Tuesday/ downtown Seattle

I made the second of my three trips to the passport office and took a few pictures of the buildings downtown.  The picture shows the region’s tallest building, the Columbia Center, in the middle ‘below’ the street lamp.  It has 76 stories and is almost 1,000 ft tall .. and is reportedly 40% empty.  Which is actually a lot better than some condo buildings downtown.

From The Stranger, a Seattle alternative weekly newspaper :

In March, the present owners of the Columbia Center tower, a Boston-based group called the Beacon Capital Partners, decided not to fork over its $1.6 million mortgage payment. This rattled not only downtown Seattle but the whole commercial real-estate market…  For the Columbia Center all the trouble began in 2007, the year the future refused to reveal anything to developers and financiers but a golden escalator to a brilliant cloud of profits. Beacon Capital bought the building for an astounding 621 million bucks—more than triple what it cost developer Martin Selig to build the tower two decades before. The purchase was a part of the group’s money-mad, frenzied, intoxicated spending spree of glamorous office properties in Seattle and Bellevue. The region had never seen anything like it. Millions upon millions were poured into amazed pockets.

Looking back, we now wonder how in the world anyone (and particularly those in the business of making loads of money) had such blind faith in an economy that was to crash only the following year. How could these professionals miss the signs? These same men and women bought the Columbia Center with the complete belief that today, in 2010, there would be even more money to be made than in 2007, the year the stock market passed the dizzying 14,000 mark. A year after the economy collapsed, the mighty Columbia Center has instead lost roughly 40 percent of its value, and the income from the building is now “less than needed to service its debt” (Puget Sound Business Journal, March 24).

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