Dan Price — locally grown, internationally known — has some thoughts on the relationship between work and where one does it.
But the key takeaway for me was this, about the possibility of earning Seattle wages outside Seattle, of being able to take your job to where you had more buying power.
“But wait, isn’t that what suburbs are for? And you hate suburbs…”
If you don’t have to commute back into the city, it’s not a suburb. If you work for Microsoft but are based in London, does that make London a suburb of Redmond? I think not. So if people are able to work from Renton or Bremerton and make the same wages, why not do that? And if Seattle wants to keep those people, it will have to do something to make that happen…lowering housing costs, improving commutes, etc. But I think a survey would find that a lot of people live in Seattle because that’s where the jobs are. Service jobs, any kind of in-person/presence-based work – healthcare, education, grooming/personal care, food service — are also tied to location.
I wish even one member of city council understood this, that there is not affordable housing without affordable land and that the cost of land or high value extracted by speculators is making Seattle a rich people’s playground, not a city for everyone.