There have been a number of stories over the past few months related to housing costs:

• The Seattle City Council is considering an ordinance on tenants’ move-in fees (they would be capped and could be paid in installments). The Rental Housing Association of Washington writes, “The idea that move‐in fees can be capped and spread out over a period of time without any further impacts to the rental housing market is fundamentally wrong.” 

• Meanwhile, Seattle Mayor Ed Murray had asked a committee of community members to make recommendations on commercial affordability. In September, the committee made its recommendations, which did not include commercial rent control. The Seattle Times notes that the state prohibition on local rent control “does not clearly bar rent control on commercial spaces.” In a special report on rent control, we argue that the law suggests that commercial as well as residential rent control is banned. Further, the solution is not rent control but an increase in supply.

• In September, the Obama administration released a “Housing Development Toolkit.” It shows what local governments can do “to promote health, responsive, affordable, high-opportunity housing markets,” noting,

Over the past three decades, local barriers to housing development have intensified, particularly in the high-growth metropolitan areas increasingly fueling the national economy. The accumulation of such barriers – including zoning, other land use regulations, and lengthy development approval processes – has reduced the ability of many housing markets to respond to growing demand.

• Dan Bertolet has an interesting piece in Sightline about the ins and outs of zoned capacity (“how many new homes could theoretically be built under zoning rules”); he argues that Seattle’s estimate of zoned capacity is too high. Further (emphasis in original),

. . . the most important thing to know about zoned capacity: in every city, zoned capacity is a side show to the main event. The main event is housing prices.

Housing prices are the crux of the matter. They reveal if people have enough housing choices. If vacancy rates are low and rents and housing prices are rising, then a city needs more homes. Period. The city needs to remove zoning-code barriers to more housing, so that builders can construct more homes. Compared with the evidence of the actual housing market, zoned capacity is just fuzzy math.

• The Wall Street Journal writes about a study that found that suburbs may help increase city affordability more than skyscrapers:

Even cities that were able to increase the pace of housing construction without sprawling, such as Portland and Seattle, were unable to keep pace with demand nearly as well as their counterparts that spread outward. Portland saw inflation-adjusted home values increase 78% from 1980 to 2010 and Seattle saw home prices jump 119%, according to BuildZoom. Meanwhile, Las Vegas saw real home values increase just 4.7% and Atlanta saw a mere 14% jump.

• Here’s an interesting Priceonomics story on mobile homes. It looks at why people invest in mobile home parks and why they are a good affordable housing option.

Millions of Americans struggle with rent payments, but still want a lawn. For them, mobile homes are the cheapest form of housing available. At the same time, it’s rare for someone to build a new mobile home park, because no homeowner wants a trailer park nearby. An industry with healthy demand but a fixed supply attracts the country’s capitalists.

The story also makes the point that housing is so expensive because the land is. Meanwhile, The Seattle Globalist reports that a mobile home park in Seattle is closing next year, to be “developed into 89 townhomes.”

• Housing affordability is connected to income inequality, as the WSJ notes:

Moving to a wealthier area in search of job opportunities has historically been a way to promote economic equality, allowing workers to pursue higher-paying jobs elsewhere. But those wage gains lose their appeal if they are eaten up by higher housing costs. The result: More people stay put and lose out on potential higher incomes.

• Finally, Mike Rosenberg of the Seattle Times reported last week that this summer there were more construction cranes at work in Seattle than in any other U.S. city. Seattle had 58 cranes; the city with the second most was L.A., with 40. Some nice imagery in Rosenberg’s story: “Some of the cranes are so close together, especially in downtown and South Lake Union, that crews now have to dance through a sort of synchronized crane ballet to avoid hitting one another with the long horizontal arms.”