Is intown Seattle starting to get overbuilt yet?
I suppose that could be answered differently from different perspectives. Google searches for city densities return differing numbers based on boundaries.
Relative to the density of world cities Seattle's density is almost sparse enough to be rural(not really). A city site shows Seattle at 156th densest with about 1,100 people per square kilometer. That's less dense than San Antonio, Detroit and Miami. The same site shows a population of 2,700k which would include Bellevue, Tacoma and probably Everett so, imo, that covers a multitude of suburbs.
Wikipedia, on the other hand, shows Seattle proper 25th in the nation at 6,717 people per square mile. That entry shows Miami with 16,461 people per square mile.
The building here is most dramatic in the downtown core and tapers somewhat in concentric circles. Several downtown 'neighborhoods' are increasing steeply in density and price. The primary driver there is Amazon which is developing the south Lake Union(downtown) area along with Paul Allen(Microsoft/SeaSeahawks/PortTrailblazers). That gives the downtown core three strong neighborhoods to include Belltown and Pioneer Square. This development is almost exclusively vertical.
The first circle outside of downtown includes North Seattle[Ballard, Queen Anne, Magnolia, University(of Washington), Green Lake and others], West Seattle(actually south of the city proper), and the Central District east of the downtown core. All of these areas are accessible from and to downtown without using the freeway and are, in general, about 15 minutes from downtown. Each of these areas have major apartment construction projects from 30 to 200+ units. Some have projected new rental units of several thousand either just completed, underway or scheduled.
Anecdotally, we have several renters in our units that work for Amazon and are reporting signing bonus' of $20k to $30k and more. That fact is a big part of my contention that the tech industry is driving our real estate market. A google search for signing bonus will return many reports of large signing bonus' in both Seattle and San Francisco and I would contend that a major dip in the stock prices of Google, Amazon, Microsoft and a few others would have a major negative impact on the real estate market in both cities.
With respect to Seattle being overbuilt the 4thQ 2013 apartment vacancy rate was 4.1%. That's not a number that indicates overbuilt. The traffic from the neighborhoods above to downtown would indicate Seattle is overbuilt vis a vis it's transportation system. |
