Despite remote work keeping some employees home and out of the city, Seattle’s population has continued to grow in the last few years. The Washington Office of Financial Management recently released a report indicating that the city’s population rose to 779,200 on April 1—an increase of 16,700 people, or 2.2%, from the year prior.
Other West Coast cities have not fared as well, with San Francisco and Portland both losing population since 2020. Seattle also accounted for more than half of King County’s growth from April 1, 2022, to April 1 this year.
There were a few local municipalities that grew faster than Seattle. Black Diamond had the highest percentage growth, with a 12% population increase from 6,145 to 6,880. This area is home to the master-planned community Ten Trails, which originally opened in 2018. Since then, the development has been opening in stages, with the ultimate plan of building around 6,000 homes and adding more than 15,000 residents to the area.
Carnation and Woodinville also saw sold growth at 3% and 2.8% respectively, but with their smaller populations to start with, this amounts to just a few hundred people total.
Several cities on the Eastside also outpaced Seattle’s rate of population growth, including Kirkland, Redmond and Woodinville. Bellevue gained about 700 people, an increase of just .5%. That brings the city’s population up to 154,600 total.
One point of interest in this data is the ratio of men to women in King County. Recent census data indicates that in 2022, there were around 35,000 more men than women in the 25-to-39 age group in King County. With about 321,000 men and 286,000 women, the ratio works out to about 112 men for every 100 women.
This gender gap places King County third in the country for the highest male-to-female ratio, behind only Santa Clarita County and San Francisco County in California.
The reason for this gender gap may already be obvious: the tech industry. Despite efforts to the contrary, STEM fields still skew mostly male. Because of this, Seattle’s tech industry is more likely to pull in male workers, simply because there are more of them.
Information for this article was sourced from The Seattle Times here and here.
