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I'm moving to the Pacific Northwest...Help me find somewhere to live
Kendrik
Lewisville, TXRegistered User regular
Lewisville, TXRegistered User regular
So, I'm currently living in the DFW area of Texas. As an atheist, socially-liberal father of a transgender son, and given our current political circumstances I've finally decided that I need to get the hell out of here. I already work remotely for a company out of Seattle so I figured heading west is a good idea. So, you folks from Washington / Oregon...any suggestions for a city to settle in? I currently have all 3 of my kids living at home and my mother recently moved in with us so I need a pretty big place. This realistically rules out living in the Seattle plex because of housing costs. I'm currently looking at Spokane / Spokane Valley, the Tri-Cities area and Vancouver but I honestly know nothing about these places. So, I'm hoping some locals might be able to give me some feedback about their experiences in the area and maybe turn me on to some other places that might fit the bill.
My only really strong requirement is a big enough place to hold all of us and good broadband internet. The rest of them are covered by being in a state that's not slowly falling back to the iron age. Thanks, everyone!
My only really strong requirement is a big enough place to hold all of us and good broadband internet. The rest of them are covered by being in a state that's not slowly falling back to the iron age. Thanks, everyone!
Guild Wars 2: Kendrik.5984
+1
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I've lived in Seattle and Portland, and I have extended family in Olympia, Tri-cities, Spokane, and all over the greater Seattle metro.
I'm really not a fan of Tri-Cities. Part of that is personal bias, but there's an objective reason for it too. It's the location of the old Hanford nuclear site. Evidence is mixed on whether this actually matters for health outcomes, with older evidence showing stronger effects on cancer than newer evidence (which is consistent with decades of cleanup efforts and natural runoff). It's probably fine but given a choice, I wouldn't take the risk. It's also just not a particularly pleasant place to live, IMO.
Instead of Spokane or Tri-Cities, I'd look at Pullman. I personally think it's nicer, and Google tells me it has a good school district.
Seattle is fucking great, but like you said it's expensive. As a single adult, I wouldn't even try to live inside city limits if I made under, roughly, $80k/yr or $90k/yr. I can't even imagine what it costs to raise 3 kids there. Like any big city, you can mitigate that somewhat by living a little out of town. Everett and Edmonds are pretty nice, IMO.
I like Portland a lot and it is easily the most politically & culturally progressive place listed here. Housing is more affordable than Seattle but expensive in a national comparison. We do have legitimate problems with mental health and crime. Most of those problems have been vastly exaggerated by both conservative and mainstream media. If you pay too close attention to some news sites, you might get the impression that Portland is constantly on fire. But despite that exaggeration, the problems still exist - property crime in particular, and I do encounter people out in the streets who are very loudly in need of better mental health care. That can be alarming or disruptive, even if that person isn't actually a safety risk to anybody but themselves.
A lot of people live in Vancouver for the tax benefits. By being a Washington resident, you don't have to pay income tax. You can easily cross the state line into Oregon for shopping to avoid sales tax.
If you ever need to get to Seattle, it's a lot easier to do that if you're on the western edge of the state. Going all the way from Canada to Oregon along the state's west side just means going down the I-5 corridor which is an easy drive (if a bit long) and there are busses and Amtrak. Going from Spokane to Seattle by car is totally fine in the summer but during the winter you'll have to navigate the Cascade mountains which require snow chains on a good day (and often get shut down completely). A lot of the time, you'd just end up taking a short flight from Spokane airport to Sea-Tac instead and deal with that hassle.
Also keep in mind that the PNW is only culturally progressive in certain areas. A lot of eastern Washington, and the I-5 corridor between Olympia and Portland, will feel culturally more similar to Dallas than to Seattle. While the state government tends to be progressive, it can be surprisingly conservative in some ways. For example, the tax structure is the most regressive of any state in the US.
A few towns that didn't make your list but probably should. Each of these are little queer-friendly enclaves that are IMO pretty nice but still cheap and have small town vibes (but I really have no idea how good the schools are):
Bellingham, up north.
Ellensburg, dead center.
Centralia, halfway between Seattle and Portland.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
I REALLY like the idea of living in Vancouver/Portland but I was having trouble finding listings that fit my budget. It's definitely in my top 3, though. I do appreciate the info on travel to Seattle, though, as it's something I'd like to be easier, rather than harder. Also, to clarify, 2 of my 3 kids are adults and my 3rd is in his junior year in high school (and remote-schools) so the schools are pretty low on my priority list. I do like the smalltown vibe...it's why I stick to the far-out suburbs, so I'll definitely look at those 3 you recommended. Like a guy from work said, as long as there's a grocery store, a hardware store, and good takeout I can get everything else from Amazon.
