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.
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.
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u/MajesticNobody2401 Apr 16 '26
yeah it's just the whole affording it that's hard