A new report from the Household Pulse Survey found that nearly 10 percent of adult residents of the greater Seattle area have “felt pressure” to leave the embattled city in the last six months as it grapples with soaring cost of living and skyrocketing crime rates.

Nearly half of the more than 600,000 respondents cited “rent increase” as their number one reason for potentially leaving Seattle, followed immediately by over a quarter of a million people who mentioned “unsafe neighborhoods.”

The figure roughly translates to nearly 200,000 residents, making Seattle a national leader in resident dissatisfaction, ahead of Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and New York City. A prior survey conducted by the same research firm a week earlier found an identical result: Seattle bested 15 other metropolitan areas across the country where people felt pressured to leave for their own safety.

“On a personal note, my own sense of safety in my neighborhood has been shaken in recent months,” Gene Balk, a Seattle Times journalist who first reported on the findings, wrote in early August. “I have lived for many years in Belltown near Pike Place Market, and I’ve never felt unsafe here. But I have felt less safe since the horrific killing of Eina Kwon, who owned a restaurant a couple of blocks from where I live.”

In June, Kwon, who was eight months pregnant, was shot alongside her husband while stopped in their car at a Belltown intersection.

“More recently, five people were shot in a grocery store parking lot in Rainier Beach in South Seattle, and a man was fatally shot near Westfield Southcenter Mall in Tukwila. It’s easy to see how violent crimes in such public spaces can contribute to the perception of one’s neighborhood not being a safe place.”

While Balk clarified that “the Seattle area’s violent-crime rate isn’t particularly high for a large urban area,” the city has seen a 24 percent jump in homicides last year alongside a 30 percent spike in vehicle thefts. During the summer riots of 2020, stretches of downtown Seattle were overtaken by Black Lives Matter (BLM) activists. The area was deemed off-limits to cops and named the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, otherwise known as CHAZ.

In 2022, amid calls to “Defund the Police,” the size of the local police department roster hit a decades-low as anti-law enforcement rhetoric pushed many into early retirement.