In the last 50 years, Seattle has become one of America’s leading regional business centers. This included new bank towers in the 1980s, the emergence of a “Financial District” in the 1980s, the expansion of Starbucks and Fred Hutchison in the 1990s, Paul Allen and Bill Gates’ new campuses in the 2000s, and Amazon’s growth in the 2010s.
Massive spending to make downtown a destination for both work and play included the bus tunnel and light rail, cultural venues, multiple stadiums, and the new waterfront promenade. Throughout, the Sound and saltwater have kept downtown from becoming another bland corporate center like Dallas or Atlanta.
The pandemic, however, inflicted a blow from which downtown has yet to recover. Downtown towers emptied, foot traffic declined, cafes and businesses closed or relocated, and it’s now clear that work patterns have changed, perhaps for good. We need to reimagine a new city center that supports how we now work and live today.
The starting place for this is right in front of us: the waterfront, where there are vast tracts of publicly-owned land that are now vacant and covered with asphalt. How to attract more people to the center? We could put that land to better use, into places that would attract talent and investment. Combined with Seattle’s quality-of-life and world-class organizations, the investment would make Seattle not just a prosperous regional center, but, like Singapore and Vancouver, a vibrant city-state on the Pacific Rim…