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

The article notes that the US overall office vacancy rate is 23%. Seattle is 37%.

Have we reached "peak office" at last?

How many people in offices does society really need, anyway?

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.

New York City: Hold my Negroni aperitivo. I have faith in the Big Apple administration's ability to become a leader on this metric.

Zoning and other regulations getting the way of it being used. The city "just" needs to incentivize it getting used, and someone's gotta come to terms with losing money.

As the mayor says, "Bye!"

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I know that commercial and residential building codes are different, but you would think converting them to residential units would fix this..

If you haven't lived in Seattle, it's hard to understand the problem. It's multifaceted; business climate, generally poor quality of the city itself as a walking / working destination, extremely hostile to business city government, and greener pastures (literally) east across the bay, which happen to be closer to some very large headquarters.

The die was largely cast when Amazon called Seattle's bluff during COVID and relocated, but so much needs to be done to make the city itself an attractive place to live and work, and there is so little planning, zoning or effective change happening it seems likely to be decades before I could imagine a truly vibrant city core. Even when I write that, it seems unlikely. As we speak, Seattle is aiming to become the highest tax jurisdiction in the country, higher even than NYC, because ... revenues are down. It's a disappointing response to a serious urban problem.