What’s behind Seattle’s steady growth?
The Seattle metro area experienced the fifth largest amount of growth among 85 metros in the Western Region of the U.S. from 2000-2014, an annual average rate of 1.4 percent.
While that might not sound like a lot, that is about 700,000 new residents calling the Emerald City home since the turn of the millennium.
We wanted to find out why they are coming and where they are coming from.
The short answer to the first question: jobs. Seattle is one of the highest ranked places for job creation and wage growth in the country. It is also a major tech hub, ranking second in GDP growth among U.S. metros in the tech sector last year.
As to where everyone is coming from, one in five new Seattleites are immigrants and more than half of those are coming from Asian countries. For a more detailed look at migration to Seattle see our interactive chart below.
