A fascinating analysis of the housing and development challenges in Seattle by Casey Jaywork – with a lot of backstory from the last few decades. While there are some valid parallels for Vancouver, it’s a very Seattle story.
Seattle is suffering an affordable-housing crisis—on this there is no debate. But the causes of and solutions to that crisis remain a well-gnawed bone of contention.
On one side is a faction known as “urbanists” by friends and “densinistas” by enemies. Their ideology begins with the premise that housing is a commodity. Like all commodities, its price follows the tug-and-shove of supply and demand. Right now demand is surging, and with supply sitting tight in its snug little single-family bungalow, cost is surging as well.
An obvious solution follows from this narrative: Build more housing. Keep building until it catches up with supply, or rents will stay high and poor renters will either pay more than they can afford, move out of the city, or become homeless. As architect David Neiman puts it, “You gotta build as much housing as there is demand… [or] the whole housing market stays in a bidding war for scarcity, and poor people lose.” …
Underlying all this is the preservationist conviction that market development hurts housing affordability rather than helps it. “Developers are running roughshod over neighborhoods,” says Fox. “The only thing slowing down development now is that there aren’t enough people to process the permits at City Hall fast enough.” …
Looking for answers, I spoke with some key activists in the fight for limited growth, plus some of their critics and a couple of old hands who have been here since time immemorial. The answers I found surprised me.
I’ll bet you didn’t know that preservationists are fundamentally informed by a Marxist view of political economy, or that the city’s 1994 Comprehensive Plan was a high point for neighborhood/city relations, which took a nose-dive in the 2000s. Perhaps most important is the insight that our current battle over development has been going on for decades—long before the most recent boom—and is as much about people feeling as if they’ve been heard as it is about substantive questions of growth policy.
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