and we're more likely bringing in breadcrumbs rather than bread.

I'll be 30 soon and the dream isn't to buy/own. It's to be able to afford a non-luxury apartment without roommates.
posted by driedmango at 2:28 PM on April 28, 2018 [13 favorites]

I am really arguing for these types of policy based solutions.

Maybe elsewhere in the thread. In the comment I responded to, you were not, and you were very much making the argument that US rules, laws and legal cases prevented my proposal from ever being a possibility. That was clearly nonsense, and you must have somehow misunderstood the conversation since you say that wasn't what you intended to do.
posted by the agents of KAOS at 2:29 PM on April 28, 2018 [2 favorites]

our company/teams have moved completely to agile development and you just can't have anyone teleworking or not be in the same floor or room

Agile definitely isn't incompatible with people being fully/substantially remote or just working from home occasionally. Having substantially remote teams takes real effort that many companies aren't willing to make, but it's possible.
posted by hoyland at 2:34 PM on April 28, 2018 [1 favorite]

Of course it's possible. But again, they're not willing to make it and moving towards agile is used as good excuse/justification for not allowing remote work.
posted by driedmango at 2:37 PM on April 28, 2018 [1 favorite]

Solution: Tiny Houses Stacked Up.

http://tucson.com/business/shipping-container-housing-project-to-go-up-near-downtown-tucson/article_1a70cc00-7b63-5ba5-b724-e804b4027c83.html
posted by bongo_x at 2:38 PM on April 28, 2018

You can live in the midwest a lot cheaper

When I moved from Chicago, my cost of living went up 1.25-2x (depending on how you measure), but my income (straight W2) more than tripled.

I'd love to move back to the Midwest, but it's gonna have to be worth my while. This whole "having disposable income" thing is pretty great and being able to save for retirement is also fairly nifty.

In retrospect I wasted a lot of my prime earning years. Should have made the move years ago, it was only my own stubborn wilful blindness that stopped me.
posted by aramaic at 2:45 PM on April 28, 2018 [3 favorites]

if i was a professional millennial, i'd be asking myself if the high cost of having a career in one of the west coast cities is really worth it - you can live in the midwest a lot cheaper

Unfortunately, as a millenial who grew up in the midwest and lives on the west coast now, the answer is no. I've run the spreadsheet numbers and I'm saving away more than I grossed at my previous job. And my employer is somewhat known for being stingy for the Bay Area -- no free lunches, modest 401k match, active participant in the no cold calling scandal, etc.

Yes, a house is expensive here, but the pay more than compensates. I figure you can save up for a house at roughly the same rate working in KC or SF, but in only one of those do you end up with a million dollar asset you live in at the end of 30 years. And the salary ramp up is quite incredible -- your stock grants typically vest on a multi year cycle, and employers typically allocate "refresher grants" of 50-100 percent of your initial grant depending on perf reviews. Those refreshers are on the same multi-year vesting cycle. Which means after 4 years, you have 4 simultaneous grants vesting each period. None of that is guaranteed, mind you, but when you're trying to recruit a devops engineer with 5 years exp with one company, they have a lot of reasons to stay. with their current company. I've heard stories of Apple engineers who took a part time job in retail while their stock vested, and I imagine you could try something similar with Microsoft. I think Amazon warehouse employees are mostly vendor contractors, but if Amazon ever opens up a retail store outside Seattle, that'd also be an option.

But frankly, I consider renting in SF pretty ideal. I don't have to shovel snow, rake leaves, or mow lawns, and the VTA busses travel on a direct route from my apt. complex to my office.
posted by pwnguin at 2:50 PM on April 28, 2018 [9 favorites]

Midwest is generally cheaper, but less density has it's downsides too. Flex time and work from home seem way less common out here (although maybe I just run in different circles in the Midwest compared to the PNW). Which means you're stuck traveling in rush hour. If you're in a more suburban or rural environment then it may not be too bad, but likely the less aggravating your rush hour is the farther it is you're driving, which will eventually wear on you too. Even if I don't have as many urban amenities, I'd still prefer to not have to spend hours commuting, I want to enjoy that yard and garden! If you're coupled and both working, you and your spouse are also probably working farther apart, so you both likely need a car. So car costs eats into the cheaper rent (cause we're still not going to be able to own for a while).

And even if you're lucky enough to be able to buy and live somewhere that gives you both a decent commute...what happens if (likely when, it seems like now adays) one of you gets laid off? Or if a work environment turns toxic? Less job density= less job options nearby. So up goes your commute time and costs. Or maybe now you have to relocate to make it reasonable.
posted by ghost phoneme at 2:54 PM on April 28, 2018 [7 favorites]

The one thing I can be sure of after reading the article and the comments is that if you don't have money and power you are going to get screwed by people who only have the best interests of the city at heart.
posted by Pembquist at 3:01 PM on April 28, 2018 [7 favorites]

Grandmother here. I personally did not make enough money in my last working years to hang onto my bungalow. Nor was I really able to handle upkeep once payments went up. And I gad a feeling about the real estate bubble. So I sold. It seemed smarter to do that than to wind up with crippling debt late in life, especially since neither of my grown children wanted the place. I think that very few grannies actually want to hang onto a bungalow unless they have the help and means to care for it, unless it’s paid for.
They’d rather be in something smaller but not horrible urban projects where they have to deal with harassment. A friend in Toronto’s public housing has constant problems with a drunk who bothers everyone in the building. One older man there try to break into an older woman’s apartment to have sex with her and the management is useless. In this building there were constant problems with people who used street drugs or drank excessively. The current manager dealt with the problems and it’s not bad here.
Some older men can really get pushy. I had a problem with one who lived next door with his mother when I lived in my bungalow.I had to threaten to call the police on him in order to be left alone.
Had I lived in an apartment building, maybe nothing would have really been done.
Tiny house projects out in the suburbs, with gardening space and transportation into the city for medical reasons or shopping, or even entertainment would be better for older ladies.
Maybe make urban retirement facilities a little more like a decent hotel and less like a nursing home.
One place here leaves you with only $60 of your check.
The reason anyone ever wants to stay in their bungalow is that if it was bought early in one’s working years, it is paid for. Of course you will still have property taxes, but odds are you have slightly more pocket money. Many cities either excuse property taxes for senior citizens or disabled people or discount them because it is cheaper to help people age in place with chore help and care-givers than it is to have people even in the cheapest most terrible nursing homes.
posted by Katjusa Roquette at 3:08 PM on April 28, 2018 [18 favorites]

Which is the subject of TFA.

Ehh... the subject of the article certainly would like some zoning changes to suit his speculative schemes, but is heavily against anything that isn’t immediately to his profit and hates public housing. Sure he’s run some “numbers” that price that’s best, but he’s some techno-libertarian jerk-off not a housing policy expert, him running numbersvisnt exactly meaningful.

And TBH the generational conflict he wants to introduce triggers my scam sense mightily.
posted by Artw at 3:12 PM on April 28, 2018 [6 favorites]

Also, shout-out to the several other DC people in this thread who aren't entirely looking forward to HQ2, which local press is trying very hard to make feel inevitable. The housing market and the commutes here are already terrible. HQ2 would make them so much worse.

I've lived in DC for 20 years, am actively involved in local history circles, my wife is a native, and both of my kids were born here.

The last 5 years have been a series of "is this the last straw?" moments for me, but Amazon? It's hard to imagine much beyond the rivers that make it worth living here surviving a bear hug from Bezos.

We already concluded 5 years ago that we can't afford a house, too.
posted by ryanshepard at 3:13 PM on April 28, 2018 [2 favorites]

So I don't know about Seattle. I spent a summer there a decade ago; my girlfriend and I rented a pretty OK place in the U-district. I worked around the corner, and she had little trouble commuting to Amazon downtown. Maybe things changed, but man, high-density there meant density of beer cans in the bushes and barf on the sidewalk... it's part of why I still have a little sympathy for people who think that any change in zoning might mean a frat house next door. Doesn't mean they're right of course, but the students have their parents' money to throw around, and they don't need a back yard...

