’There’s no going back’: Business districts in Charlotte and Raleigh seek new ways to recover

In Charlotte, new office towers are filling up, but older office buildings are having trouble drawing tenants.

In Raleigh, the South Glenwood entertainment district is bustling, but Fayetteville Street, once the vibrant main street at the city’s core, is struggling with empty offices and vacant storefronts.

These contrasts reflect the muddled conditions in the centers of North Carolina’s two largest cities. Urban boosters and city officials are seeking ways to restore the vibrancy drained since 2020 by the arrival of the COVID pandemic. The pandemic spurred a major – and to an unexpected degree, lasting – shift to more people working remotely and fewer coming into downtown business districts.

“2020 changed everything,” said Bill King, head of the Raleigh Downtown Alliance.

King’s counterpart in Charlotte, Michael Smith, president and CEO of Charlotte Center City Partners, echoes him. “There’s no going back to 2019,” he said. “What we experienced collectively changed everything.”

An analysis of downtown activity by the School of Cities at the University of Toronto shows the extent of that change. The Toronto researchers regularly take the number of unique mobile phones in a city’s downtown area and then divide it by the number of unique visitors during the equivalent time period in 2019.

Based on the results, the researchers rank 63 U.S. and Canadian cities by their rate of downtown recovery. In the latest ranking comparing March to May 2023 to the same period in 2019, Charlotte ranked 31st at 63 percent and Raleigh ranked 57th at 44 percent

Notably, the two cities have diverged in recent months in their ongoing rate of center city recovery as measured by cell phone data. On Feb. 6, both were nearly even, with Charlotte’s recovery rate at 59 percent and Raleigh’s at 55 percent. But on June 12, the latest date available, Charlotte’s rate of recovery had risen to 65 percent and Raleigh had fallen to 43 percent.

So what to do? In Raleigh, King’s group and the City of Raleigh have launched a study of ways to restore activity to the downtown core. The project, supported by $250,000 in federal COVID relief funds, will outline options for the district’s future.

“We realized that for a lot of reasons we need a new strategy that reckons with the post-COVID world,” King said.

One aim, he said, is to create strong links between Fayetteville Street’s hotels and restaurants and events and activities at Raleigh’s new 308-acre Dix Park near downtown.

In Charlotte, the city is following a vision plan adopted by the City Council in December 2021. But Smith said adjustments will continue as post-COVID work patterns emerge. Office workers are coming back, but not all the way. “Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday are vibrant and Monday is firming up,” he said, but Fridays remain “as soft as they can be.”

Ron Blatman has visited cities across the U.S. as executive director of the documentary series “Saving the City: Remaking the American Metropolis.” He is familiar with Raleigh and Charlotte and, as a San Francisco resident, keenly aware of cities’ post-COVID challenges.

Blatman told me Raleigh and Charlotte have different obstacles to achieving a full rebound in their urban centers. Raleigh’s PNC Arena, he said, should be downtown, not isolated on the city’s western edge. Charlotte has a strong corporate base and growing cultural appeal, he said, but it needs more retail in its central district.

Raleigh and Charlotte could boost activity by bringing local university programs into center city buildings. “One thing that has happened in a lot of cities very successfully is getting some pieces of that educational world right into the core of the city,” he said.

But Blatman’s message for both cities is that a major overhaul and new public subsidies are not needed. He thinks market forces will bring back many office workers and the number of people living downtown will increase. Cities, he said, need to focus on their essential functions: pick up the trash, provide public transportation and ensure that visitors and residents feel safe.

“It’s really blocking and tackling,” he said. “It’s doing what cities are supposed to do, which is keep your streets clean, keep your people safe, keep activity high and make sure people can get in and out easily and they feel like it’s someplace where people want to be.”

The pandemic turned downtowns into ghost towns overnight, but governments delivering strong services and planners pursuing bold ideas can make these iconic districts the centers of city life again.