Seattle could pretty easily get to 2.5 million residents in 10 years if we let it.
Right now ~75% of residential land in the city is essentially low density/detached SF. If we simply legalized townhome density citywide, that would 6x that land. Legalizing apartment buildings would go even higher.
Right now ~75% of residential land in the city is essentially low density/detached SF. If we simply legalized townhome density citywide, that would 6x that land. Legalizing apartment buildings would go even higher.
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My suspicion is that there's a self reinforcing dynamic to growth and the rate would look more like doubling population in a decade if those weren't obstacles.
hey the more i talk about it the more i realize this is a very good idea, no?
But if we really unleashed building, it's likely that household size would go down. So maybe we'd conservatively need 1.1 million additional homes. That would come out to 110,000 a year, ~10x what we're currently averaging.
My completely uneducated guess; capital is the big throttle.
Even in a more modest double homebuilding scenario, labor could get tight. Contractors price gouge during booms. So even if the labor can be found, it gets pricier, potentially dooming some projects.
To build multiples faster, building thousands of workforce housing units set aside for construction labor to try to recruit more to region would be a good way to get momentum rolling.
If we removed the caps, we'd see a lot more built during boom cycles, which would impact prices and then that would be a virtuous cycle.
harrell... ain't.