It's tough to live up to big city ambitions with a small town heart.

More like the vaunted "seattle way" is a fucking joke.

Amen, brother!

Yeah, because Shoreline sure is the model of how a community should look and operate. Every time I cross 145th at Aurora and see that gorgeous Walgreens sign I think "man, what a fantastic place THIS is; I wish downtown Seattle was this vacant and homogenized and BEIGE".

BEST FUCKING LETTER YET!

Seattle is stuck-up, but has little self-confidence.

I couldn't agree more, particularly about improving inner-city neighborhoods then crying "gentrification."

WORD!

The smoking ban passed in every single county across the state, so that's hardly a Seattle thing. And wow, large groups of people are inconsistent in their actions. The only place that wasn't true was Jonestown.

I dunno, I just don't get this terribly fashionable 'make fun of Seattle for being a small town at heart' thing. I don't particularly want it to be like other big US cities -- if I liked any of them better I wouldn't be living here. Seems like the real insecurity is people who can't accept us doing our own thing.

The boob who wrote this letter doesn't even live in Seattle, he lives in Shoreline. SHORELINE.

FNARF,
Please take another look at that Walgreens and imagine it in the context of an evolved Hy 99 (under a plausible but optimistic scenario.)

What? The bench out next to the 45 MPH traffic? The craptastic plantings that are already going to seed after just a couple of years because of no maintenance (and the wrong kind of plants)? The fact that the parking lot is shifted, placing the fake windows streetside instead of in the back? Yuck. I'm sorry, that's emblematic of a kind of bogus simulacrum of a streetscape that is taking over the world. It is the ENEMY of the street. And it's the wrong street.

99 is a HIGHWAY, and has, innocent of the blandishments of urban planners, has evolved a style, Roadside America, that is a thousand times more vibrant than the "Fake Greenwich Village" style the planners want to replace it with. The loss of places like the Twin Teepees and the burger joints and motels along Aurora is a cultural catastrophe.

But Shoreline's stretch has debased its charm, and is now worse than the rest, and has NOTHING to teach the city of Seattle. What we get when we pretend to learn is the Safeway store at 15th and John -- totally fake. That building will fall down of its own accord long before the city figures out how to use it properly. Ditto most of the big buildings in Seattle -- Safeways and Walgreens seem to be especially guilty -- that have adopted that style of fake streetside windows glued on the outside of what are really very retrograde boxes.

I can't totally disagree with that letter.

One more thing: The U-Village. I doubt it was the first of it's kind - more likely started in suburban California - but was the first example of it's type I ever experience and has long been my high water mark for what is wrong with the development of the this Country.

The U Village style of open-air mall has been around forever. Many of today's enclosed malls started out open-air -- Northgate, Bellevue Square. There were seemingly dozens of them in San Jose 20 years ago -- The Pruneyard, Town and Country, etc.

U Village is a pretty good example of one, probably the nicest I've ever seen. If you're saying you don't like it because it's not downtown, well, you're missing the point. It's not trying to be downtown. It does what it does extremely well. If you want examples of BAD shopping development, head out to South Hill in Puyallup -- oh, my fucking god. It makes the Southcenter strips look like Milan or Paris.

Calm down everyone. It could be worse. You could be in The Lou. Talk about small town/big city complex...

FNARF,
The "boob" who wrote the letter probably lives in Shoreline because he can't find a decent affordable home in the City. Why can't we seem to develop enough affordable/workforce housing (not the heavily subsidized stuff, but the homes affordable to a young couple making $70k/yr combined)?

"We" aren't going to develop anything. Developers build houses, and sell them for what people feel like paying. There's been a lot of condo building in Seattle lately, but it's a tiny drop in the bucket compared to the real mega-developments out in the sticks. For every condo unit in the city, there are a THOUSAND crappy cheap houses going up in Marysville or Orting.

To specifically answer your question, there isn't room. If you're looking for a single-family house, Seattle is full and will not be building significant numbers of more of them. The city will be aquiring lots more apartment units as infill (for rent and sale) but not houses. The new units will not move the prices down appreciably. There are a lot of people moving here from the Bay Area who find our $600,000 houses remarkably CHEAP. The "affordable" places you mention will be, as they always have been forever, in the less attractive parts of the city. Your Green Lake used to be one of those, in the 70s, but now you'll have to go out to Skyway or Auburn or someplace. That's just life.

Fnarf - you obviously haven't lived here very long. Affordable housing has not always been in the least desirable parts of the city. I lived on Queen Anne for 12 years. A few short years ago it became way out of reach for even middle income earners. Many neighborhoods of Seattle were affordable and *quite nice* until the late 90's when the real estate barons decided to turn us into the next San Francisco.

Last week the Seattle papers reported that the only affordable homes for middle income earners are in the Georgetown neighborhood.

