High housing costs and homeless people driving man out of Seattle

Blogger in Seattle

After 14 years a Seattle man, fed up with homeless, out-of-control housing costs, and tin-eared politicians has had enough.

He's leaving.

From his op-ed in the Seattle Times:

As a professional science writer, I've certainly grown accustomed to the crass insults that have become routine in our toxic political environment. I just didn’t expect it from a person for whom I voted. But perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised.

Slowly but surely, Seattle has become an angry place. Councilmember Kshama Sawant called a police shooting a “brutal murder.” She also tweeted that it was “terrible” for a feminist organization to wish that Barbara Bush, on her death, rest in peace. As a congressional candidate, Pramila Jayapal supporters implied that her respectable opponent, Brady Walkinshaw, was a misogynist and racist. And former Mayor Ed Murray, whose pattern of alleged sexual behavior finally caught up with him, remained defiant until the bitter end.

For a city that prides itself on being “anti-Trump,” it is difficult to see how exactly we’re supposed to possess the moral high ground over “The Other Washington.”

The toxic politics are bad enough, but the city also has become unaffordable for the middle class. Partly, that is due to high demand (which is a good problem for a city to have), but it’s also due to self-inflicted wounds, such as a restrictive housing policy that artificially caps supply. Seattle is well on its way to becoming the next Vancouver, British Columbia, with the median housing price having spiked to an eye-watering $820,000, far outside the reach of the middle class. Unless they are able to save for about 14 years to afford a down payment, millennials can forget about homeownership entirely.