Tag: Downtown Seattle Association

Economy, Maybe Metropolis

Maybe Metropolis: French Revolution Vibes

By Josh Feit

Seattle’s capitalist class gathered last week in the fifth-floor ballroom of the $2 billion Pine St. convention center for the Downtown Seattle Association’s annual state-of-downtown shindig.. Mayor Katie Wilson, who playfully identified herself as a socialist, received a tepid—though hardly hostile— response as she defended higher taxes while bonding with the establishment camp on the need to improve public safety.

As they do every year, the DSA paired the event with a user-friendly report on the economic state of downtown, which they define as 13 distinct neighborhoods that stretch from SoDo to Lower Queen Anne and from the Chinatown/International District to the western blocks of  Capitol Hill. The boosterish report had lots to brag about this year: An uptick in downtown visitors and daily foot traffic. An increase in occupied apartments, new units,, and new businesses. And a decrease in violent crime. One troubling footnote: A drop in new housing permits, the precursor to a construction and housing downturn.

Here’s something I found even more concerning. I got French Revolution vibes reading the DSA’s descriptions of who’s keeping downtown flush.

According to the group’s Downtown Seattle retail assessment, a 2025 snapshot of downtown consumers courtesy of DSA consultant Downtown Works and analytics from mapping software company Esri, there are five key demographics driving the downtown economy. They are: 1) Metro Renters (34.7 percent of downtown shoppers): “Young, educated, professionally ambitious, tech natives;” 2) Laptops & Lattes (21.1 percent): “Digitally connected, trend-conscious, experience-driven”; Urban Chic (19.8 percent): “Health-conscious, financially savvy, globally connected”; 4) Top-Tier (8.7 percent): “Affluent, cultured, service-oriented urban dwellers”; and 5) Trendsetters (6.1 percent): “Tech-savvy, health-minded, socially engaged.”

And while it’s a bit hard to tell the difference between thee five discrete groups, the Top-Tier crowd is specifically differentiated as hyper-wealthy. As in: “The pinnacle of affluence, earning more than three times the U.S. average household income and enjoying an average net worth exceeding $3 million.” This is as opposed to the Metro Renters, who are explicitly described as younger and who “Prefer generic and budget-friendly brands when shopping.”

Otherwise, the five categories, which read like they were written by AI, an intern, or both, seem indistinguishable. They are all educated, tech savvy, health conscious, environmentally conscious, and active. And the Urban Chic certainly don’t seem that different than the Top-Tier. “They indulge in the finer things—imported wines, organic foods, luxury cars and world travel. Equally at home in yoga studios, ski resorts and art galleries, these discerning consumers prize both wellness and worldly experiences.”

As I said, French Revolution vibes. Seattle’s privileged elite “earn above-average incomes but happily channel much of it into rent, fashion and cutting-edge technology that keeps them connected [and] entertained.” For those who haven’t seen Metropolis, Fritz Lang’s early-20th century sci-fi masterpiece about a mob-rule proletarian revolution, these descriptions are reminiscent of the super rich in the “Garden of Delights,” who live sequestered above the toiling city before the violent revolution. A more modern reference? Think of President Snow and Effie Trinket lounging in the Capitol in The Hunger Games. 

I’m not one of those Gen Xers who’s nostalgic for the ’90s. In fact, I think Capitol Hill is more diverse and more exciting these days. However, as I float around the coffeehouses and bars on the Capitol Hill circuit, I’ve duly noted how dramatically the typical topics of conversation have changed over the years—from bohemian concerns such as politics, underground theater, and feminism to 9-to-5, normie talking points, like Monday’s stand-up meeting, investment strategies, and weddings.

In that context, the Urban Chic who “indulge in the finer things,” the Trendsetters “who crave the latest in branded fashion and tech from laptops to smartphones and tablets,” alongside the Top-Tier who “channel their disposable income into experiences that fuel both body and soul — organic foods, fitness clubs, stylish wardrobes, travel, arts,” is a red flag for a renter-majority city where half of renters are cost-burdened, spending more than 30 percent of their income on rent. A city that relies on rarefied lifestyles at this extreme is not sustainable.

