brookings_metro americaBruce Katz has an interesting take on the next-generation challenges facing the Seattle area:

Puget Sound residents look to places like Portland and San Francisco and wonder whether the region needs improvement or is doing it better than others… But in the coming decade, the demographic changes that metropolitan Seattle will face should prompt a look at another set of places more like the region than its West Coast neighbors.

Over the 2000s, the Puget Sound region ranked above the national average on measures of growth, educational attainment and racial and ethnic diversity. The Seattle region faces challenges and opportunities distinct from those in the less-diverse Portland area, or the much slower-growing San Francisco Bay area.

New Brookings research instead counts Seattle among a series of growing, highly educated, diverse “Next Frontier” regions like Austin, Denver, and Washington, D.C.

The whole thing is worth a read. It’s part of a larger project, The State of Metropolitan America, by the Brookings Institution, which also includes some treatment of Portland and Boise.