Addressing the causes of that being a high-cost housing market, or even just walking through the though exercise of why it is that and what might change the situation, is recommended.
Sure, but the structural issues that Seattle (and many other municipalities) have with ensuring conditions to allow sufficient construction to meet housing demand don't have much to do with visible homelessness stemming from mental health issues.
City centres are where service provisioning tends to be most efficient. Providing services there does seem to make sense. And if the homeless / housing-insecure population is so large as to skew overall real estate markets ... maybe you have a bigger problem?
I have lived in Seattle since 1995. It is now a shi-shi techtropolis fully of 300k+ tech bros, of which I am an aged version. There is zero reason for tech (and god I hate hate this term) should be clustered in a locale. It is absurd, my locality has never played into anything I have done. It isn't like someone opened the yellow pages and looked for a data gravity consultant.
How about for one year, we all put our incomes into a pot and split it 1/population of america. Just for funsies.
There is zero reason tech should be clustered in a locale
Presumably because the end-product (and some intermediates) are ephemeral and can be transmitted losslessly long distances in little time at low cost?
Perversely: that's just what leads to greater rather than less concentration in industries. Especially where there's a great deal ofhumam interaction and collaboration required.
Since the end-products are ephemeral, they can be distributed to any point on Earth. But clustering of creation activities, returns to scale, even a small component of ancillary support services and infrastructure, and even small gains to round-trip interaction rates, reliability, or flexibility, favour concentration over decentralisation and mean that any one locale which gains an edge over others sees path-dependencies and positive feedback encouraging yet higher growth. Only when frictions develop (say: high costs of housing), or regional differentiators (language, cultural, regulatory regimes, say), do you see a formation of alternate hubs.
Zipf's law / power functions still strongly favour the formation of small numbers of such hubs.
Film, banking, and publishing have very similar tendencies.
