Downtown’s Pacific Place redevelopment plan to create office space falls through

In an effort to revitalize the in-person shopping experience and provide a new use to the now empty storefronts, plans were created to renovate the Pacific Place shopping center to include office space, as reported by The Seattle Times. Now though, those plans have hit a hitch as Pacific Place shopping center said the proposal is off the table.

With the pandemic leaving malls and shopping centers empty as patrons sheltered in their homes from the COVID-19 virus, a large number of storefronts were left empty as retailers closed down due to the lack of traffic. Mall attendance has been in steady decline for a while now, with the rise of online shopping taking a bulk of the business, but for many, the pandemic restrictions were the breaking point.

Downtown Seattle attempts to entice workers from remote settings with a revitalized atmosphere

The mall had already been struggling to maintain tenants, going from 50 stores and restaurants in 2017 to only 21 in January 2020, right before the pandemic hit.

Hudson Pacific Properties Inc., a Los Angeles-based real estate developer, put together the $260 million plan to redevelop the mall to include office space in the building, even going to far as filing a building and land use pre-application to convert the second through fifth floors away from retail space.

Now that plan has been put on hold indefinitely, which is currently being reported by the Puget Sound Business Journal, crediting a source with knowledge of the redevelopment proposal.

Hudson Pacific Properties, Madison Marquette, the owner of Pacific Place, and Seattle developer Pine Street Group, which originally developed the mall, did not respond to questions about the sale, redevelopment, or why the plan might have fallen through.

How much the offices are even needed is another question, as the Downtown Seattle Association said July saw Seattle office workers returning to downtown at only about 40% of 2019 totals. The organization stated that employees are returning to downtown at its highest rate since the start of the pandemic and are hopeful those numbers will continue to rise.

While remote-based employment did become a popular solution for working through a pandemic, only 18% of employees want to work remotely full-time, said one survey done by the DSA, as the reasoning as to why developing office space might be useful.