The Seattle Times reports on lagging new-home building in the suburbs of Seattle.
For decades, housing construction in King County looked about how you’d expect: Seattle, which has about one-third of the county’s population, built about one-third of the region’s new housing. The suburbs that make up the rest of the county built the rest.
But now that has all changed: Seattle is building housing like never before. And housing growth has slowed significantly in the suburbs.
The shift is the result of a combination of developers chasing the biggest profits in Seattle – where housing demand has gone through the roof, and city leaders have opened the floodgates for bigger buildings – and suburbs restricting new construction through zoning laws that all but ban new housing in most parts of the region.
