King County, Washington

Amazon back, Boeing down, downtown empty

In January 2025, Amazon ordered 50,000 Seattle employees back to the office five days a week. The same quarter, the company gave up 595,000 square feet of Seattle office space and shifted workers to new towers in Bellevue. The company that built modern Seattle couldn’t decide if it wanted to be in Seattle anymore.

Meanwhile, across town, King County judges were processing a record crush of eviction cases. Down in Renton, Boeing was laying off workers from the 737 MAX factory after a door plug blew out of an airplane at 16,000 feet. And downtown office vacancy hit 35.6%, a record, with $3.7 billion in property value evaporating from the skyline.

King County scores 40.2 on the County Distress Index. The second-least distressed fifth, 35th of 39 in Washington. Less distressed than 69% of American counties.

Both things are true. That’s the interesting part.

The filter: who the price lets in

By nearly every measure of financial resilience, King County performs near the bottom decile of distress. Low delinquency, low default, a Safety Net & Buffer score of 10.16 — among the lowest in the country. And then Debt Burden arrives at 74.52 out of 100. Rent-to-income sits at the 79th percentile of distress. The cost of housing is the one dimension where King County reads like a distressed place.

That gap between the overall score and the housing number is the mechanism.

Call it the filter. The median home in King County costs $850,000. The annual income required to buy one, with 20% down, exceeds $188,000. The county’s median household income — $124,746, the highest in Washington — doesn’t reach the threshold.

A two-bedroom apartment runs $2,450 a month. The cost of being here means the people who show up in the county’s debt, poverty, and vulnerability data are disproportionately the people who can afford to be here. The low distress scores are real. They’re also a measurement of who survived the price.

Two King Counties, twenty minutes apart

The filter produces two King Counties that share a government and almost nothing else.

Mercer Island’s median home costs $2,550,000. Auburn’s costs $583,000. Bellevue sits above $1.5 million. Federal Way is at $610,000. Per capita income in Federal Way runs $32,788. In Bellevue it’s $71,633. These places are twenty minutes apart on I-405.

Poverty rates in Kent and Federal Way hit 15.5% and 15.8%. South King County’s rate of households below 200% of the federal poverty level — 22.6% — is closer to the national average than to the Eastside sitting a few exits north. The wealthiest fifth of Seattle households earned $439,000 in 2023. The poorest fifth averaged $21,000. That ratio — 21 to 1 — widened from 19x before the pandemic.

The composite absorbs all of this into one number. The number lands King in the second-least-distressed fifth — less distressed than 69% of U.S. counties.

The cushion and how long it lasts

Here’s what’s changing. The filter held for a decade. Tech salaries kept pace with housing, more or less. The people who could afford the county kept earning enough to stay.

In 2025, that started to slip. Nearly 13,000 workers were laid off in King County, more than half in tech. Amazon cut 2,303 Washington positions. Microsoft eliminated 3,200. Meta cut 330. Boeing — after a seven-week machinists’ strike that cost $7.6 billion — laid off 2,192 Washington workers, most of them from the Renton factory that builds the plane with the door problem.

The Labor domain registers at 85.34 — the single highest domain in a county where nearly everything else reads bottom-decile. The metro unemployment rate hit 5.1% by November 2025, exceeding the national average. The debt numbers haven’t moved. The cushion is still there — home equity, severance, savings from the years when a $250,000 salary was normal. The cushion still sits between the layoffs and the debt data.

The eviction docket tells on the composite

The number that makes the filter visible is evictions. King County recorded 6,635 eviction orders in 2025, up 217% from 2023. Nine in ten were for nonpayment of rent.

A county in the second-least distressed fifth is processing a record eviction caseload. Both are true because the composite includes Mercer Island and the eviction docket is mostly South King County.

About 11,000 people left King County through domestic migration in 2024. Thirty-seven percent moved to Snohomish, Pierce, or Kitsap counties. They didn’t leave the region. They left the price. The filter, working as designed.

The indicator to watch is debt

Pierce County sits to the south at 56.9. Kittitas to the east at 53.5. Yakima, the most distressed county in Washington, at 68.2. Every neighbor scores worse. King County’s population peers land in the same second-least distressed fifth — Middlesex in Massachusetts at 32.8, Hennepin County in Minneapolis at 39.1, Wake County in Raleigh at 34.4. The second-least-fifth label fits the composite.

But the composite is a portrait of who the filter kept in the frame. The domain to watch is Delinquency, which reads 14.83 as of the 2026 scoring — among the lowest scores in the county. That floor is what the housing filter buys: a population that already passed an affordability test before it ever showed up in the debt data. The exposure sits one layer down. The people who passed the housing filter still carry credit cards and auto loans, and 13,000 layoffs and a record eviction docket land on the same households. The 40.2 describes a county whose calm in the debt numbers rests on who it priced out, not on who it protected.