Not very robust, but it is an interesting story
SEATTLE — Amazon.com’s extraordinary growth has turned Seattle
into the biggest company town in America.
Amazon now occupies 19 percent of all prime office space in the
city, the most for any employer in a major U.S. city, according to an analysis
conducted for The Seattle Times.
Amazon’s presence in Seattle is more than twice as large as any
other company in any other big U.S. city, and the e-commerce giant’s expansion
here is just getting started.
The swarms of young workers crowding into South Lake Union every
morning represent an urban campus that is unparalleled in the United States —
and they have helped transform Seattle, for better or worse. Amazon’s rapid
rise has fueled an economy that has driven up wages and lowered unemployment,
but also produced clogged traffic on the roads and sky-high housing prices.
And while Seattle’s booming economy is often attributed to a
wide variety of factors, increasingly, it’s all about one company.
Amazon now occupies more office space than the next 40 biggest
employers in the city combined.
And that’s only the beginning: Amazon’s 8.1 million square feet
in Seattle is expected to soar to more than 12 million square feet within five
years.
Amazon’s supremacy in e-commerce and cloud computing has
translated, locally, into an avalanche of glass, steel, people and money. It’s
given Seattle more prominence as a magnet for talent from all over the world,
and reshaped formerly forlorn parts of the city, into vibrant
live-work-and-play neighborhoods.
The company’s unparalleled impact in determining Seattle’s
fortunes may give some pause to those who experienced the downturn of the
1970s, when the shine of “Jet City” was tarnished as Boeing cut about
two-thirds of its huge local workforce.
“Seattle’s been through this before,” said Tracey Seslen, a
professor at the University of Washington’s Foster School of Business. “IfAmazon were to leave, that would create a giant hole in their
wake.”
However, unlike Boeing, whose local operations focus on the
single business of building airplanes, Amazon runs a vast web of mutually
reinforcing but diverse businesses –– selling computing power, retailing nearly
everything, publishing books and producing films, among other things.
John Schoettler, Amazon’s director of real estate, says that all
he’s experienced in his nearly two decades at Amazon is “steady, continued
growth,” the result of the company’s zealous focus on satisfying customers.
The legacy of what so far amounts to $4 billion spent by the
company on real estate here will be long-lasting, he said: “These buildings
will stand for hundreds of years.”
For this story, the real-estate data firm CoStar provided a list
of all office tenants in the nation’s 20 biggest cities by population, looking
at only Class A offices, the modern buildings used by the vast majority of
major employers.
While other company campuses may be larger and more dominant in
some suburbs — Microsoft in Redmond, Wash., or Apple, Google and Facebook in
Silicon Valley — in big cities, corporate tenancy is generally fragmented.
For example, financial giant Citi has 3.7 million square feet in
New York — making it the second-largest major-city office tenant in absolute
terms after Amazon. But it represents less than 3 percent of Class A office
space in the Big Apple.
That’s typical: In most big cities, the top employer has less
than 5 percent of local office space.
Among the country’s largest 20 cities, only Columbus, Ohio —
where insurer Nationwide occupies 16 percent of office space — has a situation
comparable in its dominance to Amazon. But it’s still less than half of
Amazon’s total square footage.
In Seattle itself, Amazon is in a league of its own. Its
presence is nearly 20 times greater than that of the next-biggest employer.
Amazon got its start in a Bellevue garage in 1994, and it first
grew without much of a plan — its employees were scattered in various downtown
Seattle buildings and in the former Pacific Medical Center building on Beacon
Hill. When Mr. Schoettler, the Amazon real-estate executive, joined the company
in 2001, it had 630,000 square feet in Seattle.
In 2005, Mr. Schoettler said, he told CEO Jeff Bezos that the
company needed a plan, and Mr. Bezos agreed. His only condition was that Amazon
stay in downtown Seattle, Mr. Schoettler said.
That coincided with the reversal of a decades-long outflow from
U.S. cities to their suburbs: By staying in the urban core, Amazon would
attract members of the hip creative class.
Amazon’s expansion has led, in the short time since the end of
the recession, to a “record level of private investment,” as well as
significant levels of public infrastructure investment, according to John
Scholes, CEO of the Downtown Seattle Association.
Over the past decade, South Lake Union has had $668 million in
infrastructure improvements, including a new electrical substation under
construction, the revamped Mercer Street, a new streetcar line and upgraded
parks.
Amazon has become the go-to scapegoat for people complaining
about Seattle’s problems associated with growth, like housing prices and
clogged streets. And while it’s certainly not the only reason Seattle is
bursting at the seams, Amazon makes up a disproportionate share of the city’s
rapid growth.
Apartment rents this year are 63 percent higher than in 2010, as
Seattle has become the fastest-growing city in the country.
Home costs are rising faster here than anywhere else in the
nation, and have doubled in the past five years, pushing the middle class to
surrounding, less expensive towns.
Seattle now also has the nation’s third-highest concentration of
commuters who travel at least 90 minutes each way to work. Their numbers have
grown 72 percent in five years.
Wages here are rising faster than anywhere else in the country,
driven by Amazon’s hiring binge of employees making six figures. Unemployment
is near a record low.
Amazon has begun turning around the reputation that it’s done
little to alleviate the problems stemming from Seattle’s growth. The company
recently said it would house a homeless shelter in one of its new offices and
is offering nonprofits space for restaurants in some of its other buildings. It
gave $10 million to the University of Washington last fall, created plazas for
public use and has helped underwrite the South Lake Union streetcar.
Amazon’s growth has been so substantial that it can singlehandedly
skew the city’s core office market, said Matthew Gardner, the chief economist
of Windermere Real Estate.
In the last quarter of 2016, for example, all non-Amazon
employers in Seattle’s greater downtown region shrank by a combined 150,000
square feet of office space. But Amazon gained 408,000 square feet by itself,
making it a positive quarter for the market overall.
Amazon’s growing mass has also created a gravitational pull for
other big tech companies on the prowl for employees. Google and Facebook have
set up big offices in Seattle’s urban core, and by the end of the decade they
are both poised to be among the top 10 tenants in the city.
Apple, Airbnb, Uber, the makers of Snapchat and others have also
set up shop downtown after Amazon’s success in recruiting engineering talent.
That, said Ms. Seslen, the University of Washington professor,
helps strengthen the local tech community.
Although Amazon, the world’s largest e-commerce company, has
been long criticized for destroying Main Street retail jobs, in Seattle’s case
the influx of Amazon jobs has been accompanied by a boom in local retail.
Between 2010 and 2015, retail sales in downtown Seattle have
grown more than 19 percent annually — much faster than in nearby cities,
according to the Downtown Seattle Association. Just in 2015, sales rose 27.5
percent, to about $1.4 billion. By comparison, Bellevue sales grew by 13.3
percent and Redmond’s by 5.7 percent that year.
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