Amazon joins a parade of high tech to the urban core
The New Economy started in the suburbs, but the new trend is back to urban neighborhoods. Amazon is a good match for South Lake Union, but the danger is that it could be too big, with too few small companies clustering around.
The remaking of Seattle's South Lake Union neighborhood got a boost last week with a City Council vote paving the way for online retailing giant Amazon to move its headquarters into a multi-block development at the neighborhood's heart, along the new Seattle Streetcar line. Amazon's move will make the neighborhood home to major players from all four pillars of the Seattle region's knowledge economy - biomedical research (the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center), higher education (the University of Washington), global philanthropy (the Gates Foundation), and technology.
Amazon's move - and the redevelopment of South Lake Union generally - is part of a global trend that has been gathering steam for about a decade. New-economy companies are clustering in old manufacturing and warehouse districts in cities from San Francisco to Vancouver to Barcelona. These and many other cities worldwide have redeveloped broad swaths of urban industrial land for new high-tech campuses only minutes from downtown. Drawing on a creative, young workforce who prefer city life, high-tech companies use an urban location as a recruitment and retention tool to show that they are not only innovative, but they are also cool.
These landscapes are a departure from high-tech and biotech companies' usual habit of locating in self-contained campuses, separated from other kinds of industries and land uses - landscapes that American suburbs have been very good at providing. Techies were among the first white-collar workers to move to the suburbs, and research park developers were among the first to create grade-A suburban commercial real estate.
From the Ferrari-driving California tycoons immortalized by Tom Wolfe in the late 1960s to the film Office Space and the cubicle-culture cartoon strip Dilbert in the 1990s, technology seemed to occupy a particularly anonymous kind of suburban space in the public imagination. Pundits called these "technoburbs" and "nerdistans"; boosters called them "Silicon Valley" and "Silicon Prairie" and "Silicon Forest," but never "Silicon City."
The strong suburban association has persisted as technology has globalized. The rise of countries like China and India as high-tech powers has resulted in new landscapes of research parks and campuses at the urban periphery, whose buildings looks as though they could just as easily be in Redmond or Cupertino.
The gradual emergence of an alternative, more-urban model for the high-tech district is a result of the growth and diversification of the technology industry and its workforce. Larger urban trends have also paved the way for this change. It is hardly a coincidence that technology industries returned to older urban centers after a decade of national prosperity and declining crime rates during which big cities "came back" and once again became desirable locations for the professional class.
Remodeling older buildings as airy live-work lofts and building glass-clad towers on the sites of low-rise midcentury structures and surface parking lots, new-economy companies have helped to drive a huge transformation of the urban fabric. Early adapters like San Francisco's SoMa neighborhood have been joined by the Pearl District in Portland, downtown San Diego, and Old City in Philadelphia. And while the internet-media firms of New York's "Silicon Alley" are scattered across downtown Manhattan, their rise and public prominence helped redefine high-tech as an urban activity. The cubicles are still there, but Dilbert has left the building.
These areas have prospered also because they have been able to create the kind of self-contained, amenity-rich environment that drew tech companies to suburbs in the first place. Technology and other knowledge-intensive industries tend to thrive when located in a place that is built for them, surrounded by other companies like them, filled with features that educated workers want and need.
This is another kind of high-tech bubble, one built not on company valuations but created instead by the actual physical environment of a place. The most successful dot-com and knowledge-worker districts in big cities across the world have managed to recreate this bubble in an urban setting, while managing to retain enough funk to keep the neighborhood interesting.
It's not just large cities that are getting into the act. The same day of the City Council vote, real estate developer Wright Runstad announced plans for a 36-acre "urban village" in east Bellevue, which promises to offer all the amenities that new-economy companies demand, in a dense and transit-oriented setting. Eastside communities and suburban cities and towns across the country are taking note of the growing needs and market demand for city-like retail, commercial, and residential districts. If a company wants a denser and livelier landscape for its workers, it may not need to go to the city to find one.
However, older large cities still have something that suburbs, by and large, do not. City neighborhoods can be more diverse and interesting architecturally, economically, and demographically. History gives the urban fabric an interesting quality that is hard to replicate in a newer suburban setting. The funkiness that urban high-tech districts retain - whether accomplished by rehabilitating older buildings or keeping the homegrown retailers - is what gives the city a competitive edge over the suburb.
The other ways that urban tech districts can set themselves apart from suburban developments - both the high-tech campuses and the "urban villages" - is by recruiting the right kind of tenants. Not all knowledge-economy firms are created equal when it comes to creating and maintaining a vibrant urban environment. Firms engaged in sensitive research, like many biotech firms, must have elaborate building security systems that make it difficult for people to enter - and for workers to go out for lunch, or pick up clothes at the dry cleaner, or shop in local stores. They may need to be surrounded by walls or gates, without street-level windows. The need for this kind of security is part of what drove technology firms to suburban campuses in the first place.