Where I am right now, in Austin, there's a giant housing boom as well. I live in a weirdly low-density neighborhood; poeple have yards and downtown is more or less walkable. Places like my house (11 people on one lot) are illegal but tolerated. Poeple building 'granny houses' in their back yards is almost encouraged, and they do, a lot.

Explicit zoning changes in the past have not lead to low-income housing as far as I can tell. What happens (as it did on west campus and more sporadically in other places) is a feeding frenzy of large-scale developers buying entire city blocks, tearing down old buildings (some crappy, some charming, who cares!) and optimizing rent revenue through optimizing the number of rent checks per square foot. It's not pretty, and I'm not sure it helps anyone. The density of $1700 one-bedrooms is impressive though, both downtown and near campus.

Overall I tend to think density sounds great, but if you think it'll fix what's wrong, you'll end up pissing off old people and not helping the young people, at least not those who pay their own rent.
posted by kleinsteradikaleminderheit at 3:27 PM on April 28, 2018 [2 favorites]

When we sat down and did the math, it was cheaper to live in a furnished 2 bed 3 bath in a resort mountain town than it was to live in an unfurnished 2 bed 2 bath townhome in North fucking Bend 30 minutes east of Seattle (on a Sunday morning, mind).

We threw in the towel immediately. I’m lucky enough to have a remote job, so that made the decision WAY easy. I was born and raised in Seattle, my parents are there, but there is no way in hell we can afford to build a life there.

We have property on Queen Anne hill in the family, and my brother and I will inherit it someday, but it would be FAR more prudent to rent it out rather than live in it. In this market right now it would rent for at least $3k a month. 🙄

So for now I’m in the mountains mourning the loss of my birthplace to tech gentrification, but the Sierras aren’t a bad place to do it in. We might move back eventually (to the islands) once/if we have kids, but I wouldn’t put money on it.
posted by Snacks at 3:31 PM on April 28, 2018 [4 favorites]

but is heavily against anything that isn’t immediately to his profit and hates public housing. Sure he’s run some “numbers” that price that’s best, but he’s some techno-libertarian jerk-off not a housing policy expert, him running numbersvisnt exactly meaningful.

This is really baseless. There is no evidence the guy cares about his "profit," either in a monetary or a more general sense. He is an activist, working on a problem he feels passionately about. The fact that he is a well paid white tech worker does not invalidate his views or (credibly) impugn his motivations.

Zero, zilch, nada in the article says he "hates public housing." He correctly points out that upzoning does not require government money. There is no indication this stems from some sort of fiscal conservatism or distrust of public schemes. As anyone who follows US housing politics knows, getting significantly more money for affordable housing is damn near impossible, especially relative to the amount it would take to move the needle on overall affordability. Lubarsky is trying to solve a real problem with solutions that are actually feasible, not sell everyone on a socialist pipedream.

And what is with the scare quotes around "numbers?" Is there any indication whatsoever that his data is less than credible? That his analysis is flawed? Is there any indication, other than a preference for projects that do not require massive public spending, that he is a libertarian? If anything, he seems to explicitly reject market-solutionist thinking.

There is nothing about "housing policy experts" that fundamentally renders their analysis any better than anyone else's. A motivated person who has taken some stat and knows their way around R and QGIS can make some damn fine analysis. And there are plenty of decorated "experts" in all sorts of domains who publish blantantly invalid statistical reasoning and speak on talk shows like their whims are all that.

I don't know the exact quality of this guy's analysis, Artw, but you don't either, and if you aren't willing to put in a few hours to pour through it with an open mind, I suggest you curtail your presumption that it is invalid.
posted by andrewpcone at 3:34 PM on April 28, 2018 [12 favorites]

From the linked NY post article about New Yorkers moving to Columbus:

"They were paying $1,600 a month for a one-bedroom apartment in Sunnyside, Queens, when a trip to see Bryan’s family back in Ohio led to an epiphany.

Driving around the city’s German Village, Short North and Old Towne East neighborhoods, they noticed the city’s positive energy — and the refreshing degree of homeownership. “We started thinking, ‘There’s a momentum here,’ ” says Catherine, now 33. “And we could make something for ourselves that we wouldn’t be able to do in NYC. That was the turning point, and we moved six months later.”

The Williamsons have invested in other properties and make a tidy profit renting them out on Airbnb."

LO fucking L.
posted by nakedmolerats at 3:36 PM on April 28, 2018 [23 favorites]

.what happens if (likely when, it seems like now adays) one of you gets laid off? Or if a work environment turns toxic? Less job density= less job options nearby. So up goes your commute time and costs. Or maybe now you have to relocate to make it reasonable.

This. I moved to a largish Midwest city a few years back. But my job is incredibly specialized, which means that I can either work at the one place that hired me or I can move several hundred miles away.

Give me one big city. I'd like to have multiple options.
posted by steady-state strawberry at 3:46 PM on April 28, 2018 [5 favorites]

Is there a reason we don't demand that STEM people get some kind of fucking training in philosophy or the liberals arts so we don't end up with this data-driven wankery that stares right past obvious issues that are looking them right in the face?

Training in philosophy and the liberal arts does not make people more virtuous. The idea that it does is a self-congratulatory myth of people looking to justify such things. Anyway, most of us evil STEM folks are made to learn social science and humanities. I remember my Marx, Durkheim, Levi-Strauss, and Fanon pretty damn well. And I'd have to be on a God-contact dose of LSD to believe it had any fruitful bearing on strategies for affordable development. It does not.

I believe what is more lacking is the ability to think quantitatively and dispassionately about hot-button issues. Indeed, there is an acute lack or such thinking on this thread.
posted by andrewpcone at 3:49 PM on April 28, 2018 [27 favorites]

Venture capitalists and FAANG executives insisting on doing 90% of their US hiring in Seattle, the Bay Area, New York and Austin (and LA? I can never figure out if LA counts) maybe has some character of a public policy problem, although not sure what the solution is.

I work for a large tech company (though not FAANG) headquartered in a medium/large sized city. Our headcount is north of 5000, and we still hire about 50 people a week. Roughly half of those people are coming from another city and negotiated some kind of relocation bonus as part of their package. Apparently that proportion goes up even higher next month when college grads arrive. We have basically tapped our city for all of its eligible workers in our fields, and we need to import people from other places, and right now it is just cheaper for us to pay those workers to come here than deal with setting up payroll and leasing a second office in a new state.

It makes me wonder if part of the solution is rolling back the tax credit for relocation expenses and even going further and applying a tax penalty for relocation assistance to cover the additional support that a city or state has to provide for an influx of domestic migrants. As an immigrant, I am rather leery of any legislation that discourages the free movement of people but I wonder about other incentives that can be implemented to encourage companies to open more branch offices rather than import their people to their HQ,

(also as someone who has managed agile development teams for fully distributed software companies, I will be the first to say that anyone saying that agile is a “good” reason to keep everyone in the office is just using it as an excuse. There is no reason why agile is better or worse for remote or coloacted teams. You might as well be saying that we need to have people in the office because how else are we going to serve cake efficiently when someone’s birthday comes up.)
posted by bl1nk at 4:00 PM on April 28, 2018 [6 favorites]

Ugh. As I said to a friend who shared the Politico article on FB and tagged me: this is the only conversation in Seattle right now.

I love Seattle but these days I don't know if I'm going to be able to stay long term. I first moved here in 2009, and after I got over the culture shock (being from the East Coast), it became my home very quickly. I love so much about this city, but I'm gradually realizing that a lot of the things I loved most about it were based on the fact that it was a reasonably priced city. Seattle natives: I know, I know, it was already becoming expensive in 2009, but coming from living on the East Coast, it really did seem reasonable.

