Downtown Seattle has more residents than ever (Roy, Index: real estate, apartments)

[homesinseattle]

Article link here: https://www.axios.com/local/seattle/...opulation-boom

“A record high 104,000 residents now call downtown Seattle home.

Driving the news: Downtown Seattle, comprising 12 neighborhoods from SODO to South Lake Union, accounts for just over 4% of Seattle's total land area, but is now home to more than 14% of all Seattleites, according to Downtown Seattle Association's (DSA) 2023 economic report.

Why it matters: Downtown Seattle has been slower to recover from the pandemic by some measures than many other U.S. cities. But a diverse and growing residential base could set the stage for a more resilient than ever downtown, DSA spokesperson James Sido told Axios.

By the numbers: Downtown Seattle's resident population has increased by 70% since 2010, according to DSA, and is still trending up. Per the report:

Downtown had a record 55,639 occupied apartments last year.
In 2022, the top three most populous downtown neighborhoods were Capitol Hill (west of Broadway) with more than 18,200 residents, followed closely by South Lake Union (15,100) and First Hill (14,600).
South Lake Union and the Denny Triangle grew the fastest, accounting for nearly 45% of downtown's net residential population increase”.

[Hemlock140]

That's an interesting way to look at it. I don't consider SLU, Capitol Hill and First Hill to be downtown. I suppose the Downtown Seattle Association has decided that they are. Working here for years, I always thought downtown was Belltown to Pioneer Square, below about Boren.

[jabogitlu]

I'm a First Hill resident and consider my neighborhood to be a downtown neighborhood. But yes, we don't have official borders set forth by the Clerk or anyone else, so it's all up to interpretation.

Boren is very much a First Hill corridor, FWIW.

I was at both downtown Sephoras this weekend and they were both packed, as was 1st Ave and Westlake. Thousands of folks out and about downtown.

[uniquetraveler]

Seattle will come back stronger in spite of the pandemic.. on the long run it's better to have a good mix of residential folks and office goers.

[Guineas]

Originally Posted by Hemlock140

That's an interesting way to look at it. I don't consider SLU, Capitol Hill and First Hill to be downtown. I suppose the Downtown Seattle Association has decided that they are. Working here for years, I always thought downtown was Belltown to Pioneer Square, below about Boren.

Of course it's part of downtown. You can't isolate downtown to the traditional CBD. SLU blends into Belltown around Denny and the traditional CBD (further past 6th Ave). There's no reason to arbitrarily isolate downtown to a few blocks and then say "Look downtown is dead." Most large cities have multiple nodes of the downtown core. What's interesting is trying to argue that Westlake Ave/Denny isn't part of a downtown urban core environment.

[Hemlock140]

I would go with the City of Seattle's own definition of downtown:

Downtown neighborhoods
Belltown
Central Business District
Central Waterfront
Denny Regrade
First Hill
International District
Pike Market
Pioneer Square
Yesler Terrace

Seattle City Clerk's Office Geographic Indexing Atlas

[jabogitlu]

This dataset has a pretty big disclaimer:

Disclaimer: The Seattle City Clerk's Office Geographic Indexing Atlas is designed for subject indexing of legislation, photographs, and other records in the City Clerk's Office and Seattle Municipal Archives according to geographic area. Neighborhoods are named and delineated in this collection of maps in order to provide consistency in the way geographic names are used in describing records of the Archives and City Clerk, thus allowing precise retrieval of records. The neighborhood names and boundaries are not intended to represent any "official" City of Seattle neighborhood map.

[jabogitlu]

The south boundary of that map goes to Royal Brougham in SoDo and to Dearborn in the International District. Measuring from Denny to the midpoint between those streets, the average north-south distance of the Clerk's downtown zone is 1.84 miles. So half of that (a rough approximation at geographic center) would be .9 miles or 4,750 ft south from Denny, or roughly the central library.

To me, that says the map is ideologically out of date and those boundaries were probably drawn between 2000 and 2010. The goal of that map is very clearly stated on the Clerk's website to be a tool they use for archival and record storage purposes.

The center of the city has drifted north into central Belltown and around the Amazon spheres. Belltown is undergoing a second wave of redevelopment (after its initial 1990s changes) and is becoming much more urban scale. Then the Amazon spheres area is literally just new urban fabric, created out of parking lots and weird, crusty old hotels.

Tl;dr- old map with obsolete boundaries of downtown seattle

[uniquetraveler]

Census data shows Seattle-area population rose again last year after pandemic dip
BY KURT SCHLOSSER on March 30, 2023 at 3:55 pm

Seattle’s King County gained 13,751 residents from July 2021 to July 2022. (GeekWire File Photo / Kurt Schlosser)
After an outflow of residents during the COVID-19 pandemic, new population estimates released Thursday by the U.S. Census Bureau show that fewer people are leaving urban centers such as King County, home to Seattle.

The Census Bureau reported that overall patterns of population growth and decline are moving toward pre-pandemic rates for the nation’s 3,144 counties.

King County had net domestic outmigration of -16,035 in 2022, compared to -37,655 in 2021. When counting other factors, such as births, deaths, and international migration, the county gained 13,751 residents from July 2021 to July 2022.

King County’s population dip from 2020 (2.27 million) to 2021 (2.25 million) was the first for the county since the early 1970s, according to Data Commons.

During the height of the pandemic, some predicted a population shift to rural areas and smaller cities as remote work took hold. In tech hubs like Seattle, where many thousands of workers could do their jobs from home, the question became, “where should home be?”

Glenn Kelman, CEO of Seattle-based real estate company Redfin, predicted back in May 2020 that the health crisis and remote work capabilities would fuel an aversion to big cities and drive workers from places such as Seattle and San Francisco to smaller spots like Boise, Idaho, or Bozeman, Mont., in search of bigger homes and fewer people.

The Census Bureau reported that San Francisco County, Calif., had net domestic outmigration of -9,421 in 2022, compared to -57,611 the prior year. And New York County (Manhattan) had a slight net domestic migration of 2,908 this year, compared to a net domestic outmigration of -98,566 the prior year.

Whitman County, Wash., was the fastest growing U.S. county between 2021 and 2022, illustrating how many college and university counties saw a rebound after a drop during the pandemic. Home to Washington State University, Whitman County’s population dropped by 9.6% between 2020 and 2021 but then grew by 10.1% last year — the most of any county above 20,000 in population.

“I wasn’t expecting this quick of a bounce back for some cities and urban areas,” demographer William Frey of the Brookings Institution told The Associated Press. “It’s not a full recovery from before the pandemic but moving in the right direction.”

Redfin reported in January that a record number of users are looking to relocate to a different metro area due to remote work and affordability, among other factors.
https://www.geekwire.com/2023/census...-pandemic-dip/

[uniquetraveler]

^^ Not just downtown, looks like entire Seattle metro is growing again..

We have issues like homelessness and graffiti, that deters folks but there are industries like aerospace, tech, biotech that take decades to build, so talented people will always be attracted by the region.