Rents To Rise Sharply in Seattle's Suburbs

Arriving just in time for the sharp rent increases in the suburbs. Charles Mudede

Puget Sound Business Journal's real estate reporter Marc Stiles writes that Zillow, a Seattle-based online company that collects data on housing markets, has made a grim forecast for area rents in the near future: The high and still-rising apartment rents of Seattle will next year begin to aggressively pursue people who have fled to the suburbs for affordability. "Zillow predicts rents will go up fastest in lower-cost suburban markets," writes Stiles, "such as Burien, Renton and Shoreline." Landlords have seen this coming for some time and have been buying up properties in these areas. It is no accident that the dawn of expensive suburbs is concurrent with the opening of Link's second suburban station, Angle Lake.

These are the stark numbers: Between the Augusts of 2015 and 2016, there was an astonishing 9.7 percent increase in area rents. No other market in the nation rose by that much. (The current median rent in our city is $2,067.) Working-class people will find no real relief in 2017, as rents are expected to rise by another 7.2 percent. At this pace, Seattle will soon become the third-most expensive market in the country, behind only New York City and San Francisco/San Jose.

What all of this means is that more mental and physical stress will be exerted on people who live on standard wages. This is in line with the history of capitalism, an economic system that can only function if it generates some form of crisis. (Indeed, an excellent definition of socialism is the active management and prevention of economic crises.) The only reason why we do not see the displacement or the dispossession of the working poor as a crisis is because poverty is not considered to be a crisis. Poverty is coded as a natural state of things. The poor are inherent to the earth. The anomaly (or the crisis) is a drop in asset values or a deceleration in the rate of growth and wealth accumulation.