Consider the Suburbs

With the opening of Sound Transit’s 2 Line, a light rail line connecting Seattle with its largest eastern suburbs, I’m starting to question my long-held misgivings about spending time in the areas around the city where I’ve lived for nearly 20 years. After a year of traveling far from home, it’s time to explore some nearby places.

I was born and raised in the New York City suburbs, and considering the state of the big city in the 1970s, my parents made the right decision to move out to Long Island. The suburbs had little crime, good schools, and reliable mass transit to take office workers to and from Manhattan. Until I learned how to drive, I also found my hometown to be isolating, with few ways to get around, other than the school bus and car rides to and from my friends’ houses. In 1995, I wrote a letter to Newsday, Long Island’s largest newspaper, in support of a local mother who feared for her child’s safety walking to and from school, on streets with high-speed traffic and no sidewalks; over 30 years later, walking around my parents’ hometown is as hazardous as it was when I was in high school. My current passion for walkable, transit-oriented cities could be traced to my fascination with going into New York City and my desire to get out of my suburban hometown. For years, “no suburbs” has been on my LinkedIn profile, although I still regularly get recruiter messages for suburban-based companies.

I moved to Ballard, in northwestern Seattle, in 2019, and five years later, I bought a car, ending a nearly 17-year period when I didn’t own one. My car-shopping trips took me up to Shoreline, just over the border from Seattle, which has grown so much that it practically blends in with Seattle’s northernmost neighborhoods. From the RapidRide E Line bus that connects downtown Seattle with Shoreline, I can see parks, shopping, new apartments, and education and health centers, built up in a way that should inspire Urbanist Shoreline, a volunteer group whose mailing list I’ve joined. Further to the north of Shoreline is Edmonds, with a charming and walkable downtown, and also a variety of businesses large and small, with a ferry connection out to the Olympic Peninsula. Edmonds is vibrant and flourishing, despite the pleas by some residents not to “Ballardize” it, using the name of my Seattle neighborhood as a byword for the growth and development that they oppose. As the crow flies, Shoreline and Edmonds are as close to me as they are to Seattle’s southern neighborhoods; by transit or by car, they are even quicker to access. Edmonds even has a Winco Foods, which I really appreciate, especially since it has an electric car charger on-site.

The Eastside, unlike Seattle’s northern suburbs, has had very little appeal to me. When I moved to Seattle in 2006, I thought I would be spending some of my time in places like Bellevue and Redmond, but that hasn’t really panned out. I used to watch Steelers games with a group at a sports bar in Bellevue, but because I was renting cars by the hour, I came straight home afterwards, and I later found (and, years later, took over) a group that met in Seattle proper. I thought I’d be going to events at the Microsoft campus, but in nearly 20 years, I’ve been there exactly once, for a university alumni event in January 2007. I interviewed on site at Google’s Kirkland office in 2007; I didn’t get a job there, but had they made an offer, I would have had to confront the choice of having a lengthy commute (without owning a car, at that time) or decamping from Seattle and moving closer to work. I’ve been to Kirkland a few times since then, and it’s grown significantly, but it still has the feel of a small town, by design.

My first couple of light rail trips to the Eastside helped me question my decades-old perception of the suburbs as car-centric and underbuilt. On opening day, I rode the new “Crosslink Connection” out to Redmond, where I had lunch with a few Seattle-based urbanists at a restaurant surrounded by modern apartment buildings, a privately-owned park, and many Microsoft offices. I then continued on to downtown Redmond, where the light rail terminus leads riders into a remarkably walkable and accessible city core. Returning home from the terminus took me nearly two hours, making a Redmond commute impractical, but while I was on the ground, I felt like a commute from downtown Redmond to the Eastside’s many office parks had never been more feasible. The following week, I traveled out to Bellevue Downtown station, and I found that while the station is very convenient to many office complexes, the shopping, dining, and parks of downtown Bellevue are about a mile away from the station, and the pedestrian experience along very wide downtown roads is as bad in 2026 as it was the last time I visited, which was at least seven years ago.

Am I ready to drop my hard prohibition against working in the suburbs? I don’t consider suburban cities to be contiguous with the city just yet, but at the same time, I’m willing to talk about particularly compelling jobs that include occasional travel out to the hinterlands. I also want to make some more trips out to the Eastside, including with my bike, as the weather gets better. There are some amazing trails out there, including some that are right next to light rail stations. Mixing cycling with light rail might make a long commute more bearable. It certainly beats sitting in traffic on a cross-lake bridge, which until recently, was my only practical commute option. Suddenly, I’m more of an optimist about the suburbs.