Two recent articles, the first in ARCADE magazine, the second a follow-up in Seattle Magazine, have claimed that Seattle is experiencing an enormous and unprecedented increase in demolitions.
This simply isn’t true.
The erroneous analysis started in Schema Design’s ARCADE magazine, which ran a story and accompanying graphics showing the number of demolition permits per year growing from a mere 14 in 2005 to an expected 875 in 2015. Knute Berger followed up with a column in Seattle Magazine that cited the ARCADE piece and a supposed 8-fold increase in demolitions. In reality, demolitions are down from their previous peak in 2007 and 2008 and roughly in line with long-term trends.
Schema’s mistake? They draw their 10 year analysis from a dataset titled “Building Permits issued in the past five years”. When they plot this data, it’s no surprise that 2010-2015 looks dramatically different from 2005-2009, a period that isn’t included in their source data. The data does contain a few holdovers from previous years, making the resulting graph look plausible if you’re already inclined to believe the article’s conclusions.
(I contacted Schema Design and they amended the article with a statement expressing regret for the misleading analysis.)
Here are the actual statistics on demolitions, straight from the Department of Planning and Development. Note that this graph shows the number of housing units demolished, whereas the ARCADE piece used the number of demolition permit applications, so the numbers are not directly comparable.
Demolitions are indeed up in 2014, but only by about 60 percent over the 20-year average, and they look to be going down for 2015. As a whole, 2010-2015 demolitions are actually down by a third compared to 2005-2009. That’s a far cry from the 8-fold increase stated in the Seattle Magazine.
The articles in ARCADE and Seattle Magazine no doubt tap into a widespread feeling that there are a lot of demolitions. As a value judgement, people can disagree on what constitutes “a lot”. What should be clear from the data, however, is that there’s no explosion in demolitions. In fact, the pace of demolitions is entirely average.
Ethan is the founder and lead organizer for Seattle Tech 4 Housing, a grassroots education and advocacy group fighting for progressive housing reform. Seattle Tech 4 Housing was founded on the principals that the tech boom can and should benefit every Seattle resident; that abundant and affordable housing is the foundation of an equitable city; and that the tech community in particular has a responsibility to fight for solutions. Ethan is also the founder of Seattle in Progress, a real estate tech consultancy and website for tracking construction in Seattle.
My single family neighborhood is having a lot of tear downs. Buy an old $500K house, knock it down, spend $500K on a newly constructed house on newly vacated lot. New house then appraises for $1.2 million and up. Very crazy but no net loss in housing units, and even sometimes the new house includes an accessory dwelling unit as well.
I think it would be interesting to see the number of demolitions that are replaced by new (presumably bigger) houses versus the number of demolitions that are replaced by apartments.
i don’t know how to break down the numbers for single family – i would posit many of them were torn down for new house on same site. it gets a little funkier in the LR zones where many have been torn down for 2-4 housing units – but also several for microhousing.
however, despite the rhetoric, the number of apartments being lost to development is quite small.