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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

#121

Post by [deleted] »

vessenes wrote: post #102
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…

Totally agree. Going to Vancouver often just highlights this for me, same climate and topology and .. amazing food scene! Shops are open until 10pm! Lots of good walking areas! It can be done!

[deleted]

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

#122

Post by woodruffw »

hamdingers wrote: post #88
woodruffw wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, this is a huge advantage (and one among several reasons why malaise in the commercial real estate market in other US cities doesn’t transfer easily into lessons about NYC’s market).

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

#123

Post by halestock »

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.

I'll bite, how's Seattle doing that?

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

#124

Post by consensus1 »

dlcarrier wrote: post #116
rolph wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Build where there is water people complain. Build where there is no water people complain.

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

#125

Post by fhrow4484 »

Schiendelman wrote: post #42
DenisM wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did Amazon relocate? I think most employees are still traveling to SLU to their offices.

Amazon didn't "relocate" - they just moved most of their new hiring to Bellevue.

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

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

#126

Post by naturalmovement »

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…

> The Seattle Times has always been a conservative rag

The Seattle Times is Left-Center with a high credibility rating. [1]

Such a deliberate distortion of the facts renders the rest of your screed null and void.

[1] https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/seattle-times/

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

#127

Post by bayarearefugee »

garbawarb wrote: post #60
jonfromsf wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

How will he do that?

> How will he do that?

Through the evil power of socialism!! (/s)

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

#128

Post by IG_Semmelweiss »

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…

What are the financial "instruments" ?

The main claims from the article seem worrysome, IN particular, the 37% vacancy rate, as well as multiple buildings underwater[3], etc.

Now, lets dissect the claims that this is part of some cycle, and not the result of new city hall management. The reality is that with Jumpstart, and with the vacancy rate, enterprises are not renting. But, the owner is stuck with the asset in what is now a hostile jurisdiction. So, even if owner may not be able to change terms on their mortgage, they certainly can charge less for rent. Empty units do not contribute to cash flows to pay the building mortage. I understand there may be consequences to lowering rents, but those consequences are coming home anyway: The building will need to be sold, at a loss, by the bank to a new owner. And as you said, that process takes time. And the jurisdiction seems hellbent to make it harder.

Now, as buildings sell, this in turn lowers the appraised value, which is key to the Seattle tax base.

So, the downtown core is going to produce far less in property taxes in the foreseeable future, with fewer tenants paying (at least in short term) occupancy taxes, etc. This is going to play out in a decade.

According to this, commercial property taxes are about 26 %[1] of the Seattle budget

Let's assume appraisals go down 50% for those impaired offices. This is not crazy, there's precendent for it[2]. That means the Seattle budget must be cut by 13%. This is not even factoring other losses from job loss, sales tax lost, etc. Maybe that's not "Seattle is dying" , but sound pretty bad ?

[1] https://www.seattle.gov/documents/departments/financedepartm...

[2] Seattle/downtown office properties lost ~$10–15+ billion in assessed value since 2020 (46–48% drop) . https://cdn.downtownseattle.org/app/uploads/2026/06/New-Repo...

[3] https://www.king5.com/article/money/business/downtown-seattl...

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

#129

Post by lukeschlather »

naturalmovement wrote: post #126
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…

> The Seattle Times has always been a conservative rag The Seattle Times is Left-Center with a high credibility rating. [1] Such a deliberate distortion of the facts renders the rest of your screed null and void. [1] https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/seattle-times/

They're looking at national politics, and on that score, yes, the ST is liberal. When it comes to local politics the Seattle Times is conservative. Your objection is a bit like people who object that the Democrats are conservatives, from a European perspective, except this is about the city itself. The current mayor is liberal, the previous mayor was conservative. They're both Democrats and would be defined as liberals by your factcheck, but that's a different rubric than the one we're talking about.

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

#130

Post by Schiendelman »

IG_Semmelweiss wrote: post #128
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…

What are the financial "instruments" ? The main claims from the article seem worrysome, IN particular, the 37% vacancy rate, as well as multiple buildings underwater[3], etc. Now, lets dissect the claims that this is part of some cycle, and not the result of new city hall management. The reality is that with Jumpstart, and with the vacancy rate, enterprises are not renting. But, the owner is stuck with the asset in w…

The financial instruments are commercial real estate loans.

Those loans often do not allow the borrower to charge lower rent.

Property taxes are not calculated that way. The property tax rate for a given year is backed into (a "mill rate") based on approved dollars of spending divided by total property value. If total citywide property value drops by 50%, the property tax rate doubles that year.

So no, the property value changes aren't really an issue.

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