8 ms·

As downtown Seattle offices empty, city facing years of 'zombie' towers

• wxw 4mo ago
  Back in 2019, I was amazed to learn just how many buildings in Seattle's downtown were Amazon offices. IIRC, it was dozens of buildings, some entirely owned by Amazon, some WeWork leases, etc. Downtown isn't very big, so that's a huge presence. It was also fun to check out the company-city that is Redmond, not far away. Seattle's a great city, and it's got great tech presence. I'm optimistic for its recovery.
  • rolph 4mo ago
    owned by amazon .. now where should data centers be constructed, rather than arable farmland?
    • bartread 4mo ago
      It’s an interesting thought. One wonders if a lot of the utility infrastructure they need would be more readily available and/or be less negatively impactful to build as well.
      • rolph 4mo ago
        at face it seems like it would be "retooling" rather than ground up construction, with foundations for connection infra, it should go up fast, and easy if AMZ already owns it.
      • danudey 4mo ago
        Just for reference, Peer 1 has a data centre in downtown Vancouver which, fifteen or so years ago, was able to accept my then-employer as a client and offer us a quarter, half, or full rack, but could only offer us enough actual power to run about two servers. The reason being that they had a huge number of old, grandfathered-in clients with old systems from ten or fifteen years ago which were using massive amounts of power for the work they were doing; newer systems could do the same work for a tenth the power or less, but the customers have no reason to upgrade so they don't. Getting any more power into the building, I was told, would require having BC Hydro replace the transmission lines coming into the building, which would expand out to a modernization of a lot of the transmission lines in the neighbourhood. For obvious reasons it was cheaper for them to just build a new data centre somewhere else, though they wouldn't say where at the time. When it comes to the hyperscale data centres that are all the rage these days, it's very likely that downtown Seattle doesn't have the power infrastructure to support very many, if any; couple that with the claim from this random website I've never heard of that hyperscale data centres could be up to 10 million square feet and you'd probably have to bulldoze half of downtown Seattle to build the infrastructure required. https://programs.com/resources/data-center-statistics/ https://programs.com/resources/data-center-statistics/
        • bartread 4mo ago
          Your 3rd paragraph: I wondered if something like that might be the issue, hence my somewhat tentative musing. Legacy of all kinds seems always to be so expensive to deal with.
        • hirsin 4mo ago
          Fwiw there's a 290k sqft DC on Denny a few blocks from the Amazon towers https://h5datacenters.com/seattle-colocation.html https://h5datacenters.com/seattle-colocation.html If you live in Seattle you've probably walked right past it. Small potatoes compared to a 10M sqft DC but it hosts real traffic.
    • dlcarrier 4mo ago
      How about arid land? We have a lot of that in the Pacific Southwest.
      • consensus1 4mo ago
        Build where there is water people complain. Build where there is no water people complain.
        • dlcarrier 4mo ago
          There's a surprising amount of farming in arid regions Maybe we should replace those farms with data centers, to reduce water consumption.
    • m3047 4mo ago
      As someone pointed out in a conversation elsewhere, datacenter water use is a small part of total water use (in WA and CA), which is dominated by agriculture. Simple, obvious answer to your rhetorical question is: where there's water and power. But city water and city power are not the same as what ag needs / wants / suffers. City water and city power have reliability and purity / quality standards which ag doesn't need (not enough to pay for it). Do the objectives / needs of datacenters comport with the constraints and drivers which evolved city water / power? How do the constituents who paid for (and probably are still paying for) the buildout feel about the resource _which they own_ being utilized for a purpose which maybe doesn't comport with the _contract_ they thought they were getting?
  • sublinear 4mo ago
    Wasn't the shared-workspace business model to take advantage of these vacancies? Despite the graph shown in the article, I have to wonder if this is really a new problem.
  • pllbnk 4mo ago
    What's the point of the "recovery" in terms of stuffing people back to the offices when they can successfully perform their work from home?
  • asveikau 4mo ago
    The neighborhoods they built that stuff in (mostly South Lake Union and Denny Triangle) used to be so sleepy in 2010 and earlier. It was a big transformation.
    • hedgehog 4mo ago
      They were (maybe still are?) around 20% of sq feet overall and a lot of that was leases in buildings far from SLU with no obvious Amazon branding.
    • Schiendelman 4mo ago
      Earlier than that, they were actively dangerous. I spent a lot of my childhood in Belltown, and it was not a safe place in the late 80s and early 90s. SLU and Denny Triangle are amazing now. Those are some of the few places with restaurants open into the evenings. Amazon, like them or not, does a great job prioritizing local businesses in the retail spaces in their buildings. They can't all survive, but they've had a good track record.
