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

seattletimes.com

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

#81

Post by BryantD »

mempko wrote: post #65
BryantD wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

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.

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

#82

Post by dendrite9 »

Animats wrote: post #50
skybrian wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, thank…

There have been some attempts to convert office buildings with large rectangular floors into long, narrow apartments so every apartment has a window. It's possible, but difficult.[1] Plumbing and sewerage turns out to be a huge headache. Large office buildings often have all the plumbing and sewerage in a small vertical core. The rest of the building is just flat slabs on columns. Adding a sewer line means punching t…

A few years ago I was involved in purchasing a commercial building for split purposes. After viewing several spaces it became clear how critical plumbing location were to thinking about how a space could be used. We looked at a few where owners had attempted to change the layout in strange ways. In the end we decided our two goals were not well suited to a single building so we leased a production space and purchased a smaller building for other purposes.

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

#83

Post by jmyeet »

Schiendelman wrote: post #67

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…

I'm not sure the bank has that much to do with it.

Commercial real estate valuation is based entirely on its ability to produce income. Lower the rent, lower the value. And that's a problem because most commercial leases are long (5-20+ years) so you're locking in an asset writedown for a long period of time. So it can be better to leave it vacant and pretend the value hasn't changed.

You can still run into problems with this (eg servicing the loan). So I don't think it's quite the issue that banks have to approve lowering the rent so much as the owner might lower their asset value and have problems with the LTV and DSCR so the bank may then require you to refinance or add capital.

By the way, we've gone through this before. Up until the 1990s, law firms were by far the largest tenants of office space because they had very large law libraries. Then that went online and they downsized. This was an acpolaypse in the 2000s combined with the dot-com bust.

I think the lag you're talking about is on banks essentially foreclosing on a building and selling it off, allowing the new owners to charge less because they paid less.

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

#84

Post by operatingthetan »

vessenes wrote: post #36

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 an…

>If you haven't lived in Seattle, it's hard to understand the problem.

[...]

>greener pastures (literally) east across the bay

Well obviously you haven't lived in Seattle because if you did you would know the body of water separating Seattle and Bellevue is Lake Washington. Not a bay.

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

#85

Post by operatingthetan »

wenc wrote: post #70
vessenes wrote: post #36

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 an…

I've lived all over the country, both in big and small cities, and most recently in the Seattle area (across the lake in Kirkland) for 4 years. Seattle has trappings of a city, but socially it doesn't feel like one in the way Chicago and NYC are (ok they're bigger, but hear me out -- it's not the size, it's the people). To me, Seattle feels like Cleveland but with more money. I couldn't quite put my finger on it, but…

>Even Lynnwood WA -- a suburb -- had more energy.

I'm sorry but this is so beyond the pale.

Also your comment complains about the energy of the city (that it is too suburban feeling) and then you say you like Ballard the most -- which is by far the most suburban of the neighborhoods you mentioned.

Finally we've been hosting the world cup and news writers from around the world have been exclaiming that Seattle has absolutely peak energy and culture as a host. E.g. https://www.irishtimes.com/sport/soccer/2026/06/22/keith-dug...

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

#86

Post by wenc »

operatingthetan wrote: post #85
wenc wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've lived all over the country, both in big and small cities, and most recently in the Seattle area (across the lake in Kirkland) for 4 years. Seattle has trappings of a city, but socially it doesn't feel like one in the way Chicago and NYC are (ok they're bigger, but hear me out -- it's not the size, it's the people). To me, Seattle feels like Cleveland but with more money. I couldn't quite put my finger on it, but…

>Even Lynnwood WA -- a suburb -- had more energy. I'm sorry but this is so beyond the pale. Also your comment complains about the energy of the city (that it is too suburban feeling) and then you say you like Ballard the most -- which is by far the most suburban of the neighborhoods you mentioned. Finally we've been hosting the world cup and news writers from around the world have been exclaiming that Seattle has abs…

No it is not. (lived experience as an ethnic minority). Lynnwood had way better restaurants and cafes that opened late.

Liking Ballard doesn't mean I endorse its energy. Ballard is one of the quietest parts of the city (the Nordic Museum is there), but people were also the chattiest, which is why I liked it. It provided a brief respite from the Seattle Freeze.

Ha, those writers don't live in Seattle full time. They're only visiting.

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

#87

Post by pfannkuchen »

lokar wrote: post #76
Schiendelman wrote: post #67

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…

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?

Make usury illegal again?

(I mean the classical definition not the watered down modern one)

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

#88

Post by hamdingers »

woodruffw wrote: post #48
delichon wrote: post #10

New York City: Hold my Negroni aperitivo. I have faith in the Big Apple administration's ability to become a leader on this metric.

NYC appears to be at least somewhat ahead on converting older office stock to residential stock, and I don’t expect the current administration would attempt to slow that down (it has no particular political valence in the city that I can discern).

NYC's advantage is that older office buildings are more amenable to adaptive reuse.

Modern office buildings have deep floor plates and sealed windows, relying heavily on HVAC and artificial lighting to make the center of the building habitable. Bedrooms require exterior windows, so an optimal floorplan is a ring of bedrooms around the outside which leaves gobs of low value square footage in the middle.

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

#89

Post by operatingthetan »

wenc wrote: post #86
operatingthetan wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Even Lynnwood WA -- a suburb -- had more energy. I'm sorry but this is so beyond the pale. Also your comment complains about the energy of the city (that it is too suburban feeling) and then you say you like Ballard the most -- which is by far the most suburban of the neighborhoods you mentioned. Finally we've been hosting the world cup and news writers from around the world have been exclaiming that Seattle has abs…

No it is not. (lived experience as an ethnic minority). Lynnwood had way better restaurants and cafes that opened late. Liking Ballard doesn't mean I endorse its energy. Ballard is one of the quietest parts of the city (the Nordic Museum is there), but people were also the chattiest, which is why I liked it. It provided a brief respite from the Seattle Freeze. Ha, those writers don't live in Seattle full time. They'r…

I think you may be the only person in the world who thinks Lynnwood has better energy than Seattle. Complaining about Seattle being too suburban and then praising its suburbs is too contradictory to take seriously.

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

#90

Post by wenc »

operatingthetan wrote: post #89
wenc wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it is not. (lived experience as an ethnic minority). Lynnwood had way better restaurants and cafes that opened late. Liking Ballard doesn't mean I endorse its energy. Ballard is one of the quietest parts of the city (the Nordic Museum is there), but people were also the chattiest, which is why I liked it. It provided a brief respite from the Seattle Freeze. Ha, those writers don't live in Seattle full time. They'r…

I think you may be the only person in the world who thinks Lynnwood has better energy than Seattle. Complaining about Seattle being too suburban and then praising its suburbs is too contradictory to take seriously.

We can disagree about Lynnwood (that's my opinion).

But Seattle does have very low social wattage.

p.s. I should clarify about Lynnwood since this is contentious for folks. For me, Lynnwood produced more social collisions that I care about than Seattle does. It had a lot of immigrant businesses, actually good restaurants, bookshops, hobby shops, etc. where people lingered, even though it's true you have to drive everywhere. It doesn't have urbanity, but it produced more lived energy than an actual urban place like Seattle did.

I also used "suburban" in two senses: physically suburban versus socially suburban. Lynnwood is physically suburban. But Seattle felt socially suburban: private, subdued and short on spontaneous public life -- at least to me (as someone who doesn't drink). An actual suburb like Lynnwood felt less socially suburban to me, with its late night cafes and things to do.

Same with Ballard. It's a fairly quiet part of Seattle, but the social collisions there were somehow better than say SLU.

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