In other words, it’s no wonder that, against the preference of Seattle’s business establishment, the majority of Seattle elected a socialist mayor this past November. The DSA members might not like Mayor Wilson’s pitch for progressive taxation, but if we don’t go that route, the inequality DSA inadvertently portrayed with its Marie Antoinette character sketches also paints a volatile picture. Howard Schultz may have been wise to flee Seattle last week.

Footnote: The DSA profiles don’t add up to 100 percent of downtown’s customer base. Evidently, shoppers who account for 10 percent of downtown customers are going unnamed.

Development, podcasts, Police, Transit

Downtown Seattle Association Leader Discusses Density, Return-to-Office Mandates, and Surveillance

By Erica C. Barnett

Jon Scholes, head of the Downtown Seattle Association, had a lot to say about the present and future of downtown when he came on Seattle Nice late last week—most of it surprisingly positive.

Yes, the DSA is still focused on filling up vacant office space with people who may prefer working from home, a goal that seems at odds with the group’s stated commitment to reducing climate change. (The most recent Commute Seattle survey found that drive-alone commutes into downtown grew at twice the rate of trips by transit.) According to the State of Downtown economic report, 32 percent of the office vacancies in the central business district remains vacant six years after the start of the pandemic, suggesting a long-term trend.

And yes, Scholes had plenty to say about how taxes are supposedly driving companies out of Seattle and into Bellevue, where employment has grown 12 percent.

But there were parts of our conversation that may surprise some listeners—starting with Scholes’ apparent optimism that at least some existing office buildings could still be converted into housing . “I think there’s great public good to be gained from more of us living more closely together,” Scholes said.”And if we care about climate change and protecting the environment and driving down carbon emission, we need to live more closely together, and we need to live close to transit, and we need to live where we’re maximizing the investment we’ve already made in utilities and sidewalks and parks.”

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Scholes isn’t wide-eyed about the potential for new housing downtown, however. In fact, I was amused to hear the skepticism in Scholes’ voice when we talked about former county executive Dow Constantine’s big plan to create a whole new office and residential district centered around Sound Transit’s future light rail station two blocks west of the King County Courthouse. (Current County Executive Girmay Zahilay briefly mentioned the plan in his remarks at the DSA’s State of Downtown event last week).

“The reality,” Scholes said, is that despite decades of robust development downtown, “we somehow still have a hole in the ground” across the street from City Hall and the county courthouse. “But I commend the executive for continuing to advance it and to figure out what is possible, what can be phased, what might be more incremental. It’s the right thing to do.”

We were wrapping things up when Scholes told us we were being too polite, and asked if we were going to talk about the city’s police surveillance cameras—an issue Mayor Katie Wilson has hedged on after expressing strong opposition during her campaign. Unless Wilson reverses course, the city will install many more cameras in the downtown stadium district for the World Cup games in June.

Economy, Mayor Wilson, Opinion

Mayor Wilson Defies Convention at Annual Downtown Business Event
View from the cheap cheap cheap cheap seats at Wednesday’s State of Downtown Seattle event.

By Erica C. Barnett

During the Downtown Seattle Association’s event celebrating the annual State of Downtown Seattle report yesterday, I got a kick out of Mayor Katie Wilson’s speech, in which she cheerfully defied expectations for political speeches at this glad-handing event. Wilson spoke after King County Executive Girmay Zahliay, who touted his three-day-a-week return-to-office mandate to surprisingly tepid applause.

It wasn’t that Wilson didn’t kowtow a bit to her corporate audience—saying, for example, that she wants to “keep our parks and public spaces welcoming and accessible to all” by “finally … putting people inside in large numbers.” People experiencing behavioral health crises “can make  the people around them feel less safe,” Wilson said. “We have to acknowledge that, and we have to do more to make all of our streets and public spaces feel more welcoming for people of all incomes and backgrounds, whether they live downtown or tourists visiting our city for the first time.”

But Wilson also used the occasion to frame a commitment to good government as an explicitly left-wing priority. “As a progressive and as a socialist— as a progressive and as a socialist—I believe it’s very important for people to have faith in their government, and that means, among other things, being able to trust that it is a good and effective steward of our collective resources. We can’t be afraid to stop funding things that aren’t working well.” (Ahem.)

