Affordable housing: use savings from parking to fund transit; should we be building more housing?
Use savings from less parking to fund transit
It seems that the issues of parking provided in new apartment construction are seldom linked to the availability of public transit [“How to create more affordable housing,” Opinion, Dec. 29].
Limiting parking to encourage a reduction in local traffic would seem to be a good idea if there were some consideration given to just how the newly car-less residents were supposed to get to work or make other local travel arrangements.
How about letting the housing developers share their savings derived from not needing to provide parking? Perhaps some portion of the savings could be designated as a transit-relief payment and diverted to Metro in order to keep that organization from having to kill or reduce service on routes needed to get the newly car-less to and from jobs, recreation and shopping.
Mike Anderson, Burien
Should we even be building more housing?
Rather than ask how to create more affordable housing, The Times should be asking whether to create more housing — affordable or otherwise.
Seattle currently has 635,000 people living within the city limits. Before adding more people, we should establish the maximum limit that this city can support without compromising our quality of life.
Some Seattle residents might claim that we reached that limit 100,000 people ago. Others would claim we can support 2 million. Or 20 million. Imagine Seattle with three (or 30) times as many people crammed into our borders.
Do we really want that? If so, we should debate how to increase affordable housing. If not, perhaps we should look for ways to preserve affordable housing while reducing overall housing stock.
Dick Dickinson, Seattle
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