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Originally Posted by mhays
This is based on mid-Covid numbers. How asinine.
As for Seattle, it's trending in the right direction. Housing construction is booming, vacancy rates are still pretty low despite that, the tents left the Downtown core when a new mayor was elected this year, Downtown retail openings are gaining steam, tourism was huge this summer... Somehow we also keep breaking ground on new office buildings (typically biotech-friendly ones) in the urban core...at least 11 during Covid off the top of my head, including a couple just starting now.
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On the tents - thank god for whatever they are doing. There was an article from a year ago about a guy in Belltown who had to turn to the corner drug dealers and gang members to keep people from breaking into his store because the local prosecutor wouldn’t put anything more than a misdemeanor on them and the police couldn’t hang out at his doggie day care 24/7 and arrest the same people over and over again only for them to be let back out. Corner drug dealers were the only people willing to act forcefully enough to allow the guy to run his business. It was pathetic.
As for the growth, some observations..
The GMA (via PSRC) mandates that Seattle bear a disproportionate share of the upzoning to absorb the long range projected growth in the region. The rationale being that growth is directed to areas with high capacity infrastructure. However, the local ordinances have effectively put small scale apartment landlords out of business by making it MUCH too hard to evict tenants who refuse to pay rent. What I’m getting at is that, relative to other parts of the country, the return margins in Seattle are very thin, especially compared to other west coast markets like the Bay Area or LA where the state doesn’t sanction municipalities that fail to upzone enough for 20 years of projected growth. In a nutshell, inner north Seattle, Bellevue, and nicer suburbs like Redmond and Issaquah have been frothy AF and predicated on ongoing expansion in the tech sector.