In the case of Seattle, Kirkland and Bellevue are host to quite a few small and large tech companies already. The office space is plentiful and cheap on this side of Lake Washington, and there is less of a worry of being hit with poorly planned taxes and regulations that Seattle is, at this point, infamous for enacting.
With the way the housing market is going, and the upcoming King County property tax hike, I wouldn't be surprised if tech workers started creeping out into Snohomish County and favoring jobs on the Eastside instead of Seattle due to traffic.
The north and east side are the worst places to live in the Seattle area, however, if you are young and without a family. It is very much like comparing San Jose to San Francisco (I say this living in Bellevue and having grown up in Bothell).
I don't know many young people that agree with that. Families, sure, east and north side is better for schools and such, since it is basically suburbia.
I have a family and live in the east side :-) I've seen it a million times, people move to seattle, get an apartment, then couple up and buy a smaller condo, have kids, need space, move to the evil eastside.
East side is far more expensive, and so is office space, head tax notwithstanding. Does the over/under on that work out? My guess is no. Seattle has far better transit, still cheaper housing and office space.
The problem with location is that for almost all the companies I have worked for in the Seattle area, almost every single person lives on the east side (cause we are older, have families, etc and got imported here by Microsoft). New people, those young college kids, they all start in Seattle, whether at amazon or not. When I moved here years ago I wanted to be close to my work, so I was at Microsoft.
90% agree (homes don't look to cheap on the east side). I was recently team matching with google for the seattle area and my girlfriend and I were more interested in the kirkland office over fremont/soon to be SLU because of this.
you don't want to work in downtown seattle for google because of a 275 dollar tax? that's ridiculous. google probably doesn't even have any software engineers working for less than a 100k, and you think about $25 / month?
Not at all. I'm against taxes that cost me more money on the homeless problem while disproportionally effect me more than others. Spending more money locally on the homeless giving them handouts is only going to attract more worsening the problem.
My girlfriend was recently assaulted downtown by a homeless person which is why we liked kirkland when we checked it out because there seemed to be less of them in kirkland.
I think the homeless problem should be tackled on a federal level since it is easy for them to move states but not countries. Thus, any non-federal government that spends tax revenue to help the homeless will likely just attract more homeless people from other areas worsening the local populations lives through the negative externalities and the costs which only reduce other local areas homeless externalities/expenses.
Seattle seems to be growing strong with this methodology which is why I am against taxes like this that incentivize the homeless to move here.
The lack of empathy for those being displaced by huge tech companies moving in and eclipsing everyone else's salary in this thread is incredibly stunning. Not to say that homelessness is entirely caused by this, but its definitely a factor.
91% of the homeless in Seattle are from the greater Seattle region. Home prices have doubled in 10 years, and tripled if you count the bottom of the great recession. Renters have had to move further and further away. Saying there's no effect on people falling into homelessness is both silly and dangerous.
That's not to say Seattle doesn't have some of the blame - they are not great at solving actual problems with their tax money, they're slow, and they don't tend to enforce a lot of quality of life things like panhandlers or break-ins.
But for heavens sake, if you suddenly drop a huge amount of upper class people that buy up all the housing in an area you should have to be at least partially responsible for cleaning up the consequences.
To escape the lunacy of The Seattle City Council? How about Bellevue, Kirkland or Redmond? The industry in Vancouver is also steadily growing.
The council quite openly sees economic growth as the source of all it's problems, which they have mostly created for themselves. As they have no idea how to manage these problems, and as most of their attempts to do so have in fact made them worse, the only thing they can do to further shirk responsibility is to implement more taxes.
It's hard to see why a business today would plan to base itself in Seattle, or expand on operations there. If Amazon hadn't already completed so much of the construction on its latest building there, I can't imagine they'd be committing to finishing it. Which will all in turn make Seattle's problems even worse.
Going to Vancouver with its far higher taxes to protest a $20m tax on a $xxxbillion company seems like a poor idea to me. Local government need not grovel to those that take advantage of its amenities to attract talent.
The cost of living is less in Vancouver than Seattle, and by extension salaries are lower. This is what has been moving tech companies further up the west coast, so yes it does make perfect business sense.
You also have things perfectly backwards. These companies are what is driving growth in Seattle, not the other way around. These companies are responsible for more than doubling local government revenue in the past decade. The companies create the growth, not the ‘amenities’ of Seattle city.
