1) We need subsidized housing for the folks the market won't serve, but unfortunately subsidized housing tends to cost about twice as much as regular housing to build. We should build more, but I don't think it's ever going to be enough.
2) We have chosen to severely limit the amount of housing that can be built in places where lots of people now want to live. Folks with money are going to get those houses every time. That's that system we have set up. That's an equity problem.
3) Seattle's population didn't pass the 1960 peak until after 2000, meaning we went two generations without needing new housing or knowing what it feels like to live in or what regulations are needed in a growing city. I'm not sure when zoning was created in Seattle but most of its history has been during that long stagnation, and it worked just fine then because we already had more housing than we needed.
4) Unless we decide to make our city shitty enough, or unaffordable enough, people will probably continue to want to move here. As long as they do, we'll be putting fewer people on the tens-of-thousands-long waitlists for subsidized housing if we can get the market-rate housing to be cheaper. We do that by allowing enough housing to be built to accommodate the people moving here.
5) We should probably allow that growth in places that are actually desirable to live. A lot of apartments get built on slopey/swampy land because that's where there's not already single-family homes. People want to live near a mainstreet where they can buy stuff and hang out with friends, near transit, and near schools and parks and stuff.
6) Most of the land around those places (like 2 blocks away from California Ave for instance) is reserved for stand-alone single family homes with lawns, which these days means reserved for rich people. We could choose to adjust our zoning to allow any of the following to be built: duplexes, rowhouses, courtyard houses, backyard cottages, small apartments, or even big ugly apartments. At present all those things are unbuildable in most of the city under our zoning.
7) I like developers a little bit because they are predicable. They are like reptiles. They just want to make money. Anyhow they respond to the regulations that exist.
8) We need to seriously look at the policies we have on our books and see if they are giving us the outcomes we most want. I see a lot of small old homes torn down to build bigger, more expensive homes, because that's the only thing you're allowed build. I see a lot of obnoxious buildings being built blanketing certain parts of the city - these are the only areas where much building is allowed, so they are building a fuckton of the biggest things they can all in one place. Moderate and low income people get displaced out to shitty apartment complexes in Renton and Seatac and Tukwila (where they are legal) and have to spend all their money keeping their cars working and all their time stuck in traffic. Weird bohemian types end up living in sailboats and warehouse lofts in the polluted and noisy industrial district, because that's better than living in an awful apartment complex in the suburbs.
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