by Kevin Schofield

Through most of the late 2010s, we here in Seattle were told the city was going through an unprecedented population boom, fed in large part by furious hiring by tech companies. Then, many of us were surprised when the 2020 census results were published, which knocked tens of thousands off even the U.S. Census Bureau’s own estimates (the Census Bureau takes an official count every 10 years, then uses various methods in between to generate annual estimates of year-to-year growth). Was it the pandemic, or the high cost of living, or perhaps just “irrational exuberance” in how the estimations were done that fed a desired narrative of a booming Seattle?