Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is an interesting position that I am quite conflicted about. From the conclusion of the original post it seems like he/she would prefer company that brings in high salary jobs not to relocate to the area if the company itself would not be employing people that originated from the area for those high salary jobs. This is because he/she perceived that there is no benefit to the economy since the local does not get…
"The Times reported in July that 74 projects were under construction in downtown Seattle. Two-thirds of the buildings will be residential towers, with most being apartments for rent, not condos...Seattle has gone from one of the most affordable West Coast cities to one of the least, Aaron Terrazas, a senior economist at Zillow, told CNN Money. The city and developers have tried to alleviate that by building tons of a…
The first thing to consider is that the density on new construction for these is significantly higher - a lot of land that had 80 units before might now have now have an additional 640. Most of these apartment buildings downtown are building up significantly higher than previous places. Going from 4 stories to 30+. Some seriously tall high rises.
And then it's a good thing that these are targeted as luxury accommodations, because they're making the high income newcomers their targets - that means there are fewer of these newcomers targeting the existing housing increasing that price.
Now, you have luxury housing that exists in much higher quantities than the previous housing - this has a disproportionate impact on the city average, but doesn't say anything about the impact on the majority of existing housing outside of these new constructions.
That isn't to say it hasn't gone up as well, but you have to look at how much the supply of this existing housing has contracted and if that contraction has pushed the demand up enough that those prices have significantly increased as well. This isn't captured in looking at the average rent price of the city.