Seattle is getting young, fast

We’ve all noticed that Seattle feels like a younger city these days. Census data indicates that change is happening fast.

The number of adults under age 35 has been growing and much faster than in other tech capitals.

Since 2010, the proportion of the city’s population that is under age 35 has jumped 1.4 percent, according to Seattle’s demographer Diana Canzoneri.

In an email to KUOW, Canzoneri said a lot of this jump occurred around 2015 and 2016.

At the same time, San Francisco has also gotten younger, though not as fast. Silicon Valley has gotten slightly older.

Seattle’s growing population of millennials has slipped the city’s median age to just below 36. That’s two years younger than the median for the U.S. as a whole.

And in neighborhoods favored by the young, the shift is strong enough to be felt.

“There’s almost no old people anywhere,” said musician Jim Parfitt, who lives on Capitol Hill. “There are, somewhere on the fringes somewhere, but that’s something I really notice. Like they’ve all been vacuumed up or something.”

In fact, according to census data, the proportion of people over age 65 in Seattle is up overall.

Groups over age 35 and deep into middle age are the ones who are in retreat — leaving the city or staying away in the first place.