Discussion summary
Downtown Seattle faces many vacant office buildings, with some suggesting conversion to residential units. Experts note limited feasibility due to building codes and economic factors.
What the discussion says
- Some believe converting offices to housing can address vacancies.
- Others point out legal and structural challenges in conversions.
- The tech sector's slowdown contributed to office vacancies.
- Cities like Dallas also face high office vacancy rates.
“Turning offices into housing could help, but it's complex.”
“Conversion feasibility depends on building codes and costs.”
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- Hacker News
- I know that commercial and residential building codes are different, but you would think converting them to residential units would fix this..by Avicebron
- might depend how different the codes are. could be a really expensive retrofit. Residential and office put different stresses on infrastructure.
- I live in a converted office building I. Downtown Chicago . But it was built in 1913. Newer office buildings are less practical to convert due to larger floor plates. Older office buildings are smaller or have light wells etc.by cozzyd
- Apparently it's really expensive to convert to meet reasonably sane residential standards.
Add in required shrubbery, section 8 housing set-asides, rent control, etc., it becomes unattractive -- especially if the jobs have moved to business friendly suburbs
- On top of architectural issues like plumbing and access to windows, cities like NYC have programs where converting economically obsolete offices to residential exempts the building from property taxes if at least some units are for low-income renters.by kccqzy
- It's not easy, but some people are trying it! https://www.npr.org/2026/02/21/g-s1-110595/from-cubicles-to-...by cryzinger
- On top of the architectural challenges and efficacy of it, you have to contend with the terms of the bank loans that apply. Those are why the buildings "can't" lower rents to attract new business.
If they sign a lease at a new lower rent it basically triggers a re-check of "can they repay the loan based on their rental income?", which comes back as "no". That trigger _doesn't_ occur if you just leave the building empty, with _no one_ paying rent, because your last mark to market rent was high enough.
Fundamentally changing the type of tenant in the building would presumably trigger that check as well.
It's a shell game that eventually leads to the loan defaulting, but both the bank and the building owner are happy to pretend they can't see the train coming down the tracks at them.
For an example of this in Seattle that everyone was calling years ahead of the collision, see the Martin Selig sagas https://deepnewz.com/real-estate/seattle-developer-selig-war...
by hirsin - The article goes into this:
> The city of Seattle estimates that, with aggressive incentives, conversions could generate up to 6,000 housing units over the next seven years. At a rough approximation, that would use around a fifth of the city’s present office surplus.
> But “potential” is doing a lot of work here.
> Newer, larger office buildings, like the U.S. Bank Center, are hugely impractical for conversion, thanks to massive floor plates, centralized plumbing and other utilities and a host of other constraints.
> The preferred candidates are typically smaller, older buildings, especially those with C- or E-shaped floor layouts, which make it easier to create smaller units with adequate windows.
> But these buildings can be prohibitively costly to bring up to seismic and energy building codes, said Jen Pasquier, a Seattle developer who wants to convert the 10-story Liggett Building, at Fourth and Pike, into 93 apartments.
by skybrian - 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.by fragmede
- New York City: Hold my Negroni aperitivo. I have faith in the Big Apple administration's ability to become a leader on this metric.by delichon
- According to the graph in the article, NYC is doing about average, and LA/SF are the other front-runners.by Terr_
- NYC appears to be at least somewhat ahead on converting older office stock to residential stock, and I don’t expect the current administration would attempt to slow that down (it has no particular political valence in the city that I can discern).by woodruffw
- Seattle has a few confounding factors: - Higher taxes that are not present in surrounding cities - A public school system that is hot garbage compared to 20 years ago (Eastside schools are still ok) - Amazon as of almost a decade has been pushing hiring to their Eastside offices, and trying to freeze headcount in the state overall - Lots of the engineers you want to hire live on the Eastside
Short term, Bellevue is a better place to have your office. Mid term, the big winners are Texas, Vancouver (CA) and India. A little longer term, the lower end of all those jobs are gonna anyway in a puff of tokens.
by a34729t - Yet rents won't drop -- the commercial mortgage covenants prevent landlords from dropping rental rates, so they'll just sit there fallow until the market recovers.by beambot
- Or government pushes them to change. Regulators have tremendous power over banks.by lokar
- Or until more rational covenants exist. Markets are largely rational economically.