Guild Wars 2: Kendrik.5984
Does anyone have experience with the southern-most coastal part of the state, like Brookings or Gold Beach? What about something closer to Portland yet not Portland, like Tilamook? Is COL similar to Portland in these places, or is it perhaps worse because they're coastal?
But fuck you — no, fuck y'all, that's as blunt as it gets"
- Kendrick Lamar, "The Blacker the Berry"
cost of living on the coast is pretty low compared to the portland metro unless you want to be like, right on the beach; you'd have to look hard into internet options though because there is not much fiber penetration in the state yet (basically just the portland metro iirc, though it's expanding)
you could consider vancouver WA, which is both geographically and culturally portland-adjacent and a popular lower-cost-housing option, though you are stuck with kind of a monstrous commute if you come south (again, maybe not in comparison to texas)
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
As it turns out, the company I work for in Seattle is Astound Broadband (formerly Wave) as a Network Engineer. I did a little digging into our cable internet presence (not my area of specialty) and it looks like we've got presence in Woodburn, Silverton, and Depoe Bay as far as any place south of Portland. I obviously can't speak for other providers but there you go.
On an un-related note it turns out my son has one friend who lives in Spokane and a few that live in Idaho near Spokane. They say that they really like the area and that it's quite LGBTQ+ friendly, as well. So, yeah...he's pushing for that as our final destination.
Guild Wars 2: Kendrik.5984
We are aiming for rural because whatever place we move into, we want it to have many trees and hopefully a mountain either in the distance or the house is built at the foot of a mountain. So we are prepared that such places will have MAGA folks around, but since we're there for the trees and the more rational labor and women's healthcare laws of a state like OR, we can tolerate that conservatives are probably around somewhere as well.
Actually, one of the reasons I am focusing on OR is that there is a greater fiber penetration in that state than in, say, Northern CA which was my original choice. I've been using the FCC broadband map to verify what kind of internet coverage any house I might be interested in has. If the map is even mostly accurate, OR has pretty good fiber coverage in the areas I'm most interested in. And internet is pretty important to me since I'm a remote worker.
Commuting to Portland isn't something I'm really going to be interested in. The main reason I want Portland-adjacent is for the weather. I want a place where it rains all the time. And that gets snow during the winter. And that isn't hotter than the surface of the sun during summer. That's why I'm looking at "Portland, but not." WA isn't out of the question, but another consideration we have is that my husband's parents live in CA, and so if we can find a home in Northern CA or southern OR that would make visiting so much easier. My MIL has even said that if we were to move to Crescent City, CA (which is on the list of possibilities), that she and FIL would move there too so they could be near us. My ILs are sweet people so I have no problem with this, and I know my MIL especially misses her son terribly, living so far away as we do.
But fuck you — no, fuck y'all, that's as blunt as it gets"
- Kendrick Lamar, "The Blacker the Berry"
I actually didn't realize fiber pen was that good in the state, it must be expanding rapidly
if you're not married to being near the coast you could also consider eugene or bend, although COL has been all over the place in bend in recent times and I don't really have the pulse of it
lotta beautiful country down there though
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
I don't know how it's been elsewhere, but the whole west coast has been having more and larger wildfires. I expect that trend to continue in the future. This means not only the risk of needing to evacuate if the fire is close, risk of the fire burning your place, but also smoke. As in, wildfire smoke that saturates the whole geographical area for days, weeks, possibly months.
Especially since folks are talking about being further out, in general. Last year lots of eastern Oregon was burning for a long time. Washington was probably similar.
I think it's something to consider when looking at where exactly you want to end up, at least.
There's also a lot of areas that despite all the rain and cold winter temperatures, don't actually get reliable snow. Vancouver/Portland area supposedly gets like 4.5 inches a year on average, and that's often in the form of juuuust enough to make things white and that's it. Every 2-3 years there'll be a fun week with a nice layer of snow, though, just definitely not every year. And a real bad storm every decade or so.
It helps a lot that one of the major telecom undersea cable routes comes into Hillsboro, OR by way of (approximately) Cannon Beach, OR, with additional landing points for undersea cables in nearby towns. That doesn't mean that the whole coast is fiber ready or anything but even the coax providers in the area are pretty decent. And Hillsboro is one of the big datacenter hubs in the region.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Ding ding ding, the ol' I-5 shuffle that one.
Yep. We've got presence in a couple of DC's in Hillsboro. Our FTTP footprint is thin on the ground but our Coax footprint is pretty decent.
Guild Wars 2: Kendrik.5984