There are few downtown areas in the nation that are more attractive than Seattle. Downtown Seattle is a dream of spontaneous order and a fascinating place well worth exploring. It is one of the nation’s great walkable downtown areas, with a mixture of older and newer buildings, hills, Ivars Acres of Clams and the Chief Seattle fire boat on Elliot Bay, Pioneer Square, the Pike Place Market (itself the home of the first Starbuck’s coffee) and a hyper-dense 100,000 jobs per square mile.
Downtown boasts the L. C. Smith Tower, which from 1914 to 1966 was the tallest office tower in the west, at 42 floors and nearly 500 feet. Now Smith Tower ranks no better than 35th tallest downtown. Seattle has built so aggressively that a visitor to the observation deck would see more looking up than down. Smith Tower is dwarfed by a skyline containing some of the nation’s most impressive office architecture, such as Columbia Center and the Washington Mutual Building, which was named for the subprime mortgage lending champion.
Downtown has many more historic landmarks, such as the Olympic Hotel and the Washington Athletic Club. The art-deco Northern Life Tower was the second tallest until the building boom of the 1960s and would have been the pride of more downtown areas than not. The 1970s Henry M. (Scoop) Jackson federal building is a rare gem of its age, while the Rainier Bank Building is perched on a tapered base that begs the question as to whether it will collapse before the Alaskan Way Viaduct in the great Cascadian subduction zone earthquake (which is due to strike sometime between now and the end of time).
The Condominium Bust: Downtown Seattle has experienced one of the nation’s strongest central city condominium booms, though its success (and that of others) has long been drowned out by the high pitched chorus of the Portland missionary society. As in Portland, Atlanta, San Diego, Los Angeles and other newly resurgent downtown areas, Seattle’s condominium boom is now a bust as resembling that of a subprime-baby remote desert exurb halfway between San Bernardino and Las Vegas. Even so, the condominium neighborhoods of downtown Seattle are more attractive than what they replaced. Eventually, the large inventory of empty units will be sold or converted into rental units.
The Office Bust: Downtown’s condominium bust has spread to its office market as well. The vacancy rate is now over 20%.
The Employment Bust: Data from the Puget Sound Regional Council of Governments (PSRG) indicates the depth of the problem. From 2000 to 2009, employment in the downtown core declined more than 12%, with a loss of 20,000 jobs. But it would be a mistake to conclude that downtown Seattle’s employment decline stems from the Great Recession. The losses occurred before. In 2007, the last year before the recession, employment had fallen nearly 18,000 from 2000.
Downtown Seattle’s employment decline mirrors trends around the nation and around the world. Now, downtown Seattle accounts for only 8.4% of employment in the four county area, something that would surprise an airline passenger looking at its verticalness from above.
The balance of the city of Seattle has done somewhat better, having lost 3% of its employment since 2000.
Suburban Job Ascendancy: All of the employment growth in the Seattle area has been in the suburbs. While the city, including downtown, was losing nearly 30,000 jobs, the suburbs of King, Pierce, Snohomish and Kitsap counties added 90,000 jobs (Table). Suburban Redmond, home of Microsoft, added 19,000 jobs all by itself. Even Tacoma, the old second central city and long since defeated challenger to Seattle added a modest number of jobs between 2000 and 2009.
| EMPLOYMENT IN THE SEATTLE AREA: 2000-2009 | ||||
| Area | 2000 | 2009 | Change | % Change |
| Downtown | 164,255 | 143,952 | (20,303) | -12.4% |
| Balance: Downtown | 338,580 | 329,182 | (9,398) | -2.8% |
| Balance: King County | 646,807 | 662,470 | 15,663 | 2.4% |
| Kitsap County | 70,854 | 81,617 | 10,763 | 15.2% |
| Pierce County | 234,619 | 264,402 | 29,783 | 12.7% |
| Snohomish County | 207,764 | 241,569 | 33,805 | 16.3% |
| 4-County Area | 1,662,879 | 1,723,192 | 60,313 | 3.6% |
| Compiled from Puget Sound Regional Council of Governments data. | ||||
If You Built it, They Must be Going: With these trends, it might be expected that local transportation agencies would be rushing to provide sufficient infrastructure to the growing suburbs. Not so. Planners are scurrying about to build one of the nation’s most expensive light rail systems with lines converging on downtown, to feed 20,000 fewer jobs today and perhaps 30,000 or 40,000 fewer in the future. Perhaps this is the train “got a whole city moving again” as the television commercials put it?
What about growing Redmond? It’s on the map. The line is scheduled to reach Redmond sometime between now and the end of time.
Comments
42 responses to “The Downtown Seattle Jobs Rush to the Suburbs”
You’re comparing employment in a recession year (2009) to the year that was the height of the technology boom (2000). Just about any place with a concentration of high-tech jobs had less employment in 2009 than it did in 2000.
That still leaves a 9-year period of net job exodus.
If you check the story, you will see that the job losses in downtown Seattle, 2000-2007, the last year before the recession were 18,000, compared to 20,303 in the 2000-2009 time period.
Tom Rubin
2000 was an enormous boom year for any place with a lot of tech jobs. Look at Sunnyvale or Mountain View, CA. Sunnyvale’s employment was 79,000 in 2000 but only 71,000 in 2008. Same story with Mountain View or Palo Alto or Cupertino… Anywhere that benefited that technology bubble from 1999-2001 added a lot of jobs in those years that were lost after the bubble popped. I wouldn’t take that to mean that the Silicon Valley is declining economically.
Job data on CA here:
http://www.labormarketinfo.edd.ca.gov/cgi/dataanalysis/labForceReport.asp?menuchoice=LABFORCE
My point is, before you draw conclusions about employment trends in a place, you should look at multiple years of data. Compare 1995 to 2007-2009, and I bet the data will look very different.
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I suppose at some point this trend was to be expected, the downtown life has become quite unaffordable for many companies, that means that one of their few options was to move to the suburbs. I think the office relocation companies in have more exact details on that.
Seattle employment grew by nearly 20 percent from 1995 to 2000, its peak year. 2006 employment was 6.7 percent below the 2000 level.The six suburban cities (Bellevue, Bothell, Issaquah, Kirkland, Redmond and Renton.) experienced a greater percentage growth in employment than Seattle from 1995 to 2000 (32.5 percent),although the absolute gain in employment was greater in Seattle than in the suburban cities (84,500 versus 76,900). Employment continued to grow strongly into 2001 for the suburban six, while it turned down in Seattle. Employment growth from 2004 to 2006 was stronger in the suburban six than in Seattle.Either way,unemployment rates are rising and many businesses are affected by the increasing costs of claims.Payroll outsourcing companies might offer a solution on this matter.
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