Changes since congestion pricing started in New York

s/strategic/wealthy/

I agree there are places in Seattle one can do this, but boy one certainly needs the paper to do this.

Seattle is weird in that drive til you qualify is not a thing unless you start getting really far out. Some inner ring neighborhoods and suburbs are comparable or more expensive than the core.

You make a tradeoff. You are still going to plop down $1 million for a home unless you live way out there, but instead of a 2000 foot SFH in Bothell or Lynwood, you make do with a 1250 foot townhome in Ballard (same price, less property taxes, more urban). Ballard isn't exactly Capitol Hill or Queen Anne either (we thought about Magnolia just across the locks, but it made me think that I would at least need an electric cargo bike to make most days work without a car).

If you want to head straight south or straight north you won’t have to go further out than 1 hour before rents and property values fall significantly from city center Seattle. Tacoma is 30 minutes away without traffic and has a median home price 40% less than Seattle. Drive till you qualify is real.

If you want to head east, you’re running into the real estate aftermath of Microsoft making tens of thousands of millionaires in the 90s and 00s. You won’t save much money there.

Yeah, the Eastside is a real estate hellscape. Everything east of Lake Washington till highway 203/18 is genuinely quite bad. I had cheaper rent on top of Queen Anne, 1 block from the Trader Joe's, than any place of comparable walk/transit on the east side ($2065/month for a 2 bedroom 1.75 bathroom apartment+1 parking place, ~950sq/ft).

Really curious what would amount to 1.75 bathroom, I'm unfamiliar with the concept. One full bathroom and a second with just a a toilet/sink combination?

With traffic, Tacoma isn’t very viable. Also I have a relative who commuted to his job in Tacoma from…west Seattle (granted they bought in the late 80s). It was an easy reverse commute (so close to actually 30 minutes?), going the other way is hard and you can only win with the train (sounder) or maybe bus. Link is making its way down to federal way soon (or already?) but that assumes you work near a station or it quickly becomes not competitive with driving.

My mom commuted to Redmond from Bothell when I was in high school, horrible traffic…and that was early 90s. You don’t want to do anything on 405 during rush hour.

You can also head west if you dare. I have a coworker commuting in from Vashon Island. I don’t think prices are that great on the islands though, maybe 30-20% less than Seattle, but you live by the ferry schedule and if you want something near the ferry dock you’ll pay a lot more for that walk on convenience.

That is 1.5. A 1.75 is usually a small bathroom with a shower. The space would have no room for a tub. These often get counted as full baths anyways.

The ferry is also so expensive that you’d probably eat up a lot of savings using that as your commute method.

It depends how often you need to show up at the office. Honestly, if you live near the dock and work downtown, and only need to show up 2 days a week, it can work. Otherwise it sounds like too much if a hassle to me..

Yeah, it varies in a lot of cities. I live about an hour (given not a lot of traffic--hah!) west of Boston and the real estate prices aren't cheap but not crazy. A lot of the tech industry was out that way anyway historically until pharma and outposts of west coast companies took over Kendall Square. But certainly a lot of the coastal towns north and south of the city are pretty pricey.

Yeah. A lot of us prefer a shower to a bathtub with shower anyway. But it's probably an important distinction for people with kids especially.

Why stop at WA-18, though? I-90 is wide and not particularly busy past that point even at peak times, so you can easily get to North Bend in only a few more minutes.

The real cutoff point for commuting to Seattle is just past exit 34, because that's where they close Snoqualmie Pass when there's too much snow.

Totally agree. I'm renting on the eastside at the moment, but places like Ballard and Magnolia are on my list of places to look to buy for the very reasons you mentioned. Having more space in these exurbs is "nice", but you pay the time tax every time you want to do something.

I remember coming here mid-pandemic and having white picket fences in my eyes as the company pointed me to a real estate agent. Thank god I didn't pull the trigger and buy because I would've been financially trapped (upside down) in some very unsafe urban area (e.g. south Seattle) or far-flung place (like Sultan).

You probably wouldn't be upside down in south Seattle, just maybe not that happy. But if you don't have kids, Georgetown is (or at least was) the hip area to be in ATM.