I’ve lived in Seattle for 30 years and have founded three companies here. Due to the expense of labor and housing, politics, bad traffic and the loss of the cit

I’ve lived in Seattle for 30 years and have founded three companies here. Due to the expense of labor and housing, politics, bad traffic and the loss of the city’s sense of community I will be moving my business to Bellingham in the next year. The bad parts of Amazon work culture have permeated almost every company here. It used to be very common in tech companies for people to leave the office at 3:00pm to go hiking after work in the summer or come in late after skiing powder in the morning. Now so many are working 60 hour weeks they don’t have the time to really enjoy the outside or engaging in making our city better. In short, Seattle residents are in general much less friendly and more stressed than ten years ago. Since my company builds outdoor products, our employees are happy to move to a new town with access to fanastic mountain biking, skiing and hiking with little traffic and somewhat more affordable home prices. It’s too bad Seattle grew without plans in place to help preserve its livability and attractiveness to small businesses.