Seattle has now been named one of the most expensive places to live. It is also now the most educated city in the United States. This brings about two phenomena - a highly rich and highly poor city, and a very smart and qualified city.
The nature of balanced cities looks like the food pyramid with a wide lower "blue collar" working class, a medium sized "white collar" middle class, and a smaller "golden collar" upper class. There are more menial jobs needing to be done in the lower class (think of everyone in a service position - gas station, food service, manual labor), a medium amount of middle class jobs and a few high-end executive jobs.
But with Seattle's demographic changes of highly educated people with the ability to live in an expensive world, suddenly the supply of low-class workers disappears. Those workers, needing to live on their earnings leave the city to find more affordable housing leaving thousands of jobs that the rest of the population doesn't want to do.
Suddenly, having a college degree puts you level with everyone else. It becomes the standard and by posessing merely a diploma, you find yourself looking for jobs and finding those that the lower class has left on their journey to affordable living.
Consider the housing market. Apartment buildings are being remodeled into condominiums to buy. And when all the apartments turn into salable homes, where is that lower bracket of apartment affording people going to go? They have to leave.
Affordable housing is considered to be approximately 1/3 your income. The median income in Seattle is $70,000. (Median is the point where half is above and half is below - not average!) Supposedly, $1944 per month would go to rent/mortgage etc. These people spending that amount on housing are not typical across the country. Seattle has a very unique demographic that is leading to the destruction of the middle class.
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