The pandemic hit American cities hard, especially their downtowns. Office towers emptied almost overnight as remote work became the norm. Many businesses that relied on office workers couldn’t survive.
But a new report shows some downtowns have fully bounced back, or even exceeded, their pre-pandemic levels of activity. Others — Seattle included — have not come close.
This winter, activity in downtown Seattle was only at 48% of pre-pandemic levels, according to newly released data from the ongoing Urban Displacement Project, a research initiative at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Toronto.
The approach is novel. Most research attempting to measure the vitality of urban centers since the start of the pandemic has looked at factors like the change in office vacancy rates, public transportation ridership, or retail spending. Instead, this study looked at smartphone data.
Among the 63 downtowns in the U.S. and Canada included in the study, Seattle ranked 51st. And Seattle’s downtown was one of just 14 where activity levels this winter were less than half of their pre-pandemic level.
Researchers analyzed data from 18 million smartphone visits to downtown points of interest, comparing current levels of activity (the most recent data covers December 2022 through February of this year) with the pre-pandemic period. Points of interest include many places someone might visit — restaurants, retail shops, grocery stores and so on.
While Seattle’s level of downtown activity this winter was pretty dismal, it does represent a slight improvement from one year earlier. In the winter of 2021-2022, downtown was only at 44% of pre-pandemic activity levels. And from March through May 2022 — when I last looked at this study — downtown hit 52% of its 2019 levels.
The lagging numbers here, surely, are due to the persistence of remote work and relatively few employees returning to downtown. Data shared by the Downtown Seattle Association shows that in February, only 47% of office workers had returned when compared with 2019.
This data, of course, lags by a few months. And there has been some recent good news for downtown recovery: Starting in early May, Amazon workers in Seattle were required to return to the office three days per week. This change could have a significant, positive impact on Seattle’s numbers in future releases of this data.
In five U.S. cities, recovery from the pandemic is complete. Salt Lake City was way ahead of the pack, with cellphone activity at 139% of pre-pandemic levels. The other cities were Bakersfield and Fresno, Calif.; Columbus, Ohio; and El Paso, Texas.
These are all midsized cities, which overall seem to have recovered more quickly than major cities. However, there are some big cities that have recovered much faster than Seattle. For example, San Diego was at 93% of pre-pandemic activity this winter. The nation’s largest city, New York, was at 75%.
But Seattle shines compared with a couple of other West Coast cities. San Francisco came in last among the 63 cities, at a dismal 32%, and Portland was third from the bottom at 40%.
So far, Seattle’s best performance was in the spring of 2022 (when downtown was at 52% of pre-pandemic activity levels).
And the worst? The summer of 2020, when downtown was only at 37%.
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