President’s Message: Downtown Salt Lake City Has Entered Its Most Consequential Decade in Over a Century

The numbers in this year’s Downtown Economic Benchmark Report, produced by the Downtown Alliance, tell a significant story.

• 30.7 million customer days with increased visits among visitors, workers and residents. The Alliance defines a customer day as anytime someone spends more than an hour Downtown. Measurement is made using mobile phone location data.
  
• 4.7 million attendees at downtown sports, arts and entertainment venues. Attendance grew 16.3% over 2024, driven by attendance growth among Utah Mammoth fans, arts patrons and Clark Planetarium guests.
  
• 412,000 Salt Palace convention attendees, the highest attendance since 2019.
  
• $2.1 billion in downtown consumer spending on shopping, dining, entertainment and accommodations, up 6.1% over 2024.
  
• Downtown’s residential census is up 63% since 2019, and downtown adults are notably younger, more educated and less car-dependent than the Wasatch Front average.

This is Salt Lake City’s strongest downtown economy in a generation. It is also a downtown in transition. More than $10 billion is committed to 23 downtown projects. The Sports, Entertainment, Culture and Convention District is nearly here. A reimagined Salt Palace will draw the kind of high-spend visitors that lift every business around it. The University of Utah is bringing student housing, programs, colleges and employees to the downtown core. Temple Square is preparing for a six-month open house that will move millions of people through the heart of our capital. And just past the “old boundaries” of downtown comes a Major League Baseball stadium, the Power District, the Western Governors University campus and a nine-acre hospital campus. The momentum is exciting.

Two facts in this report deserve our strategic attention. First, the weekly worker census is down 32% from 2019 as hybrid schedules persist, and a constrained supply of Class A office space could cause us to miss the high-value employers now evaluating downtown. Currently, new inventory is at least three years out. Second, the Salt Palace Convention Center closes in 2027 for a multi-year rebuild. That reconstruction will deliver a world-class facility, but the hotels, restaurants and merchants who depend on convention traffic face a real bridge to cross in the interim.

The work ahead brings opportunity and challenges. This moment belongs to all of us, and it plays to Utah’s greatest strength: We convene, we commit and we act together in building a brighter Utah. If you haven’t reviewed the Benchmark Report yet, I encourage you to do so. 

To all of you engaged in this work, thank you. Our Downtown is rising.