The keynote speaker, Atlantic writer Derek Thompson, was the co-author (along with New York Times columnist Ezra Klein), of Abundance—the book every pro-market urbanist in your life was urging you to read last year. Sounds like this was happening to Wilson, too, and she finally get around to reading it after the election.

It was pretty clear Wilson wasn’t as taken with the book as those who embraced it as a clever takedown of progressive dogma. If I had to guess, I’d say that’s because she saw through its paper-thin thesis—that if liberals would only become libertarians, we’d live in an age of abundant housing, transportation, consumer products, and energy.

“Some of you might know that in my prior career, in addition to being a community organizer, I was also a columnist who’s written for some of our local publications, and I’m sure that if I hadn’t been running for office last year, I would have found time to write my critical take on the abundance framework,” Wilson said. “Now I’m in a role where I have to muzzle myself a little bit, so I’m going to resist the temptation, having an audience with Derek, to give my Abundance TED Talk.”

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Instead, she said, she’d focus on some things she liked from the book, like the Urbanism 101 argument that NIMBY land-use restrictions prevent housing from being built.

“I have to say, I also really love the abundance vision of the world, in the not-far-off year of 2050, when we’ve achieved such abundance and productivity that the work week has been shortened to just a few days,” Wilson continued. “I do hope that 10 or so years from now, when AI has thoroughly disrupted the job market, and you start hearing a national rally cry for a 24-hour work week, that many of the far-sighted business leaders here today will hop on board that train.”

I haven’t reviewed Abundance, and I’ll try not to here, but the few minutes I saw of Thompson’s PowerPoint presentation before I had to leave for an event across were pretty misleading examples—tailored for a a roomful of business elites who are inclined to oppose taxes and believe in the awesome power of free markets.

Thompson extolled Lakewood, a suburb of L.A., as an example of the dense housing that can happen in the suburbs when government gets out of the way. (Lakewood, as a contrast to Petaluma in Northern California, is a central example in the book.) But Lakewood sits on an artificial oasis in what would otherwise be harsh, unwelcoming desert, and that oasis was made possible by government intervention in the early 20th century, when Los Angeles diverted water from farmland, destroying farmers’ livelihoods to build a city in an otherwise uninhabitable area. The conflict became known as the Water Wars.

Similarly, Thompson’s praise for Texas and its vast solar farms would be inspiring, except that Texas (where I’m from) has a notoriously unreliable power grid—a fact that the dominant Republicans in the state, including Gov. Greg Abbott, have falsely blamed on renewable energy. They’ve also been working steadily for the past decade to undermine wind and solar while doubling down on fossil-fuel subsidies—but never mind that, look at this slide of a solar farm!

Thompson brushed past another example of what he considers anti-“abundance” waste—the fact that affordable housing for low-income and formerly homeless people costs more to build than market rate apartments—by saying there was no reason for this to be the case. While it’s true that rules for affordable housing can increase costs, a bigger cost driver financing, which typically comes from many public and private sources and can take months or years to secure. Eliminating unnecessary regulation is important, but it’s only part of the story—and  “abundance” advocates often simply ignore the reasons for some regulations, such as building codes and accessibility requirements.

As I said, I ducked out of Thompson’s talk after about two minutes (remember, I did read the book.*) But I hope the mayor will elaborate at some point—maybe on Seattle Nice!—about her reaction to the “libertarian, but make it pro-social” argument at the center of this bestseller.

*  Which, by the way, also lacks any substantive class or racial analysis and conveniently elides the experience of poor people in the US and the rest of the world. Somebody’s gotta mine all those rare-earth metals, pose as AI sexbots, and pilot those “autonomous” delivery robots, after all, and it ain’t gonna be the elites who write bestselling books promising us a frictionless technotopia is right around the corner.

Business, City Council, education, Elections, Mayor Harrell

Head of Downtown Business Group Lobbied for Digital Kiosk Company; Education Levy Will Help Backfill City’s Budget Deficit

1. Under an agreement signed earlier this month, the Downtown Seattle Association will get to keep the revenues, estimated at a little over $1 million a year, from 30 digital ad kiosks that a company called IKE Smart City will soon install on downtown sidewalks. Because the agreement itself is private (the city will get no money from the deal, unless revenues exceed expectations), it’s hard to say whether the business group got a good deal or if IKE will walk away with the lion’s share of the profits.