It felt like a city in balance. There were lots of trees and gardens, but many neighborhoods were dense enough to be walkable. It was big enough and enough of a hub to have the amenities of a big city, but wasn't as crowded or expensive as SF or DC. There was lots to do but there wasn't the pressure to be out every night. It has always been too homogenous, but it can also feel cosmopolitan because people come here from all over the world.

I feel like the growth and rise in Cost of Living has thrown the city out of balance. I actually was living in DC for two years when the crazy growth first started (2014-2015) and I didn't quite understand what the big deal was until I moved back. I was actually a booster of the growth, because I thought Seattle could stand to be a bit more of a "big city." From the outside, it sounds like what's happening in cities all over the place - but the suddenness and the speed of it here is just completely disorienting.

I should have bought a place when I lived here before. I absolutely did not have the money, but I wish I'd figured out a way to at least buy a studio or something. I've never actually really wanted to own a house, but it's a hedge on rising costs. Now I am in this weird place where I have not been completely priced out of Seattle yet. I could conceivably buy a really small house in one of the outlying neighborhoods (or a condo, if they were building them at all). Which would be fine - but I just started working for myself, and I'm not going to be able to get a mortgage for at least a year or two. So I'm just going to ride this out and see what happens. For now, I have rent that I can afford (though it's not cheap), and I'm trying to take every gig I can and sock money away in case I am able to buy in two years. But if I can't, I will probably have to leave because I'm single and just turned 40 and it feels precarious to live in a place where I have to work like crazy just to get by.

And the thing is, I am really, really lucky. I do make enough to get by here. And I work for myself, so I can move if I have to. But having been here the better part of 9 years, I have a community, I have a routine. I have family near here. It's become my home, and I'd like to stay.

But if I can't buy in two years, I'm heading back to Minneapolis. Thank god for its ridiculous winters. But I have to warn you, Minneapolis: the "bad" weather only keeps people away for so long. Just ask Seattle.
posted by lunasol at 4:19 PM on April 28, 2018 [4 favorites]

^ I certainly wish you were making the decisions here bl1nk but unfortunately that attitude of remote work starts from the top re: agile used as an excuse to colocate.

Instead of negotiating relocation packages, why isn't your company allowing remote working?
posted by driedmango at 4:24 PM on April 28, 2018 [1 favorite]

> Is there a reason we don't demand that STEM people get some kind of fucking training in philosophy or the liberals arts so we don't end up with this data-driven wankery that stares right past obvious issues that are looking them right in the face?

Wow. That is some offensive shit. I don't necessarily agree with the approach, but they're trying to help. You go sit on your fucking degree in moral superiority. I mean, seriously? Sometimes all it takes is a semi-well intentioned jackass to really mess with your sense of solidarity...
posted by kleinsteradikaleminderheit at 4:25 PM on April 28, 2018 [9 favorites]

Apparently I am one of those old boomer fossils who would like to work just a couple more years until I am eligible for Medicare and those full retirement benefits that I hope I don't have to wait until I am 70 to collect, if the current administration has its way.

Back in the mid-70s when I first took a corporate job, I felt like I was selling out and abandoning my principles. On the other hand I had a child to feed and I was making $500 a month with a $170 car payment. Minimum wage at an independent bookstore just wasn't going to cut it. I am one of the lucky ones - I don't have a college degree but I can learn anything very very quickly. I got most of my early corporate jobs by temping. Once most companies had me in their clutches they didn't let me go. Still, for a woman, that meant that I was always earning less than men with similar jobs and skills. Only once has my lack of a college degree kept a company from hiring me and that was Deloitte and about 3 years ago.

When 401k plans became available I was among the first to sign up. If I hadn't done that, and left the money mostly alone, I would be looking at a long stretch of extreme poverty. As it is, with Social Security, I should mostly be okay. So I am lucky. My parents raised 5 children and basically never had 2 nickels to rub together. My father died before I started consulting, but he would have been flabbergasted at how much I was making. Also I do own a house and I bought at a time and at a price point that has kept it affordable.

One thing that has supported the growth of so many tech companies is the H1B program. When they can hire H1B employees for about half what they pay comparable employees who are citizens, you do the math. And like many immigrants throughout this country's history, H1B workers are among the best-educated in their countries and they come here ready to make the most of opportunities that do not exist where they came from.

The media has talked up how boomers aren't retiring so millenials are having a hard time getting jobs. I would LOVE to retire instead of just being long-term unemployed.
posted by Altomentis at 4:26 PM on April 28, 2018 [9 favorites]

How is it that climate change gets lip service in these conversations, but not much more? Is not every conversation about housing also a conversation about climate change? And about equity, and doubly so equity as it relates to climate change?

What the fuck. Is this just me? Am I taking crazy pills here? Isn't the cognitive dissonance between what we say about equity and climate change and what we do, right on the fucking surface here? Are people not already moving to Seattle specifically in order to weather climate change more comfortably?

Am I wrong? Is it not incumbent on us to encourage density and welcoming cities? Is sprawl not almost objectively worse than the alternatives? Is this not an existential debate? Is this not a debate critical to equity and to all of our futures? Is it not a debate where we've nominally already agreed one side is the correct side, and the other is the one we want to be true?
posted by tychotesla at 4:28 PM on April 28, 2018 [14 favorites]

We bought 8 years ago when inheritance and the right house in Seattle proper finally aligned with the Housing Bust. We scraped what we had together and bought. 8 years later, both Zillow and Redfin say the price of the house has more than doubled.

I looked at available houses here in Maple Leaf on Redfin the other day. There are 7. Total. 6 of them are priced at $1M+. Maple Leaf is as much a million dollar neighborhood as Dutch tulip bulbs are meaningful long term investments.

As has been said above, this is really a crisis of Seattle's own making. Neighborhood associations and councils are packed with single family homeowners who protest new dense housing. The city's love-hate relationship with mass transit means Seattle didn't get a proper rail transit line until 2009, almost 40 years after the subway system got quashed. Buses are overloaded even after we've raised taxes TWICE to explain the bus frequency. The city's leadership is stymied by the community council focus and a desire to just build half-solutions instead of solving the problem.

Meanwhile, Amazon consumes and consumes and consumes. They're now slated to be the main tenant of a downtown building -- the second tallest in the city when finished -- that won't even open until mid 2020. There are three other buildings they will be taking over in town as well. Amazon needs HQ2 because there's just no more room in Seattle for them, not without building a Microsoft sized campus.

I've lived in Seattle half my life and experienced the best and worst of this place, booms and busts, crappy sports team to crappy sports team. What this town is facing right now is a battle for its very soul. On one side, those who insist if we stick with the status quo people will just go away, denser housing just brings more people in, and what about the crime and can't we just round up the homeless and put them somewhere. On the other side, those who see things are rapidly changing and pushing for changes, even at the cost of sky high taxes and some portion of the city's "character." This is the battle San Francisco just skipped right over. Seattle doesn't want to be San Francisco, but the longer the status quo holds, the more likely we'll be facing million dollar homes in formerly lower class suburbs any year now.

I don't know how this ends. But every time I see my home price estimate climb, I think about how I'm one of the lucky ones who could move and walk away with something. I also think about the people living in their cars a few blocks away, people who are working class but couldn't even afford fair market rent on a bedroom in our place. We need a solution soon, before this city ossifies into Yet Another San Jose.
posted by dw at 4:28 PM on April 28, 2018 [13 favorites]

So I don't know about Seattle. I spent a summer there a decade ago; my girlfriend and I rented a pretty OK place in the U-district. I worked around the corner, and she had little trouble commuting to Amazon downtown. Maybe things changed, but man, high-density there meant density of beer cans in the bushes and barf on the sidewalk...

On your first point, uh yes, things have changed. Average rents have more than doubled since 2011. I'd guess they've gone up by 120-140% since you were here in the late 2000s. So if that place you rented in the U District was $1,000/month when you were here, it's probably more like $2,000 now, if it hasn't been torn down and replaced with more expensive apartments.

