Michael Luis is a public policy consultant who has been wrestling with housing, growth and economic development issues around Washington State for over 30 years. He is author of several books on local history and served as mayor of Medina.
According to Internal Revenue Service data, between 2017 and 2018, 215,000 people moved to Washington State, and 185,000 moved away, for a net gain of 30,000 people.
The Census Bureau expects annual births to increase only slightly in the U.S. over the next 20 years, and IHME expects annual births in the U.S. to fall during that time. In contrast, OFM expects births in Washington state to increase by over 20 percent between now and 2040.
Seattle is well below the average for officer coverage among large cities, and has a officer/resident ratio just slightly above the average for all cities with over 100,000 population.
Seattle was seeing a softening in its apartment rental market before the pandemic made the prospect of living in a dense neighborhood with a mandatory elevator ride daunting. Conditions can only get worse for building owners, at least in the near and mid-term.
The new state population estimates show Kittitas County growing 3.4 percent last year, and 7.6 percent over the last three years, both figures tops in the state.
We see sharp drops in all activities and a comparatively large drop in employment. Things bottom out late March to mid-April and begin a steady climb back toward their March 1 level.
As local leaders consider restructuring their police departments in response to citizen concerns, they will need to consider the impact that those restructurings will have on the ability of the departments to respond to the very high levels of property crime in the region. And those leaders may want to step back and ask how Seattle ended up with such high rates of property crime in the first place.
All kinds of trips have increased since the low points of late March and early April. As people have returned to work, transit use has increased. At the same time, the residential line has fallen by more than half, as people gradually emerge from their self-isolation.
The locus of protest has largely been within the city of Seattle, and yet Seattle’s regional role as a home for African Americans has diminished sharply in the past 30 years.