This metric seems not to reflect anything I actually look for in a city's downtown. By way of anecdote, I have recently (within the last 6 months) spent some time downtown in SLC, San Francisco,...
This metric seems not to reflect anything I actually look for in a city's downtown. By way of anecdote, I have recently (within the last 6 months) spent some time downtown in SLC, San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, Montreal, Chicago, and Philadelphia. All of those cities except SLC are in the bottom 20 spots on this list, and, if I'm picking one to spend time in today, I'm picking any one of those over SLC, no contest.
I think the issue is that the raw amount of foot traffic is an imperfect metric to measure “recovery”, where recovery may be more appropriately measured by performance of various business sectors...
I think the issue is that the raw amount of foot traffic is an imperfect metric to measure “recovery”, where recovery may be more appropriately measured by performance of various business sectors downtown, “voluntary” foot traffic downtown, etc (no one metric is perfect).
Let’s take 2 downtowns for example: one has a downtown dominated by offices of corporations that have forced full return to office, and has seen office / commuter traffic return to normal. Another has a downtown dominated by offices of tech corporations that have leaned in to remote work (SF is a decent example), where very little office / commuter traffic has returned.
Yes the foot traffic has returned for the first city due to workers being forced downtown, but long-term is that a purely good thing? That downtown traffic will be driven by commuting traffic / people filing in and out of offices, maybe grabbing a lunch, while the second city may develop a downtown that has lower traffic overall but draws in a crowd that spends more at local businesses and comes in for voluntary reasons.
I agree with the point the prior comment was making, a high-foot traffic downtown has little relation to one that I’d visit and spent time and money in. I think the article paints “recovery” in a light that doesn't capture it’s complexity, and I’ve seen it sighted in articles framing these cities that lost a large tech sector as “failures”when the problem is beyond short-term fixed by the local government and “success” may be hard to measure.
I think "recovery" is a bit of misnomer given the data. It's comparing cell phone usage data pre and post covid. For many of the US cities at the top, what I suspect is less a recovery and more...
I think "recovery" is a bit of misnomer given the data. It's comparing cell phone usage data pre and post covid. For many of the US cities at the top, what I suspect is less a recovery and more that they never particularly suffered injury from COVID.
The COVID "response" was most acutely felt and actioned on by wealthier knowledge workers who were also demographically more likely to be democrats. In cities with proportionately less knowledge workers, well, WFH was never an option offered to begin with.
That's not to say that the data isn't interesting, but I think rather than, say, Bakersfield having this noticeable dip in activity throughout 2020-2022 and a recovery from 2022-2023, I think it's more likely there was a big hit to traffic in late 2019, early 2020, and from then on it was things as normal + population growth.
I'm surprised San Jose is fairly up in the list. The cynical quip would be wonder what exactly in San Jose is supposed to be "downtown", but it does indicate that Return To Office from the #BigTech companies is having an effect.
Such a weird take. I'm in Milwaukee and the city is recovering nicely. Some small businesses and restaurants closed, as to be expected. But others have mostly popped up in their place. I'd be...
Such a weird take. I'm in Milwaukee and the city is recovering nicely. Some small businesses and restaurants closed, as to be expected. But others have mostly popped up in their place. I'd be interested in the actual geographical area they are considering for "downtown". They were saying highest level of employment for zip code.
While we have a lot of new businesses opening, we also have quite a few high rise office buildings, like the Northwestern Mutual Insurance building. Many people from these jobs are now WFH, along with other headquarters.
The Deer District has been fairly robust, the 3rd Street Market Hall recently opened and is jumping. We have hotels going up, more highrises, including some recently finished like the Ascent and ongoing construction like The Couture. It seems like their measure of cell phone data doesn't take into account some very important critera.
From their methodology: Milwaukee is on pg 29 of that PDF, and has a map which shows the geographical area they took the data from. Does that map line up with what you, as a native Milwaukeean,...
I'd be interested in the actual geographical area they are considering for "downtown"
Maps of the downtown areas for each city can be found here.
Milwaukee is on pg 29 of that PDF, and has a map which shows the geographical area they took the data from. Does that map line up with what you, as a native Milwaukeean, view as "downtown"?
Thanks @cfabbro! From what I'm seeing some of these area are "downtown adjacent". The Third Ward is on the other side of I-794 (which may or may not be removed) to connect it with actual downtown....
Thanks @cfabbro! From what I'm seeing some of these area are "downtown adjacent". The Third Ward is on the other side of I-794 (which may or may not be removed) to connect it with actual downtown.
The area near Northpoint includes a hospital and some smaller businesses, but locals call it the (fashionable) Lower East side. They also include the entire lakefront area, which doesn't have much business as it's a parkway. We have the Calatrava, the marina, and a coffee shop, but little else.
