2.	General characteristics of the study area
West Hill is an urban unincorporated area bordering the southern end of Lake Washington and surrounded by the cities of Seattle, Tukwila, and Renton.  The area is roughly 2.25 miles wide, when measured from east to west, and slightly more than 2 miles long and includes the neighborhoods of Bryn Mawr, Lakeridge, Skyway, Earlington, Campbell Hill, Panorama View, and a commercial/industrial area south of Martin Luther King, Jr. Way.
Population
While King County and the Puget Sound region have experienced significant population growth over the past 30 years, the population of West Hill has remained relatively stable.  Current estimates placed the 1998 population of West Hill at 14,000, versus 12,500 in 1990.  For the purposes of our assessment of the feasibility of incorporation, we projected a straight-line continuation of this 1990s growth trend, estimating that population will grow by 375 people from 1998 to year 2000.  We therefore base our feasibility analysis on an estimated year 2000 West Hill population of 14,375.
Taxable Assessed Value
The Assessors’ Office of King County reports that the 1998 taxable assessed value of real and personal property in unincorporated West Hill was roughly $712 million ($654 million in real property and $58 million in personal and intercounty utility/transportation property).  In order to project this value to an assessed value for 1999 (the value on which year 2000 property taxes would be levied) we assume an inflation-adjusted growth rate of 3.5 percent.  (Given a regional inflation rate of 2.5 percent, this growth rate translates to a 6 percent nominal growth rate.)  Applying this 3.5-percent real growth rate, we arrive at our final 1999 projection for taxable assessed value of roughly $737 million.  In per capita terms, this translates to roughly $51,000 of taxable assessed value for each West Hill resident.

To allow us to get a sense of how these assessed values are distributed within the West Hill area, the Assessors’ Office also provided us with data broken down by three separate subareas. (See map below.)  According to this data, Area 1 exhibited a total assessed value of $156 million; Area 2 exhibited an assessed value of $436 million; and Area 3 exhibited $119 million.  In order to help put these values in perspective, we also estimated the respective populations of each of these areas.  While these population estimates are admittedly rough, when we combine them with the above assessed values, we generate assessed values per resident as follows:
Table 1:  Estimated Subarea Assessed Values per Capita
Subarea	Assessed Value per Resident	
1	$38,000	
2	$61,000	
3	$44,000