Columbus answering post-pandemic call?
Cellphone data shows downtown area recovering, but some question reliability
A recent study using cellphone data might have surprised some here in central Ohio when it showed that downtown Columbus had rebounded from the pandemic shutdowns better than most large and mid-sized American and Canadian cities.
The study compiled cellphone activity going back to March 2020 to compare data to what it was before the COVID-19 pandemic took hold that month. And in the latest quarter, from December 2022 to February 2023, cellphone activity in downtown Columbus was at 109% of what it was before the pandemic.
That was the fourth best on the list, trailing Salt Lake City at 139%, and the interior California cities of Bakersfield (118%) and Fresno (115%).
In dead-last at 63rd was San Francisco at 32%. Other Ohio cities sampled were Cincinnati, which finished 32nd at 63%, and Cleveland, which was 58th at 44%.
For the rolling 47-month period from January 2019 to November 2022, Columbus ranked third of 62 cities at 93%, trailing San Diego (99%) and Baltimore (95%) in the large-city category.
Columbus still struggles with office vacancies Downtown and workforce levels that remain far below their heights. But at least according to this metric, it is recovering better than most cities.
“I would be feeling pretty good if I were Columbus,” said Karen Chapple, director of the School of Cities and a professor geography and planning at the University of Toronto, which conducted the research.
The research involved tracking cellphone pings when people stopped for at least five minutes. That eliminated cellphones on people driving through town, Chapple said.
For this study, researchers looked at Downtown ZIP codes. For Columbus, that is 43215, which not only captures the heart of Downtown but also the southern part of the Short North, a northern slice of German Village, the Brewery District, the Whittier Peninsula (home to Scioto Audubon Metro Park), and areas along either side of Dublin Road heading west up to about
West Fifth Avenue.
Chapple said that various factors could have played a role in Columbus’ showing. For one, like Salt Lake City, Columbus is a state capital, with people visiting the Statehouse and state offices.
Chapple also mentioned that large medical presences help, and Ohiohealth Grant Medical Center is located Downtown.
The area of Columbus studied is also home to Columbus State Community College, the Columbus College of Art and Design and Franklin University.
Low commute times likely helped Columbus, Chapple said. It’s an easier decision for a Worthington resident to decide at the last minute to drive 20 minutes to a Downtown office than it is for people living in larger, more spreadout metro areas.
Chapple also said that downtowns that have concentrations of activities back every day tend to be doing better.
“Sports helps. If you got back into action early on with the sports teams then you are doing better,” Chapple said. Downtown is home to the Columbus Blue Jackets, Crew and Clippers.
Tourism helps too, Chapple said. That’s why activity in the heart of New York City, despite one estimate that the city’s vacant office space could fill more than 26 Empire State Buildings, is back to 75% of pre-pandemic levels, according to the University of Toronto study.
But Chapple said there is a long climb back from COVID for most downtowns. Will longtime office tenants renew leases when they come up for renewal? According to commercial real estate company CBRE, the vacancy rate for Class A office space in downtown Columbus during the first quarter of 2023 was 27%.
“If half of tenants reduce or drop space, we’ll see long-playing dynamics on downtown economies,” Chapple said.
“Your downtown is not going to be the downtown that it was 10 years ago,” she said. “That’s OK.”
‘Some cities are more resilient’
Cellphone activity is just one way to measure whether downtowns are rebounding, and may not paint a complete picture.
Tracy Hadden Loh is a fellow with the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Center for Transformative Placemaking at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., and an expert in real estate and city planning.
Loh said that she thinks the cellphone study is helpful, and that using ZIP codes for downtown boundaries is fine. But in some cases, the results can be misleading because of where they are drawn, she said.
For example, the San Diego ZIP code includes the airport, she said.
“I don’t know that San Diego is 93% recovered,” Loh said.
It also might be easier for some downtowns to recover if the baseline — the number of people downtown — was low to begin with in the first place, she said.
For cities such as Columbus and Salt Lake City, their positive recoveries might also be attributed to the fact that the cities and their metro areas have grown in population since 2019. So even if offices aren’t as full as they were, there might be new people coming downtown now, she said.
The cellphone data also doesn’t take into account what time of day people are downtown, Loh said.
“People don’t want to go to the office, but people want to be together,” she said.
Amy Taylor, president of the Columbus Downtown Development Corporation,
said that according to data collected by Placer.ai, an average of about 60,000 workers a day were back Downtown in the first quarter of 2023 compared to 55,000 in October 2022.
“We’ve seen that number continue to go in the right direction,” she said.
According to the Capital Crossroads and Discovery special improvement districts’ recent report on the state of Downtown, there would be 89,410 workers Downtown if offices were occupied they way they were before COVID shut things down in March 2020.
The new Downtown strategic plan sets a goal of 40,000 residents and 120,000 workers Downtown by 2040.
According to information Taylor provided, the number of visits and visitors to downtown Columbus grew from the fourth quarter of 2022 to the first quarter of 2023:
● Visits: 9.1 million to 9.9 million.
● Visitors: 2.2 million to 2.4 million. Marc Conte, executive director of the Capital Crossroads and Discovery special improvement districts, said his group has seen more Downtown activity.
“We’ve certainly seen more leisure visitors, arts events, all that kind of stuff,” Conte said. “From a year ago, we do see more people in the office.”
“The trend is in the right direction,” he said.
According to the Columbus Department of Public Service, the amount of revenue collected from Downtown onstreet parking zones from January 2022 to March 2023 ranged from a low of $207,499 in February 2022 to $302,745 in March 2023 (the Arnold Classic returned that month).
For the first three months of 2023, the amount rose steadily:
● January: $225,368
● February: $227,978
● March: $273,101 Meanwhile, monthly parking revenues have gone up and down at the city’s four parking garages since April 2022. Here are the high months:
● North 4th and Elm: $73,942 (March 2023)
● River South, 232 S. Front St.: $169,346 (January 2023)
● Dorrian Green, 50 S. Belle St., East Franklinton: $212,710 (March 2023)
● Starling Street, East Franklinton: $212,175 (April 2023)
Businesses still seeing lower traffic
Bob Szuter, co-owner of Wolf’s Ridge Brewing at 215 N. 4th St., Downtown, said he was surprised when he saw the cellphone data. He said his business is off 20% overall compared to numbers before the COVID-19 pandemic, with his dining room business down 30% because of lower lunch traffic.
“Downtown as an economic core, it’s not coming back as it was,” Szuter said. “What are we going to do now? I’d like to see more intentional direction to support Downtown in the long-term.”
He said making Downtown more pedestrian-friendly will help, mentioning the city’s move to make the speed limit on all Downtown streets 25 mph.
Szuter said he’d also like to see the city convert some alleys to pedestrianonly, and building owners continue to transform office buildings to residences.
“I think that is all going in the right direction,” he said.
Szuter said Wolf’s Ridge overall is not at-risk. “We do have a diverse business,” he said, mentioning private event space, and Wolf’s Ridge opening the popular Understory lounge and restaurant in 2022 in the Open Air building on Neil Avenue in Old North Columbus.
But Szuter said Downtown remains key to his business.
“Downtown is still our flagship,” Szuter said. “It’s an important one to us.” mferench@dispatch.com @Markferenchik