Data from Kastle Systems, the security company that operates the ubiquitous key card systems, shows that on Chicago’s best days, Wednesdays, the downtown is still only 45% as full as it was before the pandemic. On Fridays it gets as low as 30%.
To put that in numbers, in March 2018, Crain’s Chicago Business reported there were over 670,000 jobs in downtown Chicago. That means that now, about 335,000 fewer people are downtown on the city’s best days. That’s like all of Sioux Falls, South Dakota not showing up one day.
Looking around my drastically emptier city I feel like the downtown is no longer built for this moment. For 150 years, Chicago’s downtown coursed with people and commerce. You came here to do, never to linger. It wasn’t built at a human scale, because it was filled with so many humans – all the time.
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