CLEVELAND — In March 2020, like every other city in Ohio, downtown Cleveland was a ghost town. Businesses temporarily closed. Downtown workers began commuting from their kitchen tables. Although downtown Cleveland’s recovery from the start of the COVID-19 pandemic has proven to be modestly more robust than some other cities, downtown officials and business owners believe there’s still a long way to go.
The most recent data from the Downtown Cleveland Alliance shows varying levels of recovery across the so-called ‘three-legged stool’ that makes up the downtown economy: residents, visitors and office workers. The DCA’s September 2022 report, which includes data from the month of August, revealed that the number of office workers is an estimated 61% of pre-pandemic levels.
George Tsambounieris, a popular hotdog vendor that has been providing downtown workers with a quick lunch for nearly 40 years, has seen it first hand.
“It’s very slow, very slow. Ever since COVID hit, it’s been very slow. It’s not the same,” Tsambounieris said. “A lot of people are working from home. They need to bring the people back downtown like it was before. Hopefully, they will come back slowly but surely. We need more people to come to work.”
Tsambounieris, who routinely sets up shop outside the Cuyahoga County Administrative Headquarters at East 9th and Prospect, said the slow-but-steady return of downtown office workers is reflected in his bottom line.
“I’m surviving, barely. Barely surviving. I’m taking it one day at a time,” Tsambounieris said.
Although the most recent data shows the downtown workforce is estimated to be at 61% of pre-pandemic levels, Michael Deemer, the president and CEO of the Downtown Cleveland Alliance, said Cleveland’s recovery has been stronger than in other cities.
“Downtown is doing a lot better than it was just a couple of years ago. We’re making a lot of progress in Downtown Cleveland but we have a lot of work to do,” Deemer said. “The office workers have been the slowest to return… That’s not where we want to be. It’s better than the national average which is about 50%, but we really want to see that number get up to 80 to 85%. I think the biggest challenge is employers want their employees to come back but employees have options now.”
The data broadly shows that working from home is no longer a necessity brought on the pandemic. Instead, remote and hybrid work environments are clearly here to stay.
According to research published earlier this year by the Fund for Our Economic Future, a survey of 5,000 working-age adults found a majority workers preferring to work entirely remotely or in some hybrid type work arrangement.
Because of that, Deemer said it may not be possible for there to be a 100% recovery in terms of downtown office workers. Instead, the other two legs supporting the three-legged stool will have to be stronger.
“We will get to 100% recovery. Downtown is going to look a lot different. We’re going to have a better mix of residents and office workers,” Deemer said. “The recovery will be 100% but it’s going to look different than it did before.”
While downtown workers have been slow to return, downtown visits and the number of people living downtown have shown strong gains over much of the year. In August, the city’s downtown area logged 4.7 million visits, according to the DCA’s most recent report. That number is widely expected to increase for the month of September and October, due in part to the NFL season and MLB playoffs getting underway.
Outside of major sporting events, the Downtown Cleveland Alliance, in partnership with City Hall, has embarked on a marketing blitz, culminating in dozens of special events, pop-up attractions and live music in an effort to lure people back downtown.
“We’ve seen the numbers go up over the course of the summer. We need to keep pushing until they go up more,” Deemer said. “We would have experiences that we would only find in Downtown Cleveland that makes you want to be here. We did hear from a lot of people coming back that maybe hadn’t been downtown in a while, they’re rediscovering what they loved about being in Downtown Cleveland.”
