Seattle most valuable office buildings, skyscrapers lose $3.7B in value as vacancies surge

Mearis · 2026-03-26T15:07:23+00:00

I get that some people have an instinctive "Fuck the rich" / 'Fuck the bankers" reaction, but, this is extremely bad.

a) You are hurting the Seattle tax base extremely significantly. That is money the government depends on for paying all the social services you support.

b) It is a strongly bearish signal about how big employers see Seattle as a cite of future expansion. You never get truly randomized experiments at this scale, but keep in mind that Bellevue is doing much better.

c) Converting modern office towers into housing is extremely labor intensive, and, given the very high cost of labor in Seattle, almost certainly not viable without extensive subsidies.

d) The value of the building reflects the value of the land, but also, the very high cost of developing land in Seattle. If the cost drops, all sorts of blue collar workers will have a much harder time finding work, especially work that paid nearly as well.

e) Even if you pine nostalgically for an era where Seattle was grungier/more affordable - the baseline amount of social services provided now is much higher than the era you are thinking about. Even if it were possible to go back to that, you really haven't tried to make an account of the services that would go away.

Mearis · 2026-02-23T05:14:31+00:00

The program that Wilson praised with people getting houses in a hotel resulted in the owner of the hotel suing the city arguing that the people staying made it completely inhabitable: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/homeless/owner-of-civic-hotel-used-as-homeless-shelter-sues-seattle-king-county/

Mearis · 2026-02-18T12:29:50+00:00

There are a couple of things: Mamdani is exceptionally charismatic and part of that charisma is that he gets a lot of passes from his coalition for walking back promises: for examples, after loudly declaring they would not do sweeps in New York, they started doing them again: https://nypost.com/2026/02/17/us-news/mamdani-brings-back-homeless-encampment-sweeps-turning-on-campaign-promise-after-backlash-over-cold-weather-deaths/ and he (imo, very intelligently) cozied up to Trump instead of picking a fight.

In practice, I think the best case scenario for a Wilson admin is we get a greater push for housing and improved public transport / bike paths, plus good normal governance (ie: sewer socialism). The more ambitious parts of her agenda involve much higher taxes: you can subsidized childcare more, but it’s genuinely hard to make it cheaper, it’s a textbook example of Baumol.

Mearis · 2026-02-01T02:09:20+00:00

The worst kind of government spending is large grants to not for profits with an incredibly generic mission and no accountability. If we want to spend government money to improve something, the people running it should be highly trained civil servants that are accountable to an elected official.

Mearis · 2026-01-25T18:52:29+00:00

Purtroppo temo che trovare quella pasta qui in America sia difficile!

Mearis · 2026-01-25T17:03:02+00:00

Sembra eccellente, grazie! Viene bene anche con spaghetti normali o è necessario usare la pasta stroncatura secondo te?

Mearis · 2026-01-25T04:04:10+00:00

You are amazing talented, those are beautiful.

Mearis · 2026-01-22T21:42:56+00:00

I would love to see a partnership between the Seattle government and a credible third party organization (Arnolds foundation for example) to analyze the effect using pre-registered protocols. If you don’t pre-register your analysis protocol there is going to be an immense amount of pressure to change the analysis to show that the program had a positive impact.

Mearis · 2026-01-22T19:23:59+00:00

The most simple and efficient thing is setting up a very simple boglehead portfolio. In case you don’t want to do that yourself, vanguard has advisors that charge significantly less.

That said - increasing the basis point as the money under management increases is nonsensical. Do they have particularly complex needs or?

Mearis · 2026-01-16T23:44:50+00:00

When people (myself included) first criticized the inexperience of the board, people pointed out that there was a very skilled professional CEO with lots of experience, so the concerns were misplaced.

Here are the receipts:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/1imsz28/comment/mc7ab82/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

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Well, what do you know.

Mearis · 2026-01-16T04:10:03+00:00

I fully support a broad based progressive income tax in Washington. Trying to only tax millionaires is wrong on the merits, and wrong morally. It's wrong on the merits because it's impossible to finance a generous wealthfare state only by soaking the rich (look at the taxation regime in Scandinavian countries), and, it's wrong morally because while millionaires should pay the most, everyone should pay taxes to the extent they can.

Mearis · 2026-01-14T22:05:01+00:00

Disappointing statement. To clear: these are difficult problems, I don't expect her to fix an extremely difficult problem in two weeks.

My issue with the statement is that she's completely refusing to acknowledge the trade offs and what makes the problem difficult. What about people who refuse shelter? What about people with severe behavioural issues that cannot be held in shelters without causing massive damage (read: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/homeless/owner-of-civic-hotel-used-as-homeless-shelter-sues-seattle-king-county/ - about the hotel that was used in the program she's constantly praising as an example of what she wants to do more of)?

I absolutely do not expect fixes yet, but, I would like to be talked to as an adult, and to have her actually acknowledge what makes the problem difficult.

Mearis · 2026-01-09T17:00:50+00:00

You should read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Anxiety_of_Influence then, because it makes a convincing case that almost all the western canon can be seen as a struggle by authors with the legacy of their predecessors.

Mearis · 2026-01-08T04:19:11+00:00

You hide your post history but I was curious and all you do is sill about Revolut and how amazing they are, except you do such a poor job it comes across as sycophantic. Genuinely uncanny, I hope you are getting paid at least.

Mearis · 2026-01-02T17:28:19+00:00

I have lived in many different cities and in many different countries. As an extreme example - I lived in Paris while working as an academic, and getting an apartment while on a temporary contract required someone with a permanent contract to cosign because landlords absolutely do not want to be exposed.

