The Empty Downtown – A New Normal?

Three years after the coronavirus pandemic began, the situation of North American downtowns remains fundamentally changed.

As Statista’s Katharina Buchholz reports below, while most people’s lives have returned to normal, the legacies of the lockdown era continue to affect formerly bustling city centers to a point that could cause a downwards spiral.

Data collected by the University of Toronto School of Cities shows that as of the fall of 2022, the downtowns of many major population centers in the U.S. and Canada were still recording much less activity than before the pandemic. Los Angeles had gained back around two thirds of its former life (as measured by cellphone activity), but other downtowns – like in Chicago, Vancouver in British Columbia, Seattle and San Francisco – are now at most half as active as they had been before the pandemic. The lull also affects boomtowns of former years like Denver, Atlanta and Houston.