The letter writer does make some valid points. I love my city, but Seattle needs to get it together. I hope the city council sticks it to the mayor's good neighbor bullshit proposal.

"Real estate barons turned Seattle into the next San Francisco?" That's cute. I'm no stinking republican, but I know how the market works, and Seattle got this way because of a booming economy (late 90s), lots of good press (everything from "Sleepless in Seattle" and "Singles" to the cover of Money magazine) in the mid 90s, and the nationwide housing boom courtesy of the Fed's low interest rates.

Sorry, but while real estate agents (or "barons") may have done nothing but encourage higher prices, they hardly could have made it happen without a whole lot of help.

I've lived in this city longer than you have, Mickey. I was born here. And I've lived here long enough to know how real estate works. Supply and demand. Matt from Denver is correct. House prices are high all over, but especially so in hot urban neighborhoods, which didn't use to be true. I remember when Fremont and Green Lake were hippie slums, back in the 70s, when all the people with money wanted to live on the Eastside. Now they want those big old Seattle boxes, and the commute runs the other way in the mornings and the afternoons. They don't much want to live in condos, though some of them do. And there's just not enough to go around, so the prices are high.

People of modest means are being priced out, yes, and their centers are elsewhere now. Does that kind of suck, if you don't want to live in Kent? There's nothing in Kent. But there was nothing of interest in Green Lake once, too.

And it's not the developers' fault. The developers are building houses faster than city residents can imagine; they're just building them out in the sticks, where there's still unoccupied land. They're not building them in Green Lake because there's no place in Green Lake to put them. Take a little drive down in Pierce County, to a little town called McMillin, just down the hill from South Hill in Puyallup: there's all the houses you can imagine, and more, with fantastic views of Mt. Rainier coming right up off the patio. Of course, they're unbelievably horrible.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: the only way to cut house prices in this area is to destroy the economy. Shut down Boeing, shut down Microsoft, cut the UW in half, shut down Safeco and Honeywell and Paccar and the Port, and you'll be able to buy a great house for almost nothing.

Not long ago we drove through Shelby, Montana, which is a little town on the High Line, and saw in the real estate office there a listing for a four bedroom house for $28,000. We could have bought the cutest little cowboy bar you ever saw for well under a hundred grand. Go for it. Be sure to bring warm clothes; it gets to 40 below in the winter there.

I hear what you're saying, Mickey, and Henry in Green Lake, but it's crazy to blame "the developers". What you're complaining about is happening all over. Go to San Francisco, where you can expect to pay well over a million bucks, with multiple competing bidders, for thrashed-out crack houses in the worst part of the Mission.

This letter is the worst sort of straw-man; it is constructed with a bunch of disparate opinions, all linked together into a single entity, a Seattleite. But, there's no such being. There are only individuals making individual decisions. If you think you can composite these arguments and then extract some unifying "solution" to the problems you identify, you'll continue to be disappointed with politics and civic life. It doesn't work that way.

If you understand that seattle is a great place to live, then understanding the market value of homes here should be just as simple.

Don't act stupid when you live in the city that employees umpteen thousand techies at amazon, real, etc. etc.

People are making bank, and paying bank for their lovely homes.

Want afordable down fucking town??? Aford more by getting a better job.

Median home prices in Seattle have outpaced median incomes for many years now. Price increases aren't linked to the local economy in any real way.

As far as the "running out of land" theory goes, between 2000 and 2002, the population of Seattle actually *dropped*, and has since grown by only about 1-2% per year. Yet oddly, median home prices have increased by more than 30% during the same period.

Despite what you think you "know" about the local housing market, most of the recent price growth has nothing to do with fundamental economics -- it's pure speculation. People are paying $350,000 for cracker-box condos because they think they will be worth $450,000 next year, not because they think they're worth 350 grand today.

Also, for the record: Most of the techies I know are not making enough "bank" to afford homes in this market. Just like everyone else, they're leveraged to their eyeballs with suicide loans and high hopes for future price appreciation.

Remember what happened to the tech stocks in 2000? Yeah, well...your "charming" craftsman bungalows have more in common with pets.com than you might care to imagine....

A Nony Mouse: check out the average family sizes since the 1950s. Then: many fewer houses, much larger families in them, thus larger population. Now: more houses, fewer people in them. Seattle has one of the lowest if not THE lowest proportion of kids in the US.

"No available land" is not a "theory", it's a readily verifiable fact. There are essentially no house-lot sites left. What there ARE is sites that can take medium-sized buildings with condos or apartments in them. The house sites that are "available", and there are zillions of them, are out in the sticks.
Seriously: if you want to know what's happening in the region, get the hell out of the city and drive around the exurbs for a while. Pike/Pine condo units are 0.01% of the story.

As for house sales being driven by pure speculation, I don't think so. If that was true, you'd see massive increases in renting out these houses as investments, but you don't, much. What you see is people paying $450,000 because that's what it costs to buy.

