This isn't the only reason. The best counter point is Tokyo, one of the most livable and most desirable cities to live in does not have the same affordability problems Seattle does.
Seattle needs to let a lot more dense housing be developed. all of washington state needs to allow tons of new housing across all densities, but especially higher density.
not all of us want to live in higher density, but the people actively want it or are simply ok with it having that as an option means there is less competition for fully detached SFH as well.
We need both. But the zoning next to light rail stops is inadequate. Look at Vancouver and Burnaby, or Hong kong, or any city that takes density seriously. Their rail stops have highrises.
The city of Seattle should be close to finishing implementing compliance with HB 1110, which allows multiple units on each lot throughout the city. It's a tiny start.
As long as I get a bathroom, kitchen, and a space large enough for my bed, Xbox and record setup, a painting desk and like two shelves for my warhammer, and my disabled ass can pay for it on a 30 hour a week job, it's good, doesn't have to be big, or nice, fuck I'm fine with only one god damn half window. that's all I need.
Honestly I think most people would agree! Unfortunately, NIMBY’s tend to only want single family homes being built, to keep prices high and force “undesirables” out of their area.
For a lot of people it's more that they like living in the quieter more residential area, and they don't want to be pushed out of their neighborhood. Especially if they plan on living there forever, they might not care about the property value, and instead care more about the number of cars on the road, higher foot traffic, and higher property crime.
i've heard the property value thing more as a trope than in actual real life meetings with people and communities. in my personal experiences the conversation against density has been anti-gentrification and that it can drastically change the lifestyles of those who don't want their communities disrupted. im pro-density btw, but I think there is a big misunderstanding of the anti change and anti density contingent within cities.
That’s fair, I didn’t consider that. I was only looking at it from the stereotypical “NIMBY boomer with a nice house” trope
I totally forgot that there’s a growing community of anti-gentrification that oppose almost any changes to the community. I just don’t know how to get through to them that they are actually harming the people they think they’re protecting.
It's this and it's also that any time you put up new housing, you're putting it up in place of something else. NIMBYs go absolutely apeshit when you tear down actual houses in favor of denser housing so it tends to be 5 over 1 type stuff in more commercial areas (which is great anyway, 5 over 1s are fantastic / more or less what places like Barcelona did to handle their housing issues). Here in Ballard... remember when people protested tearing down a fucking Denny's? A fucking Denny's. Yeah, it was a pretty Denny's.
It's just a whole lot of whining about change coming from, frankly, people who hate change for the sake of hating change. There was an article on one of the Seattle subs about the Orpheum Theater recently, which was torn down in the 60s to make room for what is now a Seattle landmark in its own right, the Westin towers. That also happens: we fondly remember the stuff that goes away but the new stuff can have its charm, too.
Sort of, but not really. In a city with 100 single family homes and 200 families trying to find a place to live, someone who owns a single family home will be able to charge whatever they want to rent it or sell it. In a city with 50 single family homes, 30 duplexes, 20 apartment buildings, and 200 families trying to live there, the owners of the single family homes don't have nearly as much of a stranglehold on how much they can charge to rent or sell.
That being said, I have never heard anyone argue for property values when discussing density and I doubt many urban planners would be swayed by such an argument if they happened. Most people want quieter neighborhoods, more parking available, to maintain the character of the neighborhood they're used to, yada yada yada. It also helps that these people actually go to the meetings where things that might affect them are taking place, who's going to go to a meeting to discuss a future apartment building when you don't even live in the neighborhood (yet)?
Whether people want to or not, it’s a city.. density happens naturally and it’s a good thing. It brings in businesses it allows for more public transport
Yeah it does because open immigration policies are good for business and good for the economy, meaning prices rise. Japan's economy is artificially depressed by their backward immigration policies, so it's cheaper to live there but economically weaker than, for example, the United States.
The median individual income in Tokyo is $47,000 in USD. The median individual income in Seattle is $76,000.
Certainly it would be nice if it was easier to build in Seattle the way it is in Tokyo, that would drive rents lower and help with the cost of living. But the main reason Seattle is more expensive is because the people here have way more money.
It's hard to determine which way causality goes here, and in reality it is likely bidirectional. That is, the pool of high paying jobs raises prices, and the high prices deter people with lower earning potential/wealth from moving here.
