Why housing affordability looms as a final frontier for Seattle area’s space industry
BELLEVUE, Wash. — The biggest applause line at a Bellevue Chamber event focusing on the Seattle area’s space industry came when attention was paid to a down-to-earth topic: housing affordability for the industry’s workers.
“They don’t just come here to work,” U.S. Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., told the audience at today’s sold-out luncheon. “They come here to live.”
The space industry is definitely on the rise in the Seattle area — particularly in a cluster of suburbs extending from Bellevue to Redmond and Kirkland to the north, and to Kent and Tukwila in the south.
Mike Fong, who is the director of the Washington State Department of Commerce and served as the event’s moderator, said the state’s commercial space ventures account for $4.6 billion in economic activity and more than 13,000 jobs.
That figure has continued to grow in the two years since the economic impact report that Fong cited first came out. Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture is said to have about 11,000 employees spread across the country, with many of them working at the company’s HQ in Kent. Amazon’s Project Kuiper satellite network — which is ramping up facilities in Redmond, Kirkland and Everett — has built up its workforce to about 2,000 employees.
When you include the workers at SpaceX’s satellite factory in Redmond, Aerojet Rocketdyne in Redmond, LeoStella in Tukwila and a host of space startups, it all adds up to more pressure on the region’s housing market. That pressure is already sky-high. For example, the median selling price for a home in Bellevue is more than $1.5 million, based on figures from the Northwest Multiple Listing Service.
“Not everybody who works in these companies is going to be issued 200 grand a year in stock options,” Smith told the audience, which included business leaders as well as elected officials. “How are you going to afford a place to live? You’ve got to be better at building housing, building it affordably.”
The region’s communities and employers have been trying to address the affordability crisis, but Smith said more needs to be done.
“You cannot have the nightmare permitting process that you have, all the requirements that go into that, and be able to build more housing,” he said. “I know there are a lot of people who are strong advocates for spending more money on housing. I applaud that. I do. But if we don’t change the cost structure of what it costs to build that housing, there is not enough money.”
Smith also said the state needed to devote more attention to the education system, particularly in the fields of science, technology, engineering and math, known collectively as STEM. Kelly Maloney, co-founder of a public-private consortium called Space Northwest, expressed a similar sentiment.
“The workforce of the future are really the young individuals that we need to embrace and have programs for,” Maloney said. “There’s been a lot done, but there’s also a lot that still needs to be done, and a lot of it is for the underserved and the marginalized.”
It’s not all bad news. “One policy area that we are getting right is workforce development,” Smith said. “You see a lot of cooperation between businesses, unions, community / technical colleges and, increasingly, high schools.”
Brian Huseman, Amazon’s vice president for public policy and community engagement, pointed to Project Kuiper’s partnership with Lake Washington Institute of Technology in Kirkland. That partnership aims to create a certificate program for satellite technicians, some of whom are likely to end up working for Project Kuiper.
“We’re helping to train and create a new class of jobs,” Huseman said. “We’re incredibly excited about that.”
Looking ahead, Maloney suggested that Washington state’s space industry could adapt the playbook used by other sectors of the tech industry.
“One thing that I think would serve our state well would be a partnership with government on an incubator specific to the space industry, or tech and related industries,” she said. “It would be something that would enhance people at the startup innovative stage.”
There are already a few space-centric startup accelerators, including Starburst, Amazon Web Services’ AWS Space Accelerator and the Techstars Space Accelerator. A venture studio called Actuate Ventures is just starting to get off the ground with plans to create innovation hubs in Redmond and other space industry hotspots. Will there be more? Stay tuned.
Fong said today’s rising interest in commercial space ventures is just the latest manifestation of the region’s leadership in the tech industry.
“This is really building on a 60-year legacy, going back to Boeing’s work on the lunar rover during the Apollo missions,” he said. “In truth, the unique DNA of the Pacific Northwest is what fosters and enables us to have an enduring role in this emergent economic opportunity.”