Will the market crash? Maybe. But that doesn't challenge my point that blaming "developers" for "not building enough affordable housing" is misguided. There's lots of affordable housing: it's just not big houses in the fashionable parts of the city. You want "affordable" housing, you're going to have to settle for a big house way out in Orting or Marysville, or a smaller apartment in the city. Quel horreur!

i think developers do take some of the blame, because they are the arms of giant corporations that know and care nothing about the locals.

Fnarf - you sound like you must work for one.

It is true that the price of homes in Seattle outpaces the median income. People who work in Seattle should be able to live there, not in "marysville" which makes for a torture commute, that is also very expensive to both the wallet and the environment. so then what? just rent in Seattle, i guess.

Just having rich people only in Seattle will kill the culture because artists are not rich and they make the city worth being in.

i think density is the way to go. and don't have kids so you can more easily be squished in with your neighbors.

by the way, i was not being sarcastic about no kids. and here's an article from the NYT - on topic...

Cities Shed Middle Class, and Are Richer and Poorer for It

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/23/weekinreview/23scott.html

The article should assuage those worried about Seattle becomming a place for the rich only. There's nothing wrong with rich people, and having wealthy residents means great restaurants, and vibrant nightlife.

i guess you didn't read the end of it, since there was a little more ambiguity to it than that.

your comment is of the troll variety, because it is clear not everyone reading or posting here would be included in the rich-only city you sound like you are dreaming of. but i'm not offended, because most people who are wealthy and keep themselves only around wealthy people are not that interesting. some exposure to diversity of any kind makes for a much more "vibrant" scene.

LETTER WRITER WROTE:
"You fly into a rage about fiscal improprieties committed by your school district. Then the school district proposes to close down a few of the more dilapidated schools to try to save some money, and you scream about unfairness and discrimination."

COMMENT:
That logic escapes me. I submit that financial waste by the school district is a major reason why it is then forced to "save some money" by closing actual schools.

It's true that housing prices far outpace wage increases. But if people stopped trying to buy more house than they could afford, refused mortgages with lousy terms, and waited to wade into the housing market until they had a large down payment (the old standby was 20%) then housing prices would slow down, maybe even stop. Of course, if banks were more fair they'd impose those kinds of limits themselves.

High housing prices are very complicated, but the consumers themselves bear their share of the blame for trying to have a home at any cost.

I agree with A Nony Mouse, and for good reason - actually, for two good reasons - I have friends who are doing exactly what the Mouse suggests is happening. They're buying up property in 'undervalued' (ha!) neighborhoods like Westwood and South Park as speculative investments. One friend just paid $450,000 for what I consider a shithole in Rainier Beach, because he expects the value to skyrocket. Some of these friends are renting the houses out, but most are not; they're putting a few thousand into some cosmetic remodeling and holding onto the houses for a bit, waiting to see how inflated their values can get.

The second reason I agree with that contention is that I've been trying to buy in those selfsame 'undervalued' neighborhoods myself (to live in the house, though, not as an investment). All the houses I'm finding that are even remotely within my price range are a) unoccupied, and b) were sold within the last couple of years, and c) have suffered minor cosmetic remodeling (new carpets and paint, new windows, but they still have rotten siding and crappy electrical and plumbing).

I can't afford to live in Seattle, and I have a fair amount of equity in my current home and I make good money. Frankly, I don't know how anyone can afford to buy a house in Seattle anymore. And it's my freaking home town! I've lived here since 1959. I wish I'd never moved out of the city; it was the biggest mistake I ever made, not to buy that crappy ugly little house in the shade of I-5 near the 65th exit that I could have gotten for less than $45,000 in 1978. Frigging house is still there, and it's probably worth $450,000 now.

Fnarf is right. This is a supply issue. Obviously there is no room in the city to build enough new single family homes to significantly affect home prices. The only way to significantly increase the number of housing units is to increase the number of apartments and condos.

I am not professionally trained in the matter (though I hope to be when the UW begins granting a formal Real Estate studies graduate degree [soon]), but it would seem that a possible way to increase the production of relatively affordable apartments and condos (to those "luxury units" being built downtown) would be to encourage upward development in more pockets of the city. I am not sure if this idea is terribly new, to create "urban villages" within a number of Seattle neighborhoods, but I am not sure it's actually been tried anywhere significantly distant from downtown.

Think of Roosevelt, which actually fought to have a light-rail station in it's commercail core. Ought not the city upzone the immediately surrounding area? Increasing the building heights and other development incentives would increase the feasibility of developments, allowing developers to achieve the profits they demand even as they build cheaper units (as they don't demand downtown's price premiums).

By creating small pockets of modest density throughout the city in select neighborhoods, development is encouraged in areas that demand a lower price premium than downtown, allow neighborhoods to define, create, and come to identify with a neighborhood core instead of lines on a map, and generally make the idea of living inside Seattle but distant from downtown actually attractive.

