The Changing Dynamics of South Lake Union

In recent years millions of dollars and thousands of people have poured into Seattle's South Lake Union in a concerted effort to build a technology center. The area has changed in dramatic ways due to new office and retail space, as well as residential units.

SLU also exhibits strange behaviors that organically grown neighborhoods don't. For one, a huge chunk of the population disappears after the workday. This is such a notable phenomenon that some restaurants simply close after lunch rather than pay staff to stare glumly at the floor.

Another oddity is that this heavily engineered neighborhood doesn't grow in typical ways. Through the passage of years, a normal neighborhood will gradually flex and grow and reinvent itself in ways that reflect the people who live there and their life stages. Not so in SLU. Here we have an instant neighborhood with massive mixed-use buildings seemingly dropped from outer space.

We were approached with a novel challenge. Some retailers balked at the available space around the periphery of SLU, on the notion that people stayed near the core. They felt the peripheral real estate had much less value. The goal was to determine how far SLU workers are willing to walk, especially during lunch time. What we found was a dramatic shift over the course of a year.

Here is the area we're discussing. The red hot center is the retail core where ostensibly all the action happens. The cooler orange border is experiencing a frenzy of construction.

                                    

So where do SLU workers walk during the lunching hours? In 2014, the space of travel was fairly constrained, indeed mostly to the core. Here are pedestrian trips starting in the core and spanning up to 1 kilometer:

                                   

But, recent construction and entry of cafes and stores has changed the complexion. So far in 2015, we do see activity predominately in the core. However, the northwest corner has begun to attract significant attention:

                                    

The construction of several new mixed-use buildings and the addition of desirable destinations is drawing people out of the core and into the periphery.

Some key insights from this experiment:

1. People will walk from 200 to 600 meters (or 650 to 2000 feet) during lunch
2. They walk at lunch more slowly than they walk at other times of day (hey, me too)
3. The core is expanding.

In the future, we will leverage these techniques to make predictions about how a neighborhood can be expected to change with the addition or removal of buildings and certain types of business. We will be able to provide guidance to retailers about traffic changes they can expect to see and that ultimately will affect the vitality of their business.

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PlaceProps Analytics publishes proprietary, GPS-based consumer movement data for commercial real estate site selection, out of home audience measurement, retail trade area definition, and urban planning.  Available online. 

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