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The Street

Samanda Dorger

The Cities With the Weakest and Strongest Recovery After Two Years of Pandemic

Brookings Pandemic Home Prices Calif Fla San Francisco Texas United States

The U.S. economy was on a tear in 2019. It grew 2.3%, added 2.1 million jobs, and unemployment was at a historic low of 3.5%.

Cities were thriving. The Brookings Metro Monitor found that from 2009 to 2019, 179 of the nation’s 191 largest metro areas had posted growth in jobs, adult employment rates, and median earnings.

But the record-long U.S. economic expansion ground to a halt in March 2020, when the novel coronavirus was declared a national emergency and many U.S. states began to shut down to prevent its spread. By April 2020, unemployment reached 14.8%.

Back then, Brookings predicted that cities most reliant upon certain vulnerable industries, such as energy, leisure and hospitality, would be hit hardest, while tech-oriented university towns were expected be safest.

To find out how cities are faring since the pandemic hit, Brookings gathered employment and housing data as well as economic indicators like retail vacancies and workplace visits from 192 metro areas with populations over 250,000.

The results are mixed. Among the country’s 53 largest cities of over 1 million, the unemployment recovery is weakest in Las Vegas, where it's 1.8% higher than pre-pandemic, New York (1.6%) and Houston (1.4%.) Of 191 U.S. metro areas with populations of at least a quarter million, 121 (63%) had fewer jobs in March 2022 than in February 2020, Brookings says.

And while many tech workers may be enjoying a life of mostly working from home, the loss of these office workers has had a significant impact on small businesses in many cities.

Retail vacancy recovery is weakest in San Francisco, where work visits are down 32.7%, according to Brookings. The absence of office workers’ earnings that once flowed to cafes, retail outlets, restaurants and entertainment in the city has had a big impact on the city’s downtown, where swaths of shops, restaurants and cafes remain closed, the San Francisco Chronicle reported in June. A record high 20.4 million square feet of office space, or roughly 24% of the citywide total, was vacant at the end of the first quarter of this year, and San Francisco unlikely to ever get office workers returning more than 50% of the time, according to the Chronicle.

In New York City, as of April this year, at least 1,000 restaurants have closed since March 2020 due to the pandemic, according to New York Eater.

And college towns have not emerged unscathed, Brookings reports. The extended absence of students seems to have resulted in permanent business closures in several places. Of the metro areas with significant increases in retail vacancies, several are college towns—Ann Arbor, Mich.; Boulder, Colo.; College Station, Texas; Lansing, Mich.; and Santa Cruz, Calif.

Here are the cities that Brookings found to have the strongest and weakest recoveries in jobs, work visits and housing prices over two years of pandemic.