      • asveikau 4mo ago
        I haven't lived in Seattle since 2011. I remember Belltown having one or two blocks that felt a little spotty or like you wanted your guard up, but the rest of it was thoroughly gentrified by the time I left, and it was a common choice to live for new college grads from the suburbs arriving to work in tech. I have to assume the process has continued.
        • Schiendelman 4mo ago
          Yep, it's even fancier now. The main spot where it seems sketchy is directly across the street from the Downtown Emergency Service Center.
        • shawn_w 4mo ago
          The area around 3rd and Blanchard is sketchy, but in the rest of Belltown the biggest hazards are incompetent Uber/lyft/doordash/etc. drivers and drunk people on lyme scooters.
  • dlcarrier 4mo ago
    While visiting a family member at least a decade ago, I went to a fireworks display in Redmond, and two things really stood out. First: It doesn't get dark until practically midnight, so the fireworks show started at 10:00, but it was still pretty light. The second: Most families there had at least one parent with a Windows phone or Surface Tablet, back when they only used ARM processors. I had seen maybe one of each in use before that, and suddenly I was surrounded by them.
• onetokeoverthe 4mo ago
  [dead]
• Avicebron 4mo ago
  I know that commercial and residential building codes are different, but you would think converting them to residential units would fix this..
  • skybrian 4mo ago
    The article goes into this: > The city of Seattle estimates that, with aggressive incentives, conversions could generate up to 6,000 housing units over the next seven years. At a rough approximation, that would use around a fifth of the city’s present office surplus. > But “potential” is doing a lot of work here. > Newer, larger office buildings, like the U.S. Bank Center, are hugely impractical for conversion, thanks to massive floor plates, centralized plumbing and other utilities and a host of other constraints. > The preferred candidates are typically smaller, older buildings, especially those with C- or E-shaped floor layouts, which make it easier to create smaller units with adequate windows. > But these buildings can be prohibitively costly to bring up to seismic and energy building codes, said Jen Pasquier, a Seattle developer who wants to convert the 10-story Liggett Building, at Fourth and Pike, into 93 apartments.
    • qpricjalcbeu 4mo ago
      So convert those buildings to giant dorms. Lots of younger people would be more than happy with such an option (as long as it's priced accordingly of course) Can also combine with capsule hotels.
      • exhilaration 4mo ago
        There was a great episode of the Planet Money podcast a few weeks back that talked about boarding houses https://www.npr.org/2026/06/10/nx-s1-5851902/housing-affordability-corporate-landlords-boarding-houses https://www.npr.org/2026/06/10/nx-s1-5851902/housing-afforda... they're apparently illegal in most places
      • Analemma_ 4mo ago
        In the 2010s Seattle briefly legalized SRO-like "pod apartments" of 300-400 sq ft, and several were built. A friend of mine rented one for several years and it was fantastic. But nothing makes NIMBYs throw a shitfit like the word "SRO" and they were eventually made illegal again.
• fragmede 4mo ago
  Zoning and other regulations getting the way of it being used. The city "just" needs to incentivize it getting used, and someone's gotta come to terms with losing money.
  • readthenotes1 4mo ago
    [flagged]
    • BryantD 4mo ago
      No, that's the rhetoric. The reality: states like Massachusetts which have passed higher taxes on millionaires haven't seen the predicted exodus of millionaires. Mayor Wilson knows this and isn't taking dire predictions seriously. If you're gonna move, move, but it's not going to be because of that -- it's gonna be something you'd do anyhow. Meanwhile, in the real world, Washington’s real GDP rose 1.1% to almost $730 billion between the fourth quarter of 2025 and the first quarter of 2026 -- substantially ahead of the overall pace in the US. Anthropic just signed a least for a 113,000-square-foot space in the South Lake Union neighborhood.
      • mempko 4mo ago
        Yeah, when I hear about how the tax changes are going to result in a huge exodus of millionaires it's not backed by data. The data shows millionaires actually move LESS than the general population. Places that instituted high taxes didn't see an exodus. It turns out if you have a great city with great physical and social infrastructure, people want to be there. Seattle is building both. The physical infrastructure is better now then when I moved there 10 years ago. I just took a train to Bellevue from downtown Seattle for a couple bucks. Waterfront looks amazing and beautiful now. City is really clean.
        • BryantD 4mo ago
          The cross-lake rail is just amazing. I commuted to Bellevue up until my retirement recently and I really liked it the couple of times I took it. I don't want to pretend Seattle's perfect. It is very difficult to build new housing here thanks to well-meaning regulatory reform; as someone else noted, you used to be able to build fairly small apartments and that's not legal now. It'd also help a ton if the liberal centrist business-oriented cohort and the progressive wing could figure out how to work together without all the finger pointing. But it's an excellent city.