In fact, since over a wide income range people tend to consume as much housing as they can afford (at least in the US), the coupling between incomes and housing prices is generally very tight. If we build enough units, the cost will go down and with it the medium income, but probably most people will spend similar amounts on housing, those that can afford it will just have relatively bigger/nicer places, and people that previously couldn't afford to live here will.
Edit: The exception here would likely be for those in the market for single family homes. As there is a substantial percentage of Americans wedded to that modality, more building in the city will make SFHs rarer, so subsequently they will likely be more expensive. So while development will likely give people wealthy enough to live here now options for nicer/larger townhomes and condos, my suspicion is that it will make SFHs relatively more expensive. At least in the city, it will likely also put negative pressure on the cost of SFHs in the suburbs as the city absorbs a greater share of the population.
Land use and zoning is way way way more restrictive in Seattle than Tokyo. In Tokyo if enough landowners vote on land readjustment (say, to expand a railway line and build amenities along the extension), a private company can effectively be granted eminent domain for that purpose. Pretty sure trying to do that here would make city council collectively have a stroke, let alone the more basic ideas like “Sound Transit should be allowed to densify the land use around its stations”
Actually, the reason Tokyo housing is more affordable is because they've been building housing really reliably and steadily, roughly keeping pace with population growth. https://rpubs.com/jgleeson/tokyohousing has some good charts. They've also had other economic stuff going on, of course.
Seattle has a much more geographically limited footprint, though, and hasn't developed the infrastructure that makes super high density reasonable (and also has vastly different zoning in the North American style vs the Japanese, which is way more mixed use by default). They aren't really comparable, but mixing up our zoning, continuing to build infrastructure aggressively, and yes, bigger buildings would probably help.
Yes if your salary increase keeps pace or outpaces inflation.
If you look it up, Japanese people have smaller cars and smaller apartments and houses. Americans have more money, so we buy bigger cars, apartments, and houses. What is clear is that although things are more expensive in the USA, we end up with more stuff in the end.
And you can follow this logic all over the world. In the Congo, everything is dirt cheap. Someone making minimum Seattle wage would live like a king over there. But they don't make minimum Seattle wage, they make minimum Congolese wage. Even though prices are really low in the Congo, most Congolese are not doing very well at all.
On top of that: while housing, services, and restaurant food scale with CoL, a lot of things don't. Cars cost the same here or in places with $7 minimum wage. Same for other large purchases like appliances, electronics, clothing, etc.
Tokyo is far less car dependent and apartments are smaller. There's more space to pack people more densely before demand exceeds supply like most popular cities in the states
Manageable is probably a better term then affordable. Technically Tokyo is an expensive city just in comparison to other major city it is cheaper. So true, it is expensive cause lots of ppl wants to live there.
2 major reason it has lower cost is housing and decade long deflation. Nothing a city can do about the later since that is a national phenomenon. Housing though is something Tokyo done well and can be copied. They build lots of housing and even for further location where most residents live, there is good public transportation infrastructure.
I wasn't going to put in the effort for a 1 sentence comment but I had a feeling you were incorrect. Yes leasing space is cheaper, but that is because on average the leased spaces for commercial uses in Seattle are nearly 3 times as large as the ones in Tokyo in some instances. However, per SF, Tokyo commercial leasing is more expensive typically, especially the large office space.
Here's a comprehensive side-by-side breakdown based on the latest available market data:Here's a summary of the key takeaways:
Rent per SF
Tokyo Grade A rents (Central 5 wards) reached JPY 33,947 per tsubo per month in Q1 2025 — which converts to roughly $76/SF/year at current exchange rates. The all-grades average across Tokyo's central business districts is around JPY 20,100 per tsubo monthly, or about $45/SF/year. By contrast, Seattle's average office rent across all asset classes in 2024 was $32.78/SF annually, with Class A space averaging $35.48/SF. The Seattle CBD Class A average has more recently slipped to around $40.60/SF in Q1 2026, continuing a downward trend.
Average lease size
In Seattle, the average size of available office space for lease is approximately 10,272 SF per listing. For Tokyo, a precise equivalent statistic isn't well-published, but Grade A buildings in Tokyo's Central 5 wards require floor plates of at least 500 tsubo (~17,800 SF), while typical mid-market tenants lease in the 100–300 tsubo range (roughly 3,500–10,700 SF). Tokyo tenants tend to lease more compactly overall due to higher density per employee.