Size is the other thing that sets these firms apart. The high-tech category ranges from 10-person startups to 70,000-head global giants like Microsoft. In an urban setting, smaller tends to be better. An area has multiple tenants rather than one or two, and these tenants also may interact and socialize with one another - collaborating on projects, hiring one another as clients, or simply having a cup of coffee. The enthusiasm of boosters for anything "high-tech" tends to ignore these distinctions, giving urban high-tech districts the potential to be as bland as any suburban office park.
On balance, Amazon's move is welcome news for South Lake Union. Its business activities and its workers are the kind of things that a city neighborhood needs. Neither trafficking in state secrets nor performing intensive laboratory research, Amazon can occupy a facility that opens up to the outside world, and its employees can become part of the neighborhood's street life.
However, Amazon is a very large company, and its sheer size means that its part of South Lake Union runs the risk of becoming a corporate campus rather than a real neighborhood. Although Amazon is a giant employer, there's potential here to make the area around it an aesthetically interesting and diverse urban place that will, in turn, be attractive to other, smaller companies.
In order for this potential to be realized - and for South Lake Union to hold its own in the regional high-tech real estate game - the development process needs to retain some of the neighborhood irregularities and imperfections that make cities interesting. A lot of this can be accomplished through interesting architecture, and more by a good retail mix. But buttressing Amazon's tenancy by attracting smaller high-tech firms is truly essential. Seattle, get to work.
Comments:
Posted Thu, Dec 20, 11:02 a.m.
Interesting, relevant article: Note to Crosscut editors:
I'd appreciate many more more features like this one, i.e, thoughtful observations on contemporary phenomena in our city.
I could do with less of the following:
- pained, nostalgia-fueled rants from the likes of Knute Berger
- 1960's-era ideas about urban planning from the likes of Richard Morrill, Ted van Dyk, and Kemper Freeman.
Posted Thu, Dec 20, 11:39 a.m.
Research scholar?: Your author presents Amazon's move to South Lake Union as a foregone conclusion, despite there being no public record of any intent to relocate on Amazon's part.
So much for the quality of "research" at Stanford ...
Posted Thu, Dec 20, 11:56 a.m.
RE: Research scholar?: Please see this Crosscut article: http://www.crosscut.com/amazon/7918/
Posted Thu, Dec 20, 12:10 p.m.
RE: Research scholar?: Please see this text from that article:
"according to sources in the company and at City Hall."
Posted Thu, Dec 20, 12:43 p.m.
Amazon coming to SLU?: Vulcan, the real estate developer, has confirmed that it is now putting the final touches on the deal with Amazon, and Mayor Nickels refers to "an online bookseller" as the tenant. But the commenter is correct in noting that the deal has not been signed.
Posted Thu, Dec 20, 12:55 p.m.
RE: Amazon coming to SLU?: Really? Here's the last article I can find on the subject: click
"Vulcan, Amazon and Nickels have not confirmed that Amazon is the tenant. But Steinbrueck said 'there's no question' it's Amazon."
That bit where it says "not confirmed" sounds suspiciously like the opposite of "confirmed". Is there a more recent article?
Posted Thu, Dec 20, 1:43 p.m.
Seattle City Council Bill 116090: In the context of this excellent article, it's important to note the Seattle City Council's badly misguided passage this week of Council Bill 116090. Essentially, this bill restricts parts of areas such as SODO and Ballard to "industrial" use.
Technology startups need reasonably priced space to nucleate and to grow. Google's recent move to Fremont is wonderful for the city of Seattle (and for the University of Washington, for whom I work), but it contributes to placing Fremont out of reach for smaller companies. You can already forget about the U-District, South Lake Union, and downtown. Ballard and SoDo were all that was left. This ill-conceived bill takes them off the table, in favor of preserving the industries of the past rather than building the industries of the future.
Dumb dumb dumb.
Posted Fri, Dec 21, 8:36 a.m.
RE: Seattle City Council Bill 116090: Technology startups need reasonably priced space to nucleate and to grow....You can already forget about the U-District, South Lake Union, and downtown. Ballard and SoDo were all that was left.
Wow--I didn't know that contemporary maps of Seattle still had "Here Be Dragons" stamped across anything south of Interstate 90!
How about the Rainier Valley, Columbia City, Beacon Hill, West Seattle, Georgetown?
Neighborhoods all over the south side of town have been revitalizing for the past decade. You don't have to look hard to find those authentic urban villages that the main article's author says are so attractive to young tech professionals. And south of downtown they are still much more affordable than the neighborhoods cited by Mr. Lazowska above.
Posted Fri, Dec 21, 1:04 p.m.
Right idea: This article is indeed a good one. The author's key practical point is that "the development process needs to retain some of the neighborhood irregularities and imperfections that make cities interesting."
It is a point which bears repeating: "[T]he development process needs to retain some of the neighborhood irregularities and imperfections that make cities interesting."
There are a host of ways but one way might be to discourage full-block buildings. Or force full-block development -- which might have advantages in economies of underground parking, for example -- to read and function as a series of smaller buildings. That method might face resistance from a major land-owner fully able and willing to build at such a scale.