• delichon 4mo ago
  New York City: Hold my Negroni aperitivo. I have faith in the Big Apple administration's ability to become a leader on this metric.
  • Terr_ 4mo ago
    According to the graph in the article, NYC is doing about average, and LA/SF are the other front-runners.
    • freedomben 4mo ago
      It will be interesting to see how that changes with mamdani. Depending on who you ask, it will either bring in the Utopia or it will be a devastating waste, but very few people expect not much to change. Thing is, it takes years to move so it will be a while until we see the results. Regardless of which side you tend to be on, it seems like it will be a useful experiment!
      • burritoAlPast0r 4mo ago
        "Regardless of which side you tend to be on, it seems like it will be a useful experiment!" I strongly disagree.
      • jonfromsf 4mo ago
        Mamdani is going to destroy the entire pre-1974 multifamily housing stock of the 5 boroughs. It will happen really quickly (values already down 40%, 11% of owners are behind on their mortgages).
        • garbawarb 4mo ago
          How will he do that?
          • bayarearefugee 4mo ago
            > How will he do that? Through the evil power of socialism!! (/s)
• bebe9494i4 4mo ago
  [flagged]
  • Terr_ 4mo ago
    If that isn't just anti-immigrant snark, it is at least not reading TFA.
    • bebe9494i4 4mo ago
      [flagged]
• xhkkffbf 4mo ago
  As the mayor says, "Bye!"
  • ajay-b 4mo ago
    I believe the quote was: "the ones that leave, like, bye"
  • felix-the-cat 4mo ago
    You’d think that, right, but even cities that welcome businesses are having a hard time. Even Dallas is at like 30% empty office space. I’m sure the factors are different for every city but I think remote work and companies preferring to build campuses outside of major cities is a big driver.
• Animats 4mo ago
  The article notes that the US overall office vacancy rate is 23%. Seattle is 37%. Have we reached "peak office" at last? How many people in offices does society really need, anyway?
  • piker 4mo ago
    A lot if it wants to do interesting things.
    • GroksBarnacles 4mo ago
      Are you saying we need to be in the office and not remote to do interesting things? Or are you misunderstanding the context and talking about employment or something?
      • piker 4mo ago
        Yes. I think remote works for a lot of people, but at a societal level we need real-time in person collaboration among a large swath of society to accomplish interesting tasks. I say that as someone who works entirely from home and really enjoys it.
        • PepegaRoach 4mo ago
          [dead]
        • GroksBarnacles 4mo ago
          I'll only disagree that it's not large swaths. I've never met my coworkers in person and we're doing immensely interesting things, anecdotally. And we're moving so much faster than my last in-person workplace. But my perspective isn't just based on that. Or maybe "large swaths" is too imprecise to quibble over. Certainly some industries are better in person, but who can say how many? I think my precise point is that I don't think the industries that have gone remote are worse for it and don't need to to back, and many more can afford to go remote.
  • 4mo ago
• vessenes 4mo ago
  If you haven't lived in Seattle, it's hard to understand the problem. It's multifaceted; business climate, generally poor quality of the city itself as a walking / working destination, extremely hostile to business city government, and greener pastures (literally) east across the bay, which happen to be closer to some very large headquarters. The die was largely cast when Amazon called Seattle's bluff during COVID and relocated, but so much needs to be done to make the city itself an attractive place to live and work, and there is so little planning, zoning or effective change happening it seems likely to be decades before I could imagine a truly vibrant city core. Even when I write that, it seems unlikely. As we speak, Seattle is aiming to become the highest tax jurisdiction in the country, higher even than NYC, because ... revenues are down. It's a disappointing response to a serious urban problem.
  • DenisM 4mo ago
    How did Amazon relocate? I think most employees are still traveling to SLU to their offices.
    • Schiendelman 4mo ago
      Amazon didn't "relocate" - they just moved most of their new hiring to Bellevue.
      • fhrow4484 4mo ago
        If you pay attention to the WARN layoffs notices you'd also see they fired at a much higher rate in Seattle compared to Bellevue. So faster hiring east side. Faster firing west side. It's a soft relocation
        • Schiendelman 4mo ago
          I think raw numbers are misleading - they have more Seattle employees, so per capita WARN rate is more interesting. Do you know what the percentage impacts were?
    • 4mo ago
• beambot 4mo ago
  Yet rents won't drop -- the commercial mortgage covenants prevent landlords from dropping rental rates, so they'll just sit there fallow until the market recovers.
  • calvinmorrison 4mo ago
    Or until more rational covenants exist. Markets are largely rational economically.
    • everybodyknows 4mo ago
      That's the monumental social question going unconsidered -- why has governmental regulation not somehow adapted to the new economic reality, so that all that real physical capital is put to at least some productive use?
