It’s probably no secret that the one thing many Seattleites love (or hate) to talk about – whether you’re a native or a transplant – is just how fast Seattle’s growing. It’s something we at The Evergrey have been following pretty closely. That’s why today, we’ve put together a list for you of some of the most eye-popping stats we’ve come across.
And while numbers could never tell the whole story of something as nuanced as a region’s growth, the hard data adds some context to the ways we all feel the city changing.
So next time you find yourself talking to someone about this booming city of ours, think about throwing one of these seven stats into the conversation.
Seattle is growing so much that…
(Century Link Field. Photo by Panchenks via Flickr)
…we are the fastest growing big city in the country. We added 20,000 people between July 2015 and July 16, or 57 people per day. [U.S. Census Bureau via The Seattle Times]. The area around us is booming too: an average of 236 people move to the Puget Sound region every day. After nine and a half months, they’d fill up CenturyLink Field (which has a capacity of 67,000 people). [Puget Sound Regional Council]
(Photo by Washington State Department of Transportation via Flickr.)
…62 construction cranes worked on our skyline at the end of 2016. That’s three times as many as New York City. [Rider Levett Bucknall via The Seattle Times]
(Mercer Mess traffic. Photo by Oran Viriyincy via Flickr.)
…there are 30,000 more cars driving on the Mercer corridor than there were in 2014. And we’ve got the traffic to show for it. [INRIX via KOMO News]
(Belltown apartments/condos across from Olympic Sculpture Park. Photo by Joe Wolf via Flickr.)
…we’re opening nearly 10,000 new apartments in 2017. That’s almost twice as many as any other year in our history. [Dupre + Scott via The Seattle Times]
(Amazon bubbles. Photo by Kiewic via Flickr.)
…Amazon posted 11,042 job openings in King County this past summer. That’s twice the number it posted in the summer of 2015. The company moved its headquarters to South Lake Union in 2010 and has been growing like crazy ever since. [Washington’s Employment Security Department via The Seattle Times]
(Photo by Harold Hollingsworth via Flickr.)
…we are officially the hottest housing market in the country. That’s as of November, and we kept the title through the end of the year. [Case-Shiller home price index via The Seattle Times]
And finally (and unfortunately):
(Nickelsville Homeless Camp. Photo by David Lee via Flickr.)
…the number of homeless people in Seattle/King County went up 19 percent in just one year. That’s from 2015 to 2016. [One Night Count by Seattle/King County Coalition on Homelessness]
What do you want to know or share?
Have you seen an interesting statistic or data point that you want to share? E-mail us at [email protected]. We’d like to keep a running list that we can regularly update.
Got a question about how the city’s changing that can be answered with data? Let us know and we’ll do some digging for you.
CORRECTION: Thanks to reader David Hirning for pointing out an error we’ve since corrected in this piece. We’d written initially that the number of homeless people in Seattle/King County had gone up 19 percent since 2000, but it climbed that much in just one year, from 2015 to 2016, according to the One Night Count. We’re sorry about that.