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.

DSA also conducted a survey of Seattle businesses, many of whom are in industries highly impacted by measures to mitigate the spread of COVID-19. The survey was conducted to help us better understand COVID-19’s impact on Seattle industries and their perspectives on reopening our economy.

COVID-19 Downtown Recovery Snapshot

These charts show weekly statistics from January 2020 through the most recent week available. They will be updated on a regular basis.

Notes on Sources

Downtown foot traffic data is provided by Placer.ai and is 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 in the downtown neighborhoods with the heaviest concentration of office space between 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. on weekdays.
  • Average daily visitors counts those who do not live or work downtown.
  • Total foot traffic includes all visits to downtown by visitors, residents and workers.
  • Pike Place Market visitors includes those who do not live or work at the Pike Place Market.

Traffic counts are weekly total vehicle counts by automated sensors used by the Washington State Department of Transportation.

Hotel data are based on weekly reports from Smith Travel Research, 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.