Economic Recovery
Tracking the downtown recovery
Since the onset of COVID-19, DSA has been tracking the impact on our local economy. In the midst of a changing environment, we’ve been following dozens of metrics to trace the path to economic recovery. A few of these metrics are in the economic recovery trends charts below.
Downtown Recovery Dashboard
January 2023 (December 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 recover, DSA will publish a monthly Recovery Dashboard examining key recovery 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 recovery, renewal and reemergence.
Total monthly visitors since 2019
Nearly 2.2 million visitors came downtown in December, an increase of more than 8% compared to December 2021.
Source: Placer.ai
Percentage of 2019 worker foot traffic to 2022
Worker foot traffic continued to show signs of improvement, increasing to 44% of December 2019’s levels. This represents the third consecutive month of improving return-to-office figures.
Source: Placer.ai
Monthly hotel rooms sold compared to 2019
Demand for hotel rooms weakened slightly in December, with room stays at 71% of 2019 levels. A bright spot during the holidays was New Year’s Eve, when downtown hotel demand hit 97%, nearly matching 2019 occupancy levels.
Sources: Visit Seattle, STR
Residential units continued their post-pandemic climb in the fourth quarter of 2022, reaching record levels of inventory downtown and number of occupied units (nearly 56k).
Source: CoStar
Of Note in Downtown
Average weekday King County Metro ridership for December 2022 was up 11% over December 2021.
The last quarter of 2022 saw a record 55,811 occupied residential units in downtown — an increase of more than 5,000 units since Q4 2020.
The DSA/MID Clean Team removed 2,784 graffiti tags and/or stickers from public infrastructure and private property in December 2022.
Coming Up in Downtown
The Seattle Convention Center Summit building opens this week, hosting Redfin’s Roadshow 2023 Seattle conference. More than 1,600 attendees are expected for the building’s first event Jan. 12–13. The Arch building will be hosting two events at the end of the month expected to draw crowds of more than 11,000 people — the Northwest Remodeling Expo (Jan. 20–22) and Seattle Wedding Show (Jan. 28–29).
DSA member Wing Luke Museum will be hosting a celebration to usher in the Year of the Rabbit on Jan. 28. The Lunar New Year fair begins at 10 a.m. with a lion dance.
The Seattle Kraken continue their playoff push with six straight games on home ice starting Jan. 16 after seven straight on the road. The Kraken enter this stretch at third in the Pacific Division.
COVID-19 Downtown Recovery Weekly Snapshot
These charts show weekly statistics from March 2020 through the most recent week available. To indicate the level of recovery, data is displayed as a percent of the same metric for the comparable week of 2019.
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 the downtown neighborhoods with the heaviest concentration of office space.*
- Total visitors includes those who do not live or work downtown. It does not include international visitors.
- 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.