Indexer

The easiest way to think about suburbs is as the parts of a metropolitan area that lie outside the boundaries of the central city. By this definition, the suburban footprint varies quite widely among metro areas.

If the mayor of Boise hopes that the city can absorb an income boost with new transplants, keep housing costs down, and protect the area’s quality of life, the math, unfortunately, is working against that outcome.

Only two of the areas, Salt Lake City and Baltimore, saw a gain in office use, and the Seattle-Bellevue market area had the third highest drop in office occupancy.

All markets show a big drop between the fourth quarter of 2019 and the fourth quarter of 2020. What is more surprising is that three of the five market areas actually peaked in 2018, and had lost units between 2018 and 2019.

Apartment rents have continued their freefall across most of the Seattle area. Seattle and the suburbs to the east and north have continued to see median rents drop, while suburbs to the south have more mixed results.

Among the larger metro area markets in the country, San Francisco has had the largest area-wide one-year rent drop and Seattle has had the second largest drop. The December one-bedroom median rent was $2,700 for San Francisco and $1,540 for Seattle.

With increasing technology business ties between Seattle and the San Francisco Bay Area, the longstanding sisterhood is getting closer. So, we might ask how much of what seems to be ailing San Francisco these days has migrated up the coast.

Not only are people reluctant to spend hours in an enclosed space with strangers, they are not too keen on doing the things that happen on the other end of the trip: business meetings, conventions, theme parks, tourism. So even if air travel itself has been shown to be a relatively low risk activity, it is not likely to recover until these other activities recover.

Is the entering kindergartener operating at the level of a 2-year old, a 3-year old, a 4-year old or at the level of a typical kindergartener or above? Not surprisingly, preparedness varies by school district.

The network has been expanding, and the city has signaled its strong support for bike commuting, so we might expect to see growth over time as more origins and destinations get connected.