  • lokar 4mo ago
    Or government pushes them to change. Regulators have tremendous power over banks.
    • acdha 4mo ago
      My pet theory is that the best thing any city could do is having a strict vacancy tax in the downtown core, especially on retail space. Nothing makes a place feel dead like seeing boarded up restaurants or shops, and since the pandemic those have been lasting for years because the landlords don’t want to lower rates. There should be some grace period followed by tax rates ramping up so sharply that, say, they’d pay a food truck operator to use a storefront just to have something going on at every place on the block. One of the things which helped the early web startup scene was that the amount of startup capital was a lot lower when you could get an old loft for an order of magnitude less than top-tier office space. Cheap money for most of the century skewed towards huge companies (or dreams of becoming one) but cities tend to benefit more from many small to medium sized businesses which aren’t trying to become Google.
• Schiendelman 4mo ago
  Seattle here, and a real estate nerd. This is almost entirely an artifact of the financial instruments used to pay for these buildings, regardless of any Seattle policy changes. The Seattle Times has always been a conservative rag, and their editorial board hates the new mayor, so they hit the "Seattle is dying" story as often as possible. They've got a long history of this whenever there's leadership they don't like, ask me about it! In Bellevue, office vacancies are low because most have long term tenants - even if the spaces aren't full of workers, the companies paying for them can continue to do so. In Seattle, most office space is leased by smaller companies. We have diversity in availability, which is great, we have tiny office leases available as well as big ones. I believe those smaller spaces also often had shorter leases. There are some spaces in Seattle where an anchor tenant (Indeed with 11 floors in the 2+U building at 1201 2nd Ave is a good example) shrank the footprint they use, and quickly sublet floors they aren't using. Those sublets can be priced appropriately for the market, and the main tenant keeps paying the original lease price. However, when a space loses a tenant, the bank can't just drop the price for the owner, the same as you can't just pay less on your mortgage if you get a lower paying job. That has to go through a long, painful process, and usually the building will end up sold before pricing can change. This is lag. It's easy to correlate it with a choice by Amazon or with new taxes, but there's quite a bit of demand for office space in Seattle, just not at the prices the owners are forced to ask with their financing instruments. We just saw another building turn over, US Bank Center. The new owner bought it at a price where they'll be able to lease it competitively, and it won't sit empty. We'll see that continue to happen.
  • lokar 4mo ago
    And you have to wonder, what kind of boom in innovation could lots of reasonably priced office space support? What gov policy cold push landlords and banks to accept reality? Vacancy tax? Change to bank regulations?
    • pfannkuchen 4mo ago
      Make usury illegal again? (I mean the classical definition not the watered down modern one)
• a34729t 4mo ago
  Seattle has a few confounding factors: - Higher taxes that are not present in surrounding cities - A public school system that is hot garbage compared to 20 years ago (Eastside schools are still ok) - Amazon as of almost a decade has been pushing hiring to their Eastside offices, and trying to freeze headcount in the state overall - Lots of the engineers you want to hire live on the Eastside Short term, Bellevue is a better place to have your office. Mid term, the big winners are Texas, Vancouver (CA) and India. A little longer term, the lower end of all those jobs are gonna anyway in a puff of tokens.
• AvAn12 4mo ago
  Convert some to cheap residential. Solves both problems: affordable housing as well as rebalancing supply and demand for office space.
  • onetokeoverthe 4mo ago
    [dead]
  • ETH_start 4mo ago
    This was covered in the article, only a small fraction of the office space can be converted to residential.
• fuckinpuppers 4mo ago
  Turn them in to housing.
• hnburnsy 4mo ago
  >Some commentators have blamed the downtown office apocalypse on Seattle’s taxes, antibusiness rhetoric and perceptions of public safety. That is very hand-wavy of the author, Seattle literally taxes gross receipts of every business that does over $100,000 [recently raised to $2 million], with no deduction for expenses, and on top of an employer paid payroll expense tax.
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  • MagicMoonlight 4mo ago
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• 33MHz-i486 4mo ago
  with all the new taxes the city and the state have piled on, compensation above $1m is going to be taxed (federal + state) at a marginal rate of 56% by 2030, which I believe will be the highest in the country. Not to mention the state is in budgetary deficit, the county is losing population, and the city has extremely business hostile politics. No C-level exec has any economic incentive whatsoever to contract for a large presence there over other places.
• investmuse 4mo ago
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• deleted 4mo ago
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• 1vuio0pswjnm7 4mo ago
  "The bigger culprit, though, is the tech sector. Its astonishing decadelong push for office space, and equally astonishing slowdown, left downtown Seattle with a gap between supply and demand that will be very difficult to bridge."