If you don’t like or don’t know how to manage economic growth, then by all means, make the environment as hostile as you can for businesses. You only need to look at Detroit to see how beneficial it can be when an entire industry leaves town.
> You also have things perfectly backwards. These companies are what is driving growth in Seattle, not the other way around. These companies are responsible for more than doubling local government revenue in the past decade. The companies create the growth, not the ‘amenities’ of Seattle city.
Why in the world would companies insist on staying in the bay area when they could pay people half in Ohio? This is HN, and story after story talks about how VCs /demand/ you locate yourself in the bay for the talent pool.
Seattle is in no danger of becoming Detroit, or an entire industry leaving, not when software skills are as in demand as they are right now. Its in no danger of Amazon picking up and leaving. Reminder, we're talking about $20 million dollars here, which is less than the budget for benches outside their brand new buildings.
I honestly think it would be a great thing for companies to go set up somewhere else and not over-inflate the 4-5 "chosen" tech areas. Maybe then housing prices can get reasonable, and some town that desperately needs any jobs can get started again.
I don't think the industry is going to pick up and leave Seattle, but it undoubtably puts more pressure on businesses that are already finding better places to operate elsewhere. It's these companies that have generated the revenue boom that the Seattle City Council has experienced over the past decade. If it wants more revenue and more jobs in the city, then it shouldn't make it harder for businesses to operate nor should it tax jobs. Especially when there are so many desirable areas to operate directly next door, and especially when all of those areas are already experiencing enormous growth.
Renting is about 30% more expensive in Seattle, and just about every other metric that you can measure costs of living by also favour Vancouver. The fact that Vancouver is on the west coast, and the fact that salaries are lower there than there are in the US is what is currently attracting more technology companies to open offices there. This isn't a theory, Vancouver has Canadas fastest growing tech sector. These are the same conditions that attracted companies to open offices further up the west coast to begin with, only now Seattle doesn't offer the same advantages that it used to.
Back in the day (1990s), Seattle had hardly any tech scene at all and all of the area's tech action was in Bellevue, Kirkland, and Redmond. Today, things are quite changed, with more tech jobs being sought for in downtown Seattle than the east side it seems. It is a really a strange thing to see from a long time resident perspective.
Seattle is oversubscribed, I hope you are right that the companies/startups will move back east to take off the pressure. But somehow I doubt it will happen like that.
In the long term, I can’t see how the east side could possibly fail to attract more businesses. Growth is already increasing in those areas, and there’s so much room for more. The quality of life is also arguably better over there. The more anti-business Seattle is becoming can only hasten this.
The east side is the San Jose of the Seattle area. It isn't hip and happening like the city is. Ya, the rent is cheaper (though not much anymore), houses are bigger, it has a very nice clean suburban feel, you don't trip over needles or homeless people, but many young people find the east side to be too boring.
Course, Microsoft has a bunch of buses they use to move engineers from Seattle to Redmond, but like Google does between SF and Mountain View. I guess that could work, but it doesn't really make the traffic better.
Yeah, that's a fair point. It is certainly less edgy than downtown Seattle. That said, living in Seattle and commuting east is far more doable than the other way around (although that could be subject to change). I also imagine that the east side is more desirable to employees with families, though I have no idea how much of the workforce that actually makes up.
Preferences aside though, the one thing the east has that Seattle City doesn't is abundant space.
If I knew I'd be moving there. The only thing keeping my friends and I in the bay area are each other and the lack of a clear alternative. If another locations starts to get serious traction I'd expect a phase transition.
But they have to stay in the bay/Seattle for the talent pool, by their own admission. I think the local government has a lot more power than they think. Which is wrong - the liberal livable areas attract talent, so companies flock to them, or the bottom line is more important so they should do it in a cheaper city? Seems like the former is winning by a mile in the past decade.
> > In spite of all the bitching about California, more people come in than go out.
This is correct.
> The truth is the direct opposite[0]:
No, even your source doesn't support this. You have confused what your source says about domestic migration with total migration. More people are coming in to California than leaving (the state has positive net total migration) even though more people are leaving California for other states than are coming from other states (negative net domestic migration.)
The big issue with the migration differential is that it is expensive to move into California while it is relatively cheap to move out.
So, you need a job and you have to save money to eat the differential (rent increase, security deposits, car registration) if you want to move into the state.
Selling your house in most other states barely gets you a down payment on a house in California.
On the other hand, Californians selling their houses and then paying cash to buy another house in Texas, Oregon, etc. is sufficiently common that most of such places have derogatory terms for it.