These shared apartments sound like a great idea. They modernize the "group home" so each resident has their own locked space, their own lease, etc. It really is a bit like leasing a room in a modern dorm.

Thank you! Once the rent for my small 450 sq ft studio, built in 1920 (and not updated since then)went up to $850 a month, I was forced to move south. These new living opportunities are important.

Dear Renee,

When you were 22, did you pay $600/mth for group houses?

Hell, did you pay $600/mth for your studio?

These things are expensive for shoddy money grabs.

And, because they bring the average rent down, overall, all rents can go up even higher.

It is completely uncool to show a MUP board for 8 units on a tiny plot of land and have 48 people arrive. Don't care that developers claim these people don't bring cars: They do.

If that's going to be the case, change the permitting process so everyone is on the same page. Change the regulations around how many RPZ passes these units get (ZERO). Update the amount of density neighborhoods are taking...so that it reflects the reality of these units.

And perhance limiting the number of these units in a square mile radius...let all regions of the city share density growth. THAT creates a sustainable city.

I agree with this post. The only people really opposed to "apodments" are nimby elitists. Most arguments against them are unfounded. They have not been shown to bring down property values. Residents are less likely to own cars since these buildings are usually near mass transit. Crime does not increase in or around them.

I'm willing to listen to fact-based arguments, but the vague fears well-to-do people harbor against people who make less than they are not a reason to stop building affordable housing.

@2- Those neighborhoods also don't have easily accessible grocery stores or a decent walkability score, either. So, it all but requires you to have a car, which then, makes your rent with car payment and insurance $1100 or over.

@2 and others: Cap Hill may be trendy and have lots of cafes, but it also is vastly more convenient to live in than a suburb if you are using public transit. A moratorium on this type of building will mean no further building anywhere in the city, not just on Cap Hill, so asking the rest of the city to take on density while asking for a moratorium is rather pointless.

Another day, another development whore in the Stranger.

Anytime you hear someone say "I don't like apodments" keep in mind that's just code for "I don't want young people to be able to afford to live in this neighborhood."

If they let poor and lower middle class people live in Seattle, their property values will go down, due to all the underwear thieves.

1. Steal Underwear
3. Profit!

I was trying to tell a pro-density friend about my opinion on this issue, and I made the statement that some blocks in certain places in inner-city neighborhoods should be left single-family (much of Capitol hill, IMO). He looked at me like I've gone crazy. What can I tell anyone who feels that density and cheap housing is primary, and the feel of my neighborhood is second? Don't get me wrong, I love density, but regulating these ugly heaps is part of the game.

I totally agree with this post. If we want to make Seattle affordable for everyone, we need to build enough places for people to live, of all shapes and sizes.

Keep in mind, if you here somebody say that housing should not be regulated, they hate poor people, want them to live in squalor, and want to make as much money for big developers while there are still no rules.

@14 -- There is nothing preventing anyone from building an ugly house anywhere. But put up a big apartment building and you have to have it reviewed. Oh, and what is this reviewing doing, anyway. How many people have said "Oh, what a nice building -- I'm glad the review board had a say, otherwise it would look like every other boring building in Seattle".

Basically, it is all random. Some of the Apondment buildings are quite nice, just like some of the new big buildings are nice and some new houses that are built are nice. But many are ugly. Zoning often makes things worse. Requiring parking, for example, leads developers to build uglier buildings. Most of the really nice buildings in Seattle were built before we required parking.

Pretty sure none of the "single-family residential" zoning codes (and there are many) include "ugly" or "beautiful".

Parking just means more car subsidies.

Trying to preserve the "feel" of a neighborhood has a measurable, negative impact on affordability. It literally pushes working class people out of the city. We have a responsibility not to do that. If we want to preserve "feel", we have to commit the funding to create affordability - and that's an order of magnitude more than we're spending as a city now.

At one time, there were many units similar to apodments in the downtown core, although in those days they were called SROs or Single Room Occupancy. Elitist jackasses in the 60's made them illegal. (You can see this legacy today in the empty, abandoned upper floors of Chinatown.) Here's the deal, folks - a vibrant city has residents from a variety of social classes. What the opponents of affordable housing want is to turn Seattle into a playground for the privileged, ala San Francisco or Manhattan.
The current spate of apodment building is a belated adjustment to an injustice perpetrated against the city over 50 years ago. Between 1960 and 1981, seattle lost approximately 15,000 SRO units. It is overdue, and should be encouraged.

I rented a bedroom in the U-dist for 360/month + utilties, currently I'm in Pinehurst renting a bedroom for 465/month everything included and we have a yard.

Can we just start some journalistic truth in advertising and call this what it is? It's not a moratorium on apodments; it's a moratorium on young people and the urban working class.

@21 SROs shouldn't be unregulated and $600/mth.