What is clear is that the relationship between IKE and the Downtown Seattle Association is unusually close: The DSA’s board chair, Pacific Public Affairs principal Sung Yang, is a registered lobbyist for IKE. According to Yang’s filing with the city in April, he was hired by IKE, along with former deputy mayor Hyeok Kim, to lobby the city on “legislation related to Digital Kiosks.”

James Sido, the DSA’s communications director, told PubliCola that Yang “didn’t represent IKE in negotiation on DSA’s agreement with IKE. We conferred directly with Clay Collett, senior development director at Orange Barrel Media (the creators and operators of IKE kiosks).” However, it appears that Yang lobbied the city on IKE’s behalf while serving as board chair of the DSA. That puts Yang on two sides of the three-way deal, serving as a representative for the digital billboard company and the business group that will receive a share of the revenues from the billboards.

2. The city council voted to put a $1.3 billion Families, Education, Preschool, and Promise (FEPP) levy on the ballot earlier this month. If passes, the levy will increase next year from 36.5 cents per $1,000 of assessed home value to an average of 61 cents per $1,000 over the next six years, starting at 72 cents per $1,000 in 2026. That translates to a price tag of $656 a year for the median homeowner in Seattle, up from $248 under the previous, $619 million levy.

In a press release, Mayor Bruce Harrell described the levy as  “transformative,” saying it would  “make Seattle one of the best cities in the nation to start and raise a family, supporting our children from cradle, to classroom, into college and beyond toward successful careers.”

But the levy also includes significant spending—nearly $50 million a year—on programs the city was already paying for out of its general-fund budget, placing services the city has previously treated as fundamental at the mercy of voters. Generally speaking, levies are supposed to be—and are invariably sold as—additive; while the city budget pays for essential services, like fire, police, and a functioning road system, voters decide whether to tax themselves to pay for things like library expansions, sidewalks, and preschool programs.

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This year’s levy will shift funding for almost 30 programs that are currently being funded by the general fund, the JumpStart payroll tax, and the sweetened beverage tax over to the levy, amounting to a total of nearly $300 million over six years. Here are some of the existing programs for which funding will shift to the education levy to help Harrell and the council close a funding gap that’s currently estimated at $250 million over the next two years, along with their current funding sources (all numbers are six-year totals):

  • Increased Mental Health Staffing Supports (JumpStart): $42.1 million
  • Supporting Youth for Success grants, which provide preemployment skill building and mentorship (General Fund): $26 million
  • Youth and Young Adult Behavioral Health (General Fund): $12.7 million
  • Nurse Family Partnership (General Fund): $18.8 million
  • Online therapy for people between 13 and 24 (JumpStart): $24..7 million
  • Developmental Bridge, which provides services to young children with developmental delays (Sweetened Beverage Tax): $4 million
  • In-person mental health care for middle and high school students who aren’t served by school-based health centers (JumpStart): $16.7 million

A spokeswoman for Mayor Harrell, Callie Craighead, said Harrell alluded to the need to use levy dollars to fund existing programs in his levy announcement, when he said the levy would “align existing City investments in programs serving the three initiative goals through levy investments to ensure a stable funding source for years to come, maximize program coordination, and drive positive outcomes for Seattle youth.”

“The City’s latest revenue projections show an uncertain economic outlook and a reduction in multiple funding sources … that would impact important upstream investments for Seattle youth and families. Our levy renewal proposal ensures that these priorities have dedicated, consistent funding for the next six years,” Craighead said.

Already, she added, state budget reductions have forced the city’s Department of Education and Early Learning to use the current levy to fund preschool slots for the 2025 to 2026 school year. “This shows the cascading impact of reductions that we are looking to avoid by having stable funding through the levy.” It also suggests the high-level spending plan Harrell rolled out when he proposed the levy may not be what it ends up funding, and that the city could look to the levy to solve its budget problems in the future.