By MBAKS Content Strategist James Slone

With so many unique and storied residential neighborhoods, Seattle and its surrounding communities are jam-packed with classic single-family houses, representing over a century of West Coast design trends.

Given the vast inventory of timeless homes, it’s tempting to wonder if there is a single, unifying “Seattle style,” an element or two that brings it all together. To find out, let’s take a brief tour of the classics to see what’s in their shared DNA.

First Homes

As more non-native Americans arrived from the East to work in the lumber and shipbuilding industries, they built shacks, cabins, and shanties— threadbare structures fit mostly for survival—using many of the same local materials found in longhouses. After the Klondike Gold Rush started in 1896, growth and prosperity brought more permanent housing and a burgeoning homebuilding industry.

The classical age of the Seattle home had begun.

Classic Seattle Homes

1900 to 1940

At the dawn of the twentieth century, following the Great Seattle Fire of 1889, thousands of homes sprung up overnight. The most ostentatious was Millionaire’s Row on Capitol Hill, a fantasia of blinged-out palaces for the newly minted rich. But classic homes with just as much character were generously distributed throughout the city.

Cape Cod

An understated classic in our residential fabric, the quite modest, very New England Cape Cod eschews ornamental details for simple low-and-wide construction of one or two floors, a mighty centerpiece chimney, and steep gabled roofs. Throw in some shingles for extra maritime flavor.

From Depression to War

1930 to 1945

1929 saw the end of the boom years as the stock market crash sunk much of the world into the Great Depression. History hit the stop button on Seattle’s classic era as massive shanty towns called Hoovervilles popped up overnight.

Building resumed with the introduction of federally-subsidized affordable housing developments and later wartime construction to accommodate Boeing employees and other workers during World War II. This was not an era of beauty but function first and foremost, with thousands of lookalike homes mass-produced across the region.

Homes of the Future

1946 to 1970

After the privation of the Great Depression and War years, housing started blasting off in leafy suburban-style tracts as post-war Americans started careers and kicked off the baby boom. The dawn of the Jet Age had begun in Jet City, and Modern architecture, art, and design were in full swing.

Boeing-era prosperity meant people were buying a lot of automobile-friendly singlefamily homes promising all the latest doohickeys and amenities. These were the “homes of the future,” filled with ample space, modern appliances, and other conveniences that seemed beamed in from the future.

Beyond Modern

1970 to 1990

The 1980s saw the intensification of masterplanned housing and suburban tracts with homes of hitherto unseen spaciousness. While a lot of homes in this era generically mimicked what came before, there was a noticeable push among some homebuilders for wildly eclectic and bare-bones minimalism.

The Postmodern threw out the spartan Modern approach for something more idiosyncratic, eclectic, often wildly sculptural and vibrantly colorful. While most notable Postmodern designs can be found in public and commercial spaces, any house that combines disparate elements in a playful or “deconstructed” way can be called Postmodern-influenced.

Near Contemporary

1990 to 2000

Since the 1990s, density has been the name of the game in those parts of Seattle not zoned for single-family homes. The 1990 Growth Management Act hemmed in development within urban growth boundaries, incentivizing denser single-family and multifamily housing closer to city centers. Master-planned communities continued to grow in suburbs falling inside the boundary.

While a lot of homebuilding projects became large-scale, regimented, or focused on infill, Seattleites had never had so many singlefamily options fit for every lifestyle.

Seattle Style?

Even leaving out several styles (Gothic Revival, anyone?), this is a lot. Given the aesthetic diversity and the fact that most of these movements originated elsewhere, is there really such a thing as Seattle style?

Short answer: Yes. But it’s not defined by any one feature. It’s more of a guiding principle that drives the way regional variations like the Seattle Bungalow are designed. Most were built to complement rather than overpower their surroundings—the climate, biomes, and beauty of the Puget Sound region. As such, they share key elements, including some going all the way back to Salish longhouses.

David Miller, University of Washington professor and award-winning AIA Fellow, has identified a few: Simple structures on raised foundations, large windows to drink in rare sunny days, exposed posts and beams that show off local materials, and open layouts unifying the space. They eschew hard-and-fast boundaries between interior and outdoor space, keeping occupants dry with big patios and sheltering eaves.

When you look at old Seattle homes, fully restored or radically remodeled, they often feel right because most were designed with this place in mind. Whether single-family, “missing middle,” or multifamily, the homes of today that will survive are those elegantly adapted to their surrounding nature and cityscape. These are the homes that embody the Seattle style.

Houseboats

During the apartment boom of the 1950s, houseboats very nearly went extinct before being promoted and ultimately codified by the city in the latter decades of the century— eventually losing their low-rent reputation and achieving a more glamorous status as part of Seattle’s waterfront heritage. If you look at a few of the floating palaces of today, it can be hard to imagine houseboats’ humble history.

Photo Credits

First Homes: Scott D. Sullivan
Seattle Box: Joe Mabel
Craftsman Bungalow: Courtesy Carlisle Classic Homes
WWII-Era Cottage: Courtesy Palmer Residential
Northwest Regional: Jeff Hobson for Lochwood-Lozier Custom Homes
Mid-Century Modern: Courtesy Carlisle Classic Homes
Minimalist: Courtesy Nip Tuck Remodeling

By MBAKS Senior Policy Analyst Allison Butcher

Housing inventory for sale fell between September and October to 1.74 months’ supply in King County and 1.51 months’ supply in Snohomish County. In both counties, this is down from a year ago. Meanwhile single-family and multifamily building permits were down 6% in the Seattle Metro Area (including King, Snohomish, and Pierce counties) in September compared to the same period last year.

