Here’s a good one to chew on. Is Seattle’s housing market poised to become as ridiculous and unlivable as San Francisco? Could be…
The ripples of San Francisco’s housing crisis don’t stop at the city limits. When the working poor — receptionists, day care providers, retail salespeople and housekeepers, for example — flee the city, pressure increases on them and their employers. Commutes extend time away from both the job and home. Cities lose middle- and lower-wage earners, decreasing not just economic diversity but sometimes racial diversity as well, census figures show.
In San Francisco’s case, those effects extend more than 800 miles north to Seattle, where city officials use San Francisco’s housing data as both a grim forecast and scared-straight therapy session.
“We all know we don’t want to have a housing unaffordability situation as San Francisco does,” said Adrienne Quinn, director of the city of Seattle’s Office of Housing. “We don’t want to become that.”
But it is the direction Seattle is headed. Rents in the eastern Puget Sound region have risen 35 percent over the past 10 years, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. In Seattle alone the jump is closer to 40 percent — compared with 50 percent over the same period in San Francisco.
Well we can’t have it both ways, people. Housing prices shooting up and up can’t be both good and bad at the same time. Either it’s good because all you homeowners out there are essentially making money from nothing, or it’s bad because fewer and fewer people can afford to live. Whoever wrote this article though definitely seems to believe the latter. Here’s a grim prediction:
“The housing situation here in San Francisco is this: If you are making less than $100,000, housing is not affordable. It’s in crisis. It’s not available for working class, lower class. The number of evictions is skyrocketing. …
“It’s almost as if two parallel cities are happening. The very poor (and) the very rich. What you see in (San Francisco) you will see in Seattle. It’s clashing social strata.”
I would like to know why people that are that hard off don’t do whatever they can to move to a cheaper place. If the city I lived in became completely unaffordable to me, I would use any means necessary to move to a place I could afford. Anyway, also worth mentioning is Stefan Sharkansky’s take on this article over at Sound Politics:
Oddly, the article does not contain the two most important words for understanding San Francisco’s unusually high housing prices: RENT CONTROL. … Both forms of rent control offer perverse incentives for a dweller to remain in their current home longer they would otherwise. Thus the supply of available housing is artificially suppressed, thereby raising prices for anybody who is seeking housing. Seattle would do well to learn from this experience and in general to think about the consequences of obstructing a free market in its quest to make housing more affordable (to some).
So what do you think? Is Seattle heading toward the unpleasant situation found in San Francisco? How does rent control factor into the situation? Will San Francisco and Seattle’s housing markets ever pop? Will I ever stop asking stupid questions and just go to bed?
Well I know the answer to at least one of those questions—the last one—and the answer is yes.
(Mike Lewis, Seattle P-I, 02.16.2006)