I was downtown this weekend and it was much busier than I expected. I rode the light rail from the new Northgate station, and the train was (relatively) full after the university stations. I hope the two are related.
It's not as doom and gloom as you might think. Without such a huge wealth gap between the people who work for the downtown industry and tertiary business you might get lucky and have a cultural resurgence as artists, musicians, restauranteurs, local retail, etc etc can afford to live and set up shop downtown again.
People seem to forget that outside of the supermega metro areas the typical downtown/financial districts are basically dead.
> People seem to forget that outside of the supermega metro areas the typical downtown/financial districts are basically dead.
Before working in tech I lived in mostly small and medium sized cities. The downtowns were always packed, and usually the artists were local, but as much as I hear "artists and musicians" brought up with respect to a cities value, they don't lure people in. It's just a bonus. What does is good schools, affordable home prices, stable jobs, and a decent economy.
I'm surprised that's your experience to be fair. Mid sized cities like Columbus or St. Louis's downtown effectively shuts down at 5pm in my experience. All those tall buildings are offices, most of the restaurants around them serve business people and don't offer dinner service and close after the workday. Night life is in other neighborhoods adjacent, but not in downtown.
St Louis and Columbus are much bigger than the towns I'm thinking of. The two towns are basically suburbs with a downtown area. I was able to bike to both of them from my house. In my favorite of the two there were two restaurants that offered dinner service and were owned by locals. Everything else was chain restaurants and they all offered dinner and late night/bar services.
Yeah if there isn't a ton of office space downtowns seem a lot more lively, since businesses stay open outside of 9-5 and people might actually live closer by. Even lower manhattan is considered a dead area after hours due to all the offices and not a lot of other businesses and housing to draw demand outside of 9-5 m-f.
A lot of core downtowns (whether financial district or something more diverse) were pretty dead pre-pandemic after hours even if nearby areas of the city were pretty lively.
> Before working in tech I lived in mostly small and medium sized cities.
How long ago? If you compare downtown Seattle to downtown Seattle 10 years ago, it was much better back then. Things changed quickly this decade, I wouldn't be surprised if the places you left packed are struggling today.
Seattle in general isn't struggling at all, it grew 25% this decade and the housing market...but downtown has a huge hill to climb in going to back to a fun place to visit on the weekend.
When was downtown the fun evening getaway? I've been here 15 years, and unless you're looking for a Frat Bro party in Belltown, Fremont/Cap Hill/Ballard were always where the real social life was. They're all doing just fine now - you wouldn't know there was a pandemic on.
I’ve been visiting Seattle since a toddler living in the tri-cities circa late 1970s. It indeed was a place to be, at least for a kid then a teenager and even when living in the U district and working at crackdonalds on third and pine.
But when I tell my son Seattle center used to have arcades and a roller coaster, he doesn’t believe me. Or when I talk about sending my great aunt and uncle off back to Alaska on the ferry at the water front (the Alaska marine highway used to start at Seattle rather than Bellingham).
The two I'm thinking of are in Texas and they're doing well.
If I'm reading it right, the problem you're calling out is that it is unaffordable to live in a downtown metro after it reaches a certain density. People still think they can hack together solutions by subsidizing housing, rent control, applying grants, etc but I'm more of the mind that there's probably a max size to a city, where once you hit a threshold it either takes a nosedive into poverty or becomes so unsustainably expensive that it chases out what desirable things may have existed there in the first place.
There's no lack of denser, cheaper cities than Seattle. If there's a max soze, Seattle isn't there yet. Poor design is the likely issue, likely cars being the problem. Cars take up a huge amount of space, both for wide roads for getting places, and parking both at home, at work, and at shopping centres.
> the problem you're calling out is that it is unaffordable to live in a downtown metro after it reaches a certain density.
I don't know where you got that. Affordability downtown isn't really what is keeping people away (and it is not like rental buildings have lots of vacancies, nor are close to downtown condos, towhomes, and SFHs difficult to sell), but retail and restaurant choices have been decimated over the last decade, it isn't thriving from the point of view of someone going there to do things.
Ah, retail and restaurants are low-margin businesses, so I usually associate their decline with a rise in cost (labor + real estate). Usually restaurants don't just go away, they're replaced by fewer-in-number but more-expensive options that people don't want or can't eat at regularly. Cost also correlates with density, but I think that's more abstractly. Eg: more businesses show up, more workers are needed, more houses are needed, supply and demand flip flops as inventory in a relatively-fixed area shrinks or becomes a rental market instead of buyers market.