As for the density thing - yeah, Seattleites are prickly about density. One problem is that density has become conflated with gentrification in the debate. I didn't really get that for a long time, until I moved to a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood, and saw over and over again how working class, immigrant and/or Black families (who bought their houses back when they probably cost less than $200,000, or had been renting so long they were paying below market rate) were displaced by million-dollar townhouses and proposed apartment complexes. Seattle has actually become less diverse over the last decade. I still think greater density is the solution, but man do we need to do a better job of it and I can I understand why some people are skeptical of it.

Now, the people in the North End who just don't want apartment buildings on their nice street of Craftsman bungalows? No sympathy there. If you want to live in a suburb, Seattle has plenty of them.
posted by lunasol at 4:35 PM on April 28, 2018 [2 favorites]

A very complex problem with no simple solutions - maybe not even any "real" solutions, that I can think of.
I moved to Seattle in 1987, had a good job and rented until I got married to a homeowner in 1993. That little house in a less-desirable (at the time) neighborhood south of Seattle was what allowed us to move to Bremerton in 1999, into a lovely older house with a fabulous water view - something I never dreamed I could afford! We bought our house in B-town for 40% less than we sold for.
Fast forward to now - prices are going up here, to the point that the working class folks that have always made up this town cannot afford to buy, and can barely afford to rent. We've got homeless in the woods all around, and one shelter won't re-open next winter. Our property taxes have tripled in the last ten years, and I despair that we'll be able to afford to stay here another ten years (a few years into retirement). Naturally, if we sell, we are then in the conundrum of trying to find a place to buy. In our neighborhood there are 3 (three) homes on the market - and the local stats say most home sell within 7 days.
I'm very active in my city, and the city government is painfully aware of the crisis - but I'm truly not sure we know what to do.
posted by dbmcd at 4:37 PM on April 28, 2018 [5 favorites]

I still think greater density is the solution, but man do we need to do a better job of it and I can I understand why some people are skeptical of it.

Are there examples of cities that have become more dense without it just being gentrification? I guess that means "becoming more dense with affordable housing". I'll admit to being skeptical of the "build more dense housing!" argument primarily because the people I see advancing it are frequently rich white software developers*, i.e. precisely the people who are moving into the expensive new apartments that get built. It's obvious the Bay Area (which I'm more familiar with than Seattle) needs more affordable housing, but it feels very much like no one has a plan for ensuring that's the housing that gets built.

*I am arguably a rich white software developer.
posted by hoyland at 4:49 PM on April 28, 2018 [5 favorites]

Austin is busy replacing afffordable housing with un-affordable condo towers. (Entire residential neighborhoods of old bungalows closer in are in danger of being razed & replaced by multi-use condo towers in the name of density, & to decrease sprawl, but is really a move to drive the poor out of close-in neighborhoods — the residents are gone, but some of the houses remain, as restaurants & bars— for now)

Meanwhile, we just got news last week that our 3 bedroom 2 bath, northwest of the university is now worth 100,000 more than it was last year, meaning I have to get creative & cut corners again to pay property taxes this year, & if that happens again next year, we’ll have to leave Austin entirely. There’s nowhere in commuting distance of my current job we could afford to move to, considering capital gains taxes, moving expenses, etc. so we’ll be off to points unknown, & I’ll be a 57 year-old production manager trying to find work in a town that’s not booming. I’m not really hopeful about our long-term prospects.
posted by Devils Rancher at 4:54 PM on April 28, 2018 [9 favorites]

If your region is trailing behind demand, development will essentially always mean gentrification. The part people often don't get is that gentrification will happen anyway (but maybe slower for a little longer), unless you artificially constrict job availability. And artificially constricting job availability is a barrel of worms in terms of law and equity.

Getting ahead of demand is the way to develop without gentrification, but that's hard politically and logistically. Vienna an example of this working I believe, but it's hard to try here.
posted by tychotesla at 5:02 PM on April 28, 2018 [3 favorites]

Vancouver has put together a really ambitious, many-pronged strategy to address the high and rapidly-accelerating cost of housing on many different fronts. I first became aware of it because Vancouver is requiring a certain number of units in developments that can accommodate larger families (be they nuclear families with several children or multi-generational families), which is kind-of unusual and there is a real crunch in housing for families -- often you have to leave high-rises once you have more than one or two kids (because it's all one- and two-bedroom units), poorer families pack kids in to unreasonably small spaces because they can't afford one of the vanishingly few three-bedroom units, and families are often banished to the outskirts of suburbia merely because of the lack of three-bedroom units available. The thing was, developers in Vancouver make a ROBUST PROFIT on three-bedroom and four-bedroom units ... it's just ever so slightly less than they make on one- and two-bedroom units, so despite the massive market demand for family housing, none was getting built.

Anyway, the entire plan is worth looking at, it's very comprehensive and has all kinds of avenues of attack. I'll be very interested to see what works and what doesn't over the next several years.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 5:14 PM on April 28, 2018 [12 favorites]

It's interesting that "tech workers" are being blamed in Seattle, while "offshore investors" (which is code-language for "Asians") are being blamed in Vancouver. Lack of supply is cited as causing unaffordability in both cities.

If you fly over Vancouver (as I did the other day) it's pretty apparent that the region is geographically constrained, totally built-up, and is comprised of single-family dwellings.

Supply and tech worker/offshore investor bogeyman isn't to blame, it's the fact that residents typically oppose any effort to add density and house more people.
posted by JamesBay at 5:32 PM on April 28, 2018 [1 favorite]

I like families. The ones I know, and/or am a part of. But this kind of thing makes me wonder about the degree to which the family as the fundamental social unit is the source of our problems...
posted by kleinsteradikaleminderheit at 5:46 PM on April 28, 2018 [1 favorite]

Meanwhile, Amazon consumes and consumes and consumes. They're now slated to be the main tenant of a downtown building -- the second tallest in the city when finished

Your link illustrates the problem. At first glance it looks interesting. It is a combination of office space and housing units. But if you look more closely you see that it only has 188 housing units for 722,000 square feet of office space. Even at a generous average of 400 square feet per employee, that's 1800 employees. So this building provides housing for 1/10 of its employees. Those other 1600 employees are going to push up the rents and housing prices in other places.

To accommodate one new office building, they should be building three more of the same size to house their employees. That just isn't happening.

As long as cities allow companies to continue to build offices without building the equivalent in housing, housing shortages and prices will continue to go up.
posted by JackFlash at 5:51 PM on April 28, 2018 [7 favorites]

> Instead of negotiating relocation packages, why isn't your company allowing remote working?

to clarify, my previous workplaces allowed remote working. My current gig doesn't. The reasons for it are complicated, and not to derail this topic too much on remote work pros and cons, but I'd say that there are actually three different issues that we're talking about when we talk about remote work.

1. Allowing employees to work from home in the same metro instead of coming to the office -- this is, like, remote work 101 and transitioning to supporting it in a healthy way is probably the most common pain point for companies. You have managers who are convinced that employees who work from home are just slacking off and playing videogames or being distracted by their kids if they're not in an office environment. There are employees who actually are slacking off and adding to the evidence that remote work is a bad idea and something that needs to be limited. You have people who think that the symptom of a happy office are people sitting in communal tables, drawing on whiteboard walls, and sketching out the next moonshot experiment on cocktail napkins over beer and snacks, and aren't paying attention to, say, the quality of reactjis and animated gifs in their Slack channels.

2. Setting up remote offices and making sure that these remote offices are included in discussions with HQ. This has challenges around things like ensuring decisions and brainstorming doesn't happen in hallways and face-to-face conversations and is driven into places like chat and video conferences. That people take useful minutes of meetings so that teams that are off-cycle can catch up on the meeting details when they come online. It's about moving the center of gravity for the org outside of the HQ office and into the broader network of offices.

