Bellevue a suburb of Seattle or Sister City (Like DFW/Minn-St.Paul)? (driving, historical)

[RunTheDistance476]

How did this thread get this long?

Seattle: 620,000
Belluve: 120,000

Dallas: 1.2 million
Fort Worth: 800,000


There is ZERO comparison. WTF kind of question is this? Bellevue is just one larger sized suburb. Look at the avg. income doesnt seem like a city to me.

[MaikeerinWA]

Actually Zillow's main facilities are in Seattle, on several floors of what was once the WaMu Center.

Originally Posted by usernametaken

Add Zillow to the companies listed earlier. Traffic in Bellevue during rush hour certainly seems like big city traffic. Assuming the Microsoft ship stays steady, I would not be surprised if Bellevue hits 200k residents by 2025. The downtown Bellevue fireworks crowd this past July 4 was insane.

[usernametaken]

Originally Posted by MichaelinWA

Actually Zillow's main facilities are in Seattle, on several floors of what was once the WaMu Center.

You are right.

[mrt144]

Originally Posted by RJ8089

Has Bellevue reached the point where it is no longer in Seattle's shadow of being called a suburb? The Seattle area is often referred to Seattle-Tacoma...should it be Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue or even Seattle-Bellevue? Just driving downtown Bellevue is starting to feel like a downtown Denver or something. It's starting to have the huge feel. Bellevue's population is catching up to Tacoma's!

The cultural cache of Bellevue is what exactly?

[BellevueNative]

Originally Posted by Back2Texas

Well, yeah; North Texas looks nothing like the Puget Sound area. That doesn't mean that North Texas is devoid of cities. Bellevue has quite a bit of open space as well. Actually, Bellevue's and Plano's population densities are almost identical. And Plano has no skyline because land is cheap and so it's easy to grow out, rather than up. Plano has more Fortune 500 HQs (2) than Bellevue (1), but Bellevue's Fortune 500 company HQ (Paccar) is in a high-rise building downtown while Plano's (J.C. Penney and Dr. Pepper) are in expansive campuses with low-rise buildings and open space. Yes, it looks different, but last I checked, a high-rise HQ wasn't a requirement for a company to be an economic powerhouse.

But, if you still say a city can't be a city without a skyline... how about Irving? It has a skyline, a larger population than Bellevue (about 215k, although its population density is lower), four Fortune 500 HQs and many other Fortune 500 companies with large campuses. It even used to have a professional sports team (the Cowboys played there through the 2008 season) and it's still the location of the Cowboys training facility, although that is moving in the next few years. But, again, no one considers it to be a sister city to Dallas. It's a suburb. Just like Bellevue.

I didn't say a city can't be a city without a skyline, or that Plano's not a city. I said that Bellevue does not resemble Plano at all - something you had said. Bellevue has a tall skyline, which is definitely something I associate with a major city. Now, Bellevue is not a major city - yet - but it has not been built up as a suburb, either. It is a small city. Plano, on the other hand, has been built up like a suburb, whether it has Fortune 500 companies and a bigger population or not. It is a small city, but it doesn't resemble a big city to me, or look anything like Bellevue. The two cities feel totally different, too.

[Tall Traveler]

Originally Posted by RunTheDistance476

How did this thread get this long?

Seattle: 620,000
Belluve: 120,000

Dallas: 1.2 million
Fort Worth: 800,000


There is ZERO comparison. WTF kind of question is this? Bellevue is just one larger sized suburb. Look at the avg. income doesnt seem like a city to me.

Have you ever been there. Most suburbs don't have more people working in them than living in them. Last time I heard, Bellevue does. Bellevue to me is it's own city right next to a large city. it may have started as a suburb and it doesn't have any ghetto areas like cities normally have, but it's become so much more than a bedroom community. I think there are more commuting from Seattle to Bellevue?Redmond than vice versa.

[homesinseattle]

Bellevue is very much a city, albeit not a massive one. You might also refer to the Eastside (of which Bellevue is part) collectively as the "suburbs" of Seattle.

[CrazyDonkey]

Bellevue has become a city in its own right, with suburbs of its own...

As it becomes more urban, it is becoming more liberal.

[west seattle gal]

Its identity is entwined with and dependent upon Seattle, which makes it a suburb. It is part of the larger Seattle metro area.

[hsw]

Really abt where major owners choose to live&work...separate irrelevant population masses from those w/any dollars&who make any decisions that matter

If not for AMZN, Seatt region would be the Redmond/Medina region and city of Seatt (or Bellevue) utterly irrelevant....and given no billionaires/centimillionaires have worked in Redmond for yrs now, would just be the Medina region

Biggest indiv owner of AMZN chooses to live in Medina

Much like SF is a suburb of SV (an amorphous suburban corridor dominated by Atherton/Woodside/PaloAlto and some company office towns like Cuper/MV/MP/RedwdShs)...not really sure what of value is in SJ itself or who that matters lives in Cuper/MV....let alone the vast slums of the EastBay....

Let's not forget that Net/tech allows biggest decisionmakers to not commute and to work/act 24/7 from an iPad in Medina or anywhere else....so nominal HQ offices are essentially ceremonial anyway