Regardless of Amazon’s return-to-office mandate, foot visitors round Amazon’s Seattle workplaces for January 2025 remained 26% below January 2019 levels. Simply this previous December, the “Houdini of Seattle’s office market,” Martin Selig, defaulted on a $240 million loan.
Depressed foot visitors has inflicted struggling not solely on business landlords however, extra importantly, on native companies that add to Seattle’s attraction. Steps away from Pike Place Market, retailers Danner, Free Folks, Royal Robbins and sandylew have departed. After greater than a quarter-century on First Avenue, the artwork gallery Vetri announced its closure, stating: “small impartial companies like ours need to confront the problematic actuality that whereas rents stay at downtown costs, the foot visitors we depend on isn’t what it was once.”
The Fashionable, one in every of Selig’s downtown properties accomplished in 2020, was initially designed as a mixture of workplaces and flats. However even workplace mogul Selig has seen the writing on the wall; the Fashionable’s workplaces are at present being transformed to flats.
Final month, the Seattle Mayor’s Workplace and Metropolis Council adopted tax deferrals for the conversion of underutilized business properties to residential housing. Apart from vital monetary obstacles, nevertheless, many fashionable workplace buildings are merely incompatible with residential conversion. Deep ground plates — lengthy, slim ground plans — occupied by inside cubicles and server rooms, create critical design points for flats, which require proximity to outward-facing home windows for satisfactory pure lighting. Workplace plumbing and HVAC techniques are centralized, whereas every condominium often has its personal toilet, kitchen and thermostat.
Town of Seattle ought to assume on its toes: For particularly difficult-to-convert workplace buildings, lecture rooms and dormitories provide financial and logistically viable alternate options. Dormitories, like workplaces, usually have communal bogs and kitchens. Windowless interiors of workplace buildings can accommodate lecture rooms, studying and scholar group assembly rooms, music observe rooms, school and administrative workplaces, and a complete host of different makes use of. Enlargement of educational establishments into downtown Seattle would generate much-needed foot visitors.
The dynamic, mixed-use nature of a school campus — the place college students sleep, research and socialize — means extra around-the-clock exercise and extra demand for native eating places, retailers, venues and cultural establishments just like the Seattle Artwork Museum and Benaroya Corridor. Foot visitors positive aspects from college students dwelling and studying in downtown Seattle are additional amplified by school and off-campus scholar commuters, members of the general public attending neighborhood occasions, and visiting households.
Worldwide and out-of-state college students deliver outdoors sources of shopper spending and gross sales tax income to downtown Seattle. Supplied that ample portions of on-campus housing come from re-purposed workplace buildings, the coed inhabitants wouldn’t adversely have an effect on native housing provide. Pupil spending additionally helps to modulate downtown Seattle’s fluctuating vacationer financial system — the educational 12 months nearly completely dovetails with Seattle’s tourist season.
College campuses are already driving city heart economies throughout the nation: A rising Georgia State campus “has undoubtedly been a very good factor for downtown Atlanta,” incomes GSU the Marcus Downtown Financial Impression Award. Cornell Tech’s satellite tv for pc campus on NYC’s Roosevelt Island supported 2,800 jobs. “Main strides in downtown San Antonio” by the University of Texas “create vibrant areas that entice individuals and foster engagement.” Vanderbilt’s satellite tv for pc graduate campus in West Palm Seashore is anticipated to have a projected return on funding of “greater than 20 to 1.”
Seattle leaders have to look no additional than the College of Washington: U District foot visitors for September 2024 increased 34% compared to September 2019 levels — success that might be replicated 4 miles south. Seattle Office of Planning & Community Development this previous November expressed interest in a Gensler study on changing Seattle workplaces into “co-living” areas, that are functionally simply dormitories.
As Washington lawmakers explore additional financial incentives for builders to transform workplaces into flats, they need to additionally strongly think about measures that invite universities to remodel high-vacancy business properties into lecture rooms and campus housing. A satellite tv for pc campus among the many native companies, company workplaces and cultural establishments of downtown Seattle would strengthen the virtuous cycles of innovation of Seattle’s information financial system and reinvigorate the neighborhood.