Retail has declined due to online commerce. Seattle ironically lost its downtown Bon Marche/Macy's to become more office space for Amazon.
The homeless factor can't be understated in Seattle, especially with all the encampments downtown. I worked at 3rd and Pine McDonalds in the mid-90s, and for as bad as it was back then, it is ten times worse today.
I was just in Seattle for the first time in about 5 years. The situation was... not good. And this from someone who has spent a lot of time in SF and always had a not totally positive take on Seattle with respect to the grunge factor compared to other PNW cities.
Compared to other PNW cities, Seattle is about average. Portland isn't much better, Vancouver is...better because it is Canada but otherwise has very similar problems. No one can decide whether the term "skid row" was coined in Vancouver, Seattle, or Portland, they all had a similar place that was muddy because logs skidding to the mills which became a home for the down trodden.
So at least as far as its peers in the PNW, Seattle isn't very much of an outlier. Well, unless we can compare to other Seattle-area cities like Bellevue, which can simply push most of the homeless problem onto Seattle.
I imagine there are nicer areas of Seattle than Downtown just as there are nicer areas of SF than Moscone/Union Square/Market Street but ick. Not really a city person except to visit anyway but the northern West Coast (and maybe the whole West Coast) has just gotten worse if that's possible.
There are several city parks outside of downtown overrun with homeless encampments. Many roadside parking strips and interstate greenspaces too. It's widespread.
The city is trying to move people into housing but there's a lot of mental health and addiction problems that make many people resist the outreach support.
All of the west coast cities have similar problems (soaring housing costs, high growth, great tech jobs, lots of homeless people). Even when we count non-coastal cities in the west (Spokane, Reno, Sacramento, Las Vegas), it doesn't look better.
Combination of weather and a political climate that makes harsh approaches to a difficult problem unpalatable. It's probably mostly not housing prices although that doesn't help.
> as much as I hear "artists and musicians" brought up with respect to a cities value, they don't lure people in. It's just a bonus. What does is good schools, affordable home prices, stable jobs, and a decent economy.
Sounds very dependent on what stage of life you're in. I can see how people who are already looking to start a family would want the things you mentioned, but for those of us who haven't married yet, good options to socialise and meet people are a prerequisite before we even start to think about schools and buying homes.
I think you're oversimplified and over-regimenting. Cities are like organisms. A healthy city needs a large number of different kinds of organs and systems all working in concert. Some may not be entirely essential—you can live without an appendix and give up a kidney—but almost all of them need to be in place to have something someone would call a thriving city.
I'm saying artists and musicians aren't a bonus. A city without them might be functional, but no one would love it and few would call it thriving. No part of a city is really inessential.
My hometown wasn't really known for artists or artistry and I still loved it. I think the desire to be around art is one that only part (maybe even a small part) of the country shares. Having it is nice, but not having it isn't really missing out on much, and it's fairly low on the hierarchy of needs.
"you might get lucky and have a cultural resurgence as artists, musicians, restauranteurs, local retail, etc etc can afford to live and set up shop downtown again." Or you might get what you have now: boarded up businesses, open air drug markets, rampant unprosecuted crime, needles and human waste everywhere.
The thing with the needles is crazy scary - I keep seeing them a lot recently when in Seattle, not only downtown.
Just the other day I visited Capitol Hill around 15th Avenue and an entire park is full of tents, and a person defecated in an alley by Kaiser Permanente in broad daylight. Reminded me of Tenderloin district...
Feels like the city is going downhill - especially if you have family I'd stay away
> you might get lucky and have a cultural resurgence as artists, musicians, restauranteurs, local retail, etc etc can afford to live and set up shop downtown again.
The question really comes down to how much downtown real estate is paid off or under mortgage, which basically depends on how recently it was sold to a new owner.
Anything under a mortgage will be subject to a CMBS that was valued based on the worth of renting out the units in the building. These will have terms setup such that if the owner lowers the rent, they will be required to pay an additional down payment to cover the lost value in the mortgage's collateral (the building) from the now lower rents.
CMBS's will be invested in by multiple investors at different risk levels, creating different incentives on modifying or maintaining the collateral requirements, and anywhere from 50% to 75% of the investors will have to agree to any changes to the loan terms.
In short, some landlords downtown are bound by terms forbidding them from lowering rents without having to pay a huge capital expense for the privilege to do so.
What is stopping local restaurants and retailers from serving downtown workers? Back when I worked in a CBD, I almost always ate lunch at local/regional businesses.