Thank you for your comments.

Geni,

The phenomenon you and Noni are referring to (housing speculation) is called "Flipping." There's even a show on HGTV called "Flip this House" which follows the people who do this for a living. Of course they usually do significant remodels, they're not just slapping on a coat of paint. But it is a real phenomenon. I don't know how much of the real estate market their purchases and sales account for.

Matt,

I'm referring to more than just flipping (though, there's plenty of that going on: last month, I met a 19 year old girl who was in the process of flipping two homes. Nuts.)

There are plenty of average first-time homebuyers who have seen the 15-20% year-over-year price appreciations since 2001, and think that housing is a "perfect" investment. They over-pay for existing property (using suicide loans), and justify the risk by telling themselves that they will be able to refinance in a few years' time, and use their magical "equity" to pay down a big chunk of their existing loans.

I'm way late to this conversation, but must put in my .02.

The facts of the matter are pretty simple to understand. Seattle has become a more desirable place to live. Whatever mysterious alchemies lie between human beings and the places they deem to be livable have conspired to put Seattle in the conversation of the most desirable places to live in the U.S, maybe the world. That wasn't the case before. Old school Seattleites remember when the only people who wanted to live here were...old school Seattleites.

But Seattle's zoning laws haven't caught up to the new reality. We insist on designating space for single family homes instead of condos and mixed use developments because we perceive that as part of the city's appeal, which is probably accurate. There aren't many cities that offer single-family homes so close to downtown that are as cool (that is, are perceived to be cool) as Seattle. Even out as far as Wallingford is unusual...that should be largely composed of condos, townhomes and apartments at this point. But Queen Anne? North/East Capitol Hill? You can own a 5-bedroom home and walk downtown in 10-15 minutes or less. Not many "big" cities offer that kind of initimacy.

But there is currently a brittle tension between desire and reality, and as long as our desire to maintain "neighborhood integrity" trumps our willingness to feed demand and build more housing, prices will precipitously climb.

The amount of money you have dictates how nice a place you get to live in, which is how it's always been. Because the estimation of Seattle has gotten so high, it takes more money to live here than it once did.

Pretty simple.

The letter illustrates the schizophrenia of a city that is ran at the whims of its loudest constituents. Many cities possess enough common sense know when to ignore the nonsense loudest activists, and when to run with their suggestions. But most of all, they make decisions with consistency, and STICK WITH THEM.

I'm tired of reading uninformed speculation on the "facts" behind Seattle's bubbly real-estate market.

Greg Wharton (architecht, developer, and housing market bull), does a great job of demolishing the most popular myths about the Seattle real-estate market on the Seattle PI blog:

http://tinyurl.com/je34d

Among the myth-busting:

* Land isn't all that scarce
* Population growth hasn't kept pace with prices
* Real wages are declining on an annual basis, not increasing.

As might be expected for an intelligent discussion of economics, he identifies a number of legitimate reasons for the massive price increase, not the least of which is cheap money, in the form of the various suicide loan options that are available to anyone who can fog a mirror.

I don't agree with everything Wharton says, but he's a hell of a lot more informed than most of the people who comment here (*cough* FNARF *cough*)....

Fnarf doesn't need my defense, but I'll say this - when I read his comments about land being gone, I think he means within Seattle city limits. That article in the Times about Seattle's housing market said as much. And as far as real wages declining, that's been the case everywhere since the 70s I believe. Ever increasing housing, medical, and education costs are a large part of that trend.

You're right about the suicide loans, but that's in part a result of low interest rates from a Fed determined to keep the economy humming along. I for one think a real recession would have been better, long term, than artificially keeping it from happening. I think it's just going to be all the worse when one finally happens, probably when the housing bubble finally pops.

"The 'boob' who wrote the letter probably lives in Shoreline because he can't find a decent affordable home in the City. "

Or, like many, he was afraid to look at anything south of the canal (ooh scary!) and missed out on some decent, affordable homes in places like Beacon Hill. Though admittedly even Beacon Hill has started to get pricey.

(If only we could get a pizza joint up here, dammit...)

Growing cities build up AND out, as the two options do battle against each other for competing reasons. What we're arguing about here is which option is/should be the more emphasized.

The definition of "home" is important to consider as well. I've lived in larger cities, where, for example, one home I resided in was a 3-room 'condo' (owned by the family) on the 15th floor of an 'apartment' building nestled in a neighborhood of high-rise residences.

I'm an urbanite. That's my emphasis. So keep building 'em dense in Seattle so that we, the kids, the dog, the bikes, and a guest or two can fit comfortably in. Fuck Marysville, fuck Auburn, fuck your commute. We will not be tapping the brakes all morning and evening with you on I-5.

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