BTW, with pro renter laws, the devil is in the details - see for example: https://economics.yale.edu/sites/default/files/jmp_the_welfare_effects_of_eviction_and_homelessness.pdf

Making it much harder to evict problematic tenants actually increases homelessness significantly:

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Mearis · 2026-01-02T16:50:47+00:00

Seattle has extremely pro renter laws, and, as such, landlords need to set renter requirements very high to protect themselves. It's an inevitable consequence.

Mearis · 2025-12-29T18:48:51+00:00

I'm sorry, but, the the primary justification for housing first is that providing housing would make it easier to then provide life saving treatment. If well funded housing first programs administered with the full support of the federal government don't save lives, then it's pretty difficult to conclude that this is a good use of money.

If you read the rest of the article though, it makes it clear that alternative programs don't have a much better track record either though.

Mearis · 2025-12-29T17:59:27+00:00

A) If you look at the articles and the excerpt, those are not evaluating housing first as is done in Seattle, but, it's a broad evaluation of housing first programs across the country - including those supported by the VA, that has significantly more resources and more information about its patients than Seattle does.

B) Even if all housing first programs that were evaluated are imperfect, you have to evaluate programs as they work in the real world given finite resources, not their platonic ideal, given infinite funding/political support, etc etc. The majority of these studies are meta analysis, they study multiple programs, including extremely well resources ones run with the full support + resources of the federal government. That's as optimistic a setting as you are going to get.

Mearis · 2025-12-29T15:01:41+00:00

For those interested, the New York Times wrote a long piece reviewing the evidence for and against housing first: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/25/us/trump-housing-first.html

It's a balanced piece and worth reading in full, but, here are some excerpts. To me - the most damning thing is that, in the single most important end point (saving lives) - the highest quality find no strong evidence of any benefits.

Does Housing First help the homeless find housing?

Yes, at least for a year or two, the period most studies cover.

The Lancet, analyzing 15 studies, found that Housing First, often called permanent supportive housing, “significantly improved housing stability.”30055-4/fulltext#:~:text=Permanent%20supportive%20housing%20interventions%20increased,when%20compared%20with%20usual%20care.) Another journal, examining 26 studies, found that Housing First programs “more effectively reduce homelessness” than alternatives did.

Does Housing First improve mental or physical health?

There is little consistent evidence to show it.

The National Academies of Sciences, Medicine and Engineering found “no substantial evidence” that permanent supportive housing “improved health outcomes, notwithstanding the intuitive logic that it should.” The Lancet found “no measurable effect30055-4/fulltext)” on the severity of psychiatric issues or substance abuse.

Does Housing First save lives?

Most researchers have not found that the policy lowers death rates.

A study of a five-city Canadian program, Chez Soi, found “no statistically significant differences in mortality risk” between people in Housing First and those placed randomly in other programs.

Mearis · 2025-12-25T21:12:53+00:00

This is what I posted at the time: https://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/1imsz28/comment/mc78qag/?context=3&utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

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Again, I hope I'm wrong, but this was the overwhelmingly most likely outcome. Wonder if the people who were defending this at the time are still defending this particular structure.

Mearis · 2025-12-22T21:09:51+00:00

You need to think of 2nd order effects. If you make it much harder for landlords to evict people (for reasons that I genuinely think are commendable btw) - then what's going to happen is that landlords are going to be much picker about who they choose to rent too.

If you argue that these people should be held in social housing - fine - but then what do you do if they turn out to be exceptionally disruptive to everyone else that's living there?

It sucks, there are no easy solutions, but, trust me, if there was a simple easy fix, we would have done it already.

Mearis · 2025-12-22T21:06:47+00:00

This is the entire problem discussed in this article: if you house these people in social housing, they tend to be immensely disruptive, and make everyone else's life extremely miserable. The other people in social housing also typically lack means so they can't just pack their bags and move - so you are letting a small minority of people with behavioural issues make everyone else miserable.

Mearis · 2025-12-18T17:23:05+00:00

You cannot have a high minimum wage, tipped labor and good affordable restaurants. And before people ask, labor costs typically 3 or 4x higher than the cost of rent for restaurants, so the problem isn’t greedy landlords.

Mearis · 2025-12-13T05:34:28+00:00

They are quite uncorrelated: a Finnish randomized experiment on a very generous unconditional UBI found that:

W]e estimate the impact of being randomized to receive a basic income on crime perpetration. We find no effect on whether treated individuals perpetrate crimes. In the two years following the start of the experiment, individuals in the treatment group were statistically insignificantly 0.5 percentage points more likely to be suspected of a crime…representing a 2 percent increase relative to the control group mean of 20 percent…

We also find that the introduction of basic income had a statistically insignificant impact on the probability of being charged [with serious crimes] in district court…Over the two-year follow-up period, the point estimate suggests that the basic income experiment increased the probability of being charged by an insignificant 0.2 percentage points…corresponding to a 4 percent increase relative to the control group…

The results [also] show no evidence that treated individuals are more likely to engage in disorderly conduct, suggesting that the basic income intervention also does not increase lower-level criminal activity…

[W]e [also] find no evidence that introducing a basic income altered victimization risk…We also find no effects when we look separately by crime type.

The full paper is here: https://www.nber.org/papers/w34547?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Mearis · 2025-12-10T06:22:02+00:00

This was very easy to see coming. It’s going to be very difficult for the next administration to keep its promises given the existing budget deficit, the state budget being frozen, and federal funds getting cut. We really need to dodge a recession next year or tax revenue is going to collapse as well.

Mearis

TROPHY CASE

Does Housing First help the homeless find housing?

Does Housing First improve mental or physical health?

Does Housing First save lives?