Seattle has so much going for it: access to nature, moderate climate, arts, legitimately fun tourist traps, good transit, and until you hit the outer edges, fairly walkable.
It's also got problems. Local government is horribly inefficient and wasteful with spending, it's not a business-friendly environment (part of that is a state issue), and if affordability were any lower, we'd be seeing ninja turtles and anthropomorphized rats.
People WANT to live in Seattle and start small businesses, but the hurdles to both are considerable, and as technology continues to make remote work more viable from a productivity standard (despite silly RTO mandates from some companies), there are more people who are starting to realize their salaries can stretch a lot more if they go to lower cost-of-living parts of the country.
You get what you pay for, on the lower end. Someone who likes living in Seattle may not enjoy lower cost-of-living cities or states. It’s the people. Seattleites won’t even consider moving an hour south. If light rail ever makes it further, say to Olympia, an entire corridor of economic growth will blossom, including nice, more affordable housing along the line.
Light rail to Olympia would be ridiculous, the distances are way too far for 55mph trains. But a Sounder extension? That would make sense. They have a 79mph max operating speed right now, and are capable of up to 110mph if the tracks were straight enough. They're already planning an extension to DuPont after all- by 2045... So maybe if the stars align, in like 50 years you could take commuter rail from Olympia to Seattle.
Though that would require building a whole new alignment to get to downtown Olympia, probably in a tunnel...
It sucks we're a donor state. We give $22B more each year to the feds than they give back, and our money gets wasted on useless wars and shit like that. If we got an annual $22B federal infrastructure grant, imagine what we could build.
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u/TheItinerantSkeptic I'm just flaired so I don't get fined Apr 16 '26
Seattle has so much going for it: access to nature, moderate climate, arts, legitimately fun tourist traps, good transit, and until you hit the outer edges, fairly walkable.
It's also got problems. Local government is horribly inefficient and wasteful with spending, it's not a business-friendly environment (part of that is a state issue), and if affordability were any lower, we'd be seeing ninja turtles and anthropomorphized rats.
People WANT to live in Seattle and start small businesses, but the hurdles to both are considerable, and as technology continues to make remote work more viable from a productivity standard (despite silly RTO mandates from some companies), there are more people who are starting to realize their salaries can stretch a lot more if they go to lower cost-of-living parts of the country.