The couple found a sprawling five-bedroom house next to a horse farm for $782,000, half the cost they would have paid in the Seattle suburb they left behind.
This implies that the family in the article was shopping for a $1.5M home in a "Seattle suburb" that is most likely in the Bellevue/Redmond area in the year 2015. In that year, the average sale price in the region was between $855K (Bellevue, WA) and $598K (Redmond, WA), implying that they were aspiring to live well above the median lifestyle in two of the richer suburbs in the Seattle area. [1]
I don't know how to square this family's story with the surrounding narrative in the article. This family could afford to live almost anywhere. They could afford to pay taxes to fund schools and other municipal services. They could choose to live somewhere that has none of the problems the article decries, simply by buying in.
Methinks this is a story about false advertising on the part of "Millennial Mayberry", rather than suburban flight.
[1] https://public.tableau.com/shared/9P33834MX?:display_count=y...