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Paul Tsai's avatar

Thanks for digging into the data. Please submit this to the public comment feedback at BSD. bsd@bsd405.org. If note that it's a public comment, the board is required to review it and it is recorded.

I agree with all of your points. This is a great comprehensive study and I had the same issues with the demographics data. The demographer is someone from Colorado. He is likely missing "on the ground" feel for the data. Why do we have to get a demographer from Colorado to do this work? It's like asking some guy from China to figure out American politics using infromation gleaned from newspapers.

For correlation between house prices and enrollment, you only looked at the period around covid. I am not surprised that density mattered more than house prices. If you looked at enrollment change over time as a time series vs house prices as a time series, I think you will find that enrollment goes up with house prices. From what I know living here, every parent, of almost every culture backgound/origin buys houses in Bellevue for the schools. It is not economical to live in Bellevue and pay a premium if you don't have kids and can't benefit. I am talking about people who move here not the people who are already here for other reasons previously. If schools dont' matter, places like Burien (Three Three Point) for example become much more attractive. When the demand exceeds the supply, prices go up. So when there is lots of demand for people to move here for the schools, prices and enrollment goes up. The opposite will happen. House prices are a result of enrollment demand, not the driver of it.

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Dan Welygan's avatar

Thanks for the detailed writeup!

In a discussion last week, our school principal offered some more detail about the cost of housing and potential impacts - apparently there were ~2100 records transfer requests last year. ~150 were from private schools, but the rest were mostly from schools in comparatively lower cost areas - Snohomish, Eastern Washington, Idaho, and beyond.

I think that could help offer some support to the cost of living rationale, not sure the best way to validate the transfer details independently. If one looks at today's price of homes for sale in the "affordable" neighborhoods of Bellevue it's ~1 - 1.5 million for 1960s construction and ~$3 million+ for new construction.

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