That whole return to the office thing isn’t much of a thing in Chicago.
The Windy City ranked third among four cities studied by foot traffic analytics firm Placer.ai, lagging New York and San Francisco and besting only Boston. Some 38 percent more workers visited the office in June compared with a year ago, in contrast to 54 percent in the Big Apple and 84 percent in San Francisco, the Placer report showed. The rate in Boston stood at 31 percent.
Those numbers are still well below pre-pandemic levels. Since June 2019, office visits have plunged 60 percent in San Francisco, 41 percent in Chicago, 34 percent in New York and 25 percent in Boston. Some of the California city’s decrease may stem from its 3 percent population decline between January 2019 and April 2022, leaving fewer workers across the board, Placer said.
An office recovery has been crimped by challenges throughout the first half of 2022, including the Omicron surge. While month-to-month foot traffic picked up in February and March, rising gas prices stalled some would-be commuters.
In Chicago, home to the nation’s second-largest central business district, several companies have downsized their presence in downtown towers. Most recently, global law firm Kennedys Law became the second company to leave the Boeing Building, cutting its office space to 10,000 square feet from 14,000.
Another tenant that recently left the Boeing Building, Here Technologies, adopted a hybrid work policy. Public relations firm Edelman offloaded almost 80,000 square feet of office space in the building next door in November. Chicago has some of the nation’s priciest office buildings outside New York, according to real estate data provider PropertyShark.
A previous Placer.ai report found that while workers in cities including Chicago, New York and San Francisco overall weren’t returning to work in-person, they weren’t necessarily leaving those metro areas. In the New York area, for instance, some people stayed in the city, exiting one borough for another, while others stayed close by moving to New Jersey, Connecticut and upstate New York.
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