Not enough children in Seattle...

...But plenty of Village Idiots?

This article contains just enough wisdom, thinking parallel to my own, and concern for a city that I also love, to make it worth reading. But too may wild swings to prevent it from really connecting.

On the one hand Knute Berger berates our Mayor for encouraging a dense city. Then he berates the Mayor for not paying enough attention to making Seattle pedestrian-friendly. There is a disconnect there -- while I would be the first to agree that density per se does not make a pedestrian-friendly place, by the same token it doesn't hurt. And generally a certain amount of density is associated in fact (not as causality but as result) with interesting urban places.

Then Knute berates "density freaks" for ignoring families and for somehow making Seattle unfriendly to children.

But it's not density freaks nor the Mayor who make ordinary single-family houses in Wallingford (a middle-class Seattle neighborhood) worth +$400 k but the fact that no one really wants to keep housing affordable. Or knows how.

The Mayor may well have his priorities askew but Knute doesn't really home-in -- so far as I can tell -- to uncover what ails Seattle. It's good to see that The Seattle Weekly is paying attention to these issues; I wish they'd pay just a bit more attention and offer a little more sophisticated story than attacking "urban sophisticates."

Comments

[Brian Miller]

It just seems like a random rant. Where are any solutions in a puff piece like this? Are sidewalk-free suburban boulevards lined with "Power Centers" any safer for Seattle pedestrians?

[Jesse McCann]

It looks to me like they're attacking the Stranger's density argument rather than making any points of their own. Typical of this newspaper-- the Weekly is a NIMBYist rag better suited for toilet tissue. Everything is an unsolvable crisis.

Doesn't densification (the building of townhomes on single family home sites) increase both affordability and pedestrian friendliness? How are homes supposed to be made affordable without growing inwards and upwards? Sure, condos downtown are more likely to be owned by singles and empty nesters... Townhomes, on the other hand, seem to me to be affordable alternatives that are quite kid-friendly. Maybe I'm a density freak, but I think that zoning the most of the city for detached single family homes helps exacerbate the high cost of housing and makes it difficult to raise a family affordably in the city.

[Hal O'Brien]

Mr. Berger doesn't seem to have a good handle on supply and demand. The reason houses cost so much in Seattle (or San Francisco, or Manhattan, or Portland) is because there's a helluva lot of demand for those houses.

There are only two ways to do much about the situation -- put more houses in to increase supply (which means higher density), or pay a subsidy (thereby artifically reducing the net price).

[Brian Miller]

Or...a better way of increasing the supply may be to continue to evangelize for more pedestrian-friendly cities elsewhere in the country-so that every person who wants an urbane environment doesn't have to crowd into the same boutique cities.

[Kent]

I lived in Seattle in the late 80s and most of the go-go 90s as a single 20-something and 30-something. Now I'm married with kids and currently live in Texas temporarily but expect to return to the Northwest next year. So I have a few comments about this.

First, The sky-high real estate market is a result of two factors: (1) Regional population growth exceeding the pace of housing construction, and (2) Speculation in the housing market by investors. In 1990 I had a friend who was a real estate agent and who was employed full time buying single family houses in the Puget Sound region for a group of monks from Taiwan or Hong Kong (I forgot which) who were using Puget Sound real estate as an investment vehicle. No doubt they make a killing the past decade. In my own suburb in Texas everyone owns their own home. In the Seattle area, single family houses are being snatched up at a frenetic pace by investors. No wonder families on middle class incomes can't compete.

Second, Seattle's density is increasing exponentially. When I was in grad school I rented a house at NE 55th St and 30th Ave NE (about 5 blocks north of U-Village). It was all single family housing back then. Now the entire area around U-Village is mushrooming with multi-story condos and apartments. Especially along Blakelely. I haven't really paid attention to other parts of the city but density is sure increasing in old neighborhood.

Third, it's all about the schools. As a parent of two young girls I feel pretty in tune with the sentiments of other parents and I can tell you that schools are by far the #1 reason why families choose neighborhoods. There isn't even a close second. It just so happens that upscale suburban areas have the best schools (Mercer Island, Bellevue etc.) but that's sort of a chicken and egg thing. If Seattle razed it's crumbling public schools and built a bunch of shiny new Mercer Island type schools and hired the best teachers you'd see young parents moving back overnight.

Fourth, I think it's wrong to vew cities like Seattle in isolation. Seattle is just one piece of the greater Puget Sound metro area. You really need to look at the entire metro area when bemoaning the fact that the school-age population is declining. It doesn't make any sense to compare 1950s Seattle, when Seattle was the only major urban population center in the region, to 2005, when Seattle is just one piece of a much larger urban region. It's sort of like complaining about kids moving out of Capital Hill for Wallingford in the 1950s when the first apartments started to go up. Families are going to naturally migrate to the quieter areas with affortable housing and good schools.

[Brian Miller]

Kent:

Do you really think that if Seattle built "Mercer Island Schools" that buildings alone would overcome upper middle class and middle class resistance to raising kids in a central city school system? especially if the system uses bussing or non-neighborhood based schools? There are class and ethnicity (and crime and social disfunction) issues involved, too, aren't there? (Throw in disfunctional big city politics and union issues, and...)

[Jarrett]

I love Seattle too, but I also love San Francisco, and Portland, and Vancouver, and Berkeley, and even special corners of LA.

And if it's any comfort, the underlying problem you're discussing is happening in all the desirable cities of the west coast. People want to live there, so it's expensive. That problem won't be solved unless you repeal the laws of economics, but developing dense housing, organized around transit corridors, does mitigate it.

Density isn't intrinsically bad for kids, but if you think it is, there are still plenty of places to live in Seattle. About 2/3 of the city's developable area is zoned at low densities. And affordable DENSE housing helps give the empty-nesters more choices for moving out of their garage-and-lawn homes into something that fits their lives better.

Yes, you have to fight for the schools, ferociously. But like most great battles, it's circular: Only when enough parents care will the battle be engaged. Then, you'll see progress.

Note to Kent: Your density isn't increasing "exponentially". It isn't even linear. Compared to Vancouver, Seattle's densification is downright hesitant.

Cheers, Jarrett

[Hal O'Brien]

"Your density isn't increasing "exponentially". It isn't even linear. Compared to Vancouver, Seattle's densification is downright hesitant."

It's worse than that.

According to the US Census Bureau and the City's Dept. of Planning and Development, it was only with the 2000 census that Seattle's population recovered to its peak of 1960.

So, yeah, Seattle's population has been climbing over the last two decades... But only after having been falling for the two decades before that. 40 years on, the city's population (and density, since there haven't been significant annexations) are right back where they started.