Why do People Move to Seattle?

For some time, I’ve been curious about what attracts newcomers to Seattle. David
Brewster, writing earlier in Post Alley, credited craft beer, bookstores, and coffeehouses as a one-time draw, but no longer among the city’s top attractions. While it’s hard to believe beer is what matters, it’s still important to know just what it is that lures people here. If not beer and bookstores, then what?

Not that long ago Seattle was a medium-sized town. In the 1950s the city’s home-grown
population was less than half a million, roughly the size of some podunk in Nebraska.
The exploding population — now just short of 800,000 — consists largely of those of us
who came here and stayed. Over the years I’ve had a chance to ask many of the come-
latelies that important question: What brought you to Seattle?

The answers I’ve gotten are as varied as you might expect. They range from
newcomers drawn to jobs at high-tech firms to those attracted by Seattle scenery and
temperate climate. One academic told me that he “first came here for temporary work at
the University of Washington College of Engineering.” Another tenderfoot talked about
scoring a biotech job. A woman explained she’d followed her husband who’d found work
in his medical field.

A photo journalist I know told how, after working at newspapers up and down the West
Coast, he’d been recruited by The Seattle Times. Another journalist reported finding a
job at the Seattle Gay News. Love sometimes played a role when couples who met at
East Coast colleges decided to settle in Seattle, one mate’s hometown.

David Brewster, founder and editor of the Seattle Weekly and Crosscut, himself was
brought to this city — not to quaff ale — but to teach English at the University of
Washington. (This is not to suggest that he might not have lifted a brew at the Dutchess
pub after class.)

Seattle origin stories are encyclopedic if not always spellbinding. Take my own arrival as
a new high school grad from Norfolk, Va. My father, a commissioned officer in the Coast
Survey (now NOAA), had been ordered to the Seattle-based U.S.S. Explorer, charting
Alaskan waters. After I completed college years, dad was sent to the D.C. office. My
family packed up and left for the East Coast. But I — by then in love with Seattle and one
of its sons — was working on a community weekly and stayed behind.

Historians date this city’s real arrival on the national scene to Century 21, Seattle’s 1962
world’s fair. In those mid-20th century years, Seattle began acquiring a national reputation. Come here and enjoy our quality of life and abundance (at the time) of
affordable housing.

The city’s reputation continued to grow with the establishment of Starbucks at Pike
Place Market in 1971. Soon afterwards, it was grunge music that put Seattle on the
map. Bands like Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden showed up here in the 1970s
before exploding nationally in the 1980s. The bands popularized their music along with
Grunge apparel — torn jeans and thrift shop finds.

Meanwhile, the city’s prosperity was briefly dented by a Boeing slump, when a 1971 billboard asked, “Will the last person leaving Seattle, turn off the lights?” But the good times returned in the 1980s. Microsoft located in nearby Redmond, and tech companies
arrived: Amazon, F5-Networks, Real Networks, Nintendo, and T-Mobile.

Films sparked further interest in Seattle led by Singles in 1992 and Sleepless in
Seattle the following year. The sit-com Fraiser made use of a Seattle setting, even
while filming in L.A. Seattle’s strong print tradition — papers like The Seattle Times, The
Stranger, Daily Journal of Commerce, Northwest Asian Weekly, Seattle Magazine, Seattle Weekly, and Seattle Gay News — brought many newcomers here.

As a welcoming city, Seattle had been attracting other cultures like the LBGTQ
community, which was drawn to Capitol Hill, and the Asian community with ties to the
International District. When the Vietnam War ended, Vietnamese refugees were invited
here.

By then, the city had become a hub for global health led by such giants as the Gates
Foundation, PATH, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, the University of Washington, and the Infectious Disease Institute. Many arrived here, attracted to institutions of higher education, headed by the University of Washington and Seattle University and backed by Seattle Pacific, Antioch University, and Seattle Comminity Colleges.

Whatever brought one to Seattle, the next trick is to define when you can call yourself a
Seattleite. Observers such as the Seattle Times’ FYI Guy Gene Balk (himself a
Californian first hired to work in the Times’ library) discovered that not only are most city
residents unlikely to have been born here but that three out of five weren’t even born in
Washington State. Balk jokes that you become a Seattleite when “you can pronounce
Puyallup without thinking about it.” Times staffer Christine Clarridge once said you’re a
Seattleite when you never honk your horn in anger and always cross the street at
intersections.

But getting back to David Brewster’s concern over craft beer and coffee hangouts no longer being a reason for coming here. He gloomily believes the city has “passed its hot moment” and that we need some new magnetism. If not beer, what might that be? Seafood? Water sports? Walkable waterfront?

Perversely, I don’t think we need to belabor the issue. I remember a tech
conference held here some years ago. The conference concluded with a twilight
reception held on the lawn outside one techie’s Eastside home. The evening sun was just
setting over Seattle’s hills. Clear blue, sparkling Lake Washington was dotted with
sailboats and framed by greenery and mountains. I overheard one participant saying to another, “You know I could see coming back here and settling in.”