3. Fully distributed workforce. This is the stage where you let employees relocate to Argentina for a year and just telecommute from a coworking place, and you choose to recruit your next hire from a dev meetup in Johannesburg and you don't relocate them to your home country, and instead let them keep working from their home or wherever they choose.

My current company, and a lot of established places are still thrashing on #1 and starting on #2 (at least with our first office outside the US). #2 is something, if it becomes more widespread, can help solve parts of the job overconcentration antipattern; but it still has to be about making it economically interesting to setup a remote office instead of importing employees. I've only ever seen #3 work in a healthy way in a company that started as fully distributed or at least adopted the paradigm at a very early stage in its life. It's very hard to break embedded conversation habits and get people to take most of their face-to-face conversations into some place like Slack or Skype.
posted by bl1nk at 5:52 PM on April 28, 2018 [3 favorites]

My SO is an attorney who often works with developers in Seattle. She is very skeptical that affordable housing will appear in single-family zoned neighborhoods that are re-zoned to be more dense. In the current proposals affordable housing credits can be traded away, so developers will reap the benefits of the up-zone and the affordable ghettos will be elsewhere.
posted by Mei's lost sandal at 5:52 PM on April 28, 2018 [5 favorites]

As long as cities allow companies to continue to build offices without building the equivalent in housing,

Shh! Don't give them any ideas. We don't need company condos to become a thing. Why let your employees keep all of their paycheck when you (or a subsidiary) can be their landlord/mortgage holder too?

Not what you meant, but that's where my mind went on initial read.

And now Sixteen Tons is stuck in my head.
posted by ghost phoneme at 6:15 PM on April 28, 2018 [11 favorites]

A friend in Toronto’s public housing has constant problems with a drunk who bothers everyone in the building. One older man there try to break into an older woman’s apartment to have sex with her and the management is useless. In this building there were constant problems with people who used street drugs or drank excessively

Yeah the thing I don't get about the rabid high-density housing enthusiasts is how they don't seem to understand how much living in high-density housing fucking sucks.

If one person in your building is a slob or a hoarder... You get roaches and rats. And if one person doesn't comply with pest control, or if your landlord is lazy and cheap, they just keep comimg back. If one person in your building brings in a piece of furniture with bedbugs, your entire building has permanent bedbug problems. If one of your neighbours smokes pot or cigarettes or crack in their apartment, it comes through the ventilation to fill your home. If your neigbours are loud, or scary, or gets into violent altercations with their spouse... You have nowhere to go to get away from your home and nothing but a wall between you. If you'd like to grow your own food or wash your clothes in a machine you know is clean... Too bad. Maybe you are lucky enough to have amenities and nice neighbours at an affordable price, maybe not. But if not, well, you can always move somewhere more expensive and hope it isn't worse, I guess.

I'm just saying I don't think it is so bad to want a detached home of your own, it's not some kind of terrible evil. It's not even especially selfish, I don't think. I'd like to see new suburb developments turn into real, independant, sustainable communites with robust local economies instead of just commuter holding pens and some of the more creative and exciting small community ideas take off, but it seems impossible.

I'm really sorry for what your friend went through and I hope things are better. And I hope things are okay for you.
posted by windykites at 6:20 PM on April 28, 2018 [16 favorites]

I think instead of "high density housing" you meant to say "housing inhabited by shitty people who aggressively ruin other people's housing situation which might be high density, medium density, or even a suburban street that's got some neighbours that invite other shitty people over for bad parties and to shoot guns off while they're drunk or to sell crack or whatever" -- there can be overlap there, but there doesn't have to be, and often isn't.
posted by seanmpuckett at 6:29 PM on April 28, 2018 [9 favorites]

I like families. The ones I know, and/or am a part of. But this kind of thing makes me wonder about the degree to which the family as the fundamental social unit is the source of our problems...

I think industrial capitalism that divides people from community and turns them into nothing more than "workers" and "consumers" amid rapidly depleting resources is more of a problem than families? Like, now is a time for more family not less family
posted by windykites at 6:30 PM on April 28, 2018 [13 favorites]

It is still bonkers to me that the internet has delocalized and de-brick-and-mortared everything except work--especially, it seems, the work involved in making the damn internet. I appreciate that people move to these cities because that's where the jobs are, but I don't understand why that's where the (white collar computery) jobs are.

Boston resident. White collar computery type. I can explain it very succintly:

Because this industry sector is brutally quick with pink slips. And you do NOT want to run a tab at United Airlines interviewing around the country when you've just beccome unemployed. You can tele-commute, but you cannot effectively teleconference for interviews.

I know some people who worked from home and VPN in from hobby farms and defunct farms. THe only one I know to make a go of it lives a short drive from Boston, so he can drive into town for a job hunt rather than have to fly.

BTW, the situation in Boston is nowhere near as insane as Seattle. Snob zoning is illegal in MA. Towns that refuse to designate areas for infil and affordable housing risk handing their zoning decisions to the state. So housing is getting built.
posted by ocschwar at 6:38 PM on April 28, 2018 [7 favorites]

Training in philosophy and the liberal arts does not make people more virtuous

Notable Y Combinator founder Paul Graham did his BA in philosophy. I'm not sure what deadaluspark is attempting to imply about STEM graduates, but the problem is broader and larger than an extra course in ethics for a subpopulation.
posted by pwnguin at 7:00 PM on April 28, 2018 [7 favorites]

Well, it's kind of obvious if you read the first part of the comment:

This is the guy who "helps" you with your job by automating a lot of it, and then you lose your job because his code replaced you. Oops.

It's a mistrust of the technology and data "models", similar to the mistrust of economic models voiced in a previous post.
posted by FJT at 7:16 PM on April 28, 2018

I moved to the Seattle area 14 yrs ago and paid half my income in rent. My income has tripled, and so has my rent, with no actual gain in square footage. I can never own here, and rents are so high I can never own anywhere else either because I can't save.

I'm Gen X by the way. Many more of us are in this situation than you think, plus our parents are moving into elder care - easily as expensive as child care.
posted by taterpie at 7:19 PM on April 28, 2018 [10 favorites]

not sure what deadaluspark is attempting to imply about STEM graduates
Here is a fairly general summary that probably touches on ideas in the ballpark of what was being said. Also probably you could go into any thread on Metafilter where people are lamenting about "engineer's disease" and infer the kinds of issues people see arising (anecdotally) out of a STEM-focused education.

To be honest, I often find discussions among folks on this site literal-minded to the point of obtuseness and find myself rolling my eyes and ascribing it to STEM training...
posted by Hal Mumkin at 7:38 PM on April 28, 2018 [8 favorites]

We moved to Seattle in like 1990, and bought our first house in Ballard in 92-93.

We are in our third house. We will make a ton when we sell. But until we are ready to leave here, there's just no reason, as moving to a smaller place when our kids are all gone seems like a losing proposition at this point.
posted by Windopaene at 7:52 PM on April 28, 2018

I understand the answer isn't launch boomers into the sun but nnggghhhhhh so many of our societal ills are caused by the "got mine, fuck you" generation.

Sorry (not sorry) to disagree, but all boomers do NOT have the "GM,FY" attitude.

I've seen plenty of X's, and even a few millennials, who have money with that same attitude. Seems like most Americans that do get theirs (over the $200K per year gang) pretty much figure fuck the rest.

The media has talked up how boomers aren't retiring so millennials are having a hard time getting jobs. I would LOVE to retire instead of just being long-term unemployed.
posted by Altomentis

As Altomentis said, there's a lot of boomers out there that have been shafted by the system. I can think of several people who are lucky enough to have bought a house, but are struggling to pay-off the final bits of the mortgage, or who have serious medical problems that ate through what was supposed to be a great retirement. And then there are the boomers who are supporting three, or even four, generations in the same house with not enough assistance to their retirement.

