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.
According to one MIT research, working remotely did result in less 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 came to the conclusion that, in order to reflect the new work environment’s all-day flexibility, transit agencies must adjust to have more noncommuting journeys that are less peak-focused. It might raise concerns about the projected growth of costly, fixed-guideway transit systems like light rail if remote work begins to grow once more.
Remote employment may also be supported in Seattle by the unsafe downtown and transit areas. When the city cannot keep the Little Saigon bus stops open or the Metro drivers safe from attacks, it is more difficult for managers to convince you that you must commute back to the office.
Stanford University researchers discovered that although working from home is more common, it is also making society more divided. Hello, Seattle! It’s for the wealthy and well-educated. Workers with lower incomes and less education frequently don’t even have the choice. They dubbed it the Great Work-from-Home Divide.
One researcher grimly projected that more sorting and segregation will likely weaken constructive social connectedness.
Sacramento, California, employed a group of specialists to evaluate the economic impact on the city, even though the majority of the attention is on what is happening to employees and businesses.
According to the team’s report, the results were stunning and greatly above the early estimates of Sacramento’s loss from the downtown area alone. The estimated losses from real estate alone were in the billions. Additionally, all of the workers who used to work downtown have lost their money. According to the study’s findings, downtown Sacramento, which has a remote work rate that is only roughly half that of Seattle, is losing at least $4.4 billion in revenue as a result of work from home.
Seattle ought to have conducted such a study. At least then we could confront the new reality.
According to the Downtown Seattle Association, the downtown core still has around 500 empty storefronts. If there is an improvement in public safety, some of those may return. However, the Sacramento investigation revealed that many of the clientele are now just loitering in other areas.
Top downtown developer Marty Selig’s significant loan defaults on some of his office buildings in Seattle could be a foreshadowing of things to come.
The return-to-office movement, which is being promoted by Amazon and other corporations, is expected to peter out, according to Nicholas Bloom, an economics expert at Stanford. After the epidemic, remote work has decreased and plateaued, but it will undoubtedly increase once more in the future due to constantly advancing technologies.
According to him, this will require cities to shift more and more from being places of employment to places of leisure and consumerism. He claims that enhanced services like the police and education, as well as strong public infrastructure, are essential to that. Cities need to manage crime and offer enticing services to draw in inhabitants, shoppers, and eaters.
Seattle is making an effort in certain areas, albeit not very well or consistently.
Much more is required. Perhaps a return to the office by Amazon will bring things back to life. However, one suggestion is to go small for the time being and forego luring in mall-like retail establishments or new large companies.
Former Seattle Times architecture journalist Mark Hinshaw, who currently resides in Italy, claims that in Europe, the government occasionally revitalizes the economy by assuming the leases of troubled buildings and then leasing space to small enterprises.
He claims that this is frequently the reason why little, oddball companies litter the streets of Italy and places like Vancouver, British Columbia, instead of big corporations or services like banking. The small fellows have been encouraged to enter by the authorities.
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.
Hundreds of empty businesses still plague downtown, almost five years after the virus first struck. This kind of focused effort is sorely required. Or America’s faraway work capital, downtown, would continue to feel rather isolated for years to come.
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(c) The Seattle Times, 2024
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