Why Small Houses Matter

I recently watched an episode of the FYI Network‘s new small-home reality show, Tiny House Nation, a show hosted by renovation experts John Weisbarth and Zack Giffin. Weisbarth and Giffin travel the country helping families design and build tiny homes. The homes can be in the city or the country, mobile or stationary, but they […]

Buildable Lands Report: The End of Single Family?

 This year’s Buildable Lands Report, a “mid-term check in” for local 10 year Comprehensive Plans, shows some disturbing trends in housing supply. In King County, decision makers, including the Seattle City Council, have restricted the future of both single-family and multifamily segments of the housing market, limiting single-family construction to an extremely small amount of land and […]

More Housing, Fewer Rules, Means More Jobs, More Innovation

A recent study by Dr. Chang-Tai Hsieh and Dr. Enrico Moretti titled Growth in Cities and Countries, found that highly productive cities such as Seattle are limiting not only their own local economic potential, but also the national economic potential, by restricting their housing supply. Hsieh and Moretti call these highly productive cities “innovation clusters,” distinguished […]