Economic Development

Supporting Recovery & Revitalization

While 2022 began amid a major COVID outbreak, by year’s end, much of the Downtown market was well on the way to recovery with the residential, hospitality, and retail sectors at or near pre-pandemic levels. The office sector, however, continued to struggle, with uncertainty about how lower occupancy levels and fewer daytime workers might impact DTLA’s overall vitality. Downtowners also continued to have concerns about public realm conditions and public safety.

In response to these challenges, the Economic Development team developed innovative strategies for attraction and promotion: expanding our award-winning DTLA Virtual tour program to include consumer- and hospitality-focused tours; and launching our new DTLA Augmented platform to attract visitors, showcase our major cultural institutions, and activate our public spaces.

The team also continued to build on our position as the leading source of information about DTLA: we continued to publish our quarterly market reports throughout the year; updated our industry-specific reports; and produced our first annual DTLA Outlook & Insights “state of Downtown” report, which included our signature survey of Downtown residents, workers, and visitors.

We promoted these and other DCBID research and reports through our social media channels, our monthly newsletter: “DTLA Business News & Insights,” and our public relations efforts which helped generate positive media coverage in publications ranging from The Wall Street Journal to the Los Angeles Times.

To better serve our local businesses, we merged our newly established Local Business Alliance with our long-standing Marketing Roundtable.

Despite the challenges we continue to face, Downtown remains vital to the LA region - not only as its primary core of commercial activity and most significant job base, but also as a vibrant local community of over 90,000 residents; a dynamic global center of arts, culture, and entertainment; and the critical hub of its regional mass transit system. Maintaining that vitality continues to be the economic development team’s core mission.