Seattle shrinking? Maybe that’s a good thing

The news that the Seattle area’s decades long reign as the state’s growth magnet ended abruptly last year has drawn a muted reaction, or at times disbelief.

“I’m skeptical,” one economist told the Puget Sound Business Journal, about the new U.S. Census Bureau figures. “People are not just leaving in droves.”

This is an understandable response. We have only known growth, often the supercharged variety, since about the mid-1980s. That more people would always want to come here, for jobs and also because Seattle is awesome, has long seemed a ceaseless natural force, as if we had some sort of special civic gravity.

But what the census found is that an unusual number of people did pack up and leave. There were nearly 33,000 more people going than arriving in King County last year. This was balanced somewhat by births and some immigration from abroad to give a total population loss in the county of 20,266, between July 2020 and July 2021.

Maybe that’s not leaving in droves. It was enough, though, to rank King County dead last for growth among the state’s 39 counties — in both raw numbers and percentage decrease. That’s the first time that has happened, maybe ever, though for certain going back to 1960.

Seattle’s population likely contracted as well, though the Census Bureau won’t release city figures until mid-May. But the larger Seattle-Tacoma urban area saw the nation’s seventh biggest loss in domestic migration (people moving out), after biggest loser New York City, then San Francisco-San Jose, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington-Baltimore and the Boston area.

Are we now, suddenly, a shrinking city? Census data is always a year behind real life, looking backward not ahead. So it’s impossible to know.

But there’s a trend developing up and down the West Coast that suggests the days of Seattle always defying gravity may be ending.

Los Angeles has lost population for five years in a row, San Jose for four years, San Francisco for three. Last year, Portland also shrank for the first time in decades, as Multnomah County, which makes up most of the city, dropped by about 12,000 people, or 1.5%.

Canadian growth superstar Vancouver, B.C., also shrank, losing about 6,700 residents (about 1%).

California is far enough ahead of us on shrinking that they are starting to talk about it.

“We are in this new demographic era for California, of very slow or maybe even negative growth,” one demographer told the Los Angeles Times. “And it does have implications for everything in our state — from how we live our lives to which schools are getting closed down to how much capacity we might need for transportation networks, and eventually to housing.”

“I think there may be a paradigm shift happening,” echoes Sonia Hirt, a planning professor at the University of Georgia who has studied the psychology of “shrinking cities.” “It’s very much in the American mindset that only growth is good — that if you’re not growing, you’re failing. It’s definitely baked into the West Coast frontier personality, maybe more so than other parts of the country. So it will be interesting to see how those cities react.”

Indeed it will. Pretty much everything in Seattle politics, from tax levies to transit planning to social and housing policy debates, has been predicated for decades around a core sense that not only will growth keep coming, it’s a runaway train we are perpetually struggling to catch.

It’s also central to our identity. We’re No. 1, one of America’s Best Places, remember?

So it’s a punch to the civic plexus to hear that in fact people are splitting. Missing is any evidence of why, as it hasn’t been studied yet. It’s the pandemic, or the high cost of living, or soaring crime and street disorder, or insert-your-specific-urban-gripe-here.

The Los Angeles mayor speculated the top three reasons for the exodus from his city were “housing, housing and housing.” Seems odd he didn’t even mention the pandemic, which, due to the rise of remote work, has certainly untethered many jobs from the geographical location of the city.

It’s possible that with remote work, data collectors increasingly don’t know where some people live anymore — or how to assign a job to a physical place.

I met a millennial couple recently that spent the past two years working their tech jobs all around the West, in Colorado, Utah, California and then eventually here. They said plenty of their colleagues were doing the same, in a sort of wealthier, Airbnb version of Nomadland.

The Seattle metro area is recorded as having added 16,000 tech jobs during the past two years, a sure sign of growth. But what does that actually mean? The people doing those jobs could be living in Palm Springs for all we know.

Hirt, the Georgia planner, said it’s possible a tech-heavy city like Seattle now could be economically growing while simultaneously shrinking in population — a phenomenon of “growth without growth.” In this sense, West Coast shrinkage might be more of a lifestyle choice than a job-loss calamity, as it was in the Rust Belt. Though if the workers are elsewhere it will cause some pain, such as in an emptier downtown.

Amazon’s new remote work policy says: “We expect most employees to live close enough to their assigned office location that they can easily travel to the office for a meeting within a day’s notice.”

A “day’s notice” means it would now be no stretch for a South Lake Union Amazon worker to actually live in Roslyn, or Port Townsend, or even Pendleton, Oregon. That could have a profound effect on life and work patterns, and on Seattle’s traditional growth pressure points, like housing costs and traffic.

At a minimum, shouldn’t somebody at least be asking: Why are people leaving?

Hirt studied how cities react to news that they’re shrinking, and what they typically do is deny it. Or panic.

“In America it’s seen as an intolerable admission of defeat,” she said.

But it could also be an opportunity, she said. It should bring an eventual easing of rents (which has not happened yet, although in Seattle, rents are roughly the same as pre-pandemic). And it could create space for a recalibration: How should the rise of remote work be changing our transit planning, our building and development patterns, our main civic projects?

Maybe something like municipal broadband could turn out to be a more vital infrastructure investment than, say, more rail.

Whether it’s a trend or a blip, we just experienced a growth shift unseen around here in half a century. It suggests it’s worth asking a lot more questions like this than our leaders currently are.