I believe rent here was stable in January 2018, the first time since 2008. Supply seems to slowly be catching demand. There's still some serious concerns about space to build higher density but the city has not totally locked down new construction or density increases. My neighborhood is largely single-family and there are a number of places that have been demolished recently in favor of town homes and small apartment complexes.
Rents are always stable for a little bit in the winter. To get an accurate picture you have to compare year-over-year, otherwise you're just looking at noise.
Yet the median house price increased by $50k last MONTH. They have a lot of new apartments on the market from the midrise and highrise construction, but almost nothing to own.
More than SF, but not necessarily a lot. I've been looking at the assessor data to evaluate how much development is going on, and it's interesting how the past 5 years have seen a lot of new units going online but they are very small so not a huge amount of new square footage, especially relative to 2003-2008 when a lot of large single-family homes were being built.
To some degree yes but there's still neighborhoods that will reject proposals. There's all sorts of debate on this (just yesterday saw windshield flyers against upzones) - to summarize in a fun way see https://twitter.com/YIMBYwiki/status/951255440481857536
I have family in West Seattle and can sympathize with the increased traffic that increased density has brought. Compared to 10 years ago, it is much more built up but no road infrastructure was upgraded so it has turned into quite a mess.
Yeah, I've thankfully avoided most of the seattle traffic over the years by working remote but have gotten disgruntled with some of the public transit issues (bus bunching problems / stop closures / etc.). On the plus side the density's attracted more services - we have three 'grab n' go' car-rental services (zipcar/car2go/reachnow) and three dockless bicycle rental services (spin/limebike/ofo) which is seemingly more than any city I can think of in the world.
Most folks working at local medium-large businesses seem to get price-reduced orca cards for their daily commute.
They are, but the zoning rules and tight geographic constraints hurt it a lot. There is also a WA law that greatly increases Condo liability - nearly every new building in the city in a midrise or above density building area is built for apartments, not condos. Go look on Zillow - the number of units and houses on the market are EXTREMELY low and have been for a very long time.
This is one of the more frustrating things I see with Seattle and makes me consider moving out - there's more apartment buildings getting built instead of condos. And from what I heard developers (particularly in Portland) are shying away from new projects due to newer city requirements to build more some portion of low-income units within a new building.
