“You’ve got to protect yourself both ways,” he said. Jordan said she hopes to take her father’s role when he retires.
While the city has better known billionaires, like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, the Selig family has been a fixture of Seattle’s business scene for decades. Martin and his parents fled Nazi Germany, traveling east through Russia, Korea and Japan, before boarding a boat they thought was headed for San Francisco. On the way, it docked in Seattle. It was a sun splashed day in in October 1940, with Mount Rainier looming in the distance. They decided to stay.
After spending time working in his family’s children’s clothing business, Martin ventured into real estate, putting up shopping centers in the early 1960s. He eventually branched out into office buildings and made a name for himself as a daring developer.
“He’s a master opportunist,” said Jack McCullough, a local real estate lawyer who has worked with the Seligs. “He does projects that others are unwilling or refuse to do.”
Such ambition has caused headaches for city planners, who thought it was almost impossible to build something as big as Selig did with Columbia Center in the early 1980s. The 76-story monolith is so huge that it prompted local lawmakers to limit the size of buildings downtown. One critic called it “a flat-out symbol of greed and egoism.” The black box is still the city’s tallest building and, even though he no longer owns it, a source of pride for the developer.
“We built as high as we could until the federal government stopped us,” Martin said, noting that a building any taller would have affected flights out of Seattle-Tacoma International Airport.
About a mile from her father’s magnum opus, Jordan is leading the development of 400 Westlake, the green building she hopes will have a similarly long-lasting impact on Seattle.
While Martin was reluctant, his daughter was able to make a business case for going green. As part of Seattle’s Living Building Pilot program — a plan that Jordan helped draft — the structure will be two stories bigger than would have been permitted otherwise.
“We’re not just doing this out of the goodness of our hearts,” said Jordan, a Columbia University graduate. “We generally try to build the biggest building that we possibly can on any given site.”
It’s just one example of how she’s pushing her father to embrace change. The company is taking on a handful of residential projects now, and may expand into different types of developments in the future, Jordan said of her plans for the company should she take the helm. One of the new buildings is an apartment complex planned for the city’s waterfront on a site that Martin purchased in the 1980s.