I’ve mentioned that my partner and I have been discussing moving out of New York City for several reasons and contemplating cities on the West Coast. We had our eye on several cities and I visited all of them to help evaluate if they met our criteria, which was the below:-
- Cost
- Job Opportunities
- Work/Life Balance
- Transportation/Walkability
- Weather
- Beauty
- Food and Bars
- Ease of Travel Home/Abroad
- “Gut Feeling”
Seattle wasn’t originally even on the list. All I knew about it was its stereotype of being rainy and dismissed it immediately. However, when I went there to visit a friend for a weekend I absolutely fell in love. To be fair I had visited for a total of 12 hours before in February two years ago on the way to a vacation in the Maldives and found it surprisingly warm for February after coming from NYC, the people surprisingly friendly for a large city and the city shockingly beautiful even with the clouds and without having seen the mountains. I had no idea the city was so surrounded by calming water and lush forests.
Ridiculously the last piece of criteria is the one that hit me first: The Feeling. Given that I am constantly stressed about work even though I know work does not truly affect my daily life and should be easier to shake off than conflict in my personal life, the stress is always with me. But in Seattle it was strangely absent. The city gave me a similar feeling that I get when I visit my home in Atlanta: complete calm. It was only later that I discovered Seattle was a hidden gem that met all of our criteria in addition to that “Gut Feeling.”
I had no idea, but Seattle is one of the U.S. cities with the most job opportunities and this is only increasing. Huge technology companies have and are still opening offices in Seattle and causing unemployment rates to continue to drop below the U.S. average. Amazon, Starbucks, Boeing and Microsoft are obvious local behemoths, but Google, Facebook and even Apple have opened up shop there. The second fact that shocked me was that because of this job boom and the expansion of Silicon Valley companies in Seattle the salaries offered in Seattle are akin to salaries in NYC while the cost of living is half. The combination is beyond amazing.
The next surprise was when I discovered that Seattle is not actually that ‘rainy.’ I imagined a constant downpour and 300 days of overcast skies based on how people talk about it, but that’s not the case. Seattle actually only has a few more overcast days that New York and in return provides temperate temperatures year round. It’s rare for the temperature to be below 30, which is a constant in NY in the five months of what I call winter. 0 degrees is a constant companion. I would gladly trade freezing walks for a little more clouds. It’s not the clouds that keep me inside my apartment in the winter: it’s the cold.
Seattle was turning out to be everything I love about New York: a walkable, convenient big city with a lot of job opportunities combined with everything I’ve been missing: kind people with small town charm, companies that actually care about their employees and much lower rents. It really seems pretty perfect. I have a few good friends there that assure me it’s an amazing place to live and shockingly every time I tell someone we’re moving to Seattle they respond “I love Seattle!” I never knew this city was so well loved.