The Renters are Coming

Suspecting what I would find there, I checked out the website, and sure enough, I found this:

This new building will encompass 134 new apartments approximately plus some retail stores. This is a big development (4 stories building) which will have a severe impact in our community as traffic will increase significantly and home value could be negatively impacted.

While it's become popular to blame Amazon and Microsoft for the run-up in housing values, factors like Washington State's Growth Management Act, which restricted the available land for housing, are largely overlook. Also overlooked is the resistance of incumbent homeowners to the large blocks of new housing that are required to keep the supply on par with demand. While this website seems to indicate that it's the size and traffic impacts of the new complex that are the culprits (in language that reads oddly like a non-native speaker of English...) the fact of the matter is that if a shortage of housing is driving prices up, alleviating that shortage is bad for you, if you're a homeowner; especially one who purchased recently.

And this, to me, is the biggest overlooked factor. The hundreds of thousands of households for whom the fact that housing stock is limited becomes a direct infusion of home equity. And not that I necessarily blame them. I know a single mother whose children's college funds are essentially the fact that she can borrow against the high value of her home. If housing prices collapse, one wonders how they'll go to school.

But it is worth keeping in mind that opportunities come at a cost to someone. And sometimes, zero-sum games develop.