By The Seattle Times’ Danny Westneat
The incapacity of the city to take charge of public safety in downtown Seattle has been appropriately cited as one of the main causes of the area’s difficulties in recovering from the pandemic.
However, new data from the U.S. Census Bureau demonstrates that Seattle has been more impacted than any other American city by the shift in how we work.
For the five-year period from 2019 to 2023, Seattle led the country in remote work among the 20 largest cities, according to new census data. There is a startling disparity between Seattle and many other cities.
According to data from the bureau’s American Community Survey, the percentage of Seattleites who work from home as their primary mode of transportation is twice as high as that of New York City.
Over 140,000 employees in Seattle, or 31.3% of the workforce, work primarily from home. Compared to the five years before to the pandemic uprooting everything, that represents an increase of just 7.2%. It’s almost as many as the 170,000 Seattle employees who still make the traditional, one-way commute by automobile.
The epicenter of remote work is Seattle.
According to recent census data, out of the 20 major cities, Seattle had the highest percentage of its workers working remotely between 2019 and 2023.
One year prior to the pandemic, the actual epidemic, and the two years after it started to abate are all included in the Census Bureau’s five-year data. It provides the most comprehensive snapshot of the workforce situation in different locations to date.
A more recent picture is provided by the bureau’s one-year surveys. According to that statistics, Seattle has the second-highest percentage of significant cities that allow remote work (28.5%) through the end of 2023, only surpassed by Charlotte, North Carolina, which is dominated by banking (29.7%).
Slowly, employees have begun going back to work almost everywhere. However, even with Amazon’s efforts to bring back all of its employees—starting with three days a week in May 2023 and moving to all five days on January 2—remote work is still common inside Seattle’s city borders.
According to the five-year data, Austin, Texas (27.5%), San Francisco (27.5%), Charlotte (25.5%), and Denver (24.4%) were the next most popular locations for working from home after Seattle. (Data for 2023 showed that Portland’s percentage was 25.7%.)
Workers aged 16 and older were asked how they went to work the week before, including whether they drove alone, took public transportation, walked, worked from home, and so on. Since respondents were asked to choose their daily activities, a person who works from home may occasionally visit the office and vice versa.
Researchers have also started to speculate about how cities are being affected by the widespread shift to remote labor.
One study from MIT found that remote work did lead to an easing in traffic. However, since remote workers frequently use their cars to conduct errands during the day, it wasn’t as much as anticipated.
Most remarkably, they discovered that public transportation was mostly harmed by the move toward remote work. In reaction to remote work, bus and train use fell more than twice as quickly as vehicle travel.
For Seattle, this is evident from the most recent census data. The percentage of employees who drive alone to work has decreased by roughly 21%, while remote work has more than doubled in this area since the pre-pandemic. However, public transportation users fell by 36%.
The researchers concluded that transit agencies need to adapt to have more noncommuting trips that are less peak-focused, mirroring the all-day flexibility of the new work environment. If remote work starts to increase again, it may call into question the planned expansion of expensive, fixed-guideway transit systems such as light rail.
In Seattle, the lack of safety downtown and on transit may also be propping up remote work. It s a tougher sell for bosses to argue you must commute back to the office when the city can t keep the bus stops open in Little Saigon, or the Metro drivers safe from attack.
Researchers at Stanford University found that working from home is hugely popular but is also exacerbating the siloing of society. It s for the well-off and highly educated (hello, Seattle). Lower-paid, less-educated workers often don t even get the option. The Great Work-from-Home Divide, they called it.
Further sorting and segmentation is likely to further erode productive social cohesion, one researcher depressingly predicted.
While most of the focus is on what s happening to workers and companies, in Sacramento, Calif., they hired a team of consultants to assess the economic impact on the city itself.
The findings, the team wrote, were astounding, far outweighing the initial projections of loss to Sacramento through the downtown core alone. The real estate losses alone were projected in the billions. There s also the lost spending of all those workers who used to be downtown. The study concluded that downtown Sacramento which has a remote work rate only about half of Seattle s is facing at least $4.4 billion in economic losses due to work from home.
Seattle hasn t done such a study it should. We could at least then face the new reality head on.
As it is, the Downtown Seattle Association says there are still more than 500 vacant storefronts in the downtown core. Some of those might come back if public safety improves. But as the Sacramento study showed, a lot of the customer base is simply hanging out in other neighborhoods now.
The massive loan defaults of top downtown developer Marty Selig on some of his Seattle office buildings may be a signal of what s to come.
Stanford economics researcher Nicholas Bloom predicts the return-to-office movement, currently being pushed by Amazon and other companies, is going to stall out. Remote work has dipped and plateaued postpandemic, but it will inevitably rise again in the future, driven by ever-improving technologies.
For cities, this will mean increasingly moving from a place of work to a place of leisure and consumption, he writes. The key to that, he says, is good public infrastructure, and improved services like education and police. To attract residents, shoppers, and diners, cities must provide appealing services and control crime.
Seattle is trying on those fronts, though not all that consistently or effectively.
Much more is needed. Maybe Amazon s drive back to the office will rejuvenate things. But one idea is to forget about attracting new big employers or mall-like retail outlets for now, and instead go small.
Mark Hinshaw, a former Seattle Times architecture writer who now lives in Italy, says in Europe the government sometimes jump-starts the street by stepping in to take over the leases of distressed buildings, then renting out spots to small businesses.
It s often why streets in Italy and cities like Vancouver, B.C., are lined with small, quirky businesses rather than large chains or services like banks, he writes. The government has incentivized the little guys to come in.
Building owners need to get over the idea they re going to get a big bank (or) a large national brand clothing store, he wrote earlier this year on Post Alley. It s going to take marketing these spaces to small locally owned businesses and at significantly lower rents.
We re now nearly five years on since the pandemic first hit, and downtown still is pocked with hundreds of vacant storefronts. Some targeted effort like this is desperately needed. Or the downtown of America s remote work capital may itself feel pretty remote for years to come.
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