There’s No Place Like Home Less Expensive Houses Lure Many Seattle Workers Into Lengthy Commute Trips

In the depths of winter, when it’s still pitch black at 6:05 a.m., folks in the north Snohomish County town of Stanwood are catching the bus to their jobs in Seattle, 60 miles away.

Commuting used to suggest traveling to the city from nearby suburbs. Now the term applies to folks who travel as much as 170 miles a day to work in Seattle.

One of the riders on the Seattle-bound Snohomish County Community Transit bus is Sean O’Meara, a U.S. Park Service ranger who lives in Bellingham, farther north in Whatcom County, and works in Pioneer Square.

“I either snooze or read,” O’Meara said of the long haul. “You get used to it.”

Some folks endure long commutes for a rural lifestyle. Others have a more practical reason - the high cost of housing in the Interstate 5 corridor.

“What I can buy in Seattle is very limited,” said Abraham Gonzales, who commutes 70 miles from Mount Vernon to his job with the Social Security Administration in downtown Seattle.

“In Mount Vernon, I can afford a new house,” said Gonzales, who paid $101,000 for his three-bedroom home.

Some long-range commuters brave Snoqualmie Pass through the Cascades on a daily basis, driving 85 miles to Puget Sound-area jobs from the Kittitas County town of Cle Elum.

“I do it because I love my job and I love where I live,” said Bonnie Granger of Cle Elum, population about 1,800, who commutes to Tukwila. “They just happen to be on opposite sides of the mountains.”

The average cost of a house in Kittitas County is $78,000, according to the Washington Association of Realtors, well below the $192,000 King County average.

In Mason County to the southwest, the average home price is $92,000, and in Lewis County to the south, it’s $80,000, said Wes Lynch of the realtors’ group.

“It’s amazing that people would drive that far to own their own house,” Lynch said. “But what’s really kind of tragic is the fact that they have to.”

Some say a nonurban lifestyle is worth the effort.

“Here, people seem more friendly and able to get along better. Maybe because it’s less crowded,” said Dennis Struck, who commutes to Auburn from Cle Elum.

“Like if we go to the lake or the Yakima River, even on a hot summer day, we pretty much have the place to ourselves.”

“Almost everyone who walks through our door is from those congested places, like Kent, Auburn, Federal Way,” said real estate agent Deanna Simons in Eatonville.

“I ask if they’re sure they want to make that drive, and they all say, ‘Just get me out of there.”’ It’s happening all over. Rural America is outstripping metropolitan areas in net growth, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Two million more people have moved to rural areas than to metropolitan areas in the 1990s. By contrast, there was a rural net loss of 1.4 million people in the 1980s.

While the real-estate market is a factor in the Puget Sound area, nationally, the migration is fueled by businesses locating in rural areas.