Jake: Seattle has a Bellevue problem

You know that feeling when you’re standing next to someone way better-looking in a photo? That painful comparison you can’t escape? Seattle is living that right now — and Bellevue is the attractive friend.

Even Mayor Katie Wilson sees it. She recently admitted she thinks “it’s a problem when Seattle’s tax environment gets very out of step with our neighboring jurisdictions, including Bellevue.” That’s Seattle’s mayor conceding the point.

These two cities are a stone’s throw apart but worlds apart in how they’re run. The numbers — compiled over 20 years by analyst Viet Q. Nguyen — tell a brutal story.

Seattle spends nearly 2X as much per resident, getting less for it

Start with spending. Since 2006, Bellevue has actually cut per-resident spending from $5,741 to $4,653 — a 19% decrease. Seattle? It’s ballooned from $5,997 to $8,677 — up 45%. Seattle now spends nearly twice as much per resident as Bellevue for the same basic services.

What’s that money buying? On violent crime, Seattle logs 542 incidents per 100,000 residents. Bellevue: 99. Property crime: Seattle racks up 4,100 cases; Bellevue about 2,200. Seattle residents are also earning less — median household income is $120,000 v. Bellevue’s $160,000.

But here’s the number that stops you cold. Life expectancy in Seattle’s downtown core — Belltown, First Hill — is 71.6 years. East King County, where Bellevue sits, comes in at 84.2. That’s a 13-year gap. Thirteen years of life, separated by a bridge.

To be fair, Seattle shoulders the region’s homelessness burden in a way Bellevue doesn’t. But that’s partly the point — the two cities have made fundamentally different ideological choices, and those choices have produced fundamentally different outcomes.

I’ve lived and worked in Seattle for most of my life. I want this city to win. But at some point, someone in Seattle politics needs to make the short trip across the lake and ask Bellevue what they’re doing — because it’s clearly working.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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