One in Four Seattle Employers Weigh Leaving As Residents Flee

If only someone had seen it coming.

While New York is still the number one city for residents looking for homes elsewhere, there's a new town in second place: Seattle. And it's not only residents who are leaving, some for tax-friendlier suburbs, some for other states entirely; businesses, seeing the labor pool dry up, are starting to bail as well.

It's not a good look for the city with its new, inexperienced communist mayor, who promised to cure all the city's ills, even though she has never done an honest day's work in her life. But, yes, welcome to another aspect of the Great Sorting.

Seattle recorded the second-largest net outflow of home shoppers among the nation’s 100 largest metro areas in the first quarter of 2026, trailing only New York, according to a new Washington Policy Center analysis of migration data. The people typing other cities into a search bar are taking their income with them.

Mark Harmsworth, the group’s director of small business policy, pulled together Redfin search data, state population estimates, federal housing figures, and IRS returns to test whether Washington is still the destination Democrats in Olympia describe. His answer is that Americans already living here are shopping for the exits, and the official headcount is disguising it.

The number informing the analysis comes from Redfin’s migration tracker, which measures where home shoppers actually search rather than where they eventually sign. The company describes it as a non-scientific indicator, though it gives an early read on who is thinking about going.

Oh, but it gets worse. It's not just headcount the city is losing.

Washington recorded a net loss of nearly 19,000 taxpayers and dependents between 2021 and 2022, along with about $1.66 billion in adjusted gross income. King County’s later filings show a net loss of roughly 13,000 people and close to $2 billion in AGI in one year. Even in a year the county gained residents from other states, it still lost $446 million in income, because the households leaving earned more than the households arriving.

Some of the people and some of the businesses are just bailing out of the city of Seattle itself, granted. But this is nevertheless another facet of the Great Sorting, which keeps happening because the left has little or no understanding of what incentives are or how to take advantage of them. In Seattle, the costs of doing business just keep increasing, with the latest stupidity being a 5 percent "social housing tax" on any company with a payroll of a million dollars or more. That's in addition to a city payroll tax and various other city business taxes and fees. Why, one might wonder, would any profitable business stay in place when a move just outside the city limits, or to another state if necessary, can save them millions that otherwise may have come off their bottom line?

That could make the difference between success and failure for any business, large or small. And Seattle's outmigration is telling that tale, vividly. Office vacancy rates in Seattle are around 33 percent. Out of every three commercial office spaces, one is empty. That one is generating no profit for a landlord, but is still likely being taxed. One in three- that's an utter disaster.

And, again, incentives matter.

If King County is losing a disproportionate share of higher-income taxpayers while attracting residents with lower incomes, the county’s overall population could remain stable even as its tax base weakens.

That matters because local governments rely on income-generating economic activity to support everything from public safety and transportation to housing programs and social services.

Nationally, the Tax Foundation has documented similar migration patterns, with higher-income households increasingly relocating to lower-cost and lower-tax regions.

Seattle is sinking fast. Their new communist mayor has little or no idea what she's doing. The city council seems equally clueless. They doubtlessly thought, as commies so often do, that their schemes really will work this time; they just need the right Top Men in charge, and they always seem to think that while engaged in preening in a mirror. But in socialism and communism, it's not the execution that's the problem; it's the system itself that is the problem.

Seattle and the taxpaying residents of that city are getting a good, hard lesson in that right now. The key question is this: Will they be capable of absorbing the lesson before the city utterly collapses?

Editor's Note: The Democrat Party has been infected by socialism, and it's spreading FAST. Democrats are claiming there's nothing to worry about, but we know the truth.

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