The far-left blue city of Seattle is bleeding businesses as companies flee to locations that don’t charge crazy levels of taxes. As a result, the percentage of empty office buildings in the city has risen to more than a third. That is unbelievable.
And yet, the people who live there just keep voting for leftist political leaders who only make the problem worse. Mayors are supposed to try to attract businesses to their cities, not cause them to run away to other locations.
As technology allows more and more companies to have remote employees, the competition among cities is only going to become more fierce.
Seattle’s downtown office market is facing one of the steepest declines in the nation.
According to a new CoStar analysis, Seattle leads the country in falling office rents, with vacancies hitting record highs. Experts warn the slump could reshape Seattle’s commercial real estate, cutting into property values and city tax revenues while raising questions about the future of downtown.
“Though the amount of space available to lease has leveled off latelydue to planned demolitions and conversions removing someproperties from the market, the region’s vacancy rate continues torise more quickly than that of the rest of the country,” the analysis found. “Seattle’s officevacancy rate stands at 17.3% and is projected to peak at 18.3% in 2026.”
According to the study, the steepest drops in office space usage occurred in Seattle’s downtown, Belltown, and Queen Anne neighborhoods. Some suburban locations managed flat-to-slightly positive rent growth, but this growth has done little to offset the broader downward trend.
But the study also believes office vacancies throughout Seattle can improve over time.
“The leveling off of availability signals a likely improvement in vacancy rates in the near future,” the study shared.
Things are not likely to improve. In fact, it could get much worse. Watch below as Glenn Beck talks about how Seattle now wants to tax the owners of empty office buildings for the crime of being empty.
If they actually do this, it will make the problem far worse.
Nearly a THIRD of Seattle’s office space is completely empty. But Seattle’s incoming mayor’s solution is to tax building owners even MORE for the empty space. Not to get drugs or homeless camps off the streets, but to tax people who can’t fill their buildings because NO ONE wants… pic.twitter.com/99GjFrAHgn
— Glenn Beck (@glennbeck) March 18, 2026
Glenn is right about all of this. If Seattle wants to reverse this trend, they have to make the city attractive to businesses, not punish the owners of office buildings for the faults of the city.
The post High Taxes Are Turning Seattle Into a Ghost Town Full of Empty Office Buildings – And it’s About to Get Worse (VIDEO) appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.