I just started sobbing, and
my husband started crying, you know, it was really hard,
because we just got settled and having children, not knowing where
we're going to live or move to is very scary. I've literally been depressed
because I spent the morning on Zillow, and had it on the
Seattle area and there are zero homes in our price range. And if I told you I'd been
going a little bit higher, so that when prices fall, I kind of already have them on my radar. So what happens in cities
is you get an upturn of population growth because there's jobs. So you get jobs coming into the community, there's more innovation, more
companies locating there, more people want to live there, developers start responding to
that by building more housing and you start seeing
housing production go up, permits are going up and then,
neighbors start to complain, "There's too much noise. It
blocked my view of the sky." "That's where I used to walk my dog." Zoning, really, is nothing
more than the regulation that says how many units can
possibly be built legally, on a particular property or parcel. And the Seattle planning
commission released a report called, "Neighborhoods For All." And the bottom line, according
to them, there's too much land in the city reserved
for single family homes. Every single weekend since
we found out we weren't going to be living here anymore
is absorbed with looking for new housing. It just feels hopeless. I have no control over this housing market. I have no control when an
affordable house is going to come up. So we're just kind of at the
mercy of when people want to put a house on the market. Here I am making money,
I'm getting regular raises, I'm working my way up the ladder. Okay, wow, look, I have nine
years in the industry. When I get this giant
pay raise, okay like, I'm a legitimate professional. But I'm still $20,000 short. We have to either wait for
a really good opportunity, that is just a fluke, or we
have to look outside the city, which we're not happy about. There's a perception out
there, I think very real, that families are leaving
central cities in different metro areas across the country. The cities, sure, they
benefit from different people and different types of people
at different stages in life. Central cities like Seattle
have long established investment in schools, and just seeing
that decay because the city didn't maintain its ability
to be an attractive, worthwhile place for a
family to live affordably, you know, that would be a tragedy. The city of Seattle's been,
as a lot of large cities, confronted with housing problems,
affordability of housing, and it sort of breaks into two segments, at least. One is the folks who don't
have enough money for housing at all, they may need subsidized
housing or free housing, and then there's the folks who
are in the housing market, but they don't have a lot
of money and they're very pressed to come up with enough money. They're not like one step
away from being homeless, but they're too many steps away from being able to buy their own house. My husband's from Seattle, and finally after having
children he decided, "Yeah absolutely, I wanna
move back to Seattle." So we kinda made things work. I was able to work at
the restaurant part-time and watch the kids. Once you start getting
that commute number up closer to an hour each way,
then you're literally eroding quality of life, just
for financial purposes. What zoning ends up doing
is segregating people. It segregates people from each
other, it segregates people from their work, from their
play, from their school, from their market, from their families. If the zoning on the property
doesn't allow many units to be built, and if it
certainly doesn't allow as many as the market would bear or as
many as there are demand for, then you have under-supply of
housing and home prices go up. And I always say, "Zoning
is a 20th century solution to a 19th century problem." And the Ambler v. Euclid
decision that was made almost 100 years ago now, has
dictated the way we organize our cities in such a way
that it has driven inflation, driven prices up, because
it is limited supply in the face of rising demand. Zoning has a function. First off, cities have to
plan for infrastructure. And if you have no idea,
zoning allows a city to say, "You know what, we're
expecting in this neighborhood, or this district, to redevelop
at 200 units per acre, or some level of density." It's a dangerous place to
go when we regulate cities so much that only really
wealthy people can live there and poor people can only work there, and have to live outside of that. And that's a consequence of
regulation, which I think is a critical distinction to
make, that most people I think in our society today, in our
country today, want to make that problem about class
or greed or capitalism, when really what it's about is:
we're just not letting people move freely in the market
the way they should. President Harrell. Aye. Nine in favor, none opposed. With the unanimous vote, Seattle leaders moved
forward with sweeping changes that supporters believe could bring more affordable housing options. A number of organizations
in the city came together to fight this proposal and
they tried to stop the city council from adopting it. Their pleas fell on deaf ears, so then they retained us to appeal it. There are fears older, smaller buildings will be torn down, and some
say gentrification could impact neighborhoods like Wallingford. The further back you go in terms of when housing units were built,
by virtue of being older, those apartment units were cheaper, right? The problem is that those
apartment units tend to be on properties that are frequently
a place where a brand-new bigger building would be appropriate. And tearing down that older,
cheaper apartment is more likely to happen. Between 2005 and 2015, there
were about 40,000 new units of housing created. There were about 5,000 units demolished. That's about an eight to
one replacement ratio. There's nothing in Seattle
that I can assure you, aside from the Space Needle,
that we can't consider knocking down to build more housing. Up-zones are already
approved for several Seattle neighborhoods and now the
city's urban villages are looking at the impacts of
bigger and taller buildings. Some of the areas, and I'd say relatively small part of it, were,
sort of these vintage, historic neighborhoods. It's part of what makes
Seattle a really special place. And some parts of the up-zones edged into these neighborhoods and would have basically destroyed them. What they wanted to do was
a good thing, absolutely, you know, try to address the
affordable housing problem both for those in the
marketplace and those who need subsidized housing. But the plan they came up with
really wasn't going to work for the people in the marketplace. I had no idea how much
I found my own identity in where I live, and that in itself has been a process to work out. They're popping a little bit huh? Even though I see all these blocks, I'm just trying to
navigate them, you know. And it would be nice if I
felt like there was a way to undo some of the blocks. But because I can't, I'm
just doing the best I can with what I have. We've worked hard our whole lives and it's just still so
unaffordable for families. We've always wanted to own a
home but we just didn't realize the magnitude of owning your
own home until the situation of not being able to live here anymore. It's a bad choice that
they're confronted with, and that's why we want to
have a program that provides for affordable housing,
and here I'm talking about affordable, not for the
homeless but the lower end of the... folks like Michelle and Kip. And more supply you
create, the more opportunity, the more freedom, and the
more mobility you've created. And that's the answer to this problem. It's the answer to their
problem and it's the answer to problems that thousands of people like
Kip and Michelle and their family are facing all across the city and all across the country.
This doc roughly gets it right.
Think about the demand side. There are relatively few obstructions to business and job formation. There are no laws against moving to a new area. And then we subsidize mortgages, provide incentives for first time buyers, housing vouchers and subsidized units. All of this drives up demand.
On the supply side, there are tens of thousands of laws and regulations that reduce the supply of housing. It can take a year to get an interior renovation designed and permitted. It takes 5-6 years to get a multifamily project done, if all goes well. We endlessly increase the cost through zoning, public input, constant building code changes, environmental regs, endless 'studies'... most of which do nothing for health and safety, but are instead pretending to do so while slowing down projects and providing political cover for anti-growth actors.
Basically, we are doing everything we can as a society to increase demand and reduce supply.