COVID crushed Salt Lake City's downtown activity. What does it look like 5 years later?

Editor's note: This is part one of a two-part series reviewing how downtown Salt Lake City has changed five years after the COVID-19 pandemic began.

SALT LAKE CITY — Tim Helgeson remembers March 11, 2020, and the events that followed all too well.

The day started with the World Health Organization declaring COVID-19 a pandemic and ended with the NBA shutting its season down after then-Utah Jazz center Rudy Gobert tested positive for COVID-19.

Then came the calls. Helgeson, senior vice president of asset management at KBS, a global commercial real estate company that owns three buildings in downtown Salt Lake City, soon began fielding calls from tenants unsure what to do with their office leases.

"There was a lot of unknowns when that happened," he said, reflecting on that moment five years later.

This was a common situation in the early days of the pandemic, as businesses explored remote work and other tactics to address public health safety. Salt Lake City's activity — partly fueled by 9.3 million business worker visits in 2019 — quickly plummeted.

Downtown visitation has rebounded somewhat since then, but last year's levels were still down 20% from 2019, while worker populations remain at about two-thirds of pre-pandemic levels, according to an analysis compiled by the Salt Lake City Downtown Alliance.

"It's what I have called a 'workplace reckoning,'" said Dee Brewer, the Alliance's executive director.

This has led to some interesting new trends downtown. There are also signs pointing to a workplace recovery and signs it's also turning into something completely different than what it was right before the pandemic.

Downtown impact

Downtown Salt Lake City attracted 26.1 million visits in 2019, over a third of which came from office workers traveling to the city's core, per the Downtown Alliance. The organization also reported that there were over 36,500 daily downtown workers at the time.

However, downtown businesses started to sense COVID-19 could be bigger than was initially expected by March 2020. Julissa Breslin, marketing director at the Gateway Mall, recalls a key sponsor pulling away from an event at the downtown complex days before Gobert tested positive, citing COVID-19 concerns.

"I remember being like, 'Oh, that seems strange; that seems weird,'" she told KSL.com.

A day after Gobert's case rattled Utah, the Gateway's owner, Vestar, sent out a companywide email about temporary work-from-home plans. Many businesses did the same all over the country, leaving many downtowns — including Salt Lake City — feeling empty.

Daily downtown workers dropped to 15,136 in 2020 and even further to 12,279 in 2021, about a third of its peak.

The circumstances forced businesses and leaders to think outside the box. As restaurants utilized to-go options, the Gateway — now more of a mix of restaurant, office and special event space — started hosting outdoor events to draw people in. Salt Lake City shut down Main Street to vehicle traffic on weekends to open up more patio space for bars and restaurants, while the Downtown Alliance also held special events to bring people back to the city.

"We had to kind of shift and get creative," Breslin said, adding that holding events at this time also required extra steps to make sure events were safe for visitors and merchants alike.

The new normal?

Workers in downtown Salt Lake City nearly doubled from 2021 to 2023, but there were just minimal gains in 2024. Despite promising gains at the end of the pandemic, last year's downtown visitation reached 20.8 million, as visitors remained down by over 2.5 million and office worker volumes remained about 3 million shy of 2019 levels.

The number of downtown residents, on the other hand, grew over the past five years as more apartments and residential towers emerged during the pandemic. Downtown residents created 1.1 million "customer days" in 2019 and 1.6 million in 2024, a 45% increase, per the Downtown Alliance.

This factored into interesting new trends downtown leaders have noticed over the past half-decade. Friday and Saturday from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. has become primetime for downtown visitation, while Brewer said an after-work-hours dinnertime rush has also surpassed the old work-time rush. City Creek Center and the Gateway have become major drivers in downtown traffic, while Delta Center and Salt Palace Convention Center deliver big spikes during events.

Mia Patmides, managing partner of HallPass, says the downtown food hall is often buzzing at night and on weekends, especially now the Utah Hockey Club added dozens of new events at the nearby Delta Center.

It also helps that the Gateway decided to keep hosting festivities. Its "Last Hurrah" New Year's Eve event brought in over 24,000 people this past year — a 22% increase from the previous year.

Lunch hours on weekdays can be productive, especially when there's good weather, but Patmides says it's been inconsistent.

"It's definitely not the same. Our lunch crowd is really hit or miss," she said, explaining a "weird" trend of random weekdays performing better than others that is still difficult to pin down.

Commercial building owners have also been left to figure out what to do with their properties over the past five years.

Class A office spaces — top-of-the-line options — are still doing well despite sputtering office trends. Over 80% of the more than 1.1 million square feet of class A office space downtown was occupied, the Downtown Alliance reported in 2024.

With a strong demand for housing, some developers have decided to convert underperforming and empty office space into apartments. Hines' project to reimagine the historic South Temple Tower is one of several in progress or just wrapping up.

Is this downtown's new normal? Maybe, but leaders and businesses haven't given up on what downtown was before COVID-19.

Helgeson says KBS considered office-to-housing conversion options with its Utah portfolio, but the logistics didn't make sense. It opted instead to reinvest its office portfolio, upgrading its older properties to keep them in the class A realm.

After losing a long-term client at Second + State, a KBS property, the company spent the past few years transforming the interior to create the types of amenities companies currently want in a workplace. Crews improved a business lounge, added a "large scale" conference center and expanded a gym with brand new equipment, among other trends tenants want.

Those helped give the building new life. It ultimately brought in 10 tenants in 2024, including multiple new faces that filled in over a third of the building. Helgeson said another one of its buildings is now outpacing pre-pandemic levels in certain categories.

He explains that many in the finance, insurance, real estate and legal industry have been more willing to return to the office over the past five years, but the tech sector is also starting to come around.

It's too early to know if that means overall downtown numbers can recover, but he and others remain optimistic.

"We're really bullish on the health of downtown Salt Lake City," he said.

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