A decade ago, Seattle was the poster child of American tech prosperity. Amazon and Microsoft had turned a midsize Pacific Northwest city into a magnet for engineers, executives, and capital, adding roughly 40,000 jobs per year at the peak of the boom, according to the Puget Sound Regional Council.
Today, more than one-third of downtown Seattle’s office space sits empty, its job postings have collapsed faster than almost any other U.S. metro, and even Starbucks—the coffee giant founded in the city in 1971—is shifting jobs south to Nashville, as it commits to a $100 million, 2,000-person new footprint in Music City. The story of Seattle’s reversal unfolds in three overlapping arcs: an office market in free fall, a labor market that has gone from boom to bust, and a policy environment that has made survival harder for the small businesses left behind.
