[Rockstar]

Seattle faces a moment of truth to save downtown

Jan. 27, 2023 at 6:00 am Updated Jan. 27, 2023 at 5:38 pm

https://www.seattletimes.com/busines...save-downtown/

Jon Talton By Jon Talton
Columnist

I’ve never lived in a city that’s collapsing around me.

Almost every few days, it comes in hammer blows (one literally).

The Nike store at Sixth Avenue and Pike suddenly shut down earlier this month. It’s opening a new location at Bellevue Square.

The Downtown Seattle Association estimated in October 2021 that 500 street-level businesses had closed since 2019. About 300 new street-level businesses had opened.

This audit is more than a year old. Either way, the new shops and restaurants aren’t on Third Avenue, which has become ever more desolate. The losses include important stores such as Columbia Sportswear’s Seattle flagship, which was looted.

Even my eye doctor moved her practice off Third to a safer space on Fourth Avenue. Nike’s exit adds to a retail vacancy rate in Seattle’s central business district of around 13.5%. That compares with less than 2% in 2019. By contrast, Bellevue’s vacancy rate is 1.5% now versus 5% in 2019.

Meanwhile, Amazon is pulling out of its offices at the Port 99 tower downtown. One real estate insider called it “the first domino” as the company — Seattle’s largest private-sector employer — rethinks its property strategy in the city.

When big businesses pull back, small businesses that provide professional services and act as other vendors suffer.

Another blow: Regal Meridian will close its 16-screen movie theater at Seventh and Pike. The closing leaves yet another empty hole in the urban fabric. Seattle’s smile is becoming like that of someone with many lost teeth.

We’re lucky to have the AMC theaters remaining, but for how long? It occupies the top floors of Pacific Place, a once-thriving urban mall, which faces an uncertain future.

Meanwhile, crime is stabilizing or declining thanks to Mayor Bruce Harrell and City Attorney Ann Davison. Shoplifting, which added costs to every retailer in the city, has leveled off, but admittedly from a chaotic and rampant starting point.

The violent crime we see is horrific — a man battered with a hammer in broad daylight near Third Avenue and Pike, his assailant stealing his backpack. The victim, who was apparently trying to steal a bicycle at the time, later died. It was Seattle’s fifth homicide of the new year.

Other crime is so commonplace, it’s barely reported. The front door of my condo building was burgled (again). A building down the street with a bullet hole through the front door. Smashed glass and tagging on every other block.

I can feel the excuses being typed. Remote work is to blame! The “second tech boom” has deflated and the consequences are nationwide! San Francisco and Portland have it worse! Microsoft is vacating office space in Bellevue! Seattle has lovely neighborhoods, even a few without encampments! Regal filed for bankruptcy protection! Third Avenue used to be way worse!

If those excuses aren’t enough, others will say that tourism will offset much of the damage, especially with the cruise season and opening of the expanded convention center. Or that Nike’s closure isn’t a deathblow, just as Banana Republic, Gap and Macy’s departing didn’t end retail downtown.

Some of these points are true, but even those come with caveats.


For example, praising neighborhoods is fine, but downtown generates the majority of city tax revenue. And I don’t know of a quality metropolitan area without a thriving central core. In New York City, Manhattan is seeing a post-pandemic renaissance.

Tourism has long been a part of Seattle’s diverse economy. Thank goodness Pike Place Market survives, along with Seattle Center. The convention center expansion will prove to be a wise investment. But tourism mostly creates lower-wage jobs, and tourists provide limited support for downtown cultural centers and pro sports.

Excuses aside, today’s urban dystopia was unimaginable when I arrived here 15 years ago.

Whether from a consumer or business standpoint, we may be witnessing the demise of tolerance for bad urban experiences on the other side of this pandemic.

The conceit that places like Seattle could get away with street crime and urban disorder, chalking it up to a big city with big-city problems — and people would still come and invest — is being put to the test.

At the same time, the expectation of urban workers, residents, visitors and retailers themselves for reliably clean and safe experiences is even higher coming out of the pandemic. Retailers won’t put up with an operating environment that is expensive because of safety and retail theft issues, and customers won’t either. They’ll go somewhere else.

More workers are returning to the office nationally. For example, in January Austin, Texas, showed 77% of employees back in the office compared with the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, followed by Houston (69%).

It’s happening here, too, although at a slower pace. The Downtown Seattle Association estimated 44% had returned as of December compared with less than 30% in January 2022.

Also in December, San Francisco posted 53% and San Jose 52%.

Soon-to-be-empty City Council seats provide an opportunity to continue the backlash that elected Sara Nelson. That is, if centrists can be persuaded to run and face attacks by activists and Twitter mobs.

Otherwise, Seattle will lose out on the back-to-the-city phenomenon from which it has so benefited since the 1990s.

A paper by scholars at NYU and Columbia University put a fine point on the stakes:

“Our research emphasizes the possibility of an ‘urban doom loop’ by which decline of work in the center business district results in less foot traffic and consumption, which adversely affects the urban core in a variety of ways (less eyes on the street, so more crime; less consumption; less commuting) thereby lowering municipal revenues and also making it more challenging to provide public goods and services absent tax increases. These challenges will predominantly hit blue cities in the coming years.”

The loop doesn’t quite fit Seattle yet, whose fiscal shortfall is primarily from overspending rather than lower revenues. But unaddressed, the crisis in the core will only grow worse.

And the hits will keep coming.

Jon Talton: jtalton@seattletimes.com; on Twitter: @jontalton. Talton writes about business and the Pacific Northwest economy in the Sunday Seattle Times.