Somehow you always manage to post these things just when I'm thinking "I want to move somewhere where I won't have neighbors with Trump signs with swastikas on them" and change my mind.
Sorry...? I think? Confession: I hate the /r/Seattle subreddit. It is wholly and completely filled with whiney-ass techster hipsters that think the only good sushi is the stuff you wait an hour and pay through the nose for, that Elysian is obviously the worst beer in the world because they allowed InBev to buy them, and that wharrgarbl the only way to fix the housing problem in Seattle is to allow R1 (1 unit per parcel) parcels to be converted to multi-family and they get super salty whenever you point out that annihilating single family homes will fundamentally destroy the character of the place they want to live. They'll gripe about traffic as if it were actually an issue while also bitching about how much tabs cost. Los Angeles won't let you have a legal rental unit without a parking spot. Period. Seattle has a bunch of grandfathered shit with, like, zero parking and one of the worst mass-transit programs in the United States. Yet the eastside is uncool, the south end is uncool, the north end is uncool and who wants to deal with a ferry? CLEARLY the problem is "the man" for not allowing twee little architects to develop... I mean, okay. Here's a $400k house. It was built in 1917, which means it was there during the Depression, which means you can go down to City Hall and buy a print of what it looked like back when one of the New Deal projects was photographing every house in Seattle. Here's streetview - It's on Ravenna blvd, which is beautiful because it legit has a park in between the two lanes. It's this awesome windy-ass road that has long been one of the greenest, chillest parts of Seattle. But this choad? Eighteen apartments. EIGHTEEN. In the space of a 3br, 1100sqft single-family home, he wants to put EIGHTEEN apartments. With zero parking. And see, if the City would just go ahead and give him his goddamn subsidies, that's $11,000/mo in cash straight to the building owner, right from the city. He gets to add another $15,000/mo onto that from rents. And his eighteen apartments at 230sqft each are going to cost him about $300/sqft each to build so if he buys that place for $500k that fucker is pure profit in less than six years. And that's bullshit. And that's really what it comes down to: "I want to ruin your fucking neighborhood because, you know, 26 grand a month is a lot of money." Now explain to me how that's going to make living in Seattle more "affordable."
Yeah Seattle Zoning and housing is all sorts of fucked up. The city is building a 40 unit subsidized housing with a daycare and 5 parking sports near me. That's not even enough parking for the daycare staff. Its highly unlikely that these people will not own cars as many of them probably moonlight as Uber drivers and the ones that dont have jobs at odd hours were public transit doesn't serve them even if they wanted to use it. So thats 40-80 new cars just dumped onto the streets taking up parking spots because some developer didn't want to pay to build a garage.
I can guarantee you it's not "the city." I used to do work on those things. It's some developer working under the aegis of the city and it's shit like this that allows them to do it. Up by my hood? They're adding 300 apartments, 200 senior living units and a hotel up on 196th... and mmmmmmmaybe they'll widen the road at some point. Yaaay.
I have no clue. I live out in bumfuck, pay $800/month mortgage for ~3,000 square feet and can't find a significantly different neighborhood I could move to without my house looking like a used book store if I actually managed to fit my books, computers, and relatively spartan furniture into the space. The only sushi nearby is sold by a grocery store. I guess my point was just that America is weird and I find the intangibles that go into (what look like) insane real estate prices confusing.