The area around Amazon's downtown Seattle headquarters is bustling, with employees lining up at restaurants and food trucks at lunchtime on a recent Wednesday.
Groups of badge-wearing workers chat as they carry bags of food back into the tech giant's high-rise offices along Lenora Street between 6th and 7th Avenue. Some stop by the popular banana stand at the base of The Spheres — glass conservatories serving as employee and tourist hubs at the Amazon campus — where “banista” Jessamyn Reichmann hands out free fruit from a silver Airstream trailer on weekdays.
“Activity has picked up universally," Reichmann said. "There’s more foot traffic and commuters, and it’s more crowded in the buildings since January."
After three full months of Amazon's requirement that workers come to offices five days a week, downtown Seattle foot traffic — especially in the area around its headquarters — has reached daily averages not seen since before the pandemic hit in early 2020, the latest data from the Downtown Seattle Association shows.
Seattle's downtown averaged nearly 94,000 daily workers in February, representing nearly two-thirds of the daily worker traffic in February 2020, according to cellphone location data. In South Lake Union and Denny Triangle, worker foot traffic reached nearly 80% of February 2020 numbers.
Downtown Seattle Association CEO Jon Scholes expects the March foot traffic numbers, to be released later this month, to signal the pickup may continue over the year as weather improves and local companies follow Amazon's lead.
"The immediate impact of downtown’s biggest employer being back Monday through Friday has been influential," Scholes said in an interview at the association's downtown offices. "Other companies have been wrestling with these same considerations about how many days will they require folks to be in offices, and what works best for their business culture and strategy." It is worth noting that five-day return-to-office policies are generally not popular among common workers, who have proven over the last five years that hybrid and remote working arrangements can be as, if not more efficient, for employees and companies. These arrangements also widely lead to happier and healthier employees.
The return of office employees, tourists and other visitors — along with declining crime that both executives and public officials say has made streets safer and cleaner — has boosted hopes that downtown Seattle is turning a corner, five years after the pandemic upended city life.
But so far, the increased downtown bustle that has helped fill restaurants and shops at lunch and after work hasn't yet goosed demand for office space. Downtown Seattle's office vacancy rate hovers at a record 30% — higher than downtown districts in San Francisco, Los Angeles and other large West Coast cities, and more than double the national office vacancy rate, CoStar data shows.
"The uptick in office attendance is a positive sign for businesses that rely on this foot traffic and the momentum is encouraging, but the downtown office market has a long road to recovery," said Elliott Krivenko, director of market analytics for CoStar in Seattle. "About a third of downtown space is listed as available for lease."
Breaking the 'doom loop'
While downtown Seattle's return to offices had been slow compared with some other cities, Amazon's return to five days a week "certainly jump-started that process in January," Scholes said.
"It’s been a significant boost in traffic that translates to a pretty healthy retail environment, with fewer vacancies and full restaurants and bars," Scholes said. "Walking through the headquarters area, we can see firsthand the connection between a strong return to offices and office density, and how that affects the street life in a positive way."
"You’re challenged to walk around at 5 o’clock on any given night and not have a sense that it’s a lot like it was at the same time in 2019," Scholes added.
The slow-but-steady return to offices amid improvements that include a larger police and security presence, and decreases in violent crime and fatal drug overdoses, has led to safer and cleaner streets and encouraged more local visitors to downtown, Scholes, Mayor Bruce Harrell and other officials said at this year's association State of Downtown event.
Amazon said in a recent blog post that its teams returning to offices have been an important driver of the uptick in activity and “are playing a major role in the continued revitalization of downtown Seattle.” Amazon said it's also seeing higher foot traffic around the tech giant’s offices across Lake Washington in Bellevue and Redmond.
Though downtown still struggles with high office vacancy rates, crime and drug use, Scholes said the recent progress will help defy predictions a couple of years ago that Seattle — along with several other West Coast cities such as San Francisco and Portland, Oregon — was headed toward a destructive cycle where empty offices and streets lead to restaurant and retail closings that in turn prompt more companies to move out of the city, perpetuating a downward spiral.
"We've avoided the doom loop," Scholes added. "I would suggest that we're on the precipice of a 'bloom loop.' but we can take nothing for granted. All of this is incredibly fragile."
Other companies such as Starbucks have also stepped up their office attendance requirements since Amazon announced last fall its plan to shift this year to five days a week in-office.
The Seattle-based beverage chain recently told senior leaders that they need to come to the company's offices in Seattle and in Toronto three days a week and that future corporate roles will require employees to be based in one of the two cities.
The increase in downtown workers comes amid signs of life for the district's office market, including a 13% bump in leasing volume in 2024 from the prior year — though deal activity lags well below levels from 2010 to 2020, a period when Amazon and other tech businesses were expanding rapidly in the area, according to CoStar data.
With fewer tenants moving out or handing back sublease space, Krivenko expects the downtown vacancy rate to level off at 32% before falling gradually over the next few years.
The improvements downtown recently caught the attention of executives at Hudson Pacific Properties, one of the West Coast's largest office landlords. It recently finished construction of Washington 1000, a 531,166-square-foot office building at Olive Way and Boren Avenue near Denny Triangle.
The 17-story building has attracted interest from tenants looking to lease up to 250,000 square feet, Hudson Pacific executives said during an earnings call last month.
"Tech demand is increasing and there's growing stability with the city of Seattle, meaning enhanced security, cleaner and safer streetscapes, a stricter return to office, revitalized retail and certainly, elevated foot traffic," Art Suazo, Hudson Pacific's executive vice president of leasing, told investors. "We're encouraged that this is going to generate more [leasing] activity."
Business picks up
Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday are the peak days for full-time work at Amazon as teams collaborate at the campus, with lighter activity on Mondays and Fridays as some employees benefit from more flexible hours, employees told CoStar News.
Anecdotes passed among employees and posted online indicate that many downtown workers are struggling with crowded buses and trains, full parking lots — and average commute times that rose by up to 20% when a burst of Amazon workers arrived in the first week of January, according to a study by Kirkland, Washington-based transportation analytics company Inrix.
However, owners of shops, restaurants and other small businesses around the headquarters celebrate the jump in foot traffic that has boosted sales, even as many office workers have trimmed their spending on lunches, after-work cocktails and spa treatments.
Business has picked up since January at Top Pot Doughnuts on Fifth Avenue, a popular morning gathering spot for Amazon workers a couple of blocks from its headquarters.
One employee who has worked at the shop since early 2022 said the start of the year used to be relatively slow, but it's now busier, and business is steady.
However, while Amazon workers may be at the office more often, they're not buying lunch, patronizing bars and restaurants or frequenting the area's shops and services at pre-pandemic levels, restaurant and retail operators around South Lake Union and the Denny Triangle area told CoStar News.
Without more employers bringing back workers five days a week, such businesses say they are losing out on sales mainly due to economic concerns, from inflation to customers' fear of being laid off, alongside remote work trends that decimated foot traffic in downtown Seattle and cities across the United States.
"A lot of people aren't coming because they don’t want to pay higher prices," said Sarai Cruz, an employee at Yum Bit Taiwanese Bento.
The Top Pot Doughnut shop employee agreed.
"We’ve gotten a lot of flak from customers about higher prices," the worker said. "They say they're not able to keep up with the rising rate of inflation."
Still, things are looking up if one is wealthy enough.
As Laura Rojas, an employee preparing for the lunch rush at Saffron Spice's food truck across from Amazon headquarters, put it: "We're looking for a burst in new business this spring when the weather gets nice."