Every morning in Lake Forest Park, 5,240 residents log on or head out the door for the office. Only 88 of them work for a business within city limits. The other 98.3% are employed outside the city.

That makes this North King County city the Seattle area’s most extreme “bedroom community,” where housing vastly outstrips commercial zoning, and virtually the entire local workforce draws a paycheck from somewhere else.

I ranked cities in the Seattle metro area, which includes King, Pierce and Snohomish counties, by the share of their working residents whose employer is located elsewhere. Kenmore follows Lake Forest Park at 97.3%, and Mountlake Terrace exports 96.8% of its workforce daily. Sammamish and Des Moines, both at 96.5%, round out the top five. These cities exist almost entirely to house workers employed by businesses in other cities.

For this column, I looked only at incorporated cities with at least 3,000 employed residents — a total of 41 cities. The cutoff keeps the focus on cities large enough to support a commercial sector, and filters out small communities zoned almost exclusively for housing.

I calculated these numbers from the Census Bureau’s most recent data on employment inflow and outflow, which covers 2023. One caveat: the data maps a worker’s home address to their employer’s physical location. With the rise in remote work, a fair share of these residents may work from a home office on any given day. The data doesn’t capture that, but it does show where the businesses that pay them are located.

Each of these cities got here a little differently.

Lake Forest Park began in the 1910s as a planned community developed by Ole Hanson, a future Seattle mayor, and was pitched as a retreat for Seattle professionals seeking an escape from the urban core. Zoning preserves that residential, parklike character today. It remains what it was built to be: a residential retreat for people who work elsewhere.

Kenmore boomed after World War II. Located just east of Lake Forest Park along the northernmost shore of Lake Washington, it filled with suburban housing as the region grew. Kenmore has recently worked to revitalize its downtown, but little of the city is zoned for commercial use, and it remains primarily a commuter suburb.

Mountlake Terrace was built to be a bedroom community. In 1949, developers began constructing modest homes for returning World War II veterans. It grew so quickly that residents voted to incorporate just five years later to secure basic city services. Even with recent transit-oriented development, its residential footprint still far outweighs its local job base. Mountlake Terrace does have a large employer — Premera Blue Cross is headquartered there — but the data shows 95% of the people employed in the city live elsewhere.

Sammamish stands out for its size. The city has more than 60,000 residents and nearly 29,500 workers, yet more than 28,400 of them work outside it. Built on a plateau east of Lake Sammamish, it functions largely as a housing base for professionals employed in Redmond, Bellevue and Seattle. Sammamish does have jobs — the data show close to 6,500 — but 84% of the people who hold those jobs live somewhere else. That may reflect Sammamish’s high housing costs.

Des Moines began as a quiet waterfront community south of Seattle. It suburbanized after World War II, helped along by Highway 99 and, later, Interstate 5. Its shoreline and highway access made it a desirable residential base for workers heading north to Seattle or south toward Tacoma.

They aren’t the only ones. Five more cities have workforces that are 95% or more out-commuters: Maple Valley at 96.0%, Mill Creek at 95.5%, Shoreline at 95.1%, University Place at 95.1% and Burien at 95.0%.

How does Seattle compare? Of its 323,927 employed residents, 137,110 work for a business based outside the city, or 42.3%. It’s the only city in the region where the majority work within the city limits.