I still question whether eliminating single family zoning will drastically improve housing affordability in a city like Seattle but open to giving it a shot (in the vein of not letting the perfect be the enemy of good).

That said, I also think it’s long overdue to address the damage short term rentals have done to housing availability (not to mention its impact on the commodification of housing). I really wish Girmay and his progressive compatriots would also address the harm of companies like Airbnb (like LA, NY, Palm Springs, etc.).

The problem is they’re tearing down single family homes (in the few areas they can…) to build million dollar duplexes, condos, and townhomes.

We need to use both carrots and sticks to promote construction of AFFORDABLE housing now, not just MORE housing in the hope that supply/demand will eventually trickle down and make some housing a bit more affordable someday.

Building more Ferraris will not make Hondas more affordable.

I fear that removing all SFH zoning will come down on the working class neighborhoods of Seattle (Rainier Valley, Delridge, etc) and accelerate gentrification, while neighborhoods along the water will remain as placid as they are today.

As Our Dear NoSpin points out, the housing needs to be affordable, not competitive. I don't know that can be done about that. Also, how much of the existing housing stock is being bought up by hedge funds and turned into rentals? That's a problem across the country.

@3 Define affordable. Because at any given moment in time depending upon the current interest rates, affordable to a worker employed by a non-RSU-awarding or organization can become unaffordable to them compared to a 3-5 year-tenured RSU-granting company (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Msft, Google, etc).

The state, cities, and counties need to impose bans on hedge funds/investment firms buying property in this state. I see no issues with individuals buying additional one or two additional properties but I do have an issue with hedge funds and investment firms buying up property.

I enjoyed this article & its incessant demands for more housing. But why is the photo that goes with it showing us the most soul-sucking, institutional blandness ever? It’s almost like someone asked all the pro-density haters what they dislike most about denser housing (and they’d likely say: no space, no privacy, no yards, no uniqueness…) then it all got made it into this picture.

How an
American Dream of
Housing Became a Reality in Sweden

The U.S. once looked to modular construction as an efficient way to build lots of housing at scale, but Sweden picked up the idea and put it into practice.

As an architect, Ivan Rupnik thinks the solution to America’s affordable housing shortage is obvious: Build more houses. Start today. But the way homes are built in the United States makes speed impossible.

Years ago, Rupnik’s Croatian grandmother, an architect herself, pointed him to an intriguing answer to this conundrum: modular housing projects built in Europe in the 1950s and ’60s.

Rupnik was awed. Sure, prefab complexes, and especially Soviet bloc housing, could be ugly and too homogenous, but the process created millions of housing units in a flash.

Hooked, Rupnik started researching modular housing for his doctoral dissertation. In the archives of the Harvard Graduate School of Design, he stumbled upon a reference in an old journal article that took him by surprise: an industrialized housing initiative called Operation Breakthrough that built nearly 3,000 units between 1971 and 1973 — in the United States. How had he never heard about it?

--Francesca Mari; photographs & video --Amir Hamja
June 8, 2024

oodles More:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/08/headway/how-an-american-dream-of-housing-became-a-reality-in-sweden.html

build ‘em Elsewhere
put ‘em Up in
Seconds flat

on the Weekend
when no one’s
Looking.

make ‘em
Inflatable or
Print one out

Don't underestimate the weight of a heavily entrenched bureaucracy of city and county employees supported by decades of legislation and policy. Statistically the number of regulators per capita is inverse to housing supply.

"Washington State currently holds the unenviable title of having the fewest number of housing units per capita in the entire nation."
Folks, that is the simple reason rent is so high, only the rich can buy a house, and we have continually increasing homelessness. Not AirBnB, not our not building enough "affordable housing". Places that allow enough housing to be built--not focusing on only "affordable housing" such as Austin (rents down 12% in the past year) and Minneapolis (rents only up 1% in past five years) see results. Building any kind of housing, even expensive new housing (which is the only thing that can be built in Washington's restrictive regulatory environment), decreases the competition for older apartments, slowing the rise of rents and, when you build enough of it, lowering rent.

Simple supply and demand is true for housing just as much as for every other thing in the world. When there is not enough of something, prices go up; when there is abundance, prices go down. Let's start having an abundance of housing.