From a small northwestern observatory…

The Puget Sound Business Journal just revealed that Facebook is about to lease 1.3 million square feet in Seattle’s exploding South Lake Union neighborhood.  I might add that Expedia is moving from nearby Bellevue into a new campus in the Interbay Neighborhood (to the northwest of the map below).  They will occupy the 750,000 SF waterfront site formerly used by Amgen, but will add about 200,000 SF of new space to house up to 9,500 staff.  These announcement would be huge for any other top-20 market, but Seattle has it’s 1000 pound gorilla in the form of Amazon, which occupies a stunning 8,100,000 square feet, almost 20% of the downtown office space.  By the beginning of the next decade (that’s in about a year, folks), Amazon will employ about 55,000 people in my immediate neighborhood.

The attached map is courtesy the folks at the Seattle Times.  It’s about a year old (I’m too lazy to spend anymore time on this — journalists do great work.) but still more-or-less valid.  It is simply astonishing how much space Amazon occupies in one city.  For reference, in NYC, the biggest single private sector tenant is Citi, with only 3.7 million SF.  As for dominating a percentage of the skyline, Amazon’s 19.2% is also in first place, with the next highest being Nationwide Insurance which occupies 16% of downtown Columbus, OH.

This is even more stunning when you think of how many brand names are in Seattle or the Seattle suburbs — Microsoft, Boeing, Costco, Paccar (they make Peterbilt and Kenworth trucks), the Russell Group, Starbucks, Weyerhaeuser, Holland America, and T-Mobile, to name a few.  Add to that the Port of Seattle, which provides thru-put for Washington’s huge agriculture industry, and the associated expeditors, and hopefully you get the point.

I try to keep this blog from being too parochial, but it’s hard not to admit that Seattle is a pretty cool place to do business.  However, this comes with some drawbacks.  Morning commutes can be brutal — we have some of the worst traffic in America, and it’s getting worse by the day.  Rents are going thru the roof.  We are geographically constrained and the soil conditions make construction astronomically expensive.  Eight or nine months of the year, the weather is retched (but truth be told, it’s the most beautiful place in the world in the summer time).   The cost of living here is awful.  That said, the Creative Class, as the urban economist Richard Florida would call them, flock here by the bus load.  There is a lot to be learned from how we do things here.