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With the year more than three-quarters gone, we don’t enjoy a complete picture of 2023. But we can take stock of business and the economy so far in Seattle.
Jobs: Washington’s seasonally adjusted unemployment rate was 3.6% in September, below the 3.8% rate nationally and where economists consider “full employment.” That compares with 4.3% for the same month in 2022 as employment gradually recovered from the pandemic.
Unemployment was even lower in the Seattle-Bellevue-Everett metropolitan division: 3.2%, according to the state Employment Security Department. The level has been reached despite layoffs at some technology companies here.
According to a Bloomberg News story earlier this month, fewer than 26% of American households report someone working from home at least one day a week. This comes from the Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey and compares with 37% at the peak of remote work during the pandemic.
The data varies by state. More than 39% fell into the category of working from home in Washington this past August. The state’s concentration of tech companies in and around Seattle sees making remote work possible.
As I’ve written before, nearly 73% of businesses rarely or never allowed remote work nationally this past year. The phenomenon was hyped. And even in Seattle, we’re returning to some kind of normality thanks to Amazon’s insistence on its employees spending at least three days a week in the office.
Boeing: The company founded and formerly headquartered in Seattle, then Chicago, before moving close to the Other Washington remains critical to the Puget Sound region’s economy. This is both through Boeing Commercial Airplanes, based here, and as the star around which the planets of one of the world’s two most important aerospace hubs revolve (the other being Airbus and Toulouse, France).
As of this past December, Boeing employed 60,244 in Washington, far more than any other state.
But as my colleague Dominic Gates reported, Boeing supplier Spirit AeroSystems recently fired chief executive Tom Gentile over persistent quality issues. Spirit supplies such important parts as the bodies of the 737.
One result was that Boeing’s deliveries stalled in August because of defects in the 737 MAX and the 787 Dreamliner, the company’s two most important programs.
Trade: As of August, Washington’s merchandise trade exports totaled $38.6 billion for the year, according to WiserTrade, an analytics firm based in New York state. That’s down from $40.2 billion from the same month in 2022. Although aircraft exports rose 13%, exports of agricultural products collapsed.
Agriculture exports have fallen because of lower crop yields and competition from Brazil, among other reasons.
All this affects the Northwest Seaport Alliance, the combination of the seaports of Seattle and Tacoma. The alliance was responsible for $70 billion worth of exports with 180 worldwide trading partners in 2022. Cargo operations at the alliance support more than 58,000 jobs and $12.4 billion in economic activity in the state.
Yet it faces the headwinds of the trade war with China, begun under President Donald Trump and continued under the Biden administration. Not that China is the victim — it flouts the rules of the World Trade Organization. The victims include customers for whom tariffs are a tax and Washington, America’s most trade-vulnerable state.
Real estate: My colleague Heidi Groover has the real estate beat well covered, from how high interest rates are making houses even more expensive for buyers, to the need for thousands of new homes in King County over the next two decades.
In the 2023 edition of Emerging Trends in Real Estate, a gold-standard survey by the Urban Land Institute and PricewaterhouseCoopers, Seattle came in at No. 17 for overall prospects.
Throughout the 2010s, Seattle was always in the Top 10, sometimes number one.
Now, the top cities are Nashville, Dallas-Fort Worth, Atlanta, Austin and Tampa-St. Petersburg. Boston ranked number eight.
The report, based on research and interviews with developers, investors and other real estate professionals, praised the productivity of workers in Seattle, Los Angeles, San Jose and Chicago. But the “elevated cost of doing business and getting deals done limits their appeal for some real estate professionals.”
All of which is a reminder that Seattle faces formidable competition for talent and capital, both of which are mobile.
Downtown: The online Recovery Dashboard operated by the Downtown Seattle Association has good news and not-so-good news about the state of the center city.
Some 83,000 workers came to the office in September, a 21% increase from the same month in 2022. But this is still about half the workers in the office seen in February 2020.
Still, the increase is real and not limited to Amazon. For example, the tech site GeekWire reported this week that JPMorgan Chase’s downtown engineering center has surpassed 320 employees, all working in the office. I’m betting more will follow.
More than 2.5 million visitors came downtown this past month, 92% of the pre-pandemic level. Also, hotel demand passed 2019 levels.
Public safety continues to be paramount, not only for the central core but for the entire city and encouraging people to use public transit.
Meanwhile, Seattle contends with a treadmill of closing retailers only sometimes replaced by others. Rite Aid’s filing for bankruptcy court protection may mean the closure of even more Bartell locations.
I’ll leave you with a bright spot: The Seattle International Film Festival put up its marquee on the former Cinerama in Belltown, which the late Paul Allen lovingly restored. I can hardly wait to see a movie there. Wonder if it will have the chocolate popcorn?
What did I miss? The comments section awaits you.
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