Salt Lake's downtown is No. 1 for pandemic recovery
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Illustration: Aïda Amer/Axios
Downtown Salt Lake City is seeing way more activity now than before the pandemic, according to a new analysis of phone location data.
Driving the news: Salt Lake has North America's most recovered major downtown — by far, according to data from UC Berkeley.
- Researchers used phone location data to see how many visitors were at places of interest — such as shops, restaurants, offices, parks, sports venues — in the downtowns of 62 cities in the U.S. and Canada.
- Salt Lake City saw 55% more visitors in May 2022 than in May 2019.
- Only three other downtowns saw more activity this year than before the pandemic: Bakersfield and Fresno, California, and Columbus, Ohio.
The big picture: The shift toward remote work during the pandemic gave people the freedom to leave expensive or crowded cities — and those downtowns tended to have a harder time recovering.
- San Francisco had the lowest recovery, with just 31% of the activity it had in 2019.
- Cities with fewer professional, management and science jobs lost fewer people.
- Cities with more service workers also recovered more easily.
Of note: COVID-prevention policies — like mask mandates and crowd size limits — didn't correlate with faster or slower downtown recovery.
Between the lines: In spring 2020, downtown Salt Lake had about half of the phone traffic it did in 2019.
- The biggest gains were this spring, when activity rose more than 25% over the previous few months. In fall 2021, activity rose more than 20% from summer.
- Downtown activity here rose relatively consistently in the two years after the pandemic began, compared to other cities, which saw sharper declines at various points.