ST. LOUIS — Downtown St. Louis' activity recovery is poor compared with other North American markets, ranking only ahead of San Francisco, according to research from the University of Toronto that cites mobile phone data.
The university's School of Cities said that for a period from December 2022 to February 2023, St. Louis' downtown recovery ranked 62nd out of 63 markets, with just 38% of the activity level from the same period in 2019, before the Covid-19 pandemic. It said it obtained the activity level by dividing the sum of a downtown area's device counts by the corresponding period in 2019. It aggregated mobile phone trajectory data documenting the number of visits to places of interest downtown from SafeGraph Inc., a Denver firm.
San Francisco was the only market with worse activity recovery than St. Louis, at 32%. St. Louis peer markets all performed better, though still well below 2019 levels: Indianapolis (41%), Kansas City (47%), Detroit (52%), Nashville (66%) and Milwaukee (76%), for example. Salt Lake City saw the best result, at 135%.
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