Density helps cities such as Seattle advance and compete
When contemplating the correlation between density and socioeconomic success, Seattle offers a striking example.
Among the world’s “innovation districts” – defined by the Brookings Institution as geographic areas where leading-edge anchor institutions and companies cluster and connect with startups, (and) business incubators ….also physically compact, transit-accessible, and offer mixed-use housing, office, and retail” – South Lake Union in Seattle is considered one of the best.
The location, which flows into Belltown, is home to Amazon’s headquarters as well as numerous other tech companies, startups, high-end branches of Silicon Valley firms such as Google parent Alphabet and Facebook, plus the Seattle Biomedical Research Institute, the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center and Allen Institute for Brain Science. REI’s flagship store isn’t far away, and neither is the Gates Foundation, one of the world’s largest charitable organizations.
According to the Pittsburgh architecture practice Urban Design Associates, the district has contributed an estimated $1.3 billion in cumulative tax revenues, as of this year, since its beginnings around 2007.
Another example is the BelRed Corridor, between downtown Bellevue and Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond. In recent years, it’s been transformed into a series of mixed-use developments connected by light rail. The goal is to use higher density to promote greater economic growth.
Richard Florida, a professor at the Rotman School of Business at the University of Toronto, and NYU’s School of Professional Studies, is one of the world’s leading urban theorists.
He reintroduced people to the legacy of Jane Jacobs, who famously stopped Robert Moses from ramming a freeway through Greenwich Village and wrote the seminal “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” where she argued against urban renewal.
Florida, best known for his influential and sometimes criticized “Rise of the Creative Class,” said in a phone interview, “The combination of the pandemic and digital technology allowed people to spread out.”
For example, some tech workers working remotely considered a move to Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Yet, Florida, who also teaches at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, said that “if you look at urban economics and the history of cities, they are crucial to innovation and startups.”
He used San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York City as prime examples of a postpandemic rebound. San Francisco enjoys half of the artificial intelligence startups in the nation, and L.A. is once again the entertainment capital, while the Big Apple’s regained its prominence as a center of finance.
Florida said metropolitan Seattle stands as a place that, aside from Amazon and Microsoft, “functions around Big Tech companies of San Francisco.”
But he praised Seattle’s tech civic stewards, especially the late Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, “who plowed money into scientific research and universities…But it’s not San Francisco.”
“Density matters” as a positive economic and cultural advantage, Florida said. “Certain places stand out as the best magnets for talent. … Some people may not live in these big cities, these dominant centers, but even with digital technology, they have to come back there occasionally.”
Mark Muro, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told me that “density is absolutely essential to economic success, urban vitality and such sources of dynamism as regional industry clusters and tech ecosystems.”
Muro, born in Seattle, said a dense city acts as a large-scale incubator “of new ideas, clever organizations and high-value creativity.”
Seattle is among the metropolitan areas with one of the strongest agglomeration economies – where large numbers of services, industries and companies exist in proximity.
This allows for greater exchange of knowledge and better productivity gains, along with a big labor market, higher wages and infrastructure for expanded economic activity compared with many sprawling cities and suburbs.
Customers in such cities also benefit with more amenities per capita, Muro said, along with more choices and competition, and more efficient use of space.
“Frankly,” he said, “this is one of the oldest truths of human settlement and economics – that dense places are centers of superior exchange and flourishing compared to sprawling or spread-out places.”
Jon Scholes, president of the Downtown Seattle Association, a nonprofit trade group, said, “Density is what great downtowns are about. (Having) lots of people, uses and experiences in close proximity to one another is good for our social, community, economic and environmental health. We’ve been fortunate to add significant residential and job density in downtown Seattle over the last two decades. Today, 1 in 8 Seattleites live downtown. Density is our friend. We should encourage more of it.
Nationally known arts and culture organizations are a tremendous asset, too.
According to the agency’s Downtown Revitalization Dashboard, visitor foot traffic returned to prepandemic levels in August, while the center-city residential population stands at around 109,000, up 80% since 2010. Amazon’s return-to-office requirement, followed by several other companies, has also helped.
To be fair, Seattle’s density has produced a butcher’s block of unintended consequences.
As with many successful cities, inequality is high, homelessness is a persistent problem, and much of the dense, walkable urban fabric of the past has been demolished for skyscrapers.
Third Avenue remains a dead zone of empty storefronts, and many important retailers are gone, especially the mom-and-pop stores and repair shops I saw when I first arrived 18 years ago.
For example, the space formerly the beloved Ralph’s Grocery & Deli on Fourth Avenue at Lenora Street, then CVS, sits an empty hulk.
So, density alone won’t help without continued revitalization of the Seattle central core and other neighborhoods, a continued emphasis on public safety, and Mayor Bruce Harrell’s efforts to bring back businesses.
I hope we don’t go backward.