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Economy
Seattle faces years of ‘zombie' towers as downtown posts nation's worst office vacancy
2026-07-05
Economy is downstream of culture, too.
[SeattleRed] Downtown Seattle now leads the nation in empty office space, with nearly 37% of it vacant, and even The Seattle Times admits the city is staring down years of "zombie" towers nobody wants.

The numbers come from real estate brokerage Cushman & Wakefield, cited in a new Seattle Times report published Saturday. Since 2020, downtown office properties have shed $15 billion in value, a 46% collapse, and they are now generating $128 million less in property taxes each year, according to King County assessor data. The 44-floor U.S. Bank Center at Fifth Avenue and Pike Street sits nearly half empty and is trading at fire-sale prices. Veteran developer Martin Selig has defaulted on major chunks of his portfolio.

This is not a normal downturn, and the paper’s own reporting explains why. After the Great Recession, downtown vacancy peakedat 21% and the market recovered in five years. Seattle blew past that mark long ago and kept climbing.
Eight years of empty space, if demand ever returns
The Times calculates that even if office demand snapped back to prepandemic levels tomorrow, it would take eight more years to fill the space already sitting empty. Nobody in the industry expects that kind of comeback.

The Times concedes that companies are fleeing to Bellevue, where the 25% vacancy rate sits near the 23% national average, but insists the tech pullback is the real culprit rather than Seattle’s taxes, antibusiness rhetoric, and public safety failures. Employers keep saying otherwise.

Seattle Red reported in April that Seattle posted the worst office vacancy rate of any major U.S. market, and the Downtown Seattle Association has tied the collapse directly to a billion dollars in new city employer taxes. A near-tripling in the share of Washington employers planning to leave the state followed the Democrats’ tax spree, including the new 9.9% income tax.Homeowners get stuck with the tab
That $128 million property tax hole does not vanish with all of this.

King County assessor data shows downtown skyscrapers lost $3.7 billion in value in a single year. That tax burden merely shifts onto renters, homeowners, and small businesses, the exact people City Hall claims its taxes protect. Mayor Katie Wilson’s answer may be a vacancy tax on the empty buildings her city’s policies helped empty. But those zombie towers are not the disease. They are the symptom of bad policies.
Related:
Downtown Seattle: 2026-03-27 Washington State Dems passed an income tax they know is unconstitutional. That was the point
Downtown Seattle: 2025-06-10 Microsoft pulls major tech conference from Seattle over crime, drug use, homelessness
Downtown Seattle: 2024-11-06 Antifa out on street in Seattle
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