“Seattle was built out on pilings over the sea, and at high tide the whole city seemed to come afloat like a ship lifting free from a mud berth and swaying in its chains."
Seattle has an instructive history of innovation - sometimes to the extreme - as it has grappled with its housing shortage. Some city policies have been enormously successful, others undoing years of progress almost overnight, leaving behind a fairly clear record of what works and what doesn’t.
The first experiment started during the 1990s when Seattle experimented with upzoning residential areas from single-family to low-rise multifamily. Imagine lots that supported single houses converted into lots supporting townhomes. Gone were the yards and detached garages, enter many more conditioned square feet and a significant increase in total available homes in the city. Years of increased housing supply growth followed, right up until 2019, when Seattle famously imposed an inclusionary zoning mandate that crushed the home-building market.
What were the home-price appreciation impacts of these changes? How did the development community respond? Did affordability problems improve? A new study analyzed these questions and found results worth examining closely.1
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