Fuckin' Waaaaaaah. Wanna see what horrible "regulation" killed microhousing? It's in the text: Wanna see what Cap Hill looks like? Fuckin' half a parking spot per rental unit. So. I start new construction for a 10-unit "studio" apartment block and I need to build ten parking spots... because none of the tenants are not owning a car (and we all know it) and parking is already fucked up there. But I build "micro units" at 200 square feet and all of a sudden I need to build fifteen parking spots and the economics simply don't pencil out because a parking spot is already 100 square feet and suddenly my building is 1/3rd parking. That's not "regulation" that's "quit externalizing your shitty business model all over your neighbors." By the way, studio apartments on Capitol Hill vary in size from 350 sqft to 500 sqft but all hit between $1300 and $1500/mo. That's what we rented our 1300sqft 3br, 1/3 acre house for about six exits north. This isn't the indigent waifs of Seattle we're talking about, this is Amazonians. Up in my hood you can get a mortgage for that much even now.Micro-housing construction cannot pencil out unless it is exempt from mandates to build off-street parking.
Here's a neighborhood in Portland that I lived in for about ten years. https://www.google.com/maps/place/Vendetta/@45.5546997,-122.6667402,3a,75y,105.75h,84.67t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sEPb3fX2HFbK_-7t4xHuVSw!2e0!7i13312!8i6656!4m5!3m4!1s0x5495a7143486b35b:0x2109ff99a8f51cb4!8m2!3d45.5547252!4d-122.6665311!6m1!1e1 Roll back time and look at it in 2007. All those new units have no parking. Anything under five stories doesn't require parking (well it requires bicycle parking). It's going to power our new green public transit/bicycle infrastructure. And like you said, of course all these people have cars and most of them would never be caught dead riding the bus even though there are two convenient bus lines right outside their door. A few of them will buy $2000 dollar bikes and really cute outfits to ride them with, but the minute the rain comes they will be finding the car keys. All around that street are single family neighborhood in which you could usually find parking in around five minutes. It really fucks up the neighborhood.
Holy shit the HOA fees on that place are more than my mortgage. I'm paying $450 including escrow for a house on an acre. Granted I live in BFE in the Ohio Valley but still I can LIVE out here. There is a reason I noped the fuck out of California/West Coast, and shit like this is exhibit A.
Sorry...? I think? Confession: I hate the /r/Seattle subreddit. It is wholly and completely filled with whiney-ass techster hipsters that think the only good sushi is the stuff you wait an hour and pay through the nose for, that Elysian is obviously the worst beer in the world because they allowed InBev to buy them, and that wharrgarbl the only way to fix the housing problem in Seattle is to allow R1 (1 unit per parcel) parcels to be converted to multi-family and they get super salty whenever you point out that annihilating single family homes will fundamentally destroy the character of the place they want to live. They'll gripe about traffic as if it were actually an issue while also bitching about how much tabs cost. Los Angeles won't let you have a legal rental unit without a parking spot. Period. Seattle has a bunch of grandfathered shit with, like, zero parking and one of the worst mass-transit programs in the United States. Yet the eastside is uncool, the south end is uncool, the north end is uncool and who wants to deal with a ferry? CLEARLY the problem is "the man" for not allowing twee little architects to develop... I mean, okay. Here's a $400k house. It was built in 1917, which means it was there during the Depression, which means you can go down to City Hall and buy a print of what it looked like back when one of the New Deal projects was photographing every house in Seattle. Here's streetview - It's on Ravenna blvd, which is beautiful because it legit has a park in between the two lanes. It's this awesome windy-ass road that has long been one of the greenest, chillest parts of Seattle. But this choad? Eighteen apartments. EIGHTEEN. In the space of a 3br, 1100sqft single-family home, he wants to put EIGHTEEN apartments. With zero parking. And see, if the City would just go ahead and give him his goddamn subsidies, that's $11,000/mo in cash straight to the building owner, right from the city. He gets to add another $15,000/mo onto that from rents. And his eighteen apartments at 230sqft each are going to cost him about $300/sqft each to build so if he buys that place for $500k that fucker is pure profit in less than six years. And that's bullshit. And that's really what it comes down to: "I want to ruin your fucking neighborhood because, you know, 26 grand a month is a lot of money." Now explain to me how that's going to make living in Seattle more "affordable."
Yeah Seattle Zoning and housing is all sorts of fucked up. The city is building a 40 unit subsidized housing with a daycare and 5 parking sports near me. That's not even enough parking for the daycare staff. Its highly unlikely that these people will not own cars as many of them probably moonlight as Uber drivers and the ones that dont have jobs at odd hours were public transit doesn't serve them even if they wanted to use it. So thats 40-80 new cars just dumped onto the streets taking up parking spots because some developer didn't want to pay to build a garage.
I can guarantee you it's not "the city." I used to do work on those things. It's some developer working under the aegis of the city and it's shit like this that allows them to do it. Up by my hood? They're adding 300 apartments, 200 senior living units and a hotel up on 196th... and mmmmmmmaybe they'll widen the road at some point. Yaaay.
I have no clue. I live out in bumfuck, pay $800/month mortgage for ~3,000 square feet and can't find a significantly different neighborhood I could move to without my house looking like a used book store if I actually managed to fit my books, computers, and relatively spartan furniture into the space. The only sushi nearby is sold by a grocery store. I guess my point was just that America is weird and I find the intangibles that go into (what look like) insane real estate prices confusing.
This is why I am so hesitant to support the democratic party. I'm sick of regulations like this, and I'm suck of the interests of the people being cut down and handed off to corporate interests. I really don't want to vote for anything else, I want to see proper regulation and steps to ensure the free market doesn't go overboard, I want to see a government that fights against global warming, but this bullshit, nanny-state "we know best for you" is the number one source of issues I have with the US government right now. Stop trying to make people's lives better, it's not your place.