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Our house

About 65 percent of Seattle is zoned for single family housing. Is that too much or just right?

In Chicago and DC, all of my friends lived in apartments or condos. In Portland, they all live in standalone houses, even the renters, though some have lots of roommates. In Seattle, it’s a real mix, with townhouses, rowhouses and duplexes increasingly entering the picture.

Does our Single Family majority keep prices high? Are we ill-equipped for all this growth people keep predicting? Does Seattle have too much single family land?

I asked two SeattleScape bloggers to take on the debate. Their pieces ran in today’s DJC and can be read here without a subscription.

Irene Wall argues that Single Family housing is Seattle’s Golden Goose and we’re doing great on density already. Roger Valdez, a new blogger at SeattleScape, makes the case that preserving all that land for standalone homes hurts the working class.

What do you think? Is Seattle’s house in order? HugeAss City weighs in here.

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This entry was posted by Shawna Gamache on Sunday, September 28th, 2008 at 11:58 pm and is filed under Government, Planning, Politics, Seattle lifestyle, Zoning. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

  • Steve

    I’m sympathetic to Ms. Wall’s views; I agree that it’s nice to have trees and yards and that townhouses are often ugly. That said, I find Mr. Valdez’s arguments more convincing. Though Ms. Wall mentions that we have 3 times the land capacity needed in the next 14 years, I doubt that fully 1/3 of those land owners are looking to redevelop their land to the fullest potential (e.g. are we really expecting to have rows of 6-story apartment buildings along Aurora). And so I expect, then, that housing prices will increase even further over the next 15 years as the city remains desirable but we run out of land to develop.

    Fundamentally, people want to live in Seattle, even in smaller-than-traditional spaces — witness townhouse sales. This is desirable environmentally and desirable economically, and as a city, we should let it happen.

  • Shawna Gamache

    Hi Steve,

    Great comments. But what do you think about Irene’s argument that increased density hasn’t yet brought affordability? Is Belltown more affordable now?

    I think of San Francisco and its increased density and sky-high prices, and then there’s super-affordable Portland with single family houses everywhere. Could there be another element at play?

  • Roger Valdez

    The conundrum of why dense cities are expensive is an important one to look at. There are some answers. One that I think is an important one to consider is the one offered by Virginia Postrel in a piece that ran in the Atlantic Monthly called “A Tale of Two Townhomes” (http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200711/housing).

    The view is that cities like San Francisco and Seattle have a powerful, entrenched and motivated group of people who, while left leaning in their poltitics, fail to make the connection between their opposition to new housing and the cost of housing.

    The more difficult it is to build the more expensive the housing. In places like Dallas when the price goes up they just build more housing until the increase in the supply begins to affect prices.

    I don’t know if this is THE answer but it is an interesting article. Also, we will need to factor in what rules have changed in our post bailout market place.

  • Steve

    Also, I’d argue the point isn’t that density makes housing cheap — the cost per square foot of building 12 stories is always going to be more than the cost of building 1 story. The point is that as land cost becomes more and more of the cost of housing, the *only* way to stay affordable is by adding density.

    Take the Silicon Valley area, for example, where residents have been very unwilling to allow anything beyond single-family housing. Housing costs are far, far higher than in Seattle, in an area where incomes are only slightly higher, and people with lower-income jobs are commuting 50-60 miles daily.

    By comparison, New York, which is arguably more desirable than Silicon Valley or Seattle, has a history of dense neighborhoods. While Manhattan is, of course, crazy expensive, a low-income family can afford to live in a modest apartment in Brooklyn or the Bronx without having to spend hours commuting. I’d argue that being open to density made that possible.

    So in Seattle, it’s not that Belltown itself is affordable. It’s that Belltown has made the rest of the city more affordable.

    By the way, relaxing single-family housing restrictions doesn’t have to mean an explosion of development in residential neighborhoods. It could mean, for example, allowing duplex conversion of houses that are more than 20 years old.