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Seattle may eventually have more people and tall buildings for the reasons previously stated by other posters. But I don't think it will ever surpass San Francisco in terms of economic clout. San Francisco has a big growing IT sector (even w/o including San Jose and Silicon Valley), but what people tend to forget is that San Francisco has always been a huge banking and business services center. I don't think Seattle will ever be in the same league that way. I do remember, remember, seeing somewhere that Seattle/Tacoma has a bigger port than San Francisco/Oakland, though I don't know how much bigger, so give that one to Seattle as an economic win.
Nor will Seattle best San Francisco in cultural offerings. Seattle has spawned some great rock musicians, but so has San Fran, in addition to which San Fran clearly beats out Seattle in terms of high culture with its world class symphony, opera, museums, and repertory theater.
I love Seattle. Been there several times. But I don't think it'll ever be as important as San Francisco.
I agree with the NO voters. Not in any realistic near term time horizon. The gap may narrow in the next decade or two as the Bay Area struggles to add housing and jobs move to lower cost areas like Seattle. But hard to see Seattle ever overtaking the Bay Area. The Bay Area is still much larger and more developed on pretty much every metric.
Perhaps a more realistic question is can Seattle reach parity with Boston in the next 20 years. I think there is at least a chance of that happening.
No. Its too isolated and the metro area is too much smaller. Also the extreme lack of racial diversity in Seattle proper diminishes is cultural significance in an significant way for the 30%+ of the country that is black and Latino.
Seattle's cultural significance is larger than its population.
I agree from socially prominent companies (msft, Amazon, starbucks, to music to the Gates Foundation to it's granola outdoors lifestyle, even it's skyline and tourist attractions, It is more prominent than similar sized MSAs. But it is still well below the bay area when it comes to cultural prominence.
No. Its too isolated and the metro area is too much smaller. Also the extreme lack of racial diversity in Seattle proper diminishes is cultural significance in an significant way for the 30%+ of the country that is black and Latino.
Right. It's also likely to be overshadowed by its much more international neighbor to the North, just across the international border.
San Francisco is a city of 8,000,000 and Seattle is a little more than half that, broadly speaking.
City-of isn't terribly important...Seattle has more room to grow and is allowing a lot more growth...maybe we'll pass SF someday.
Downtowns...SF's core is quite a bit bigger and denser, but Seattle is growing at an astonishing pace, including way more highrises...we'll be a peer soon if this keeps going.
But I voted no overall. At least no anytime soon.
This is pretty extreme SF aggrandizement even for SF boosting City Data.
A better poll question would have been "has Seattle become more dominant than San Francisco."
Seattle doesn't have a peer for hundreds of miles.
San Jose is 70 miles from SF.
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