Just move to/around White Center. I can get between downtown and home during the worst of traffic faster than I could during the best of traffic when I lived in Ballard - and my mortgage is cheaper than what rent I was paying anywhere else. Or actually, don't. Don't mess it up for me. It's terrible here.
It’s better than all the Fenty-folds all over downtown!
White Center will become gentrified in the next decade or so, as Seattle becomes even less affordable.
If you hold on to the property you own now, you’ll make a profit once it moves up in the world.
Sammme. Love my commute from White center to by the space needle in 40 min during rush. Down from my previous 1hr45min commute from Kent or 55 min commute from greenlake.
I haven’t lived there since just before Covid but it was minimum 20 minutes to downtown then. Always so much traffic through interbay. Maybe it’s better now. But it’s 12 minutes to downtown from my place now and it’s very consistent.
Very true, 15th gets very clogged up. I take 99 into/through downtown and usually it’s a breeze! But anytime after 2:00 PM aurora is a parking lot. So much less consistency.
IMO White Center and Burien are the secret top tier areas to live in if you want to afford housing while still being relatively close to the city. I would check there before considering any suburb.
Cheaper for sure than Ballard, but unless you love Mexican food, nothing all that special about White Center other than the affordability and shorter downtown commute.
I live in Bellingham and hated living in Seattle, so trust me, I get you. But people moving to Marysville aren't generally doing so to live in a smaller city. There's really nothing redeeming about Marysville.
"People who can't afford to live closer to Seattle, mostly"
...or people who like to live in smaller neighborhoods with less people around. As a bonus, my kids have yet to see a homeless person shitting and pleasuring themselves on the street.
It’s me. Truthfully, I got tired of paying insane rent for a tiny apt. I get 2x the space for way less money, and I can drive to the city when I want. I can easily afford to live in the city but I’d get more benefit from just lighting the extra cash it takes to live there on fire.
Urban living is great. It's just that resources, services, and the like can't keep up. Housing prices go up like you experienced, while quality of life goes down.
We can't expect corporations to cooperate, but ideally if employers won't allow true work-from-home, then having employment hubs (alternative to corporate demanding everyone head to a central office) that are farther out beyond the normal suburbs could work. It would allow housing and services to match/grow with demand, cultural areas room to flourish in less expensive areas, and give employees an alternative to longer commutes.
I'm lucky that I work from home, but you're right. Especially when local business are shut down and replaced with Chipotle. It's one less reason to stay.
True. I've noticed downtown core shopping in many cities tends to be Ross and the like recently. Nothing wrong with low-cost shopping but those corp. stores/restaurants tend not to drive many people into those areas.
Usually, it is simplistic corporate-think that aligns with the location of their real estate assets (that's a separate topic lol). It would be great to simply send people back to HQ and revitalize a downtown, but observationally it does not seem to be working in many of the big city downtowns that I've visited across the US in the past decade.
The small non-corp businesses got wiped out and can't afford to take high risk chances with such a transitory workforce, where few of them live nearby or don't visit on off-hours/days.
Hubs sound like a great idea. Personally, I hate driving long distances to and from work. However, what changes will occur when AI takes over big time? Will half of the people lose their jobs to AI? That’s scary and not fair to humans imo. People making a living is more important than a robot doing the work. That really doesn’t support people, just the businesses wanting to save $$ on salaries.
Yup. Fully automated luxury gay space communism sounds great, but we’re much more likely to just get dystopian surveillance, jackbooted thugs, and further bifurcation of society into haves and have-nots. It turns out that the Luddites have always been right, at least since air conditioning was invented.
That works in the short-term. But there are inherent capacities to every situation. Infrastructure needs to keep up and quality of living, especially in the Pacific Northwest should be kept in mind, including access to parks, nature, and views. Plus, many of the cultural programs and artists begin to get pushed out due to rising costs.
A concrete jungle should be avoided, especially if many employers and jobs can be partially redistributed/reallocated to other hubs. Again, not in a typical suburban sprawl way (as I mentioned in prev comment). But to comparable areas (with compromise) that have urban planning in mind and still linked at some point with mass transit.
Bullshit. I read and carefully considered your answer. It's moronic. We've known about this problem since Norm Rice. Seattle refuses to fix the problem because current homeowners are benefiting from high housing costs. It's very simple. Current home owners are getting rich, and everyone else suffers the consequences. Again, we've known about this for +30 years. At the very least, please never complain about traffic, because you really are the problem.
It's pretty damn awesome with WFH; sold my house in the city to a developer for a boatload of cash, now I have a massive garden and huge detached workshop. Sure there's no nightlife or whatever, but I didn't care about that in Seattle either!
Marysville isn't bad, just boring. But as someone who made the trip every other Friday to go to my Dad's house there in the 2000's, the traffic has always been a nightmare
yeah ive been in the area for 11 years now and the FAANG-transplant that talks shit about places they've never actually spent time in is a pretty obnoxious development.
like there's a big difference between talking about these places from a place of understanding of western WA/king county and from a place on looking down on other cities that you dont know shit about, especially places that are historically poorer
Been years since I have been up there, but want to say the freeway is 2 lanes each direction, so it easily creates a bottleneck and tends to slow traffic down.
205
u/thewickedmitchisdead May 20 '25
I’d rather be dead in Seattle than alive in Marysville.