Of course the Seattle area is home to Microsoft and Boeing. Both have a huge amount of square feet. A single Boeing building in Everett, north of Seattle, is 4.3 million square feet. About half of Amazon's total.
You're talking about the Boeing Everett Factory[1], 399480 m2, 4.3 million square feet...
Of course it's big, it's a production line for Boeings 747-787, it's the largest building in the world by volume, you can see[2] that it can roughly fit 4 planes per line, with 6 lines, that's 24 planes
But... what does this have to do with office spaces in Seattle?
It takes an hour to drive across LA. From my house on the Eastside of Seattle, I would budget 10 minutes to get downtown. That's close enough for me.
Pick anywhere on what most consider to be the "Eastside", and I'll bet you can't get to the eastern shores of Lake Washington in ten minutes, let alone downtown Seattle. I live in Redmond, I budget a minimum of 30 minutes to get anywhere within the city limits of Seattle. That's on a good day, with no traffic.
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Multi-year veteran of the Redmond->Seattle commute
The chart is also deceiving because they label the next 40 companies as "everyone else" which is simply false.
Also I don't see the definition of "prime office space". As far as I can tell the definition is "convenient for the purpose of this story".
Long winded aside: Provided we can get some more high-capacity, high-frequency, separated-infrastructure transit going, I'm all for more concentration in Seattle proper. Amazon catches flak for their South Lake Union campus, but as a person with a background in urban planning, they did the responsible thing. A suburban office park would have been the irresponsible thing.
In the ~decade that I've been here, Seattle is already vastly changed from what it was. In general, I think that's fantastic, we just need to do better at making sure that our rising tides raise all boats—in other words, we need to do better at housing affordability for everyone note working in tech. In the Bay Area, we have a cautionary tale. We can do this.
Expedia is moving to the old Amgen campus but currently they are still in Bellevue.
I agree with your aside completely. What do you think of the light rail addition on I-90?
My understanding is that there are some technical / engineering challenges to running light rail across via I-90, but smarter people than I seem to think that they are surmountable.
In principle, I think that light rail is just another transit technology, and an expensive one at that. BRT could easily be done in lieu of light rail. In practice, however, Seattle seems to do a terrible job at BRT. Rapid Ride got watered down to the point where I simply call it "bus red transit." So, maybe we can't actually build good quality BRT, and we need the huge capital expenditure of light rail to do it right.
Don't flatter yourself, Eastsiders "pretend" out of convenience to those that don't obsess about Washington geography. I say "Seattle" because I don't expect someone from Iowa to have any clue where Redmond is. Just like I'd tell people "Charlotte, NC" when I really lived in Gastonia; nobody knows where the hell Gastonia, NC is, and being 20 miles away, "Charlotte" is close enough. I otherwise am quite content to have nothing to do with the city of Seattle proper, nor pretend that I am a resident.
Fair enough, and assuming that you've met such folks, that is weird...and kind of stupid. Me, I'm content with a certain sense of smugness about living in Redmond and not Seattle. :-)
I don't consider myself particularly stupid or weird but I do admit to bias on that topic.
See this is the great part about our little rivalry! Everyone gets to feel smug. :) (No sarcasm, I really think it's a pro.)
Also note that I agreed with your post above, and just pointed out that Bellevue is "not part of the city." It literally is not. That's all I said.
ST is fixating on one aspect of Amazon's impact to the city of Seattle to advance their desired narrative. They use a hyperbolic headline to perpetuate a negative image of Amazon then correlate office space with economic contribution. Nothing in the article convinces me that Amazon has turned Seattle into a "company town'.
You response to my post was literally (emphasis mine):
> I agree. But they're not at all part of the city.
My point is that Belleuve and the rest of the eastside is much more closely related to Seattle than a place like Everett or Tacoma and so a conversation about office space should acknowledge that. People and companies are mobile between the eastside and Seattle much more than they are to the north and south. This is relevant in a conversation about office space, even if you are evaluating it from a position of what's best for Seattle itself.
Its one of the coolest places I've ever been too
Also, Amazon owns about a dozen large office complexes in Seattle from what I understand and I got a backtour of the newest building last year which was cool