Mr. BlueHorse and I are retired and doing...OK. We'll never take a cruise, and our 'vacations' are weekend camping trips. We know we're damn lucky to have a mortgage almost paid for, good insurance, and a bit of retirement income coming in. We're helping my middle granddaughter with major dental bills. It's either that, or let her speech continue to deteriorate.

All of my kids are working and surviving. Two have purchased their own homes, have insurance, and will have some kind of retirement--not great, but holding their own. Two have no chance at ever owning their own place. The single mom of three (two still living at home) has a deadbeat ex, lost a decent job after 16 years and now has no insurance thanks to her shitty 38 hour/week deli job, and hasn't a prayer of a retirement. One son works continually at manual labor, elected to pay the fine rather than carry insurance because he couldn't afford it last year. Will rent forever, has no insurance, and will eventually pay the price for using his back as a forklift and his hands as hammers.

Yeah, boomers certainly contributed to 'many of our societal ills' but not all of us voted for Trump, yah know. Don't put the wedge between generations, look directly at the 1% and rampant capitalism.
posted by BlueHorse at 8:34 PM on April 28, 2018 [14 favorites]

BTW, the situation in Boston is nowhere near as insane as Seattle. Snob zoning is illegal in MA. Towns that refuse to designate areas for infil and affordable housing risk handing their zoning decisions to the state. So housing is getting built.

What about those metro west towns that have 2-acre lot requirements?
posted by lunasol at 9:16 PM on April 28, 2018 [2 favorites]

all boomers do NOT have the "GM,FY" attitude.

Yeah pondering this Vox article I've realized that in some quarters, Boomers are now being tarred with a brush which should more accurately be applied only to Yuppies, but I guess younger generations aren't really aware of a distinction between the two.
posted by Rash at 9:21 PM on April 28, 2018 [3 favorites]

all boomers do NOT have the "GM,FY" attitude.

It's interesting, some people are selling this story hard.
I was probably ranting about Boomers before some of you were born, but this is starting to be another scapegoat.

The idea that everyone older than Millennials is coasting is weird.
posted by bongo_x at 10:00 PM on April 28, 2018 [6 favorites]

Yeah the thing I don't get about the rabid high-density housing enthusiasts is how they don't seem to understand how much living in high-density housing fucking sucks.

I'm on the 22nd floor, in the densest census tract in the city, and I believe the densest tract between Vancouver and Toronto. And I'm a rabid high density enthusiast, and I agree that there are some people who need help, and some people who are shitty neighbours. This is true everywhere, and completely independent of high density housing.

Like, do you think if we moved 400 model citizens into an apartment building, would they suddenly become hoarders or commit domestic violence or blow their crack smoke under each other's doors? Obviously not. Are hoarders and yellers the entire population of Amsterdam or Hong Kong or Barcelona any other city where the vast majority of the population live in high density housing? Also obviously not.

A few percent of people are shitty to live near, and because they are often low income, they tend to wind up in inexpensive housing; some places that's shitty apartments, some places that's trailer parks, some places that's standard suburban housing. Expanding the amount of dense housing doesn't create more shitty people, it means more people have affordable housing. And maybe it means that the domestic violence guy winds up living next to someone who isn't afraid to call the cops because their apartment doesn't reek of weed.
posted by Homeboy Trouble at 12:35 AM on April 29, 2018 [11 favorites]

Yeah the thing I don't get about the rabid high-density housing enthusiasts is how they don't seem to understand how much living in high-density housing fucking sucks.

Between living in Amsterdam and Hong Kong my entire adult life, I haven't had this experience at all. Even though I was born in the US, I find myself bewildered by the US fetish for detached single family houses out in the sprawl. I've really enjoyed my apartment life close to public transport with no need for a car, thank you very much.
posted by frumiousb at 12:45 AM on April 29, 2018 [13 favorites]

Notable Y Combinator founder Paul Graham did his BA in philosophy. I'm not sure what deadaluspark is attempting to imply about STEM graduates, but the problem is broader and larger than an extra course in ethics for a subpopulation.

Never mind that engineering students in my experience usually have to take an ethics course (and an engineering-specific one at that). Where I went to college, they got an easy route though the composition requirement. I didn't think about it too hard, but I just checked their other breadth requirements and I think they work out to be roughly equivalent to the liberal arts ones, except they can concentrate their choices to a greater degree.
posted by hoyland at 3:09 AM on April 29, 2018 [2 favorites]

With Toronto and Vancouver being the largest cities here in Canada, it's not a wonder that the housing crisis is bananas because again, that is where the jobs are, We have a lot of lovely mid-tier cities here so if you find a well-paying job, you can afford to buy a house there (this is the case for us in Kingston) but if you lose that job and need to leave, you're screwed.
posted by Kitteh at 3:18 AM on April 29, 2018 [1 favorite]

A lot of central Edinburgh is made up of large, 3 and 4 bedroom victorian era 4 and 5 storey apartment blocks. Most of the people at my school grew up in one of these apartments.

They're generously proportioned with high ceilings, large windows and great views. They tend to have a shared garden in the inside of the block, away from traffic and city noise. They have large common stairways with plenty of space for prams and bikes. Apartment living can definitely be comfortable and suited to a family.
posted by leo_r at 4:28 AM on April 29, 2018 [6 favorites]

rabid high-density housing enthusiasts is how they don't seem to understand how much living in high-density housing fucking sucks.

As a rabid high-density housing enthusiast, I've lived in big apartment buildings my whole life, first as a child, and later bringing up my own children in one, and not run into the problems you describe. Are there really a lot of passionate advocates for higher density who don't have first-hand experience with it?
posted by LizardBreath at 4:32 AM on April 29, 2018 [10 favorites]

What about those metro west towns that have 2-acre lot requirements?

They're required to select a part of town that will be zoned for infil, or Beacon Hill will do it for them. Doesn't mean developers are itching to use the revised zoning just yet when there's so muchbusiness closer to downtown. But they can no longer prevent it.
posted by ocschwar at 5:55 AM on April 29, 2018 [1 favorite]

With Toronto and Vancouver being the largest cities here in Canada, it's not a wonder that the housing crisis is bananas because again, that is where the jobs are

Everyone forgets about Montréal, where it's still relatively cheap.
posted by Apocryphon at 8:40 AM on April 29, 2018 [2 favorites]

Shhhhhh!
posted by bumpkin at 8:52 AM on April 29, 2018 [2 favorites]

A lot of central Edinburgh is made up of large, 3 and 4 bedroom victorian era 4 and 5 storey apartment blocks...They're generously proportioned with high ceilings, large windows and great views.

Splendid! Unfortunately, newer high-rise apartment buildings in the US aren't so nice. I've lived in (and enjoyed) older, masonry apartment buildings, which have great sound insulation between units. And then there's the cheap stuff that's been thrown up in the last fifty years, with only a couple sheets of drywall between units. That's the kind of high-density housing that really sucks.
posted by Rash at 9:16 AM on April 29, 2018 [4 favorites]

Everyone forgets about Montréal, where it's still relatively cheap.

Oh, Montreal was on our short list for moving for a long time. We used to live in the Eastern Townships and were there nearly every weekend. But you still can't buy a home there for under $400K. (Detached, semi-detached, etc.)
posted by Kitteh at 9:24 AM on April 29, 2018

The apartment choices around here seem to be either: a unit clumily carved out of an old victorian house with ugly 70s carpet, panelling and pink bathroom tile or an overpriced "luxury apartment" in five story buildings with thin walls and shoddy construction.
posted by octothorpe at 9:32 AM on April 29, 2018

I moved out of King County almost two years ago due to rising housing costs, landing in Snohomish County. I thought maybe I could find a little condo up here to buy, but nope... there is just nothing in my price range at all around here. And now they're building a ton of luxury apartments within five miles of my current apartment complex, so I can probably expect my barely affordable rent to skyrocket soon. Maybe if I moved up to Bellingham I could find something, but if I'm going to be living a lengthy drive from a big city I'd rather be in a place where I actually have friends (with the exception of my friends who own property in Seattle, everyone I know has left Washington, and I almost never see the friends who remain here in part because traffic is so fucking terrible all the time). So now I'm looking at NE Ohio. I have friends there, my current job is portable, and I could actually afford to buy a house there on my own. Like, mortgage payments would be about 2/3 of my current rent, if not even less -- many houses I've bookmarked on Zillow would carry a monthly mortgage payment of 1/3 my current rent, for houses that would start at $700k out here. I could afford to take an actual vacation a couple of times a year instead of my annual staycations where I sit at home reading library books and watching TV because I can't even afford a short road trip in my own state anymore.

