Economic Revitalization
Tracking downtown revitalization
Since the onset of COVID-19, DSA has been tracking the impact on our local economy. As downtown bounces back, we continue to follow dozens of metrics to trace the path to full economic recovery. A few of these metrics are below.
Downtown Revitalization Dashboard
December 2025 (November data)
Downtown Seattle was the first American urban center to experience the impacts of COVID-19, enduring a sudden economic downturn. As downtown continues to evolve, DSA will publish a monthly Revitalization Dashboard examining key metrics. The data sets provide a comparison point to the same time period in 2019. Additionally, the dashboard will feature notable stories that provide context regarding downtown’s renewal and reemergence.
Please credit the Downtown Seattle Association Revitalization Dashboard for use of charts, data and images on this page.
Unique monthly visitors compared to 2019
More than 2.7 million unique visitors came downtown in November 2025. This represents 100% of the visitors seen in November 2019 and was flat compared to November 2024.
Average weekday worker foot traffic
In November, downtown’s worker foot traffic was 60% of November 2019’s daily average.
Monthly hotel rooms sold compared to 2019
More than 293,000 downtown hotel rooms were sold in November 2025. This figure represents 90% of the demand in November 2019, and a 3% decrease in demand compared to November 2024.
Quarterly
In November, the number of occupied apartment units downtown continued growing, rising to nearly 60,700. This represents a 3% increase compared to Q4 2024 and a 20% increase compared to Q4 2019.
Of Note in Downtown
Foot traffic in downtown’s retail core increased 21% on the Friday after Thanksgiving compared to Black Friday 2024, peaking at 5 p.m. with more than 16,000 visitors for the annual tree lighting.
Non-commute light rail ridership continues to grow when compared to pre-pandemic counts. Saturday boardings at Westlake Station are up 34% compared to November 2019.
Between January and November 2025, nearly a million local visitors (i.e., people living within 10 miles) visited Pike Place Market more than 3.7 million times, a 10% increase from the same period in 2024.
Coming Up in Downtown
It’s Taylor Swift’s hits as you’ve never heard them before — a string quartet performance immersed in candlelight. This free show is Friday, Dec. 19 on the second floor of Pacific Place.
Hailed by some as the world’s #1 musical, The Lion King takes the stage at The Paramount Theatre now through Jan. 4, 2026. Winner of six Tony Awards, including Best Musical, it’s an extraordinary work of music and storytelling.
The signature Seattle way to celebrate the flipping of the calendar is at Seattle Center on Wednesday, Dec. 31. A full schedule of performances begins at 8 p.m. and runs through the remainder of the night, ringing in the new year with a laser and fireworks show at midnight.
Notes on Sources
Downtown foot traffic data are provided by Placer.ai and are based on cell phone location data. Each person is counted once per day. International visitors are not included. Subsets of this data in the charts are as follows:
- Office worker presence is estimated based on visits by workers who were present between 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. on weekdays in downtown Seattle.*
- Hotel data are based on monthly reports from STR, provided by Visit Seattle.
- Apartment occupancy data are from CoStar. This is reported quarterly but the current quarter data are updated in real-time as new information is added to the database.
- Domestic visitors counts those who do not live or work downtown.
- Total foot traffic includes all visits to downtown by domestic visitors, residents and workers.
- Pike Place Market visitors includes domestic visitors who do not live or work at the Pike Place Market.
*Note that workers who have not visited their work site in the past 90 days are classified as “visitors” until they are regularly visiting their work site at least three times in a one-week period.