This is a blog post about housing in Seattle, but I hope it leaves the reader with new perspectives in their own cities when it comes to addressing affordable housing and homelessness.

We should remove policies that try to decide how and when housing developers profit, because that thinking does more harm than good.

A Personal Anecdote

I had the fortunate opportunity to spend nearly 7 years of my career at a technology company called Gusto in San Francisco. Gusto provides payroll, benefits, and HR tools to small businesses in the US.

During my tenure, Gusto grew from about 20 software engineers to several hundred. It was beautiful chaos. We were constantly trying to invent the future while reinventing ourselves.

The organization eventually grew to the point where it could stomach funding multiple, competing priorities. Two bets that were being made at the company were essentially “Will we continue to build our code in a monolith?” and “Will we write code in microservices?” I was Team Monolith and spent more emotional energy than I would like trying to discredit Team Microservices.¹

It didn’t matter and it wasn’t my decision to make. Antagonizing my colleagues on Team Microservices harmed my own reputation and some of my career prospects at the company. Given a few years of reflection, I realize my error was in trying to police others’ behaviors instead of giving them the space to fail or succeed on their own performance. Spending emotional energy, political capital, or whatever you want to call it finding the right way instead of betting on the emergent capability of successful innovation is a failure.

In a sense, I was preventing others from getting rich rather than practicing a “same team” mindset. Regardless of who was successful in these competing bets, the company (and my stock) would be better off for it. I should have kept my mouth shut and focused on my own efforts.

This led me to an important realization: in a growing and successful startup, you will watch people you like and people you dislike getting rich alongside yourself.² Policing who gets rich and on what terms would consume a young startup. You gotta live with it.

What Does This Have to Do with Housing?

In South Park, which has had [more permissive] zoning since 2019, developers are building up to six separate, small houses on a single lot, with no room for shade trees to grow.

The effect is a colorless, charmless, heat island that makes money for developers at the expense of everyone else.

You wouldn’t want to live next to it, and chances are, in the next heat wave, you wouldn’t want to live in it, either.

Seattle Times Editorial Board, Dec 5, 2024³

I recognized a familiar mindset while drinking my coffee and reading the Sunday paper last month. This sentiment is identical to my prior feelings of Team Microservices at my former employer. It says, “You can’t get rich unless I say so.” This belief is incredibly destructive to the life of a city or a company. Even permitting this we-should-decide-who-gets-rich argument is unscalable; given the choice we’d probably get N different opinions for N people in the city. Gridlock.

While some might bristle at the idea of housing developers becoming obscenely wealthy, value is accrued by everyone in the city as more housing is built.

This also betrays some of the truly great cities out there. I don’t think of New York, Amsterdam, London, Tokyo, Berlin, et al. as being especially green. Their greenery tends to be concentrated into great parks located near population centers. Uniform greenery is a unique attribute of Seattle, but I believe we can maintain that character while permitting more housing. We still have the Arboretum, Discovery, Seward, and more.

All of Seattle will not be Manhattanized overnight, but I believe the city would benefit to lean into being Brooklynized.

Let Them Get Rich (or Poor)

Seattle is one of the more difficult places to construct new housing in the country. According to a 2006 study by Wharton, it’s slightly behind San Francisco in terms of regulatory complexity at the sixth position nationally.⁴

Without even looking at the data, one can reason that a longer process for getting housing approved increases the cost of housing. Assuming that there are people with salaries behind each project, longer timelines mean more salaries to be paid. For housing to get built at all, the costs (i.e. those salaries) need to be less than the revenue generated by the new building. Efforts to police what type of housing can be built and how it can be built might even make developers richer!

In Seattle, there are 8 design review boards that are part of the process of permitting new housing.⁵ These design review boards have authority over a building’s “form, massing, and architectural design”. They do not have anything to do with the safety of the building, a responsibility handled by the Department of Construction and Inspections (SDCI). The mere existence of these design reviews adds to the pre-construction timeline. This logically increases the cost of new construction. Assuming no changes are requested to the design, this adds at least 4-6 months to the process in the simplest case.⁶

Why does a design review board get to dictate the look of new housing? Few developers likely want to build an ugly, inaccessible building. They would have trouble selling or renting units. That would be a bad use of funds! Entrusting the look of a building to a static group of individuals narrows the possible results of what housing could look like in the Seattle. This tastemaking function in the permitting process counterintuitively creates the “charmless” city that the Seattle Times editorial board bemoaned.

Because the design review has nothing to do with the safety or logistics of new construction, it should be eliminated entirely. We should expect to see shorter housing construction timelines, which will result in more affordable homes for all.

