Architecture
Seattle Ground Floor Retail is a Public Benefit
A recent trip to New York reminded me what thriving neighborhood retail feels like, and how far Seattle has drifted from it. Small, affordable, interesting storefronts are the glue that holds a city together. Here's why Seattle should treat great ground floor retail as an essential public benefit, and two ideas for getting there.
October 6, 2026
The places we live should be places of comfort and safety, filled with things that bring us joy, meet our needs, and hopefully inspire us. There are a million ways to make that happen, and doing that is one of my passions in life. But our lives are more than sitting in our homes or apartments and looking inward. Living in a city comes with all sorts of benefits, including the fact that your world extends well beyond your front door. As a city dweller, your world is the neighborhood you live in. It's the parks you frequent to play games or to sit and read a book under a shady tree. It's the coffee shop you pop into every morning to say hello to your barista, who knows your order, the restaurant you go to on date nights, and the shop you stop by to pick up food for the dinner you're making tonight.
Those places require vibrant, healthy ground floor retail. Restaurants need to be places where people can start a business, live off that business, and hire workers into stable, good jobs. Shops need to be places where shopkeepers can create an environment that delights and excites shoppers while earning enough to keep providing that service. These spaces need to be small, affordable, and inspiring. They need to be the glue that holds a city together and gives it character and life.
Seattle's glue is drying up.
What Thriving Retail Looks Like
I was just in New York City for a wedding. It's a city I deeply enjoy, and one I lived in before moving to Seattle. But Seattle was the city I fell in love with. I loved the climate and the sense that this was a place where you could make an impact. I strongly believe I couldn't have formed Board & Vellum anywhere else. Over the years, I've met so many business owners who have built incredible businesses here, and so much of that creativity comes from wanting to make a place they love even better.
Yet I haven't been able to stop thinking about that trip. I spent time in the West Village, Long Island City, Greenpoint in Brooklyn, and all over Manhattan, and retail everywhere was ALIVE. The spaces were small, and they were packed with local operators instead of chains. Restaurants were bustling at 10 p.m., shops had weird and exciting inventories, and small coffee shops and cafes were everywhere, run by people creating spaces that were uniquely theirs. Online shopping hadn't hollowed any of it out. Retail was holding each neighborhood together and serving a real purpose.
I also recognize that New York City and New York State play by different rules. Seattle has grown in density but we are still far less dense and can support fewer retail spaces. New York allows a tip credit for restaurant servers, which dramatically lowers staffing costs compared to Seattle, where every worker earns the full minimum wage. I'm not going to debate the merits of that here, but it's a reality, and it shapes what a restaurant can afford. At the same time, depending on how you measure it, Seattle's cost of living runs roughly 10 to 38 percent lower than New York's, yet dining out here often costs more. To me, that gap points to how expensive it has become to run a business in Seattle.
New York isn't the only place doing this. Over the past year, I've seen great retail in Detroit, Pittsburgh, and even Portland, Oregon. If those cities can fill their storefronts with local businesses worth seeking out, so can we.
Where Seattle Stands Today
This isn't easy to say, but Seattle retail is in deep distress. Restaurants are not busy at 10 p.m. Heck, they're barely humming at 7 p.m. Costs have gone through the roof, and owners are just trying to stay afloat, never mind turn a meager profit. Spaces are closing, and many of the businesses that are opening are national chains with the deep pockets needed to make the Seattle equation work. We have unique challenges here, and some of them exist for great reasons. Our minimum wage is very high, and workers rightfully have a better chance of earning a living wage. But businesses also face costly burglaries on a regular basis, many customers are afraid to walk in certain neighborhoods, and dining out has become so expensive that people are opting to stay in. It's harder and harder for someone to start a business here and have it thrive. The next generation of businesses needs to start here, but we aren't fostering an environment where that can happen.