- with all the new taxes the city and the state have piled on, compensation above $1m is going to be taxed (federal + state) at a marginal rate of 56% by 2030, which I believe will be the highest in the country. Not to mention the state is in budgetary deficit, the county is losing population, and the city has extremely business hostile politics. No C-level exec has any economic incentive whatsoever to contract for a large presence there over other places.by 33MHz-i486
- 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?
by Animats - A lot if it wants to do interesting things.by piker
- Could be Seattle tax/revenue policy. Bellevue WA, the only nearby comparable but smaller tech hub city, has 25% vacancy and expected to drop below 20% - according to Fable.by rhyperior
- >Some commentators have blamed the downtown office apocalypse on Seattle’s taxes, antibusiness rhetoric and perceptions of public safety.
That is very hand-wavy of the author, Seattle literally taxes gross receipts of every business that does over $100,000 [recently raised to $2 million], with no deduction for expenses, and on top of an employer paid payroll expense tax.
by hnburnsy - 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.
by wxw - owned by amazon ..
now where should data centers be constructed, rather than arable farmland?
by rolph - What's the point of the "recovery" in terms of stuffing people back to the offices when they can successfully perform their work from home?by pllbnk
- Wasn't the shared-workspace business model to take advantage of these vacancies?
Despite the graph shown in the article, I have to wonder if this is really a new problem.
by sublinear - The neighborhoods they built that stuff in (mostly South Lake Union and Denny Triangle) used to be so sleepy in 2010 and earlier. It was a big transformation.by asveikau
- While visiting a family member at least a decade ago, I went to a fireworks display in Redmond, and two things really stood out.
First: It doesn't get dark until practically midnight, so the fireworks show started at 10:00, but it was still pretty light.
The second: Most families there had at least one parent with a Windows phone or Surface Tablet, back when they only used ARM processors. I had seen maybe one of each in use before that, and suddenly I was surrounded by them.
by dlcarrier - 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.
by vessenes - Seattle is generally a fairly high quality city as walkability and bikeability goes. While office vacancies are up, sure, residential vacancies are not. The city is packed with people who enjoy and want to live here. The handful of blocks that makes up the business district aren’t as busy as they used to be, but that’s such a small part of the city.
Also, Amazon did not really “relocate” as much as open more offices in other cities. I know people supporting Amazon ELT and plenty of high level executives are here. They have huge amounts of money, employees, and office space in Seattle, and there’s no sign that’s changing. The areas close to Amazon’s office space are very attractive places to live, demanding high rent, and generally safe, green, and pleasant to exist in. (I lived near there for a few years.) The high rise apartments that have been opening year after year for a decade in these neighborhoods still have strong demand.
Am I selling it positively? Sure. But you’re selling it pretty negatively, in a way that doesn’t match what many people who live here really believe.
Anyways, Seattle has tax problems mostly because there is no income tax. But it is a challenge: to actually make the city safe and vibrant and even more great, we need to invest in public transit, biking, parks, and schools.
by anon7000 - I've lived all over the country, both in big and small cities, and most recently in the Seattle area (across the lake in Kirkland) for 4 years.
Seattle has trappings of a city, but socially it doesn't feel like one in the way Chicago and NYC are (ok they're bigger, but hear me out -- it's not the size, it's the people). To me, Seattle feels like Cleveland but with more money.
I couldn't quite put my finger on it, but I would visit different neighborhoods from Capitol Hill to ID to Northgate to Ballard (I liked Ballard the most) almost every weekend, and everything just felt so subdued compared to a city that is truly alive. I had to take trips to Vancouver -- a similar city but more alive -- just to get my dose of city energy. Even Lynnwood WA -- a suburb -- had more energy.
The city itself has too much monoculture -- predominantly tech bros or hipsters or nature people -- but that's not enough diversity to create true energy.
The food scene was uniquely mediocre relative to its wealth and size. It had pockets of good stuff, but overall just very little risk-taking and experimentation in the restaurant industry because of the economics (min wage is $21.30 which is fair to workers but hard for small business owners) and insufficient population density to turn tables at a high rate (the land is fragmented by water and mixed elevation), and high proportion of food-as-fuel population.
Seattle attracts who it attracts because of what it is -- introverted, nature loving, affluent in a countercultural way. But this does not create a vibrant city.
Seattle's social energy resembles that of a paradoxical population who want to live in a city but are secretly suburban people.
by wenc