I live as a developer in Seattle. Right now I live 45 min from downtown on a bus route with a roommate and I pay more rent for half an apartment than you do for your full one.
After 3 years here I've now purchased a townhouse in Cap Hill. I could have never afforded the house I just purchased in a comparable Vancouver neighborhood.
All of that development went to the improperly supported suburban exodus movement of the 80s and 90s.
I think Washington state's regressive tax pyramid and dependence on plebecites will still stymie progress, though; in Canada, provincial and federal governments have much more centralized power to levy taxes and spend.
There are various reasons for this, part of those reasons is that, disproportionately, the poor tend to be relegated to mass transit. Part of that is that transit doesn't make sense if you get on/off work outside of peek hours; most of the Seattle metro system is biased around serving /Seattle/. Transit systems in the counties to the north and south serve even less, have much tighter budgets, and therefore also have much less service. This is one of those self-re-enforcing loops.
With the HOV Toll Lane revealing just how horrid traffic on I-405 is (again absolute lack of urban planning), I think that you'd find many would agree about doing /something/, /anything/, except for taxing them in any way. Little do they realize that you pay 'taxes' in other ways, like having daily commutes of hell and a poor environment for their children to enter the workforce within. I know that my own career development is still severely hampered by having grown up in a suburb, without a car, and thus also with less access to the scarce jobs in the area that many (but not all) of my peers took up. I suspect that there probably weren't enough 'after school' jobs to go around though, so those who did get experience early got a head start on learning how to handle interacting with employers.
I agree with that in most cases, especially in low density wealthy cities, where people would avoid using transit even if it were more convenient, just to avoid the general population.
But in the case of several Bay Area neighborhoods the opposite is true. All else equal, in the urban core people pay a premium to live near a major mass transit station.
I guess you need a critical mass of upper middle class working people, good enough transit, and terrible traffic for this to happen. I certainly never saw transit access marketed as a selling point before moving here from flyover country in the dot-com days.
I attended many government planning meetings in the 1990's, and people were definitely anticipating the steadily increasing road congestion we've been experiencing since then. One of the big issues is that the topography in this region drives up costs. The densest urban areas are wedged between Puget Sound, Lake Washington, and Lake Sammamish, and in between there are steep hillsides and environmentally sensitive areas. Transit expansion therefore involves building bridges, purchasing land in areas with expensive view homes, and tunneling. We could raise taxes to pay for more rail expansions, but higher taxes combined with the rapidly increasing housing costs would price out many people, especially families.
Washington state is the worst state for taxes and governance, except when compared to all the other states. It works out well.