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
August 2024 (July 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.
Total monthly visitors since 2019
Nearly 3.1 million unique visitors came downtown in July 2024. This represents 94% of the visitors seen in July 2019.
Average daily worker foot traffic (Monday–Friday)
In July, downtown averaged more than 90,000 workers per weekday — the second-highest figure since March 2020. This represents a 14% increase from July 2023 and 62% of the daily worker foot traffic seen in July 2019.
Monthly hotel rooms sold compared to 2019
More than 400,000 downtown hotel rooms were sold in July 2024 — the highest monthly total since March 2020. This figure represents 102% of demand in July 2019 and a 3% increase over July 2023 demand.
In June, the number of occupied apartment units was more than 58,000. This represented a 3% increase in occupied units compared to Q3 2023 and a 17% increase compared to Q3 2019.
Of Note in Downtown
The Bite of Seattle drew 355,670 attendees to Seattle Center for three days of food and fun. Our partners at the Seattle Center report this year’s Bite more than tripled last year’s revenue. The food and live music event featured 240 vendors and more than 50 bands.
The DSA/MID Clean Team removed 5,491 graffiti tags and stickers from public structures and private property in July. That’s 1,800 more than the previous month.
The Downtown Summer Sounds concert on Friday, Aug. 9 brought an estimated 4,000 fans to the corner of Fourth and Pine. Pine Street was closed to traffic from Fourth to Fifth avenues for the free performance by Chicago-based duo DRAMA.
Coming Up in Downtown
The Chinatown-International District Block Party is a one-day music and arts event bringing more than 100 vendors, food trucks, and an indoor market to 900 King Street from 1–9 p.m. on Saturday, Aug. 17.
The Seattle Aquarium’s new Ocean Pavilion opens on Saturday, Aug. 29. This jewel of a new facility on the central waterfront will house the Pacific Northwest’s largest tropical reef system.
Big festivals open Labor Day weekend with Bumbershoot and PAX West beginning Saturday, Aug. 31. These two events brought an estimated 160,000 people to downtown Seattle last summer.
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.