Local News

Click to enlarge It may feel like boom times in Seattle, but at least one group is being left out: the city’s black residents. While Seattle’s median household income soared to an all-time high of $70,200 last year, wages for blacks nose-dived to $25,700 — a 13.5 percent drop from 2012. Among the 50 largest U.S….

Click to enlarge   I know what you’re thinking: “How could Seattle get any whiter?” Sarcasm aside, you do have a point. Seattle is very white for a large U.S. city — whiter even than Salt Lake City, believe it or not. (Tuck that fact away. It might win you some bar bets). And yet, not only could Seattle get whiter. According to new Census Bureau…

Click to enlarge If you had to guess, which of these two neighborhoods would you say is the more racially diverse: Capitol Hill’s hip, edgy Pike/Pine — or Bellevue’s BMW-filled, mall-packed downtown? If that setup didn’t make it completely obvious, the “surprise” answer is: downtown Bellevue. In fact, according to a well-known measure of diversity, Bellevue, overall,…

  Click to enlarge Is Seattle a racially diverse city? We certainly value the principle of diversity here.  But many people would probably answer that question “No” because — let’s face it — for a big American city, Seattle is pretty white (65 percent, according to the most-recent census data). And in fact, according to a well-known measure…

Click to enlarge

New census data show that racial and ethnic minorities have grown faster than the white population in Washington since 2010.

Non-Hispanic whites declined from 72.7 percent of the state’s total population in 2010 to 71.6 percent in 2012, according to the census.

Tukwila Station on the light rail (Photo: Seattledude, via Wikimedia Commons)

You don’t hear much about Tukwila.   Just south of Seattle, it’s a small city — only about 19,000 residents and fewer than 10 square miles — and it’s a place that many of us just pass through on I-5 or the light rail.  But here is something to think about next time you do pass through this little place.

According to a recent report from Brown University on the state of racial and ethnic diversity in America, Tukwila is the 11th most diverse city in the United States.  And Tukwila is No. 1 not just in Washington, but the entire Pacific Northwest.

What does “most diverse” mean?