Seattle is facing a housing crisis

The City of Seattle, like much of the country, faces a serious housing crisis. Perhaps the most visible signs of this are the houseless but houselessness is ultimately merely the tip of a much larger problem. Most ordinary citizens, many of whom have been deemed essential workers during the pandemic, cannot afford to live in Seattle. They are forced to either suffer financially or commute long distances, which both destroys communities and accelerates climate change. The main policy response to this, at least at the local level, has been to up-zone neighborhoods. The fundamental problem with this liberalization model is that it presumes that the market can deliver affordable, quality housing. Unfortunately, this is unsubstantiated since up-zoning absent complementary policies – which we outline below - will result in a great deal of low quality, poorly-designed housing that is still unaffordable to most citizens. Sustainably built, quality housing that all residents can afford is not a profitable venture. Thus, one of our main takeaways is that up-zoning based around for-profit housing development will not address the housing crisis. Moreover, many quality neighborhoods will be upended and the needed policy of up-zoning will have been discredited because it failed to deliver what many of its advocates promised.