re: Would you live in Seattle suburbs?

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Where? In Ellensburg? Yakima? That isn't really a reflective of any price point for Western Washington. Some of my neighbors and lots of my friends in the South Sound worked at JBLM.

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Tri Cities - Kennewick address but actually closer to Richland. I was mistaken about the population...its actually closer to 300K than 100K for the entire area.

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Is this relative to Washington or Seattle? Because Yakima is a terrible shithole and is a really terrible basis for comparison.

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I would agree, Yakima is a shite hole. Pasco is also on a smaller scale. Spokane is as bad as Yakima.

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I don't know about a recession, but the PNW, in particular the Sound, has a massive military presence.

If your basis of comparison is Yakima, then yeah, I can understand your point of view. But that really, really, really isn't reflective of living in Seattle or the actual Puget Sound area. It certainly isn't considered part of the greater MSA or CSA.

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I doubt if there is a state economy in the US which is stronger and more stable than that of Washington and the west side is BOOMING and a fantastic place to live as far as economics goes. Yes, housing is outlandish BUT wages more than make up for it. If I were a young man and not an old man with years of marketable experience which affords me a very nice salary in the south it would be a no brainer for me...I would relocate to Washington and tolerate all of the BS so I could earn Washington wages. I would not think twice about it. There is more to life than high wages though when you are making your nut. That aspect of living in all of the PNW is too much to accept...if you are making a good living elsewhere, something far too many people in the south ain't doing.

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You seem to be basing your experience as the dispositive example of what living in an area is like, and that seems to be the issue. If the PNW was not your cup of tea, fine, but the notion for paying for permits to hike is not a notion limited to Washington. The seasonal permits were extremely cheap too, to the degree that I've never heard of anyone complaining about that in particular.

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The fact that no one complains is the point and why it happens. In March of 2020 Washington closed all fishing due to COVID. There were some protests...I went to one in Pasco, there were about 10 other people there. When the police announced we'd be arrested if we did not leave I thought for sure he had it to do. He knew far more about those conservative Washingtonians than I did...they all, every last one of them, did as they were told. I did not, but since I was the only one left the police ignored me because I was more than 6 feet from anyone. Thats the problem...its not only accepted it is defended and encouraged by the people being governed. For those who do not know eastern Washington is GOP country...it ain't the west side. Yet those people are perfectly OK with such antics and will defend them and insist on even more. They relish the idea of public spaces and land being restricted to the public in some sort of twisted sense of ecological ideology...yet they don't balk at those same lands being exploited by industry. It wasn't my cup of tea. The weather alone would have been a stretch, the people being shocked if you spoke to them was weird but there love for regulation was shocking to me...and a deal breaker. I'd tolerate it if I were 30 and had a family and my choices were $100k in Atlanta and $150k in Tacoma but I have other options....