The other day I saw an article about the closure of a golf course just down the street from my late grandmother's senior housing apartment complex in the Kent Valley, about 20 miles south of Seattle. The developer who bought the land is planning to put up a 500 unit apartment complex. Down the block is an empty lot where another developer is planning to put a 338 unit complex. Traffic in this area is already horrifying during evening rush hour, and rapid transit already does not meet area demand. The developer of the proposed 338 unit complex has other properties in the area, including one right by the train station -- largest apartment in that complex is a 2-bed with a starting price of around $1900, and I suspect the new developments will be more of the same. That area is currently home to lots of families, immigrants, refugees... I wonder where they'll go when the rents get too high in Kent for them to stay any longer.
posted by palomar at 1:07 PM on April 29, 2018 [2 favorites]

Is there a reason we don't demand that STEM people get some kind of fucking training in philosophy or the liberals arts

Is there a name for the fallacy where people believe that simply teaching some particular subject will cause others to behave in a particular way? It's common, perhaps even the single universal belief of modern American liberal centrism: that we can somehow educate ourselves out of sin and into virtue. And, IMO, it doesn't work.

Oh sure, maybe there's some correlation between being unwilling to grind homeless people and stray dogs into pink slime and sell it as Chicken McNuggets and having taken Moral Phil. back in college, but I don't think it's causative.

If you start backing out the tendency for people who are interested in things other than rapacious fuckery to take liberal arts classes, what you are faced with is the realization that a whole lot of people who are leading the vanguard of rapacious fuckery actually have pretty good educations and would probably be pretty fun guests at a dinner party. If you look at the corporate boards of your favorite most-hated multinational company, chances are it's not being run by a ton of engineers.

Personally, I tend to think that if the world were run by a bunch of stereotypical Spock-like uberengineers, we wouldn't have half the problems we do; such people are typically pretty open to being shown that a particular solution is demonstrably, objectively suboptimal. Rather, the people you really need to look out for are the ones who spent a bit too long in Debate Club, and will find ways to talk around and undermine and generally delay whatever needs to be done, while doing whatever they want to do for their own personal gain in the meantime.

It's the smooth-talking, high-EQ sociopaths that you need to look out for, not the engineers. And in some cases, by sending those people to their very nice liberal arts educations, we've done nothing but give them the perfect set of tools to rationalize and justify their way around what ought to be clear lines that shouldn't be crossed.
posted by Kadin2048 at 3:46 PM on April 29, 2018 [16 favorites]

Ehh... trust me, I've run into a lot of bright software engineering types who think they can solve any problem by going back to first principles and modeling it all out as spherical cows, you absolutely wouldn't want to live in a world run by them.

For good or for ill that's what this "let's level Wallingford and let market forces sort it out!" plan feels like to me.
posted by Artw at 3:54 PM on April 29, 2018 [4 favorites]

Yeah the thing I don't get about the rabid high-density housing enthusiasts is how they don't seem to understand how much living in high-density housing fucking sucks.

I quite like it. Density also allows communities and cities to scale, offering better public transportation and better services. Density also means there's a better retail mix -- interesting places to shop and eat. Culture.

The one problem with density that has to be managed is the potential for gentrification.
posted by JamesBay at 5:00 PM on April 29, 2018 [2 favorites]

I tend to think that if the world were run by a bunch of stereotypical Spock-like uberengineers, we wouldn't have half the problems we do; such people are typically pretty open to being shown that a particular solution is demonstrably, objectively suboptimal.

Ahahaha. I've known plenty of engineers/STEM academics with blind spots or who stubbornly cling to a pet theory. To be fair, that's human nature. I suspect a world run entirely by any singular group would suck, but in spectacularly different ways.

I find myself bewildered by the US fetish for detached single family houses out in the sprawl.

I prefer high density, but I also like some things out in the sprawl (besides being cheaper): it's so quiet! I love the smell of fresh cut grass. I can have a bigger garden and my own outdoor entertaining area. More nature sounds and less traffic.
posted by ghost phoneme at 5:52 PM on April 29, 2018 [1 favorite]

I live in the suburbs of Seattle and the thing that’s killing my soul to watch is the little pockets of nature getting eroded away. Every year it seems like another green space is being torn up for new condos or an apartment building. I’m not confident at my city’s ability to plan for environmental impacts. We’ve already had problems with bears, coyotes and other animals getting pushed into suburban environments because their habitat is shrinking. With the forest getting turned into buildings and parking lots, there’s less space for runoff to filter pollutants before hitting our waterways.
There’s a ton of new single family housing developments in the area and I want to cry/scream when I see the sign for “Starting in the low $1,000,000’s!”
It’s insane here and I feel like it’s a situation where long term, everyone but the 1% loses hard.
posted by HMSSM at 5:55 PM on April 29, 2018 [3 favorites]

The one problem with density that has to be managed is the potential for gentrification.

The potential for a neighborhood to increase in value rather than to just decrease? Yes, I agree. That's definitely something that planners should manage carefully when they design a neighborhood.
posted by steady-state strawberry at 8:08 PM on April 29, 2018

Is there a name for the fallacy where people believe that simply teaching some particular subject will cause others to behave in a particular way?

Ironically, this appears to be liberal arts and humanities folks falling prey to the engineer's fallacy.
posted by Apocryphon at 12:42 AM on April 30, 2018 [7 favorites]

Is there a name for the fallacy where people believe that simply teaching some particular subject will cause others to behave in a particular way?

Well, since it was Gorgias who first suggested those who learn about justice are just, perhaps we can call it the Gorgias fallacy. Or disease, if you prefer to be pejorative about it.
posted by pwnguin at 8:27 AM on April 30, 2018

>>The one problem with density that has to be managed is the potential for gentrification.

The potential for a neighborhood to increase in value rather than to just decrease? Yes, I agree. That's definitely something that planners should manage carefully when they design a neighborhood.

That's a good point, but I was thinking about how redevelopment typically erodes the original culture of a particular neighbourhood, basically by increasing rents. Shops that lease retail space basically have to increase prices to afford rents.

The neighbourhood where I live, James Bay (in Victoria, British Columbia), is a good example. New mixed-use developments have added retail space, but the new retailers are typically more expensive than incumbents. We have a large population of seniors and single-parent families in the neighbourhood (about 15,000 people), but the supermarkets here offer typically "artisanal" or value-added products, making it really expensive to shop here for locals, who typically get by on lower incomes than the median.
posted by JamesBay at 9:59 AM on April 30, 2018

Gorgias, more like Borgias.
posted by Apocryphon at 4:25 PM on April 30, 2018

Is there a reason we don't demand that STEM people get some kind of fucking training in philosophy or the liberals arts ...

Maybe while you were busy not studying science or math you learned about something called "othering"
posted by exogenous at 7:16 PM on April 30, 2018 [3 favorites]

That's a good point, but I was thinking about how redevelopment typically erodes the original culture of a particular neighbourhood, basically by increasing rents. Shops that lease retail space basically have to increase prices to afford rents.

This is going on in my Hong Kong neighborhood right now, but it is driven by outside investment and not redevelopment. Any significant change in the property market can have this impact. In Hong Kong's case, we have Mainland Chinese investors who are buying property as a hedge against uncertainty with the RMB. The government managed to slow it down for a time, but their drive to invest is big enough to leap the financials and regulatory hurdles which have been put in their way.