There's a current spin regarding the people against aPODments about density and parking that I'm not sure I'm buying. What I do think we need more of us affordable standardized housing and not a bunch of expensive rent, cheap quality, SROs driving up the rent of currently existing apartments.

How many aPODments would make you happy, @21? if there were 15,000 units would that be enough? Perhaps there's a compromise in which there's "adequate" housing for the young, hip crowd that is so desired in the city.

Pol Pot dear, it wasn't "elitist jackasses in the 60's" who killed the SRO's. It was the Ozark Hotel fire

http://www.historylink.org/index.cfm?Dis…

Those buildings in Chinatown were abandoned because the landlords were too cheap to upgrade them to meet the new fire codes. The "elitist assholes" would have been happy to let poor and old people stay downtown, because in the 60's, downtowns were considered passé.

Seriously, what do people think will happen without sufficient housing at cost to support the endless streams of people moving to this region or moving out from home, if they're from here? The Seattle population will not stop growing. Our choices are either:

1. Don't increase housing stock. Everything gets more expensive. Enjoy paying $2000 a month for that Northgate studio in today's dollars in 20-30 years. It will be Boston, or San Francisco. My wife, when arriving in Boston back in 2000 (she's a Seattle native) was paying like $1000+ in year 2000 dollars for 1 bedroom in a 3 bedroom walk up in the equivalent of Northgate. This pushes up all our housing prices. A homeowner, this is appealing. My $175-$190k house (depending where you look for today's value) may be $750,000 in this scenario in 30 years. But then my kid(s) are screwed for starting out on their own, and I live in a pricey inflated city with higher taxes.

2. We increase stocks and try to stabilize the housing costs to handle the endless population growth sanely. We get more revenue for higher taxes, to spread the costs of new services needed for the population growth more evenly. More traffic, less parking, etc.

Both suck. Which sucks less? I argue #2, by far.

So a limo liberal city council member once again goes against property rights, as they did with the moratorium on small houses a while back, and people are somehow surprised?

When are the slog faithful going to figure out the rich gay city council members you voted for are rich first and gay second. Rasmussen has a six figure war chest for re-election where did you think all that came from?

This isn't news, its more of a calendar item, like when a nimby group demands a EIS for any reason.

26- the Ozark Amendments were the final straw in what had been a decade long push to do away with SRO housing. There had long been an elitist push to close these venues before the tragedy at The Ozark.
Very few of the owners could afford any of the upgrades demanded. There was not much profit in running a fleabag motel.
No attempt was ever made to assist the owners in upgrading through low interest loans or housing subsidies.
The goal was the eradication of the SRO housing stock.

"And, because they bring the average rent down, overall, all rents can go up even higher."

You had your sense of shame surgically amputated along with your ability to do arithmetic, didn't you?

A community does better when it hosts a diversity of people from various backgrounds and income levels. Maybe apodments are not ideal, but no one else has come up with a better answer, and Tom Rasmussen's priority is banning what modest affordable housing is being built (It's an emergency!), not fixing the tenant laws that are driving lower income folks away from the city.

The argument is substantial for building smaller apartments. Capitol Hill has changed drastically (it isn't nearly as much fun) since the yuppies and developers got their hands on it.

Be that as it may, I can't live in a pod. My home is where I spend a great deal of time - and I think the reasoning behind pods is that potential buyers/renters will spend the bulk of their days outside. Not me. If I can no longer afford a large enough living space where I'm living, it's time for me to move to where I can. That's only my opinion, and I realize there ware many who can live in a pod. Don't want Capitol Hill to become Podville though.

Renee's experience certainly mirrors mine. When I first moved to Seattle as a young adult, cheap housing was plentiful. I rented a studio in Casa del Rey (right on Broadway) for $250/month. And lived in as string of group homes. Pretty much everyone I knew lived similarly. You could easily live in the city on a barrista income. Today? Not hardly.

And ditto Pol Pot's comments re SROs. And we lost a lot more than 15,000. In 1980 Belltown was still chock a block w/SROs. The dislocation between 1980 and 2000 was equally large.

Gentrification may be inevitable w/out rent control (and even w/it), but we've got crack the nut of providing minimum wage housing in the center city somehow.

I always laugh when NIMBYs say that people living in apodments don't choose to live there and they are living in "squalor" or "tenement housing".

People DO choose to live there. I've looked into them, myself, and find them clean, efficient and cost friendly. The people who live there are typically single people or students who either want to save money because they don't need a lot of space and don't have epic cooking nights (like I do), or are working, but can't afford to rent a room for $800. These are not the great unwashed masses, they are fine, upstanding people who just want a fucking place to live without roommates.

If someone thinks it's squalor or like tenement housing, they are SEVERELY ignorant of what that actually is, and I highly doubt they've ever been poor or had to live in an area where gun shots, shitty landlords who don't fix anything or crazy roommates are the norm.

