Bellevue has its advantages. Proximity to Seattle is one

Bellevue enjoyed a star turn in a Wall Street Journal story this month extolling the Eastside city’s economic momentum.

The story began by mentioning how artificial intelligence firm Snowflake considered downtown Seattle for its office expansion but chose Bellevue instead. The company leased 326,000 square feet in an office building in the Spring District, about 10 minutes from its downtown Bellevue headquarters.

“You can look out the window of our building and see the mountains,” Warrick Taylor, a Snowflake vice president, told the Journal.

Although it is not a household name, Snowflake is a cloud computing and data giant. When it went public in 2020, GeekWire reported, it raised $3.4 billion, the largest initial public offering in metropolitan Seattle in years.

The Journal reported that most companies chose Seattle over the suburbs, but lately “tech firms are increasingly opting for Bellevue with its modern architecture, highly rated schools and luxury boutique stores. Crime and other quality-of-life issues, meanwhile, are causing more companies to move or stay away from Seattle’s downtown, where vacancy of top-quality office space is at a near-record 34.6%.”

The real estate consultancy Cushman & Wakefield said Bellevue has added nearly 3.9 million square feet of office space versus 2.6 million in downtown Seattle since 2021.

Even Seattle-based Amazon expects to increase its 14,000-strong workforce in Bellevue to 25,000 in coming years.

The higher interest in Bellevue is partly in response to the late 2010s and early 2020s hostility of many Seattle leaders to business, before the election of Mayor Bruce Harrell and a more centrist City Council in 2021. 

Since then, Seattle’s officials have worked to build constructive relationships with the city’s largest employer. Now this progress is in question with a left-leaning challenge from Katie Wilson for mayor and a strong rival to council President Sara Nelson, Dionne Foster.

“Seattle’s glory days of economic expansion have ended,” Peter Steinbrueck, an architect and former member of the Seattle City Council, told the Journal. “The pendulum has swung to the Eastside,” to Bellevue.

“Clean and safe is everything and Seattle is not that,” Steve Luthman, global head of real estate at Hines, a developer and manager in Bellevue, told the Journal.

To be fair, Luthman and other Bellevue boosters have an interest in putting the city in the most advantageous posture. The Eastside powerhouse — becoming increasingly urbanized thanks to the light rail — wouldn’t be as prosperous without its proximity to Seattle.

The Emerald City is home to seven Fortune 500 company headquarters, most in the central business district. This includes Amazon at No. 2, which, because of hostility from some here and the JumpStart tax that also applies to other large companies and recently posted disappointing revenue, is moving more employees to Bellevue. 

The other Fortune 500s here are Starbucks, Coupang, Nordstrom, Expedia, Weyerhaeuser and F5.

It’s shameful that Washington lacks an income tax. But JumpStart, whatever its good intentions, gives the Eastside a competitive advantage.

Amazon’s location in the Denny Triangle and South Lake Union with more than 50,000 highly paid, well-educated workers is something for which other cities would kill.

Outside of Seattle, SeaTac is home to Alaska Airlines’ headquarters, No. 362, while Redmond has Microsoft, No. 14, and Bellevue boasts the HQs of No. 133 Paccar, No. 400 Expeditors International of Washington — both with Seattle roots (Puget Energy ranks 484 and was founded in Seattle). Meanwhile, rounding out the Eastside’s headquarters assets is No. 12 Costco Wholesale.

Another win for Bellevue came in the pandemic year of 2020 when Facebook’s parent, Meta, acquired the custom-built REI campus in the Spring District, adding to leased space, as its Northwest outpost. 

The largest city on the Eastside is now home to such non-Fortune 500 companies as T-Mobile, TikTok, Robinhood, Valve Software, Eddie Bauer, OpenAI and numerous high-end satellite offices of Silicon Valley firms.

Bellevue ranks as the fifth-most-populous city in Washington, with four skyscrapers taller than 40 stories. My hometown of Phoenix, America’s fifth-most-populous city, has one skyscraper with a habitable floor count of 38 stories, and it’s lying vacant.

Still, Seattle enjoys advantages that make it the premier city of the Northwest. Among them are a highly regarded symphony and other art organizations; the Gates Foundation, one of the largest nonprofits in the world; and the South Lake Union “Innovation District,” with not only Amazon but startups, high-end offices of Silicon Valley companies and such medical assets as the Fred Hutch Cancer Center. 

Also, Pike Place Market, the Great Wheel, the new waterfront, diverse architectural style, the economic advantage of density and all the professional sports teams that carry the city name and play in the central core.

Seattle is a world city, with one of the region’s two natural deep-water ports, too.

But it also faces challenges, such as a persistent homelessness problem and a perception of crime. The former is real, and zoning and ordinances in many suburbs force Seattle to take those lacking shelter. 

But according to Seattle police data, violent crime is down to its lowest summer level since 2017. Still, the city lacks the number of officers and political willingness to enforce the quality-of-life crimes that Bellevue takes seriously. Taking the precautions I use in both big cities and suburbs, I never feel unsafe downtown.

Mark Muro, a Seattle-born senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told me: “To an extent the continued shifts to the Eastside reflect the aging of the country, and the aging of Big Tech. Increasingly ‘tech’ workers are 40- and 50-something managers who are interested in suburban schools and amenities.”

That said, Seattle and Bellevue need each other. While Seattle’s prosperity relies to a degree on Eastside options, it also needs its own safe, dynamic downtown, as well as distinctive neighborhoods, businesses and better accountability in effectively caring for those in need. All this must be attempted as we navigate a president hostile to cities and without constitutional guardrails.