High Variance Housing

What we need in west coast housing policy is comfort with higher variance while not sacrificing safety. Rather than trying to find a “better” version of the design review or policies like it, get rid of them. Let builders go wild and experiment.

This should result in a higher variance of housing and increased competition. Rather than be constrained to the 5-over-1 template that the current process produces, we should expect to see more varied construction throughout the city. With these varied options, you might see something that offends your sensibilities. That’s fine! You are not compelled to live there!

With minimal constraints, we should see a broader range of architectural and financial models competing to attract residents. The best rise to the top, eventually setting new standards.

By enabling higher variance and competition among developers, we would also see some developers getting obscenely rich. They might find a format that everyone wants to live in and call home. We should also see just as many developers striking out and producing mediocre buildings. Over time, the mediocrity will get replaced with better buildings. We have to be comfortable with letting those developers getting rich, and not try to police who gets the spoils of taking a risk.

I’m convinced that this high-variance, anything-goes housing policy is part of what makes Tokyo the object of millennial obsession. Tokyo has big apartments wedged next to tiny homes, in a patchwork that feels organic and serves its citizens. It’s beautiful chaos. We should look to cultivate our own version of this beautiful chaos for the betterment of the city.

What about Social Housing?

Seattle has also voted for social housing initiatives, such as I-135 in a 2023 special election. This creates a social housing developer authority to create housing for folks earning 120% or less than the median income of the area. Let’s do this, as long as it doesn’t come at the expense for our ability to build housing privately. Let’s assess its success at providing housing alongside other alternatives. Let’s support these things in a portfolio of other experiments and investments.

Beautiful chaos has space for a public option. We should not view this as a replacement for privately-funded, speculative housing endeavors.

Much like the United States Postal Service (public) competes alongside private alternatives (FedEx, UPS), we should create the space for public alternatives. Yes to social housing experiments, yes to private market experiments, and let’s measure results side-by-side.

The Tides are Changing

Seattle is in the process of collectively admitting defeat in its approach to housing and homelessness. I was surprised to see The Stranger publish “Where the Left Went Wrong on Homelessness” this month. The Stranger, for those without context, describes itself as a paper that “defines, defends, and sometimes defies the culture and politics of Seattle.” Hopefully I would not be out-of-line as characterizing it as a more left-leaning publication.

This article being published in this venue signifies a willingness to admit defeat in the current policies on housing and homelessness. What we’ve tried isn’t working. It’s time to call this a failed experiment and move on. It’s good to see that saying this is politically viable in the only state that became more blue in the 2024 election.⁷ Contrary to what the current administration might message, living in a blue state does not mean we lack brain cells.

Now is a great time to assess past sentiments and practices, and move towards one we feel will serve citizens better. It’s time to get rid of the developers-are-evil meme. This meme obstructs our ability to build affordable housing.

We may also choose to pay more attention to the impact of policy, not its intent. Design review comes from a good place but achieves the opposite of its goal.

Let’s Not Miss This Opportunity

A city that is less fixated on choosing which developers get to earn how much is a better, more vibrant city.

Seattle and the surrounding area are unique economically. The city has more varied industries than it did in the late 1960’s, when Boeing’s downsizing resulted in a 25% unemployment rate. We should embrace this attention and opportunity to absorb folks wanting to move here. The city will continue to change, and we should welcome that.

This will result in those that build housing making money hand-over-fist. That’s fine. If that bothers you, think of it as the price to pay for having an ever-more vibrant city. We should remove the policing of who gets to get rich as a valid opinion in discussions about housing.

Seattle is no New York, Berlin, or London. But it might grow into one. Let’s not get in our own way of making that happen.

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Special thanks to Richard D. Worth for catching a typo. I had erroneously dated the editorial board’s article as 2025 instead of 2024. It has now been corrected.

1. What a monolith and a microservice is isn’t important to this post. You can replace them with “Apple” and “Banana”. ↩

2. Compensation in a startup is centralized in its equity. You get more equity the earlier you join, since you have a bigger impact on the future trajectory of the company. Many people on Team Microservices had been at the company longer than me. Every time my stock’s value grew $1, theirs probably grew $10. ↩

3. “More paving, fewer trees. So much for a green ‘One Seattle’”, Seattle Times, Dec 5, 2024 ↩

4. “A New Measure of the Local Regulatory Environment for Housing Markets: The Wharton Residential Land Use Regulatory Index”, 2006 ↩

5. Design Review - Boards & Staff, Seattle.gov ↩

6. “Is It Time for Seattle to Do Away with Design Review?”, Publicola, May 3, 2022. ↩

7. “Why Washington appears to be the only state to shift blue in 2024”, Axios ↩