A 20% down payment on the standard Seattle home, which costs $800,000, will run you $160,000. Even with that down payment, you can expect to pay ~$3,400 on a 30-year mortgage. I must now remind people that I bought a home in the Central District for $70,000 in the not-too-distant year of 1998. (A 20-year adjustment to standard inflation places its value at around $120,000.) My down payment was $5,000. My mortgage, $600. I made less than $40,000 a year as a freelancer and adjunct lecturer. Those were the days for a young person in the arts. (Zillow presently places the value of that old house of mine at an unrealistic $800,000.)
We need to keep in mind that Seattle only had 563,374 people in 2000, not long after when he bought his little place, where today it’s at 753,675. That’s almost 200,000 — 34% — more people fighting over the same 84 square miles. If you don’t increase the density per square unit of area, every unit becomes more valuable. Charles Mudede knows that little house isn’t worth $800,000 but doesn’t expressly say why someone will pay that (and they will). It’s for the location, for the proximity to whatever the community has created there.