I find it highly improbable that your 1br was mediocre for $3200/month. The only place you can even find 1br rents that high is in brand-spanking-new buildings with tons of amenities and huge unit sizes.
For another data point, I have rented a respectable (1985+ wood frame building) 2br for the past two years for $1595/month total in Capitol Hill. You can find many places for cheap during the December-February time period.
It was pretty mediocre for $3200. It was a newer building that had a movie room that was always broken, and a small gym, but nothing crazy; most complexes have these now. No balcony, no AC, on Broadway with all kinds of crime.
My 1br condo by the airport is larger, comes with a large storage room, built in the 60's but remodeled in 2017, yard, patio, and I'm paying only $1000.
You can probably find 1br for $2000 in Cap Hill if you want to live in an older building.
I had a similar though but thought it was too low (funny how that is). Take a look at apartments < $2830 within a mile of 98101 (124 apartments) [1] and the same for > $2830 (365 apartments) [2] using craigslist counts data (which should optimally contain more duplicates for higher priced apartments). Assuming not too janky data, this tells us that it's a skewed distribution (removing the distance filter changes the skew direction as well).
Another way to think about Craigslist listings is that those are the prices that buyers haven't paid. (The inexpensive apartments fill quickly while the overpriced ones can stay on the market forever.) So listings will skew higher than actual purchase prices.
(And as your edit suggests, Seattle is much larger than a 1 mile radius from the center of 98101.)
I'm interested to know how one could arrive at a more reasonable number for a 2br apartment. Obviously, what you say is true: a luxury 2 BR with a doorman, gym, pool, onsite parking, and pets allowed is going to be vastly more expensive than your basic 2BR with none of that included. How do you tease them apart?
Median is a good place to start. You might also try to factor in how relative income affects relative rental spend choices. I.e., (on average) someone making $50k and someone making $100k in the same town are looking at different parts of the rental market. If there's a rental market floor at $2800/mo, that's extremely relevant but the average rental price definitely doesn't capture that.
I guess I wasn't clear enough. Using the median certainly works better if you're looking at the population of "all 2BR apartments." But, I would contend that's a mistake, as luxury apartments are really fundamentally different from non-luxury apartments. And, among luxury apartments, individual amenities matter. A pool is likely to be less relevant than a doorman, for instance.
Statistically, I don't see any good way around this other than doing a really gnarly ANOVA to tease out the prices of individual amenities.
2BR just happens to be the category the article chose. It's a reasonable assumption that e.g. families with a kid are going to rent at least a 2BR — of any age and luxury — if they can afford to.
Well, ok, "average" across all 2BR in the city. That doesn't really tell the full story and will be drawn up by high outliers.
There are a lot of methodology problems here.