I'm sure they are comparing apples to apples as far as the geography goes, but again, we are bouncing back nicely from covid. A lot of vibrancy and excitement in the city.
I agree @spydrchick I also think the timeframe 2022 when Bucks had just lost their playoffs in May, Summerfest was starting its new schedule of weekends so the type of people attending was...
I agree @spydrchick I also think the timeframe 2022 when Bucks had just lost their playoffs in May, Summerfest was starting its new schedule of weekends so the type of people attending was shifting and hadnt gotten a new stride yet, Festa Italiana wasn't ready to come back. I think it was still a summer we were learning how to move on.
I'd say Milwaukee is really hitting its stride now. I also find it interesting they grab mainly college areas (Marquette and UW Milwaukee) during summer months with no school and possible distant learning still for a good portion of tine, and push up the east side north but not equivalently south into Bayview.
Looking at this map it seems the focus on downtown is business downtown. I think it's interesting to see what they considered downtown. The fact the loop is chicago and it's isolated to that area....
Looking at this map it seems the focus on downtown is business downtown. I think it's interesting to see what they considered downtown. The fact the loop is chicago and it's isolated to that area. In New York it is split into two business areas, so I do think that maybe a skewed way of examining city rebound. As some businesses took the opportunity with their PPP loans to relocate or got reconstruction done and didn't get back downtown yet in 2022, and some business sprawled closer to the suburbs where people were now with their hybrid roles. I've seen growth happening in different places in some of these cities.
Seattle (page 17) seems odd they exclude South Lake Union and the Denny Triangle, which is where most of Amazon's office buildings are located. if the goal is to measure the effect the pandemic...
Seattle (page 17) seems odd
they exclude South Lake Union and the Denny Triangle, which is where most of Amazon's office buildings are located. if the goal is to measure the effect the pandemic and remote work has had...it seems like they'd want to include the offices of the largest employer in the city?
meanwhile, they include First Hill, which has relatively few office buildings, but does have 3 of Seattle's largest hospitals (Harborview, Swedish, and Virginia Mason). including hospitals in a dataset meant to measure how "active" a downtown is seems like a pretty big confounding factor.
and they also include Lumen Field, where our football teams play, while excluding T-Mobile Park, the baseball stadium just one block to the south.
it seems like they're doing this based entirely on ZIP codes, which was probably a convenient way to categorize the data, but seems very prone to these sorts of inaccuracies. if they had included South Lake Union, for example, its zip code (98109) also drags in Queen Anne, a very residential neighborhood.
I would say remote and hybrid definitely impacts it based on the maps shown the focus seems very business downtown and not liveable areas of the city as well. I think this datasets geographic...
I would say remote and hybrid definitely impacts it based on the maps shown the focus seems very business downtown and not liveable areas of the city as well.
I think this datasets geographic choice is very much a specific business central region.
Also since it's very much cellular data based research it sounds like if wifi offerings were improved or conversions to livable property that had wifi through downtown enhancements we might see some skew as well. Not exactly sure if it's grabbed as a singular data ping or duration of cellular data use in a week. Maybe it's people stopped playing games like Pokémon go, etc
This metric seems not to reflect anything I actually look for in a city's downtown. By way of anecdote, I have recently (within the last 6 months) spent some time downtown in SLC, San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, Montreal, Chicago, and Philadelphia. All of those cities except SLC are in the bottom 20 spots on this list, and, if I'm picking one to spend time in today, I'm picking any one of those over SLC, no contest.
I think the issue is that the raw amount of foot traffic is an imperfect metric to measure “recovery”, where recovery may be more appropriately measured by performance of various business sectors downtown, “voluntary” foot traffic downtown, etc (no one metric is perfect).
Let’s take 2 downtowns for example: one has a downtown dominated by offices of corporations that have forced full return to office, and has seen office / commuter traffic return to normal. Another has a downtown dominated by offices of tech corporations that have leaned in to remote work (SF is a decent example), where very little office / commuter traffic has returned.
Yes the foot traffic has returned for the first city due to workers being forced downtown, but long-term is that a purely good thing? That downtown traffic will be driven by commuting traffic / people filing in and out of offices, maybe grabbing a lunch, while the second city may develop a downtown that has lower traffic overall but draws in a crowd that spends more at local businesses and comes in for voluntary reasons.
I agree with the point the prior comment was making, a high-foot traffic downtown has little relation to one that I’d visit and spent time and money in. I think the article paints “recovery” in a light that doesn't capture it’s complexity, and I’ve seen it sighted in articles framing these cities that lost a large tech sector as “failures”when the problem is beyond short-term fixed by the local government and “success” may be hard to measure.
I think "recovery" is a bit of misnomer given the data. It's comparing cell phone usage data pre and post covid. For many of the US cities at the top, what I suspect is less a recovery and more that they never particularly suffered injury from COVID.
