Seattleite here. One of the reasons it's hard to "just build more" here is that the city of Seattle is bounded on two sides by water (Lake Washington to the east and Puget Sound to the west). This means that there are far fewer square miles available for "bedroom communities" outside the city; this, in turn, has caused massive pressure on rents and housing in those communities that are still driving distance from the city (modulo Seattle's awful traffic, which is itself driven in part by geography and is among the 10 worst in the nation[0]). There's just not as much land to build on--and most of it is already built on.
The terribly restrictive zoning hasn't helped, if we got rid of the height caps and parking minimums that kneecap growth, we would see many more apartments and condos being built. Why should a 1 bedroom apartment be over a grand in Ballard or Fremont?
Not sure removing parking minimums is all that great an idea if the public transit isn't keeping up though.
I'm also not very familiar with Seattle, but generally when cities just start building nilly willy, traffic become a real problem, which then limits how far from city center you can be while still having an acceptable commute, which drastically raises prices since people are not willing to live further out.
Parking minimums service a minority of the population of Seattle, while adding 15% to 20% onto the average rental price.
Another angle is the road network in Belltown is well beyond capacity, and is likely to only have safety and pedestrian/biker friendliness improvements done moving forward (if not a road diet or car ban), so how do you intend to service these empty spaces so they can be usable?
There isn't more land to build roads on, and tunneling for roadways is extremely expensive and prone to delays (eg. SR 99 tunnel), esp. compared to our rail tunnels which have been repeatedly completed ahead of schedule and under budget.
I admittedly only have been in Seattle once, but it didn't feel very friendly for people without cars (I don't drive myself, and it was a pain). It's better than average, but average is not a very high bar.
Is it really a minority of people who have cars there? Even in NYC, while a lot of people don't have cars, I'm not sure it's the minority.
Regardless of all that, if you build up without car infrastructure, you need to up public transportation to keep up. If you do then there's no problem. Is that happening in Seattle? In Boston/Cambridge people are also asking for parking minimums to be done with, but the public transportation infrastructure is getting worse and worse, so you have areas like around Cambridge's Alewife that are becoming massive traffic bottlenecks as they're building up around it. That's just not scalable.
In 2014 an Oregon live article claimed 17 percent of Seattlites didn't have a car. So no car owners are not the minority, despite what the op wants you to believe. Yes in the three years since that article had been published in sure more people have given up cars, but they are still in the minority. Given how poor public transportation is it will be a while yet before car owners are in the minority
On the other hand, bus transit service gets cut if the passenger numbers aren't there to support it. Better to drive more people to transit and let Metro/Sound Transit catch up, rather than wait for them to improve service just in case.
If companies would consistently allow hours other than 9ish to 5ish, so that workers can commute outside of the morning or evening rush hours, then there is plenty of much less expensive housing available a ferry ride plus a short drive from Seattle over on the other side of Puget Sound.
If you have to travel to Seattle during the morning rush or home from Seattle during the evening rush, the ferry is terrible. There can be long waits for a boat and terrible traffic near the terminal. But if you can travel outside those hours it is pretty reasonable. Get up, drive on to the ferry, then take a nap, or read, or play around on your computer, or go up and have breakfast or a snack or read or enjoy the view.
If the company needs people to overlap, make a 9 to 5 shift for people living on the Seattle side and a noon to 8 shift for people on the other side, and that should provide enough overlap almost all of the time.
If a lot of people end up living across the Sound, it might even be worth considering opening a satellite office in Bremerton or Poulsbo or Silverdale. I'm not sure about Bremerton, but Silverdale and Poulsbo are full of office space that became vacant during the recession and has stayed that way. (BTW, commuting from a home in Seattle to an office across Puget Sound is fine even during rush hour, so if someone from the main office occasionally needs to work for a while in the satellite office it should not be much of a hardship).
being bounded on multiple sides by water/geographical restrictions is not really unique to seattle, however. Vancouver BC is bounded by the fraser river, burrard inlet and the ocean on 3 sides. The problem in Vancouver is not so much geography and lack of space, but the combination of massive foreign investment distorting the market and the fact that 90%+ of the city's residential land area is still zoned for single family houses. The 15% foreign resident home buyers' tax in BC has recently resulted in a lot of the mainland Chinese capital coming to buy homes in the Seattle area instead.
Seattle could increase its housing stock by 4x by building at the density of Brooklyn. It doesn't even need to do that much to become affordable. That isn't hard, it's just a matter of allowing it to happen.
I don't know why you're being downvoted, most of the sqft limitation is due to severe height and building restrictions in zoning outside of the downtown core. That's just fact.
[0] http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/seat...