Seattle continues to defy gravity, at least up in the sky

Which way, Seattle?

Maybe no city block displays how difficult it is to answer the Emerald City’s perennially nagging question than the area around Fourth and Union downtown.

Here, on the street, is where one of downtown’s only grocery stores is about to close. That’s the new PCC Community Market in the newish Rainier Square building, the glittering 58-story high-rise that looks like a glam fashion boot.

Up and down Union, across from Rainier Square, almost every storefront is shuttered, with tents and scattered pockets of drug activity filling some of the doorways. Even inside the Rainier Square complex, which on a recent day felt fancy, fresh and very well-guarded, most of the street front retail spaces are empty. PCC will open another hole when it gives up after two years downtown in January.

But up above, it’s another atmosphere. Same city. Same block. Much different story.

On the top floor, three out of the four penthouse suites are rented, while the fourth is currently available. “Starting at $19,999” per month, the ad says. Starting? That’s $239,988 a year in rent — the price to gain entry to a three-bedroom with 12-foot ceilings in the tallest residential tower on the West Coast.

If that’s too rarefied, a few floors down on level 55 you can get a two-bedroom for $15,000 a month.

Contrary to the narrative about downtown Seattle dying, residential downtown appears to be booming.

According to a new development report from the Downtown Seattle Association, “Seattle has more than double the number of units (7,200-plus) under construction compared to Los Angeles (3,500-plus), our next-closest peer.” L.A. is five times bigger than Seattle. If this report is accurate, Seattle remarkably has more residential units being built in its downtown area than L.A., Portland and San Francisco combined.

One caveat is the DSA defines downtown more broadly than Seattleites typically do. They stretch the boundary from the waterfront to Broadway on Capitol Hill, and from Lake Union to the stadiums. That takes in a lot of neighborhoods — Uptown, for instance — that aren’t often thought of as part of downtown.

Still, even if that report is goosed up, just look out the window. Seattle once again is a leading city in the nation for construction cranes. We’ve currently got 45 up, says the RLB Crane Index — more than L.A.’s 28, or Boston’s 20 or Chicago’s paltry nine. Here’s what jumped out to me: “Of [Seattle’s] 45 cranes, 36 are brand new since the last count six months ago.”

How does Seattle keep defying gravity like this?

It’s striking that the federal government can report that homelessness has hit another depressing record high in Washington, even as the local business press has headlines suggesting the economy and housing are going great.

“Seattle, Denver account for nearly half of new residential units in the nation’s downtowns,” the Puget Sound Business Journal reported Monday.

I think what they meant is the two cities’ downtowns have nearly half of new residential units under construction, but still it’s a dizzying stat. It seems unbelievable, when you walk around our still struggling downtown, that Seattle could be going so gangbusters. That’s part of the story of our city right now. This boomlet isn’t visible at street level. It’s in the sky.

“Coming soon: Next Level Lounge,” says a hopeful sign back at beleaguered Fourth and Union. It’s part of a chain of Brazilian restaurants called Fogo de Chão, with fire-roasted meats carved tableside, and it’s set to open on the block early next year. Not on the street, though — 10 floors up.

You can see this elevational gradient playing out in other ways. This week the American Public Transportation Association reported that mass transit use nationwide is back up to 77% of its pre-pandemic levels, from a low of 20% in 2020. But Seattle lags way behind this, at only 58% mass transit recovery. We trail 76 other metro areas in how much the public has returned to buses and trains.

Some of this is because there’s more remote work here, and some of it is probably that riders have concerns about safety. But the bottom line is we aren’t mixing it up at ground level like we used to. The street is ailing; Seattle’s action is up above.

PCC tried to tap into this, siting a grocery store in the base of Rainier Square to capitalize on downtown’s residential growth surge. But people apparently don’t come out of those towers as much as expected, because it didn’t trickle down. The PCC had scant customers and high security costs, even as downtown soared past 106,000 in residential population.

“The Future Is Up” pledges a flyer for a proposed new tower nearby, called The Net. It promises a three-level “sky park,” 16,000 square feet of lush greenery 44 stories above the ground.

The future can’t just be up. Seattle’s got to figure out ways to bring the life of the sky and the street together. Or we’ll end up as a gated community after all, only vertical this time.