While Seattle still has a ton of work to do, is much more progressive on these issues than they Bay Area, and it’s getting better, not worse.
The Seattle metro is a weird microcosm of the state in that it's so vastly bigger than any other metro in the state. Seattle and surrounding metro have about 4 million of the state's 7.5 million residents. So yes, Seattle has a big influence, but it's far from the only voice in Washington.
Mostly, it’s retaining residents’ property values. By not building any new housing.
I really don't want to get deep into this topic on HN of all places, but limiting the government's ability to interfere with new construction is not progressive.
And in before someone says that the opposite is "conservative" because "NIMBYs" want to "conserve" the status quo, such a transparent abuse of language. People figured out that supply/demand applies to housing too and now want to pretend that allowing markets to lower the price is somehow progressive because progressive means good.
It's almost bordering on "Orwellian", where a word can become nearly meaningless, you can just start calling anything progressive to justify the policy rather than thinking about the functional principle of what is being done--limiting the government's interference in the market, in this case, and that's not to say that is always a good thing.