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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

#111

Post by skybrian »

Melatonic wrote: post #39
hibikir wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Large parts of the floor would be illegal to hand to anyone due to lack of natural light: They are only reasonable for offices because most of the floor doesn't have full walls, or said walls are transparent. They are also in locations where you might not want to live anyway, as there's minimal commercial support around the building for the services you would need if living in a weird, limited apartment. It's a bit l…

Seems like a creative opportunity. Each floor could be apartments on the outside with a shared workspace or coffee shop or gym in the middle. Or even do stuff like hydroponics.

From a landlord’s point of view, efficiency is about how much rent you can get for it, either directly or by making nearby units more attractive. Hidden away on an upper floor doesn’t seem very attractive as a commercial space?

If they can’t rent the interior for much, that’s going to make replacing it with a new building look better because it’s more efficient.

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

#112

Post by ch4s3 »

freedomben wrote: post #44
Terr_ wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to the graph in the article, NYC is doing about average, and LA/SF are the other front-runners.

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!

Odds are they he gets bogged down in the morass of city government and moderates out of lack of willpower and understanding of the levers of city government.

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

#114

Post by BryantD »

Schiendelman wrote: post #108
BryantD wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think it's significant that Zillow's one of the few significant tech companies to maintain full remote working? They don't leave an Amazon-sized hole in downtown, but they had quite a few floors.

I don't think they closed their office - have they reduced their actual leased footprint?

They kept at least the main floor in Russell Investment Center. I don’t know if they have all ten+ floors any more. They were trying to sublease around 100K square feet right after the pandemic but I haven’t seen any news since then.

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

#115

Post by dlcarrier »

wxw wrote: post #2

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.

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.

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

#116

Post by dlcarrier »

rolph wrote: post #4
wxw wrote: post #2

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.

owned by amazon .. now where should data centers be constructed, rather than arable farmland?

How about arid land? We have a lot of that in the Pacific Southwest.

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

#117

Post by dlcarrier »

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…

    In Bellevue, office vacancies are low because most have long term tenants…
Well yeah, Bellevue isn't trying to drive all of the office tenants out of their city.

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

#118

Post by com2kid »

Schiendelman wrote: post #54
com2kid wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seattle's DT business district had always been uniquely bad. Everything is for office workers and closes at 5pm. There is nothing else but offices and restaurants serving coffee for breakfast and workplace meeting suitable lunches. It is an example of piss poor planning and urban design.

We made a lot of gains there just before covid, but it's a fight against empty space. We simply need more residential growth in the core. South Lake Union has improved a lot in the last two years, and Denny Triangle is coming along too. That will help north downtown, it's just going to take time, and there's not much we can do now to speed it up. There was a 1993 initiative that seriously fucked up our planning proce…

One of my regrets is not joining my area's design review board when it had an opening just so I could rubber stamp everything yes.

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

#120

Post by [deleted] »

dlcarrier wrote: post #117
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…

In Bellevue, office vacancies are low because most have long term tenants… Well yeah, Bellevue isn't trying to drive all of the office tenants out of their city.

[deleted]
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