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.
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.
At the risk of being repetitive, it was a pretty strange month. Nationally, employment fell by about 15 percent. But total disposable personal income in the country rose by 13 percent
The Seattle-California connection established in 1852 continues as strong as ever. In some ways Seattle is fated to be the eternal little sibling to the Bay Area and the Los Angeles area: smaller, less glamorous, frequently ignored, sometimes disdainful, sometimes envious.
Seattle had the fastest growth for a central city from 2010 to 2020. But at the same time, the balance of the Seattle metro area ranked only ninth for growth.
Urbanism is about choices, not inevitability, and the context of those choices has changed radically. Re-engineering cities to make them vibrant, productive and safe, in the face of a dominant atmosphere of fear, will not be easy.
Quietly, tens of thousands of office workers, salespeople and their managers have been let go. A restaurant or construction supply company can't do much business with all the restaurants and sites shut down. We look at unemployment claims by occupation.
The inevitable Boeing reductions will hurt the regional economy, but not nearly as much as past Boeing job cuts. Boeing is still the region’s biggest employer, but accounts for a gradually diminishing share of all jobs.