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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

#211

Post by SilverElfin »

Schiendelman wrote: post #203
zeafoamrun wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just goes to show how loony politics are in Seattle for ST to seem conservative to people.

It's very conservative - just along certain axes that are especially locally relevant. For instance, they've opposed both our 2008 and 2016 mass transit ballot measures (both of which passed with strong support). They were supportive, until we replaced the primary owner's express onramp on Interstate 90 with a train.

Seattle Times is left leaning. Just because your pet measure of transit was opposed doesn’t make it otherwise. Calling it conservative is simply unmoored from reality. It’s also a display of what Seattle politics are like and why it has declined so much on so many facets in a short 20 years. The rampant progressive extremism is the root cause of the issues affecting Seattle. There is no balance or practical governance.

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

#213

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

"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."

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

#214

Post by 8note »

fzeroracer wrote: post #167
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…

> Lynnwood WA -- a suburb -- had more energy. As someone that actually lives in Seattle, this is so funny to read. It comes across as someone that pretends to live in Seattle and there sure are a lot of people that love to pretend they live here. Seattle has far more energy than Austin does for example and it doesn't really take much digging to get involved in the various scenes we have here. The food scene here does…

the food is a lot better now than it was a decade ago, but its expensive.

ive only spent a few days in austin, but id say it does have more energy than seattle does?

or rather, its younger and theres more people doing college student stuff like spending all day on a paddle board

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

#215

Post by m3047 »

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?

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?

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

#216

Post by dlcarrier »

consensus1 wrote: post #124
dlcarrier wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's a surprising amount of farming in arid regions Maybe we should replace those farms with data centers, to reduce water consumption.

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

#217

Post by brookst »

philwelch wrote: post #185
brookst wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do Democrats’ policies on health care, paid leave from work, unions, public funding of political campaigns, and public transit compare to European conservatives? If you’re a single-issue abortion voter, yes the US democrats tend to propose fetal viability (22 weeks or so) as the limit, while most of Europe is 12 weeks. UK and Netherlands are 24. But if you genuinely believe US democrats are wildly liberal, you mu…

> If you’re a single-issue abortion voter, yes the US democrats tend to propose fetal viability (22 weeks or so) as the limit No, the standard Democrat policy is to allow abortion on demand at any point prior to birth—40 weeks or so.

This is false. Not sure if propaganda or ignorance of infowar, or lying for the fun of it, but 100% false.

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

#218

Post by opo »

Schiendelman wrote: post #130
IG_Semmelweiss wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 v…

>...If total citywide property value drops by 50%, the property tax rate doubles that year.

This claim is simply not true. Even in a budget based system like Seattle, there are hard statutory limits on how much the tax could increase.

If total citywide property value drops by 50%, the tax rate would hit its legal maximum ceiling, and the city would have to make up the money somewhere else or cut spending.

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

#219

Post by unethical_ban »

hyperrail wrote: post #77
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…

> This is almost entirely an artifact of the financial instruments used to pay for these buildings, regardless of any Seattle policy changes. Why would this be different in Seattle than in other cities? Many downtown office towers are bought or built using a lot of debt throughout the U.S. What do you think makes Seattle special? > We just saw another building turn over, US Bank Center. The new owner bought it at a p…

>why does the Wall Street Journal famously have a liberal-biased newsroom?

Is this serious? I can't tell anymore.

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

#220

Post by hirsin »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #191
hirsin wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On top of the architectural challenges and efficacy of it, you have to contend with the terms of the bank loans that apply. Those are why the buildings "can't" lower rents to attract new business. If they sign a lease at a new lower rent it basically triggers a re-check of "can they repay the loan based on their rental income?", which comes back as "no". That trigger _doesn't_ occur if you just leave the building emp…

> If they sign a lease at a new lower rent it basically triggers a re-check of "can they repay the loan based on their rental income?", which comes back as "no". That trigger _doesn't_ occur if you just leave the building empty, with _no one_ paying rent, because your last mark to market rent was high enough. Minimum DSCRs have long been used to monitor the current value of a property, and less income is less income.…

Yep, the issue is that recalculating DSCR doesn't happen on the right timescale to incentivize reducing rents, instead incentivizing keeping vacancies open and using a pro forma DSCR.

The banks know this is a structural issue, but are likewise incentivized to keep "strong assets" on their balance sheet, rather than a bunch of troubled assets bound for default.

The claim isn't that they can keep this up forever, it just needs to last another quarter, every quarter.

The shell game is both parties knowing that the cups are all empty but still playing because it's better for them both to do so.

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