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Seattle skyline view

Seattle

A Great Place to Live, if You Can Afford It

Since its founding in 1853, Seattle has enjoyed a reputation as a boomtown. In the lumber, aircraft, and biotech industries it has been at the forefront of America’s shifting markets, and has also enjoyed a reputation as one of the country’s cultural centers, probably second only to San Francisco as a bastion of counterculture, political protest, and popular music. When Seattle hosted the 1962 World’s Fair, the futurist theme captured the imagination of urban planners everywhere. The Space Needle and the monorail, both constructed for that event, now are icons of how the early 1960s imagined the 21st century: planned, hi-tech, environmentally friendly.

It didn’t all pan out. Being a boomtown has its downside, and Seattle has had to weather several periods of economic stagnation as the market readjusted. When the Vietnam War ended, Boeing, the city’s primary employer, lost its military contracts and had to fire about two-thirds of its 80,000 employees. The oil crisis and subsequent recession left Seattle’s economy dormant until the mid-1980s. While Seattle’s highly educated population and port economy saved it from the blight suffered by other cities, population growth slowed to a near-halt and the economy decentralized as middle class residents moved to the suburbs.

In the 1990s, though, things started looking up, thanks to a young entrepreneur named Bill Gates who in 1979 had moved his fledging Microsoft from Albuquerque, New Mexico, to the suburbs of Seattle. By 1995, Microsoft was the most profitable company in the world, and at the forefront of the dot-com revolution. Then in 2000 the tech bubble burst. The ensuing economic decline hit residents hard, particularly after a decade in which rents skyrocketed by 20 percent and rising real estate prices eroded homeownership among the city’s minorities.

But over that same decade the community development industry had mobilized to confront Seattle’s housing crisis: with over 100 projects to their credit, CDCs created a total of 3,500 housing units. Housing costs continue to rise, but CDCs are finding ways to innovate and deal with the issues of growth not just through housing construction, but through funding of community facilities, anti-crime programs, and shopping centers.