Economy
When It Comes to Housing Affordability, Are Cities Like Seattle Doomed?
At their annual gathering this week, America's urban planners confronted a growing crisis in the country's most expensive cities.
By most measures, Seattle is exactly the kind of urban success story to be celebrated by the 6,300 planners and other city-minded activists who gathered here this week for the American Planning Association’s annual National Planning Conference.
This is a city with plenty of height and density, after all. It has streetcars and other transit, plus bikes and pedestrians coursing through a grid. There are lots of innovation-economy jobs, too, as witnessed by the Amazon-fueled building boom all along Westlake Avenue. It’s as green a city as they come, and there’s a bustling foodie scene, thoroughly local and organic. Even the weather was nice.