The tenement house things makes me shake my head (I heard that used on another website, not this one) because it's NOTHING like that. People in the early 1900's who lived in that sort of situation would *love* apodments - considering they are well maintained, safe and affordable (Though, I don't think apodments allows more than one person occupancy). People stuffed entire families, including grandma and aunts/uncles/cousins into a one bedroom (if that) apartment that usually had no working heat, electricity, bathroom and sometimes no safe running water. The places were unsafe, falling apart, and just awful.

Just because you think apodments are ugly (I don't, the newer structures don't look any worse than the expensive monstrosities they've built on broadway) doesn't mean they shouldn't be built. Just because you've never had to struggle with money and just want a place to yourself, doesn't mean you need to punish those who do. Not everyone needs a god damn huge apartment. But a lot of people need easy access to grocery stores, shopping areas and the urban core. So fuck you NIMBYs.

@2 Exactly.

@8

What about the ID? Totally walkable to everywhere downtown, next to Uwajimaya, light rail/Amtrak. But, oooo scary, non-whites! Not cool!

Dear "Sargon Bighorn": what are you smoking? Maybe Crown Hill and Northgate are $100 less than Cap Hill. Ditto West Seattle. Maybe even $150. The point, dear ignorant one, is that rents have shot up EVERYWHERE in this city. Are you completely clue'd out on this point. It has been well documented that EVERY neighborhood in Seattle (save for Belltown) has seen steady rent increases through 2012. And, now, Belltown rents have shot up, too. It is your ignorant "everything's fine outside of the safe and close-in neighborhoods that cater to the pretentious" attitude that forever causes the have nots to lose more and more ground as the 1%, 5% and 20% consolidate more and more wealth, property and power.

And, yes, intelligent people generally want to live near services, quality food and activities. Go figure. aPodments are a capitalism-engineering joke that only the naive would waste a moment defending. RENT CONTROL; can we please be discussing THAT?!!!

"Trying to preserve the "feel" of a neighborhood has a measurable, negative impact on affordability. It literally pushes working class people out of the city. We have a responsibility not to do that. If we want to preserve "feel", we have to commit the funding to create affordability - and that's an order of magnitude more than we're spending as a city now."

Really? Then why is it cities like Montréal, Curitiba Brasil, Montpelier France (etc.) seem to be able to balance both livability and affordability. The two are NOT mutual exclusive. It's the undereducated "leaders", those that lobby them and big business (and the ways they arrange our communities according to their modern "Industrialized" models) that cause the non-affluent to loose out. We can put people on the moon! Think about it. We can't create vibrant affordable communities, neighborhoods and districts that don't cost loads. Bullshit. I call bullshit. And, I call planning, city/state/fed. gov't, planning and developer incompetency.

@30 No.

Many developer whores like promoting the average cost of rent as proof that rents aren't skyrocketing. With the kinda-low rent being used for inadequate and regulation-free aPODments holding down the average, rents for normal housing (the kind that couples and families would desire) will go up, and the average price will stay lower.

Plus, the aPODments will be used as proof that "Hey, we're giving low income people places to live!" When, really, it's mainly ideal for the young and/or the single, while the rents for non-closets will increase and push out the poor families.

TheMisanthrope- you are correct. I wish more who posted here thought things through like you do. Connect the dots people.

@36 - Have you been to the ID lately? Do you know who's the new big blossoming renter there? I do. It's white people. And honey, those rents aren't that cheap, either.

@39: check, you genuinely have no understanding about how any of this works, either legally or economically. Noted.

If you allow developers to build more (and taller) then you can get your cheap, tiny apartment AND not have to risk sharing your cooking space with a bunch of random slobs!

@43 Great well-substantiated attacks. Perhaps you'd like to correct me, and provide some real-life examples of your understanding in practice. I'm actually quite reasonable to discuss with.

Or, do you just want to shill for development companies and money-grubbing landlord companies while making ad hominem attacks? Because, that's cool if you do. It's just a mental note that you're completely full of shit if that's the way you want to go.

@37 Thank you for revealing your complete ignorance of basic economics. Rents are increasing because demand for housing in Seattle is rising and supply is not being allowed to expand to meet it. Rent control will not fix anything. It may help some people who already are fortunate enough to live in the city, but it will do jack squat for people who want to move in and do nothing to prevent young people from being forced out of their hometown as they come of age. In both the short and the long run, the only way to fit everyone who wants to live in Seattle into Seattle at a reasonable price is to build more housing to hold them.

I am not young, poor or all that low income. I work in downtown Bellevue. I have been fortunate to have gotten a place near DT for 4 years. To my utter shock, my rent has increased 24% this year and I cannot find a decent comparable place ANYWHERE close! Housing rates have changed BIG TIME in the last couple of years!!! I have even been trying to buy a condo - no luck with that either!!! When looking for a place, don't forget to measure the price per square foot. These apodments are hideously expensive by that measure!!!