Very few want cheaper housing.

The old bromide that "growth management" helps raise housing costs has a flip side: growth management helps raise housing values. Rising housing prices -- due to whatever cause -- are NOT a problem if you own a house or make loans for people to buy them. Nor are they a problem if you build houses or broker them or tax them. In fact, homeowners and just about everyone else LIKE -- even LOVE -- increase in home values. The warning that restrictive regional planning will raise housing prices might well have tipped the political balance in favor of growth management: "A vote for Growth Management is a vote for increasing the value of land inside the urban growth boundary." Who is against that?

•••

One comment suggests that not everyone — certainly not those who don't own a house now — wants rising housing prices and that's a fair critique. So maybe I overstated and I should simply say that "the majority" are at the very least torn about whether increasing house values are good, bad or just a reality from which they both win and lose. I've written about this phenomenon here: Who really wants Affordable Housing? and also wondered whether Growth Management acts as de facto Price supports for housing. I also suggest Don't worry about a housing crash in Seattle.

Comments

[Gomez]

We'll see how homeowners think when they realize that no one can afford to buy their appreciated homes at 'market rate'.

[Erik]

Those of us who make what they thought was a living wage but can't afford their first house (or condo) are against it, that's who. Well, actually I'm all for growth management in theory but I'm currently ambivalent about it in practice, because the housing prices in Seattle are shutting me out.

[Stefan Sharkansky]

David: "A vote for Growth Management is a vote for increasing the value of land inside the urban growth boundary." Who is against that?

Try -- First time homebuyers? People who pay property taxes?

[kieth Nissen]

When crude oil prices were climbing from the 40s to the 60s commentators likened the increase in gas and heating oil cost to a tax on the economy, arguing persuasively that the increase deducted from investment, and other consumption broadly across the economy.

I think high real estate prices, especially housing, does the same thing. It makes everything more expensive and drives jobs out of high cost areas. I shows up when you want to hire someone to fix
your gutters or roof; the man who does the work now lives in Renton or Kent. He has to drive two hours a day to get to your project and back home again. You pay for that.

It used to be that a lot of mechanics and building subcontractors lived in Ballard or the near North End. That's gone.

I concede this is not exactly on subject; people who have houses can take comfort in the increase in value that benefits them but there is this stealth inflation in operation and maintenance that I think needs to be acknowledged.