A series of new high–profile books (and articles, lectures, conferences, networks, etc) propose a new framework of abundance and call out the failures of governance in cities and states led by Democrats, with a particular focus on housing.

It’s a strange feeling when suddenly lots of people are talking about what has often felt like an obscure niche obsession of mine – how to build more housing in cities. This month’s note isn’t meant to be my take on abundance, I haven’t even read the books yet. But I do want to highlight one thing that seems missing from this narrative: my hometown. Not all liberal cities are alike when it comes to building housing, and there are some important lessons to be learned from the successes (yes you read that right, successes) of a very liberal city like Seattle.

The correlations between housing production and partisanship are unavoidable. On average, blue states build far fewer homes than red states. San Francisco is a deep blue city that has become a poster child for these problems and deservedly so. There are lessons that California needs to learn from Texas and Florida, San Francisco from Austin, etc. In many recent discussions about housing abundance, I’ve heard Seattle lumped in with San Francisco. While the affordability and homelessness challenges are similar, from a production perspective the two cities are very different. People who want to build more housing in cities, near jobs, in walkable neighborhoods, can learn a lot from what Seattle does well and what it still fails to do.

If you live in Seattle, you probably don’t feel like you live in a housing success story. I don’t mean to gloss over the huge problems. I experience the high cost of housing here every month when I pay rent. I see the huge increase in homelessness in Seattle every day when I walk through my neighborhood. Production alone won’t solve these problems. But from a housing production perspective, Seattle is a success with meaningful benefits. If we just focus on the problems, we miss the lessons from what Seattle has done well.

From 2010 to 2020, Seattle built more housing (relative to its existing housing stock) than all major American cities except Austin and Denver.  Seattle added about 60,000 new homes and did so in an area of only 83 square miles. Austin added 90,000 new homes in 305 square miles. Even more remarkably, Seattle built over 80% of these new homes in just the roughly 15% of land area that are designated “urban villages.” Seattle also built far more homes than its surrounding suburbs. For these reasons, the Seattle region was adding density, while Austin and most other major metropolitan areas were sprawling outward. Housing production in Seattle has even increased since the 2010s. In 2024, Seattle added a net 14,269 new homes. San Francisco, by comparison, added only 1,735 homes last year.

Housing in Seattle is still incredibly expensive. Supply alone is not a solution for affordability. It needs to be combined with subsidy, stability, and anti-displacement strategies. And the incredible amount of housing production in Seattle’s urban villages is less impactful precisely because it is so geographically limited.

Still, we can learn some lessons from the regulatory environment in this 15% of the city that could be applied elsewhere in the region and the country. What are those lessons? A full answer to that should be someone’s dissertation, but here is a top 10 list of policies that jump out to me for consideration in more parts of Seattle, more neighboring suburban cities, and other regions around the country:

• Zoning – within the urban villages, Seattle allows midrise (6-9 stories) residential and mixed-use buildings on a lot of land. In some places you can build much higher, but midrise is the workhorse of Seattle’s housing production.
• Building code – this is another essential component of the midrise success. In Seattle you can build lower cost wood-frame construction higher than anywhere else I know of in the country. In other cities people talk about building 5 over 1. That’s typically 5 stories of type V (wood frame) over 1 story of type I (concrete). But Seattle allows 6 stories of type V over up to 3 stories of type I, making the 5 over 1 terminology very confusing.
• Fee simple townhomes – the process for subdividing a typical Seattle single family lot into several smaller townhome lots is relatively easy. This allows townhomes to be sold fee simple, like detached homes, avoiding the cost and complexity of condoization.
• Parking – while parking requirements remain in effect in other parts of the city, they have been mostly eliminated in the urban villages for over a decade. Furthermore, these are neighborhoods where it’s easier to live without a car, making developers more likely to take advantage of that flexibility.
• Vesting – in Washington State, once you submit your initial permit application to build a new project, you are vested under the regulations at that moment. Vesting happens earlier here than almost anywhere else in the country, offering certainty for developers that no one can change the rules mid-project.
• Environmental review – while zoning changes and large individual projects are subject to environmental review, most apartment buildings are exempt from project-based review in the urban villages.
• Co-living – for a few years in the 2010s, Seattle allowed dormitory style apartments with shared kitchens and common spaces in many parts of urban villages. While they were later banned, during this short time thousands of these affordable tiny homes were built. Seattle just re-legalized them last year.
• No impact fees – Seattle is one of the few cities in the state that doesn’t charge impact fees on new housing.
• Inclusionary zoning – Seattle implemented inclusionary zoning requirements alongside upzones, with requirements calibrated to reflect market conditions. The record 14,269 homes built in 2024 are almost entirely from projects that vested after inclusionary zoning went into effect.
• Underutilized lots – back in 2010, Seattle still had a lot of vacant lots, surface parking lots, and other underutilized land in urban villages that were easy to build on, though that’s less true now.

Lately, Seattle has been resting on its housing production laurels as other cities are stepping up. While homes completed hit a record high last year, new permit applications fell to the lowest level in recent memory. Permit times have gotten longer. More and more of the formerly underutilized land in the existing urban villages is now built up to midrise densities. Beyond just the cost of housing, Seattle feels like its struggling right now on many fronts. As we confront our challenges and try to figure out what went wrong, we should learn from what Seattle got right the last decade and not be shy about tooting our horn a bit too. The national housing conversation would benefit from understanding what is happening in this corner of the country.