I'm very curious what's going to happen to retail in Hong Kong since we've shot past gentrification at this point. Rental prices are so high that people don't have the money to pay the bills associated with the physical rent. eCommerce has been largely muted here, and is now suddenly surging because it's cheaper to pay for cross-border eCommerce than it is to continue to subsidise the retail rents.

All over the world right now, property is performing better than other investments. You don't need redevelopment to destroy the character of a neighborhood.
posted by frumiousb at 10:49 PM on April 30, 2018

and not run into the problems you describe.

Congratulations? I've experienced all of these problems and more, and I literally don't know anyone personally who had lived in a large building and hasn't dealt with at least some of them. There's a reason so many people are desperate to buy detached homes and it's not just that we're all selfish, brainwashed morons with no culture or empathy.

Ignoring the fact that other people have problems with a something doesn't make the problems go away. I have no interest in spending $2000/month or more on a shoebox apartment to hopefully (but no guarantees!!) Get away from the various problems that having tons of other people living on top of, underneath, and all around me, and being subject to the whims and vagaries of some random landlord/ shitty property management company can bring.

The one problem with density that has to be managed is the potential for gentrification

It's not the only problem, it's just the only one you are personally concerned about.

Like, do you think if we moved 400 model citizens into an apartment building, would they suddenly become hoarders or commit domestic violence or blow their crack smoke under each other's doors?

That's not at all a fair or accurate representation of my position, nor is it a realistic scenario, but thanks for deliberately using hyperbole to misrepresent my concerns and make them sound ridiculous.

Privacy, autonomy, cleanliness and peace are not guaranteed anywhere, but there's a difference between having proximity to people's shittiness and being smothered by it.

I'm also happy to hear that you get access so many of the amenities that I mentioned are frequently unavailable in highrises! Many of us do not, or are not permitted them.

Anyways If you live in a 22+ story building I guarantee that someone in your building is having some of these problems even if you, personally, have the privilege of being shielded from them.

Expanding the amount of dense housing doesn't create more shitty people

Never said it did. There are more than enough shitty people, shitty landlords, shitty property management companies, shitty policies, shitty design, shitty construction to make lots of people miserable, especially when you cram them together into a shit stew!

Anyways. If you like living on the 22 floor I'm happy for you. That doesn't mean that people who don't want to be forced into that life are inherently selfish or bad, because it's just not good, not healthy, not helpful, not happy, not safe for a lot of people and it shouldn't be their only option.
posted by windykites at 8:58 AM on May 1, 2018 [5 favorites]

The one problem with density that has to be managed is the potential for gentrification.

Density does not cause gentrification as much as gentrification causes density. Multistory buildings are very expensive to build. Getting the approvals to build them is also expensive. It often does not make sense for developers to pony up that much money unless property values are high, or they predict they will go up soon.

So yes, unaffordable areas have more new, dense development. But there are plenty of examples of areas that resisted density, and had property values shoot up, maybe even more so. Santa Clara and Santa Cruz counties are a clear example of that. At least until very recently, most communities vehemently opposed increased density, favoring detached single family homes on largeish lots. When the economy boomed, housing just got more and more expensive. Santa Cruz county, which has virtually no high density development, has some of the most expensive housing in the US.

It's not that complicated. If the supply does not grow to match demand, prices go up. If you want to keep housing affordable in an area with in-migration, you need more housing, and the options are suburban sprawl or urban density. The latter is better is just about every way.
posted by andrewpcone at 11:16 AM on May 1, 2018 [1 favorite]

SF Examiner: "To solve affordability crisis, Bay Area housing stock must grow 50% in 20 years"
posted by Apocryphon at 1:11 PM on May 1, 2018 [1 favorite]

CT just passed a law against snob zoning.
posted by ocschwar at 2:19 PM on May 1, 2018

redevelopment typically erodes the original culture of a particular neighbourhood, basically by increasing rents.

I understand your point, but the ability of an area to undergo redevelopment is a feature, not a bug. If your neighborhood can't undergo redevelopment -- if the bones of the area are so terrible that they can't invite in new investments -- then the neighborhood is guaranteed to continue to decline and eventually collapse as the pre-existing infrastructure decays. Designing an area so it can't undergo redevelopment is like designing a car so terrible it can't be stolen.

That doesn't mean that people who don't want to be forced into that life (of density housing) are inherently selfish or bad, because it's just not good, not healthy, not helpful, not happy, not safe for a lot of people and it shouldn't be their only option.

It's not their only option. If you want to drive an hour or two hours into work every day in order to live in a low density neighborhood, no one is stopping you. But your decision to live in an exurb isn't something my tax dollars should be subsidizing, and it's not something my city should be built around facilitating.
posted by steady-state strawberry at 3:57 AM on May 2, 2018 [2 favorites]

Amazon’s pique over head tax pauses construction, could spook developers
posted by Artw at 1:08 PM on May 2, 2018 [1 favorite]

Late to the game, namely because we spent the weekend signing a contract for a new construction house in the city. You can thank me for the assured market bubble pop in 3... 2... 1...

In all seriousness, I've been here for 7 years full-time (studying part-time since 2008, after I got out of the military) and this was the year that I could get a downpayment together and buy a house. When I first moved in, cab drivers were already cautioning me to get a house in Beacon Hill because new people were already taking over the neighborhood. But I liked downtown life: I worked hours that meant that I never saw traffic, and I found a deal in a great, cheap unit and settled down.

Over the years, my rents have never really gone up, but the cranes materialized all around me. The last couple of years have just been insane, and my spouse and I basically turned to each other and decided that this was probably the last year we'd be able to afford a house in the city limits. So after losing multiple bids for small houses that went 90 to 125K over listing, we put down 20% and are closing on an infill multi-family rowhouse that used to be a parking lot. All the same, I'm plenty scared.
posted by ntartifex at 4:04 PM on May 2, 2018 [3 favorites]

What the fuck just happened in Ballard?
posted by Artw at 9:21 AM on May 3, 2018 [4 favorites]

Artw, holy cow, what happened there?!

To cap things off, I just saw an unflipped fixer-upper in Ballard that had been listed at $700K go for $1,000,100. This is absolutely wild.
posted by ntartifex at 9:37 AM on May 3, 2018

Further to the Amazon construction pause:

Bloomberg - Amazon Pauses Seattle Expansion While City Debates New Taxes

"It’s called throwing your weight around," said Scott Galloway, a marketing professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business. "Nobody, with the circus that is the HQ2 competition, has done more to inspire a downward spiral of transfer of wealth from municipalities to big tech than Amazon."

I would humbly invite Jeff Bezos to eat a great big pile of donkey shit.
posted by Existential Dread at 9:17 AM on May 4, 2018 [2 favorites]

Seattle’s Ugly Side Threw a Tantrum This Week. We Can’t Let Them Win.
posted by Artw at 6:53 PM on May 4, 2018 [2 favorites]

Ah, capitalism. Amendment: GLOBAL capitalism... where the average Canadian or American worker is competing with low-wage countries for work, and with the world's elite and investors for buying/renting a home.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but in addition to globalization, isn't this affordability issue simply the problem of having a city become "world-class"? That Seattle, Toronto, Vancouver etc are simply joining the ranks of London, Paris, NYC, San Francisco, Hong Kong, Singapore etc, who have had these affordability problems for decades or centuries already?

World-class cities need world-class infrastructure, especially housing and transit. Cities like mine (Toronto) need to plan with this in mind. (Union station - OMFG what a mess)
posted by Artful Codger at 7:17 AM on May 6, 2018

An independent report on King County’s homelessness crisis by the consulting firm McKinsey & Company finds that squeezing efficiencies out of the current system isn’t enough to solve it; 14,000 units of affordable housing are needed, at least.
posted by Artw at 5:02 PM on May 9, 2018 [1 favorite]

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