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Old 08-19-2015, 11:49 PM   #28
Marin
Scraping Paint
 
City: -
Join Date: Oct 2007
Posts: 13,745
Quote:
Originally Posted by drb1025 View Post
There are some very nice neighborhoods in West Bellevue;

Yeah.... the only problem with that is you have to live in Bellevue. Most people's eyes can't look down their noses at that steep of an angle.

And we know longtime residents of Bellevue, too. Some of them used to live in the Clyde Hill neighborhood and one was a near neighbor of Bill Gates. They, too, have had it with the traffic, noise, messed up development, and taxes and have moved or are moving elsewhere to escape it.

Face it, the whole greater Seattle area is in an accelerating decline into crappyness. Both Nordstrom and Amazon were mere inches from pulling the plug on Seattle as their headquarters. Nordstrom was headed for Chicago and more recently Amazon was headed for somewhere else. Both of them were persuaded, primarily by one fellow, to remain in Seattle, one of the city's most powerful (and unknown) property developers and managers. I would never have known about this had I not been hired to write a book about his family and their fourth-generation company.

So it's not just me that thinks this area is getting more sucky by the day. Seattle seems determined to drive successful business out of the city with it's loony-tunes, anti-business ordinances and restrictions.

Bellevue has been cashing in on this and very successfully luring businesses away from Seattle, but now Bellevue is starting to succumb to all the same bozo actions that are dragging Seattle down.

Too bad, really. Both cities could have really done it right. But as GFC over in Tri-Cities alluded to, both cities are embarked on pursuing a political and social agenda that will ultimately defeat them.

To end this on a positive note, for someone interested in moving to the PNW and Puget Sound region, particularly to retire, the west side of the Sound--- the Kitsap Peninsula, Bainbridge Island, and the Olympic Peninsula, are still very nice. The Pacific coast is nice, too, if you like that sort of thing, notably from Ocean Shores up to Moclips (but not including Ocean Shores which is pretty pathetic) and on south past Long Beach.

Whidbey Island is very cool in a rather eclectic way, particularly the south end. Friends I used to work in commercial television in Honolulu have moved there in recent years so we are over there quite a bit these days, and we really like it. My wife finished her US Navy duty on the crash crew at Whidbey Island NAS and she says that while there have been a lot of changes, the island is not that unlike it was when she was stationed there. The Bellingham area is nice albeit rapidly getting pricey. The city itself is not all that picturesque but it has Western Washington University, a very highly rated school, and college towns tend to be cool just because they're college towns.

It's anybody's guess what the accelerating climate change will do to this region--- the predictions are pretty depressing to people who've lived here a long time---- but for the time being, the parts of western Washington that aren't Seattle/Bellevue/Redmond/Tacoma/King and Pierce counties still have a lot to offer.
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