PATH moving out of Ballard

More than 300 employees who work for the nonprofit company PATH will be moving to South Lake Union next January, the organization announced today. PATH’s global headquarters is located at the base of the Ballard Bridge, near the new Ballard Blocks development, and its staff has doubled over the last decade. PATH said it decided to move to a new environmentally-friendly Vulcan building in South Lake Union because of affordability, room for growth and closer proximity to its health and technology partners.

If you’re not familiar with PATH, its mission is to use medical technology to improve the health of people in need around the world. The press release follows below. (Thanks for the tip Hannah and Daniel!)

PRESS RELEASE — PATH intends to relocate its headquarters office, currently in Ballard, to a new location in Seattle by January 2010. On April 2, 2009, PATH signed a letter of intent with Vulcan Real Estate to retain three floors (111,000 square feet) of 2201 Westlake Avenue, a 12-story building in the South Lake Union district.

The number of staff housed at PATH’s Seattle headquarters has doubled over the past decade, and for more than a year, PATH has been reviewing options to address immediate and long-term facilities needs.

The new location meets PATH’s search criteria on several fronts:

* Affordability in the short and long term.
* Flexible space that can accommodate current and future growth.
* Environmentally friendly building (currently pursuing “Gold” Certification for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design [LEED] from the US Green Building Council) with easy access to green transport options.

The location in South Lake Union will put PATH closer to partners in the Washington Global Health Alliance and the region’s leaders in research, health, and technology. Neighbors include Seattle Biomedical Research Institute, Seattle Children’s Research Institute, the University of Washington’s biotechnology and medical research hub, the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The search for a new headquarters facility is part of a larger effort to increase PATH’s work to create sustainable, culturally relevant solutions that enable communities worldwide to break longstanding cycles of poor health.