BELLEVUE, Wash. — The biggest applause line at a Bellevue Chamber event focusing on the Seattle area’s space industry came when attention was paid to a down-to-earth topic: housing affordability for the industry’s workers.
“They don’t just come here to work,” U.S. Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., told the audience at today’s luncheon. “They come here to live.”
The space industry is definitely on the rise in the Seattle area — particularly in a cluster of suburbs extending from Bellevue to Redmond and Kirkland to the north, and to Kent and Tukwila in the south. Mike Fong, who is the director of the Washington State Department of Commerce and served as the event’s moderator, said the state’s commercial space ventures account for $4.6 billion in economic activity and more than 13,000 jobs.
That figure has continued to grow in the two years since the economic impact report that Fong cited first came out. Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture is said to have about 11,000 employees spread across the country, with many of them working at the company’s HQ in Kent. Amazon’s Project Kuiper satellite network — which is ramping up facilities in Redmond, Kirkland and Everett — has built up its workforce to about 2,000 employees.
When you include the workers at SpaceX’s satellite factory in Redmond, Aerojet Rocketdyne in Redmond, LeoStella in Tukwila and a host of space startups, it all adds up to more pressure on the region’s housing market. That pressure is already sky-high. For example, the median selling price for a home in Bellevue is more than $1.5 million, based on figures from the Northwest Multiple Listing Service.
“Not everybody who works in these companies is going to be issued 200 grand a year in stock options,” Smith told the audience, which included business leaders as well as elected officials. “How are you going to afford a place to live? You’ve got to be better at building housing, building it affordably.”
The region’s communities and employers have been trying to address the affordability crisis, but Smith said more needs to be done.
