<p>I started this post because I don’t want to detract further attention from the point of the Xavier University post.</p>
<p>Barrons, I cannot accept your ‘that’s the way the market is,’ or ‘that’s life, so we’re compelled to endure it’ lesson. Let me make a point about housing that is specific to the area we have (or had) in common, Seattle.</p>
<p>What has happened to the Seattle housing market is quite distressing, from a cultural AND economic standpoint. I have no objections to rising prices and sellers making lucrative profits. But the plain and simple fact is that demographic groups that were traditionally abused or ignored for by ‘influential housing market forces’ i.e. mortgage lenders and realtors, did not share equally in the benefits of today’s housing market.</p>
<p>My point is, people whose neighborhoods were redlined by banks, specifically Lower Madrona, Madison Valley, Leschi etc, now cannot afford to stay in those neighborhoods as the areas have been “rediscovered.” And no, those areas were never crime ridden or dilapidated. The market doesn’t play by its own rules, and those rules were never objective to begin with. Speculators capitalized on this. They always do.</p>
<p>I think that many people with expertise would say that the cost of housing in Seattle is artificially high. I don’t know if anything reasonable can be done about it, because government intervention is usually flawed (the ‘restoration’ of Holly Park, for example). But you cannot convince me that market trends are always the result of objective forces such as supply and demand.</p>
<p>In light of the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling, should governments be permitted to seize your real property without consent because a speculator can “create a demand” and therefore also create a new market for folks who would pay more for your property in taxes than you would?</p>
<p>I lived for several years in the CD at 19th and Jefferson where I managed a small apt. complex. To say the area was not rundown and did not have crime problems is just false. Redlining if it was true is anti-market and has been dealt with so that I doubt it exists today. People in the CD are selling their homes at prices they would never have anticipated just 10 years ago. They are not being forced to sell but if they so choose they can pocket several hundred thousand dollars in profit and move to a new home in the burbs or whatever they choose.</p>
<p>I think Seattle housing is high but so is most of the West Coast. LA, SD, and SF are much higher. There is nothing artificial about it except for the impact of the severe environmental and zoning limits that make building homes very costly. The alternative is to turn to zero job growth as that is what really drives housing demand.</p>
<p>You have legitimate point about the area at Jefferson and 19th Street. Not te tidiest place in town. I was thinking more of Leschi, Lower Madrona, and specifically where I lived just up the hill from Madison Valley near the East Madison YMCA.</p>
<p>Barrons, redlining was absolutely a fact in Seattle and elsewhere. Findings by the Post-Intelligencer and Seattle Times back in the 1970s revealed it. Was discrimination in Seattle ever as pervasive as Jim Crow and de jure segregation in the old Conferate state. No, but it was common in the Seattle of another time.</p>
<p>One of the great advantages of the Seattle today area is that it is much more successfully racially integrated than other metropolitan areas of the nation (at least the South End). The economic diversity at the census tract level is pretty good too, again in the South End. Particularly when you consider Mount Baker, Seward Park, Pritchard Beach and Fern Hill and Lakeridge and Rainier View neighborhoods. But it is still disturbing to see absentee owners enter these areas to speculate and INFLATE housing prices. Not all new owners, but more than a few.</p>