Downtown Seattle Leaders Offer Downbeat Prognosis on the City

“Putting our future in Focus” was the theme of the Downtown Seattle Association’s annual breakfast, but the mood before 1000 attendees this morning was decidedly downbeat. And the vision for the future was more than a little hazy.

Kate Joncas, president of the DSA, summed up the state of our economy by showing a cartoon clip of Wile E. Coyote getting battered and beaten. She went on to show bleak pictures of Seattle’s downtown and compared them to pictures of a revitalized Chicago planted with bright flowers. Bellevue, she pointed out, was doing a better job of attracting new retailers. (See our story on the Bellevue-Seattle battle in this month’s issue here.) Although the number of people living in Seattle’s city center has climbed to 57,000, up 68 percent since 1990, Joncas said the number of jobs available downtown has actually shrunk.

If that wasn’t depressing enough, our new mayor, Mike McGinn, warned darkly about the city of Seattle’s financial “challenges,” an apparent warning against moving ahead with a tunnel replacement for the Alaskan viaduct. He pointed out that cities that once led the nation as centers for the manufacturing of buggy whips and hats have since lost favor and spoke of the need to protect Seattle’s “brand.” For inspiration McGinn offered up the need to replace storm sewers and yet another initiative to fix public education.

Another downbeat message came from Jeff Finkle, CEO of the International Economic Development Council, who gave Seattle an “F” on its development efforts, pointing to the low budgets provided to Enterprise Seattle and other agencies assigned the job of promoting the city’s economy.

The one bright spot came from a company that represents the DSA’s single greatest success: Russell Investments. Andrew Doman spoke of his excitement about moving to Seattle and the importance of developing a strong core of money managers in the city. See our story on Seattle’s emergence as a money management center here. “Innovations,” said Doman, “are the product of conversations” and Seattle is a city center, recognized around the world, where those conversations can flourish.

An expanded financial cluster downtown would be an important addition to a city that is at the forefront in a large number of cutting-edge areas from cloud computing and mobile software to video gaming and electronic commerce. Maybe the DSA’s dark prognosis was meant as a wake-up call. We can only hope that all that gloomy news offered up for breakfast doesn’t persuade Russell Investments to change its mind and move instead to Chicago.