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 31.4 on the County Distress Index. Healthy. The least distressed county in Washington state. Less distressed than 89% 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 in the top 10% nationally. Low debt, low poverty, low uninsured. And then Housing Cost Burden arrives at 79.8 out of 100. Owner cost burden sits at the 80th percentile. Almost nobody owns.

That gap between the overall score and the housing number isn't a contradiction. It's a 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 says Healthy.

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.

Unemployment registers at the 80.3rd percentile — the single highest indicator in a county where nearly everything else reads bottom-decile. The metro rate hit 5.1% by November 2025, exceeding the national average. The debt numbers haven't moved yet. The cushion is still there — home equity, severance, savings from the years when a $250,000 salary was normal. Whether the debt numbers stay low depends on how long the cushion lasts and whether the mortgage payment changes while the paycheck doesn't.

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 that scores Healthy 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 51.2. Kittitas to the east at 45.3. Yakima at 58.8. Every neighbor scores worse. King County's population peers — Hennepin County in Minneapolis, Middlesex in Massachusetts, Wake County in Raleigh — all cluster between 29 and 35. The Healthy label fits the composite.

But the composite is a portrait of who the filter kept in the frame. The indicator to watch is Consumer Credit Distress, currently at 12.0 — the lowest domain score in the county. If 13,000 layoffs and record evictions haven't moved the debt numbers by mid-2027, the filter held. If credit card delinquency and auto loans start climbing off the floor — if the people who passed the housing filter start failing the debt test — that's when 31.4 stops describing this place.