WRONG. It's because nobody understands how far you have to go to get there. This apartment is 27 miles from DTLA and is in a sun-parched hellscape. This apartment is 13 miles from DTSEA and is in an actual neighborhood. Your delta$: $600/mo for 60 more square feet. Woodland Hills is the LA equivalent of Puyallup.
I'm not saying right now, but ten years down the road don't you think that the Seattle area could end up in a similar situation (I'm guessing not?)?
Not a snowball's chance in hell. Seattleites who point at California don't understand the clusterfuck that is California real estate. Prop 13 is literally rent control for your property taxes. It rewards speculation and monopolization and feeds into a preposterous amount of property barony. It also applies to commercial properties. Here's how it works: You buy a house in Tacoma in 1978. You paid $40k for it (my wife's parents bought their Lynnwood house for less than that in '79). Your property taxes are 1% of whatever the current value of the house is assessed at. In '78, that's $400. Right now your house is probably worth $160k. You're paying $1600. You buy a house in Santa Monica in 1978. You paid $90k for it (family friends did this). Your property taxes were leveed at the time of purchase at 1%. Your property taxes when yo bought it were $900. Now everything changes. Because right now, your house is probably worth around a million and a half. But you're paying $1200 in property taxes. That giant sucking sound is money leaving the school system, the highway fund, civil government, everything. And it's going right into the pockets of property owners, who now get to charge you $800/mo for a shithole 1BR in North Hollywood where, in your brief time there, you lost TWO neighbors to drive-bys AND THAT WAS NINE YEARS AGO. California is completely dysfunctional. It has income tax and sales tax higher than WA and the roads are still a little worse than Addis Ababba, according to a friend who lived for two years in both. There are alleys in Venice behind million dollar houses that have never even been paved.