Jake: Seattle could fix the homeownership problem if it wanted to

I read a piece in The Seattle Times this morning on the gap between renting and buying in this city, and one number jumped off the page: the average rent in Seattle runs about $2,100 a month. The average mortgage payment? Around $4,500. More than double.

Now, that’s not a perfect apples-to-apples comparison — the rent figure is pulled from apartments while the mortgage side reflects mostly single-family homes. Size matters, but even accounting for that, the numbers are brutal. A 6% interest rate doesn’t help, and neither does the median Seattle home price sitting near $1 million.

The article dances around the real issue, though. Buried in it is this line:

“Twin trends played out in the Seattle-area housing market in recent years: Home prices and mortgage rates remain stubbornly high while rents have leveled off following an influx of new apartment construction.”

There’s your answer. More supply, lower prices. It’s not complicated.

So why aren’t we building more? Regulation.

Seattle makes it extraordinarily difficult to build. Compare it to Bellevue — same county, similar market — and the difference is stark. Permit wait times in Bellevue run three to six months. In Seattle? Four to eight. That’s a 44% longer wait, and that’s before you factor in environmental hurdles or the nightmare of building on a slope.

Here’s a number that should make your jaw drop: in Washington, regulation accounts for 29.5% of the cost of a new home. On the state’s median home price of $690,000, that’s more than $200,000 — just in regulatory costs.

I’m not arguing for zero regulation. Safe construction standards matter. Environmental protections matter. But there’s a wide gap between sensible guardrails and what Seattle currently puts builders through — and that gap is being paid for by everyone who’s priced out of owning a home.

The maddening part? This is fixable. Cut the red tape, streamline permitting, and watch what happens. More homes get built. More apartments go up. Prices come down. It really is that simple — and Seattle knows it.

They just don’t seem to want to fix it.

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