There is a bit of a hierarchy in the neighborhoods of Seattle.

Next one I was thinking of was Queen Anne, which is a superset of North Queen Anne, East Queen Anne, West Queen Anne, and Lower Queen Anne. Less wishy-washy.

Unsure if 'quarter' is the right level; 'suburb' might be better, to match Ballard: https://openstreetmap.org/node/150940157. Impact is choosing a larger level down-weights matches in the geocoder.

Wikipedia lists the "district" each neighborhood is within: 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_neighborhoods_in_Seattle#List_of_districts_and_neighborhoods. For example Whittier Heights "neighborhood" is in Ballard "district": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whittier_Heights,_Seattle. 

For areas vs. points, the points are much easier to create. When creating the area for the quarter/suburb, you have to have include the individual ways, as you can't have a relation (e.g. West Queen Anne, East Queen Anne, ...) in a type=boundary relation, to easily make a union of the individual neighborhoods.

For example, Ballard Sculpture Garden is in the east part of Ballard, but Nominatim, by necessity, makes an assumption about how large the POI point for Ballard is, so lists it in Fremont instead of (neighborhood=West Woodland, suburb=Ballard): https://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/ui/details.html?osmtype=N&osmid=3211770267

Overall goal is to help searchability for locations, like "Coffee in Queen Anne", by giving a better bounds to the geocoders. 
