One way to make housing more affordable in Seattle is to provide more supply. Unfortunately that's constrained by NIMBY planning and the third-rail of local politics: changing zoning that prefers for single-family homes.
So it's interesting that housing supply is increasing anyway. This is by Eric de Place via the Sightline Institute's Daily Score blog:
For the first time (at least in recent history), less than half of all housing units in Seattle are detached single family dwellings. That's what I found yesterday, squirreled away in the depths of recently-released census data for 2005. Just 49.3 percent of the city's units are of the traditional house-and-yard variety.And as far as I can tell, Seattle is the only city in the U.S. Northwest where this is true. (The census numbers are easily available only in a format that makes it difficult to be certain.) Even in density-friendly Portland, fully 60 percent of the city's housing units are conventional detached single family houses.
I should mention, however, that while Seattle has passed the halfway mark, detached single family houses are still easily the most common form of housing in Seattle. But I was equally surprised to find that 34 percent of all units in Seattle are in a building containing at least 10 units.
It's interesting, I think, that the city's image of itself hasn't necessarily caught up to its new reality (as evidenced by the ritual of sackcloth and ashes still occasionally observed whenever urbanization is the topic). And while Seattle is still far less dense than, say, San Francisco, where only 16 percent of units are detached single family dwellings, I think we in the Emerald City can now officially consider ourselves urban.
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