Clicked on that list hoping to see good news in Seattle... turns out we're up more than any other city in the top 10. Sigh. There actually is a decent amount of housing construction in progress but it seems like it's not nearly enough.
* Highly constricted physical space, poor public transit and almost continuous traffic problems due to natural bottlenecks. This means people have to live close or else risk a 60 min+ commute one way.
* Single family homes drive a lot of property demand here, not just luxury apartments. Those are still expensive and hard to come by, and they are not building much more of that within the city proper. Average home value is hovering around 500k. Apartment building will not offset this very easily.
* In general, the city was historically undervalued given the insane density of highly skilled and highly paid jobs. We have some heavy hitters and offices of some large international tech companies but rents remained low for quite awhile. This is just the adjustment.
The prices for apartments will level out eventually, but we still have some way to go imo.
I disagree. It's not perfect, and it's definitely no Manhattan subway system, but I live car-free in Seattle while working on the other side of the lake and it has been pretty awesome. The trolleybuses are smooth, there are a bunch of regional express routes, and--especially after the prop 1 passage in 2014--the span of service and on-time performance have both increased.
If your measure of "quality of public transit" is defined in miles of light rail, yes, Seattle's is poor. But the buses, in my experience (though I don't usually travel during traditional commute hours), are a great companion to the light rail that we do have.
They're a disaster compared to other desirable world power cities with functioning public transit, though. Seattle's transit system would be considered a disgrace anywhere in Europe or Asia, or even most parts of the northeastern US.
But paying what we pay in rent is depressing. I record and chart our expenses in a spreadsheet and the piece of the pie for rent just dwarfs everything else.