The COVID "response" was most acutely felt and actioned on by wealthier knowledge workers who were also demographically more likely to be democrats. In cities with proportionately less knowledge workers, well, WFH was never an option offered to begin with.
That's not to say that the data isn't interesting, but I think rather than, say, Bakersfield having this noticeable dip in activity throughout 2020-2022 and a recovery from 2022-2023, I think it's more likely there was a big hit to traffic in late 2019, early 2020, and from then on it was things as normal + population growth.
I'm surprised San Jose is fairly up in the list. The cynical quip would be wonder what exactly in San Jose is supposed to be "downtown", but it does indicate that Return To Office from the #BigTech companies is having an effect.
Such a weird take. I'm in Milwaukee and the city is recovering nicely. Some small businesses and restaurants closed, as to be expected. But others have mostly popped up in their place. I'd be interested in the actual geographical area they are considering for "downtown". They were saying highest level of employment for zip code.
While we have a lot of new businesses opening, we also have quite a few high rise office buildings, like the Northwestern Mutual Insurance building. Many people from these jobs are now WFH, along with other headquarters.
The Deer District has been fairly robust, the 3rd Street Market Hall recently opened and is jumping. We have hotels going up, more highrises, including some recently finished like the Ascent and ongoing construction like The Couture. It seems like their measure of cell phone data doesn't take into account some very important critera.
From their methodology:
Milwaukee is on pg 29 of that PDF, and has a map which shows the geographical area they took the data from. Does that map line up with what you, as a native Milwaukeean, view as "downtown"?
Thanks @cfabbro! From what I'm seeing some of these area are "downtown adjacent". The Third Ward is on the other side of I-794 (which may or may not be removed) to connect it with actual downtown.
The area near Northpoint includes a hospital and some smaller businesses, but locals call it the (fashionable) Lower East side. They also include the entire lakefront area, which doesn't have much business as it's a parkway. We have the Calatrava, the marina, and a coffee shop, but little else.
I'm sure they are comparing apples to apples as far as the geography goes, but again, we are bouncing back nicely from covid. A lot of vibrancy and excitement in the city.
I agree @spydrchick I also think the timeframe 2022 when Bucks had just lost their playoffs in May, Summerfest was starting its new schedule of weekends so the type of people attending was shifting and hadnt gotten a new stride yet, Festa Italiana wasn't ready to come back. I think it was still a summer we were learning how to move on.
I'd say Milwaukee is really hitting its stride now. I also find it interesting they grab mainly college areas (Marquette and UW Milwaukee) during summer months with no school and possible distant learning still for a good portion of tine, and push up the east side north but not equivalently south into Bayview.
Looking at this map it seems the focus on downtown is business downtown. I think it's interesting to see what they considered downtown. The fact the loop is chicago and it's isolated to that area. In New York it is split into two business areas, so I do think that maybe a skewed way of examining city rebound. As some businesses took the opportunity with their PPP loans to relocate or got reconstruction done and didn't get back downtown yet in 2022, and some business sprawled closer to the suburbs where people were now with their hybrid roles. I've seen growth happening in different places in some of these cities.
Edited: because holy run on sentence batman
Seattle (page 17) seems odd
they exclude South Lake Union and the Denny Triangle, which is where most of Amazon's office buildings are located. if the goal is to measure the effect the pandemic and remote work has had...it seems like they'd want to include the offices of the largest employer in the city?
meanwhile, they include First Hill, which has relatively few office buildings, but does have 3 of Seattle's largest hospitals (Harborview, Swedish, and Virginia Mason). including hospitals in a dataset meant to measure how "active" a downtown is seems like a pretty big confounding factor.
and they also include Lumen Field, where our football teams play, while excluding T-Mobile Park, the baseball stadium just one block to the south.
it seems like they're doing this based entirely on ZIP codes, which was probably a convenient way to categorize the data, but seems very prone to these sorts of inaccuracies. if they had included South Lake Union, for example, its zip code (98109) also drags in Queen Anne, a very residential neighborhood.
I was wondering why Mississauga is on here, but then I saw it's UofT so that makes sense. Always weird seeing Canadian content out here in the wild.
If you select a previous season, you can add in the data for Europe.
I'm curious to know what's everyone's take on this data.
How does remote work affect these data?
I would say remote and hybrid definitely impacts it based on the maps shown the focus seems very business downtown and not liveable areas of the city as well.
I think this datasets geographic choice is very much a specific business central region.
Also since it's very much cellular data based research it sounds like if wifi offerings were improved or conversions to livable property that had wifi through downtown enhancements we might see some skew as well. Not exactly sure if it's grabbed as a singular data ping or duration of cellular data use in a week. Maybe it's people stopped playing games like Pokémon go, etc