The fall-back position is to require that ground-floor commercial space be brought to market in chunks far smaller than 4-6 thousand square feet...SLU will benefit from many small ground-floor retail spaces of 500 t0 1500 square feet than from the fewer but larger spaces.
Posted Fri, Dec 21, 4:48 p.m.
deja vu: I guess I must now officially be the oldest person in Seattle, or does no one remember that Amazon STARTED in downtown Seattle and for quite a while was headquartered in that dingy building on 2d ave, without changing the neighborhood in any appreciable way. Surely the writer must know this (I hope) - it's just odd to read an article about Amazon moving from the suburbs to downtown with no mention of that fact, as if - like Microsoft - the company never existed except in the (sort of) 'burbs.
Posted Tue, Dec 25, 8:19 p.m.
The City's New Industrial Land Use Policy is a Wise One: While I understand Ed Lazowska's point - cheap rent is good for attracting the kind of innovative start-ups that have put Seattle on the map - I strongly disagree with his assertion that the Industrial Land Use Policy recently passed by the Seattle City Council is, in his words, "dumb."
In fact, it is very smart and far-sighted, and Mayor Nickels and the Seattle City Council should be commended. The main reason rent in industrial zoned land is cheap is precisely because its use is restricted. Take away those restrictions like the Henry Liebmans and the other land speculators want, and the rents will go skyrocketing up. The result would be that these start-ups in need of cheap rent will be pushed even further out, defeating Lazowska's stated purpose for supporting unrestricted land use policies.
One of the main premises the author puts out there is that diversity of buildings in neighborhoods is smart. Well, diversity among neighborhoods is smart as well. Industrial businesses are often noisy, sometimes smelly, and they may well operate 24/7, with lights and noise well into the night. These uses are not typically compatible with gentrifying neighborhoods - those who first move in for the charm or cheap rent of warehouse districts soon grow tired of their industrial neighbors, desire their real estate values to rapidly appreciate, and become wicked NIMBYs with respect to uses that were there decades before they ever even considered moving into the neighborhood.
The other assertion that new economy promoters and gentrification-friendly urban planners often put forward is that the "old economy" is dead in Seattle and we should pave the way for the continued explosion of the new economy in the region. Well, if you think the old economy is dead, I would recommend taking an Argosy cruise around Elliott Bay down to the Duwamish and back up through the Ship Canal and Lake Union. The Duwamish corridor supports over 70,000 good paying maritime and industrial jobs generated mainly by small family owned businesses that have been around for generations and are still around.
Software may be able to be sold over the Internet, but for all of those other tangible products the sale of which keeps our local economy strong, these products are typically imported or exported through our container ports, and then taken by truck warehouses before being distributed again by truck.
Even with a growing new economy (which we cannot always rely on as shown most recently by the dot.com bust) we still need to continue fostering old economy businesses in Seattle. Diversity in business sectors keeps our local economy strong. To do away with industrial lands in Seattle would push those businesses into Maple Valley and even further south, or east of the Cascades, driving up freight and warehousing costs and driving up the cost of living even further in our city, already one of the most expensive in the nation in terms of wage/price differential.
I wish Microsoft, Amazon and Google Seattle all the best and hope they all continue to prosper, but the bottom line is diversity is good, protection of industrial uses is good.
Posted Wed, Dec 26, 1:12 p.m.
New economy making protection of old economy land uses in Seattle more critical, not less: Here is a link to a good article in Governing.com by William Fulton that more eloquently makes the point that I was trying to make. Namely, that the activities of the "new economy" - where consumers click through web pages purchasing goods - are making it more critical to protect "old economy" land uses, not less.
http://www.governing.com/articles/12econ.htm
Posted Sun, Dec 30, 1:55 p.m.
RE: Interesting, relevant article: While I agree that Pugh O'Mara's essay is relevant and interesting, I also find the post-modern urban planning ideas in the essays of Berger, Morrill, and van Dyk interesting as well, in addition to them being grounded in keen observations, research-based analysis, and an understanding of history.
In particular, Crosscut essayists Morrill and van Dyk may have learned from the 60s, but they are not thinking in that decade. Let me guess at the context in which NewSeattle links these men to Kemper Freeman and note this:
The ideas that are very 1960s (or more accurately, a 60's interpretation of 1910) lie in the urban renewal model of Puget Sound Regional Council, Sound Transit, and City of Seattle ... dense urban centers connected by trolley cars and subway trains. The regional body politic seemingly agrees with this assessment as well, rejecting Prop 1 by a score of 56 to 44, even though the massive tilt toward trains in the spending plan was mitigated by a sprinkling of road money that would have helped pay for the most heavily used guideways of our transit system. As David Brewster suggests in his own essay in this publication, the time for the urban-passenger-railroad model has passed us by.
The search engine on this page tells me that Kemper Freeman's writing has not yet been published in Crosscut, so I find the reference by newSeattle to be curious, even while I understand the alleged association with actual Crosscut essayists.
I'm looking forward to more perceptive writing in Crosscut in 2008.