With median home prices still crushing for anyone outside tech, many locals are quietly fleeing to Renton, Burien, or out of state entirely. Is holding on admirable, or just financially self-destructive?
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Add your commentBorn and raised in Rainier Valley. My parents bought their house in 1987 for $74,000. That same house sold last year for $810,000. I make $28 an hour working at a hospital and I will never, ever own property in the city I grew up in. You want to call that 'just the market'? Fine. I call it a generational theft that nobody wants to name out loud.
I drove a Metro bus for 19 years. Raised two kids in Beacon Hill. Retired last spring and sold my house — bought in 2001 — for enough to retire comfortably in Spokane. So yes, it worked out for ME, but only because I bought at the right time and got lucky. The guys I used to work with who are 35 right now? They have no path here. None. And we're losing exactly the people who keep the city running. Drivers, nurses, teachers. Seattle is slowly becoming a city that can't function.
Hot take that people won't like: Seattle has always been expensive relative to wages for working-class folks. This isn't new. My grandmother cleaned houses in Queen Anne in the 1970s and she lived in White Center because that's what she could afford. The mythology of the 'affordable old Seattle' erases who was always priced out. That said, it's undeniably much worse now and pretending otherwise is also wrong.
lol 'keep fighting to stay' makes it sound heroic. bro you're renting a room in Shoreline for $1,400 a month, you're not storming Normandy. sometimes moving to Boise is just the smart play and thats okay
Someone please correct me if I'm wrong but didn't Seattle pass like four major upzoning bills in the last three years specifically to create more affordable housing stock? And yet here we are still having this exact same debate. At what point do we admit the policy tools we keep reaching for aren't working?
the whole framing of this question bugs me. 'accept' or 'keep fighting'?? like those are the only two options. some of us are just... surviving. week to week. we dont have the luxury of grand philosophical stances about staying or leaving we just hope rent doesnt go up again in june
I want to push back on everyone celebrating Renton and Burien as solutions. Those cities are also seeing rapid price increases precisely BECAUSE people fleeing Seattle are moving there. We're just exporting the problem and pressuring longtime working-class communities in those areas. Anyone defending that as a fix needs to think harder about what they're actually endorsing.
Moved to Renton two years ago and honestly? Best decision I ever made. Still close enough to everything, my commute on the 169 is whatever, and I have a backyard now. A BACKYARD. Seattle proper is a brand at this point, not a community. Let it go.
Actually Seattle home prices peaked in 2022 and have been declining steadily ever since, so this conversation is kind of moot at this point. The market is correcting itself just like it always does. Give it 18 months and we'll be back to normal.
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