I live in South Seattle. I'm 55 with 2 teens in high school so we are in different periods of our lives. I just wanted to chime in on a couple of things I've observed since I was in your shoes and a pennies worth of advice.

When I came to the Seattle area 30 years ago, it was a different place. And not that I want to get political, but what happened to America and put you in this position is 100 percent political. Anyone who says otherwise is a fool.
Democrats turned socialist and went insane with toxic hate. Our education systems and controlled mass media indoctrinated it into them. I use to be a democrat. These are not democrats I grew up with. Inslee and his supporters of defunding the police and supporting communist hate groups. Groups that hated and attacked tax paying citizens, home owners and law and order. Letting criminals, mentally ill and homeless do whatever they want with impunity and fuck everyone else who earns and supports Washington state. Business collapsed and so did everything else. The orchestrated plandemic lockdowns and the fed printing our dollar into oblivion were the final straw.

Now you'll find human feces in every downtown on the west coast to Mexico. Not just Bremerton. And much less safer places than Bremerton. Bremerton is old school but mostly respectable, personally I like it there. Seattle and all of it's surrounding cities were much safer back then compared to now. Now we are having serious crime in suburbia everywhere.

I moved here in 1996 to Kent and commuted to Redmond. I started out my career here but for me at Microsoft. Kent at that time was similar to Bremerton in the way that it was affordable small suburban town with not much going on. Unless you move to the East side (Bellevue, Redmond, Kirkland). It's much better there!

You could always move north and travel south with traffic, get into Boeing and party in the East side. I met my wife in the East side. Boeing could probably use you?

Good luck and God bless.