Over the past decade, the city of Seattle, on the northern US West Coast, has been mired in housing and homelessness crises from which it is struggling to extricate itself. A question of rapid growth and too slow adaptation, but also a case study for a city like Montreal. First of two aspects under the magnifying glass of the To have to : housing.
Rachel Smith, 25, lives alone in a 300-square-foot studio apartment in Seattle’s college district. “The building is over 100 years old, and the company that owns it refuses to renovate anything, supposedly to preserve its historical value,” she says. The young woman likes the location of her apartment, but not the constant thefts from the storage compartments of her building, the passive-aggressive behavior of its landlords and the hundreds of dollars taken from her account without warning for basic repairs. “The quality of maintenance is so poor that I would rate the building 3 out of 10,” she says.
His rent is US$1,030 a month — a bargain in this city on the northern west coast of the United States.
She recently put her nursing studies on hold to reflect on her educational journey. In the meantime, she is working full-time as a librarian for an hourly wage of US$21. The young woman wants to go back to school, but the idea of combining this desire with work and the high cost of living in Seattle seems impossible to her. “There is no way to find a part-time job that would pay me enough to continue living here while studying. »
In Seattle, stories like Rachel Smith’s are common. For the past decade, the metropolis of Washington State has faced a housing crisis that is testing buyers and renters.
Supply and demand
As of July 2022, the median rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Seattle was US$1,970, much higher than the US national average of US$1,450. Homebuyers in the city could also expect to pay around US$960,000, nearly three times the national median.
Result: the homelessness rate has exploded. 1.59% of Seattle’s population was homeless in 2021.
“To understand how we arrived at this situation, you have to look at it from an economic perspective, that is to say supply and demand,” explains Gregg Colburn, professor of social economy at the University from Washington. The demand for housing in a city depends on the growth of its population, its job market and the income of its population, says the researcher. “In Seattle, we have all of these factors: a strong job market, highly paid people and a growing population. »
Between 2010 and 2020, Seattle saw its population increase by 23.8% thanks, among other things, to the many high-tech companies, including the giants Microsoft and Amazon, which chose to centralize their activities there. This fertile labor market has thus pushed many high-income workers to settle in the Emerald City.
But not all high-growth cities find themselves in the grip of a housing crisis, points out Professor Colburn, giving as examples Phoenix, Arizona, and Charlotte, North Carolina, “that have had a growth very fast and who have built a lot of housing as a result”.
It is not the growth of a city that causes such a crisis, notes the researcher, but rather an insufficient supply of housing in response to this growth. “We therefore find ourselves with a huge imbalance: many very well paid people come to live here, and our response in terms of housing supply is incomplete”, he concludes.
This imbalance is evident in Seattle: in the last 10 years, the median value of a home there has jumped by 80%, while the median income of its inhabitants has only increased by 55%.. The same phenomenon is observed in several other metropolises on the Pacific coast, such as San Francisco and Los Angeles, which are also struggling with a housing crisis.
Many critics hold high-tech companies responsible for the situation, but many industrial workers are at the forefront of the fight for access to housing. This is the case of Suresh Chanmugam, a software engineer at Amazon, who moved to Seattle in 1999. “At the time, my rent was $250 a month for a shared house. In my 23 years here, I’ve seen Seattle become considerably more expensive,” he laments.
Looking for a solution
Faced with the distress of the homeless population and the insufficient response from the City, he wanted to get involved. “It’s the humanitarian impact of this crisis that really started to worry me,” explains the engineer.
Mr. Chanmugam therefore joined in 2017 Tech4Housing, an organization formed by high-tech workers who fight for access to housing in Seattle. The group offers direct assistance to the homeless population and defends its interests with the various levels of government. “We sent our members to testify before the Washington State Legislature, various committees and the City Council in favor of policies that would help make Seattle more affordable,” says the engineer.
Among the projects defended by Tech4Housing are the I-135 initiative, which, if it garners the support of the majority of the population, would allow the creation of social housing inspired by those found in Vienna and Singapore, where more than half of the real estate market is administered by the public sector. For Suresh Chanmugam, such an initiative has become essential: “The city is unaffordable for almost everyone. […] Even our children’s teachers can no longer afford to live here! »
According to Professor Gregg Colburn, offering a public alternative to the private market is one solution. “The mistake we made in the United States was not giving the public sector a big enough role in the distribution of housing,” says the researcher.
About 11% of American households live below the poverty line, but only a tiny minority of them receive federal housing assistance. “So other people are left to fend for themselves in an unaffordable market,” he laments.
“The Canary in the Mine”
Until Tech4Housing’s efforts pay off, Seattle’s housing crisis shows no signs of abating. It even spread to the surrounding area, King County, where the average renter there saw their rent increase by US$273.40 between 2020 and 2021, a jump of 20%.
Meanwhile, in 2021, Seattle took third place in the list of cities with the highest rate of homelessness in the United States.
“You have to think of Seattle as the canary in the mine,” says Professor Colburn. According to him, the fate of the Emerald City is only a glimpse of what awaits cities like Montreal if they do not adapt upstream to their own growth. “What I would say in Montreal is to be pragmatic and make sure to build enough housing to accommodate everyone who needs it,” he says.
While waiting for the housing crisis on the west coast to be resolved, he hopes that the situation will serve as a warning: “Use our crisis as motivation to act as quickly as possible. »