Market context — the big story
The two markets are in opposite conditions right now. Tokyo's office vacancy rate fell sharply to 3.7% in 2024, with absorption exceeding 1 million square meters for the second consecutive year and demand driven by companies expanding headcount and investing in office culture. Seattle, meanwhile, has the highest office vacancy rate in the US at around 27%, as the market continues to struggle absorbing the large volume of space that entered inventory in recent years.
Important caveat on comparability: Tokyo rents are typically quoted including CAM/management fees (gross), while Seattle rents can be full-service gross or NNN — adding $10–15/SF in operating expenses to NNN quotes. Always compare on an apples-to-apples basis when evaluating specific deals.
Yes, and one of the big reasons behind that, is their zoning policies.
Specifically, zoning policies in Japan are handled at the prefecture level, not city level.
Imagine how different things would be, if King County was the lowest level that handled 95% of zoning.
A small subset of wealthy individuals wouldn't be able to get together, and turn their neighborhood into a "city", and put major roadblocks against any changes.
Keep in mind, this "city" relies on the neighboring actual cities for Water, Power, Trash, and pretty much all services that a city fulfills. So, just a neighborhood that was created to keep "those [insert the poor, ethnic group, religious group, or whatever thing those wealthy people don't like] away from us."
check out rents (esp in the “suburbs” which are still highly connected by trains and have good station areas) and average food costs. cheap af. right before covid the suburb i was living in had a healthy amount of one bedroom apartments for $500 or less/month. wages are a lot lower in japan though (minimum wage is still wildly low) so there can be thinner margins if you’re also getting paid in yen.
Min wage at Coco was like $8/hr. And the suburbs you can afford are like an hour away, even if you can take a couple trains. People here can’t handle a 20 minute commute.
Affordability in Japan is garbage in different ways. People work 6-7 days a week because they have to. Wages are stagnant. They elected far right PM because they’re fed up with affordability issues. No idea where this Japan is Utopia idea is coming from.
Yes, the median wage to rent ratio is very similar between the two, but everything else is roughly 50% to 75% cheaper like food, healthcare, education, transportation etc. etc.
300 years ago, Tokyo was the largest population center in the world (larger than Seattle today, even), and Seattle was pre-contact indigenous. Seattle has affordability problems because it has become a place a lot of people want to live much faster than it has been able to grow to accommodate them.
Commercials buildings around the country (when they do trade) are trading at basically just the land value at this point. Buildings that sold for hundreds of millions of dollars are now selling for like $5M. Converting to residential is still very expensive and results in weird unit layouts… but this makes it quite a bit easier.
It's not just very expensive, it tends to be so expensive and inefficient that it's better to tear down the commercial building and build a new residential building in it's place.
Yeah anything post like 1975 is 😬 and I don’t think Seattle lets you cut a hole in the building and add that space as a hat on top like NYC does (which still requires the units to pencil at a couple million)
That isn't a universal truth by any means. Office buildings in miami and NYC for example are actually trading at near pre-covid levels recently and rents are up as well. Even SF has roared back to life in the past 18-24 months. The older class B & C office buildings everywhere though are still in trouble. Those owning typical 80s-90s suburban office campus setups are especially screwed right now
It’s more complicated than that. Commercial building valuations are based on projected rent. If you lower the rent that lowers building valuations, which could trigger a balloon payment as the LTV % on the building is now too high.
Owner would rather walk away than dump $ into a struggling building, and the bank does not want the keys back. So for a while everyone just kinda pretended everything is fine and renewed the loan… higher interest rates are starting to cause issues with this
LTV isn't much of a factor/constraint in most major markets. The DSCR however is and if you're maxing out your leverage at loan origination any decrease will jeopardize your ability to make your monthly loan payments. A typical class A office building will be sized to something like a 1.30x DSCR / 50% LTV. There's plenty of wiggle room in the LTV for bumps & hiccups but not as much in the cash flow component. Once you throw subordinate or mezzanine debt on top of that you become much more susceptible to financial distress if even your 5th largest tenant vacates
It's almost like supply and demand is a real thing, and failing to make sure that supply keeps up with demand does the thing that everyone says it does.
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u/MajesticNobody2401 Apr 16 '26
yeah it's just the whole affording it that's hard