The Builder's Bulletin is intended to provide a convenient way to track housing in our market and includes information from the Northwest Multiple Listing Service, State of the Cities Data Systems, Office of Financial Management and the Washington State Employment Security Department.

Download this month's report:

By MBAKS Content Strategist James Slone

The Black Homeownership Initiative is working to close the homeownership gap.

In 2021, the Coalition for More Housing Choices joined a network of associations and organizations to launch the Black Homeownership Initiative with the goal of closing the gap between Black and white homeownership rates in Washington state.

The Coalition—representing a spectrum of nonprofit, business, civic, and labor organizations, including MBAKS— came together to develop a plan to build enough homes to accommodate regional growth in a way that “benefits current residents” and offers affordable housing choices.

The Black Homeownership Initiative was a natural outgrowth of the Coalition’s approach to housing with its strong focus on equity, seeking to align “infrastructure development, housing production and preservation, and underwriting and lending” to double the Black homeownership rate in the state.

They have their work cut out for them.

Mind the Gap

A history of exclusionary housing policies has meant that people of color and other minorities have been denied the financial equity, stability, and peace of mind that comes with homeownership—the basic building block of the American dream. The Black community has been especially impacted.

According to the Urban Institute, Black homeownership in the U.S. has not increased since the 1960s. Indeed, it’s actually declined 5% since 2011 versus just 1% of white households. These days, affordable housing is scarce for everyone, but for Black households, it’s even more elusive.

The situation is especially dire here in our own backyard. The Seattle Times recently reported that just 34% of Black people statewide own homes (compared to 68% of whites). In Seattle, it’s an abysmal 26%.

It is hardly surprising to learn that the median net worth of Black households in Seattle is just $23,000, compared to $456,000 for white households. Economic inequality means Black households are likelier than whites to spend more than half their income on rent and debt (e.g., student loans).

And even when they can save, their chances of being denied a home loan are much greater. An analysis by Zillow found that Black applicants were denied mortgages at a rate 84% higher than white applicants in 2020.

How did it come to this?

Racism’s Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

Black and other non-white people were kept out of most Seattle neighborhoods in the early twentieth century through zoning and racially restrictive housing covenants. While the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the covenants in 1948, lenders and real estate companies continued to discriminate through “redlining,” a practice of designating communities of color “high risk of default.”

Redlined maps determined which neighborhoods received favorable mortgages, interest rates, and refinancing. The result? Homes in Black communities hemorrhaged value, decent loans became hard to come by, and predatory loans led to defaults. The stigma of redlining also led to a loss of jobs, resources, and investment in these communities as capital—and white residents—fled to the suburbs.

The 1968 Fair Housing Act made racial discrimination illegal, but the resulting gap persists—Black households have less intergenerational wealth to pass on or equity to invest in new housing. While gentrification displaces Black residents, single-family zoning means that more affordable types of housing cannot be built in threequarters of Seattle neighborhoods.

(See “Codifying Prejudice” in the fall 2020 issue of Master Builder.)

Mending the Gap

There are signs that things are changing. Perhaps the most prominent recent example is the Africatown Community Land Trust, which has created affordable housing and cultural spaces in the Central District to mitigate the effects of gentrification and underinvestment in the historic Black community. Another recent initiative spearheaded by the Seattle Foundation’s Civic Commons seeks to help 1,500 Black households become homeowners across the Puget Sound over the next five years.

MBAKS supports the Black Homeownership Initiative because closing the gap is a crucial part of solving the housing crisis in the Puget Sound region—which will need to accommodate 60,000 new residents a year—and because it’s the right thing to do.

The Housing Development Consortium (HDC), which encompasses all major nonprofit housing developers in King County, is a leading partner of the Initiative as part of its mission to “ensure that all people live with dignity in safe, healthy, and affordable homes within communities of opportunity.”

Patience Malaba, executive director of HDC, laid out the stakes last June. “We have decades of racial injustice and economic inequality that has consistently, persistently led to disparities in wealth, specifically for BIPOC [Black, Indigenous, and People of Color] communities and disproportionately for Black households. One of the foundational steps in America to build wealth is homeownership.”

MBAKS’ Senior Policy Analyst, Allison Butcher, agrees. “The association recognizes the need to address race-based housing policies of the past to create a more inclusive future for our region. Part of the solution is creating more attainable housing choices for more people close to jobs, transit, schools, healthcare, and other amenities.”

The Initiative’s plan includes seven interrelated strategies to bolster Black ownership. These include marketing and outreach, pre- and post-purchase counseling, purchase supports and tools, changes in policies and practices, support for existing Black homeowners, and housing production to increase affordable homes.

MBAKS’ role, says Butcher, is “advocacy to enable more infill and more affordable ‘missing middle’ housing.” MBAKS sees increasing housing supply of all types as a key strategy to lowering home prices and barrier of entry for Black households.

Only the Beginning

The Initiative is off to a great start, but there’s still much to be done.

Currently most of the focus is on increasing the supply of and access to affordable homeownership. Looking toward the future, Initiative partners and the HDC hope to develop a policy framework that can be used to monitor and evaluate their collective efforts to increase homeownership opportunities.

Meanwhile, a Washington State Department of Commerceled Homeownership Disparities Work Group has developed recommendations for reducing the gap for BIPOC communities that intersects with the Initiative’s work. The report includes specific statewide recommendations that could be actionable in late 2022 or during the 2023 legislative session, creating additional momentum.

These are heartening developments. Solving the ownership gap means ensuring that everyone can find a home of their own. But to be lasting, it must go beyond up-zoning and legalizing more housing types.

It requires acknowledging the long history of racial discrimination that has narrowed homeownership options for Black people and actively working to overcome its grim legacies. Acknowledging that the gap exists—and why it exists—is an important step.