I would love to walk down my street, 15th Avenue East, and see block after block of amazing, creative retail and restaurant spaces. Instead, we've had a lot of empty storefronts lately. We have bold entrepreneurs creating some awesome spaces across the city, but we need far more of them, and we need a city that recognizes great retail as an essential public benefit. It's vital to being a truly great city on the world stage.
What Makes a Retail Space Work
At Board & Vellum, we think a lot about how buildings meet the street, and the formula for great neighborhood retail is pretty simple. The spaces need to be smaller, deep, and interesting, and the rent needs to be affordable.
Smaller spaces mean lower rent and a lower barrier for someone opening their first shop or restaurant. They also mean more storefronts per block, which means more doors, more variety, and more reasons to keep walking. Depth gives a business room to work behind the scenes, whether that's storage, a kitchen, or a workshop, without needing a wide, expensive frontage. And interesting spaces, with character, good light, and a few quirks, give operators something to build a personality around. A generic box at the base of a new building rarely inspires anyone.
All of that only matters if the rent works. A beautifully designed space that sits empty helps no one.
Treating Retail as a Public Benefit
There are a lot of issues to solve, but I think a great first step would be acknowledging what I said at the start: great retail is an essential public benefit, and it needs to be treated as such. Starting from that mindset opens up a few options.
Ground floor retail is usually built and managed by developers and property owners who often aren't retail experts. They don't always design the best spaces, and they often answer to banks that would rather see a space sit vacant at a theoretical rent than accept a lower rent that would reduce the property's value on paper. This isn't their area of expertise, and they're not always doing a great job. So what do we do with that?
A public development authority for retail
Could the city, in recognizing that great ground floor retail is a public benefit, allow the creation of public development authorities (PDAs) with real retail expertise? Look at the success of Pike Place Market. Imagine a downtown where retail is managed by a PDA more interested in a great mix of businesses than in maximizing profit. Using public funds, the PDA could sign very lengthy leases with landlords and then sublease those spaces to retail tenants. The landlords get compensated for their efforts (we live in a free, capitalist society, and we can't ignore the economic reality of their point of view), and the public gets great retail. Maybe this comes with tax breaks in lieu of direct payments.
We already have a great local example of this thinking. The Alliance for Pioneer Square has been working to attract tenants that fit an overall neighborhood mix. It isn't a full PDA, but it operates with the same intent, and it shows what curated retail planning can look like here in Seattle. There are different models to explore for making this work, but the result could be a holistic vision for neighborhood retail planning.
An affordable retail program
The other possibility is to create an affordable retail program that parallels the robust affordable housing program we already have. Our city needs housing, and it needs places for those residents to work. Building incentives and a clear pathway to more affordable retail space naturally drives job growth and helps inspire future generations. There are numerous ways this could work, but the basic framework wouldn't require a PDA.
Where Do We Start?
These are just two ideas. Over many conversations with friends and colleagues this past year, I've come to believe two things: something has to be done, and there's no shortage of ideas. Seattle is a city where you can build great things. It's why so many exciting companies got their start here. So how do we ensure the next generation of businesses has a chance here, and that our neighborhoods become a vibrant, exciting extension of our homes?
It will take a lot of people, and I'd like to speak to a few of them directly.
To developers: if owning and managing retail isn't what excites you, I hear you. Many of you would happily hand that piece off to people who live and breathe it. Let's build the structures that make that possible, and let's design spaces worth handing off.
To everyone who agrees with this and doesn't know where to start: start by talking about it. Tell your council member that great retail matters to you. Spend your money at the independent businesses in your neighborhood. Get involved with your local business district or community council. A shift in mindset starts with people saying it out loud.
To business owners and aspiring entrepreneurs: Seattle needs your ideas, and there are people ready to help you make them happen. Pioneer Square shows what's possible when a neighborhood actively goes looking for businesses like yours.
Great retail is vital to the success of our city. It's time for all of us to demand more of our leaders and get the city we want. If you're a developer, a business owner, or someone who cares about this as much as we do, we'd love to talk.
