Healing the heart of the Queen City — will Uptown return?

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More than 100,000 people used to circulate through Uptown Charlotte every day as commuters, employees and customers flowed through the central business district as part of their daily routine. They were like the vibrant lifeblood of a healthy human body.

Then the Coronavirus pandemic hit, and in a grisly mirroring of physical disease and economic illness, the quarantine orders and work-from-home mandates cut off that flow. 

Like many of America’s cities, Charlotte’s businesses were decimated with people staying home to work in relative safety instead of engaging in the time-honored tradition of their commute to work at their desks in towers that reach for the sky.

But now that the end is in sight for the scourge that cost so many lives and rearranged the world’s economy, will Uptown be able to restart the heart of the queen, or has the muscle atrophied so much that the beat will be gone forever? 

For one Charlotte market-watcher, the answer is that we’ve seen this work-from-home trend before. It didn’t last then, and it won’t last now.

“At the end of the 90’s many banks were experimenting with having employees work from home,” said Dennis Marsoun, broker at Church Street Realty who specializes in Uptown real estate. “As I was selling computers to First Union at the time, it provided me with pretty good business. The banks slowly found out that productivity started going down and managers complained that they were losing control of their employees. It ground to a halt.”

For Marsoun, who focuses on Uptown’s walkability and has been known for many years as the realtor who doesn’t own a car, history is about to repeat itself when it comes to the end of work-from-home policies in a post-pandemic world.

“I am hearing in today’s pandemic environment many employers are starting to move up target dates to have their employees come back to their offices,” he said. “Floor plates are looking to be rearranged to allow for more space per employee than before.”

The effect of the pandemic on Uptown cannot be denied, though. 

“The biggest effect is the most obvious—there was hardly anybody uptown,” said Ely Portillo of the UNC-Charlotte Urban Institute. “I’ve been on a couple sunny Friday afternoons in the past couple months, and it’s still strange and unsettling to see nothing but empty seats in Romare Bearden Park at lunchtime, or no line and only one customer at the Halal food cart at Trade & Tryon. To see only a couple other people on what’s usually an extremely busy block, and realize it’s not a holiday or a weekend, is still just bizarre.”

Portillo said he sees three primary groups of people missing from Uptown since the pandemic started: The 120,000 or so daily center city workers, the regular business travelers, and those who came uptown for special events, like concerts and Panthers games. 

“With all of those being pretty much shut down for a full year, it’s been hard on businesses that rely on those streams of customers,” he said. 

Marsoun said the major things that Uptown stood to lose during the Pandemic were the things that attracted people to the heart of the Queen City in the first place—an energetic Uptown lifestyle.

“The pre-pandemic attraction of downtown was the proximity of all the dining and entertainment spots all within walking distance of most anywhere downtown,” Marsoun said. “As things begin to return to normal, I would expect to see all venues promoting the reopening.”

And he expects Uptown to return to its former rhythm, just not immediately.

“The pandemic has changed how companies look at workspace and that square footage will rise. New buildings coming on the market, Bank of America, Honeywell, Deloitte, Ally, all will be mostly fully occupied,” Marsoun said. “Some other buildings will produce excess space which will encourage other companies to expand and new companies to relocate to Charlotte due to quality of life issues. I believe by late August we will begin to see the return to downtown.”

Portillo said he agrees, to a point.

“I don’t think there’s much chance that full-remote work will become a permanent fixture for a large number of employees,” Portillo said. “There are kinds of work that we can do remotely and kinds of work that I think we’ve all realized work a lot better in person. Living the rest of our lives via Zoom is an increasingly unappealing prospect for many of us.”

But he does understand that nationally, large corporations like Ford, Target and Salesforce are changing the way they handle doing business. 

“There’s increasing recognition that not everyone needs to be in the office every day for a full eight hours just because that’s the way we’ve always done it,” Portillo said. “I think hybrid schedules, with two to three days a week in the office, will become increasingly common.”

Marsoun is less inclined to agree to the idea of hybrid schedules. His experience in the 1990s makes him almost convinced that Uptown will return to normal by as early as 2022.

“WFH was a necessity for companies to continue to do business, but note that businesses all had declining growth,” Marsoun said. “Managers have a more difficult time controlling out-of-office workers and will want to return to in-house. Initially it may be a blend of in office time and WFH, but by mid 2022 I expect WFH to shrink considerably. I also believe that people want to be with people.  WFH employees will look forward to re-engaging with someone other than their families and pets!”

As to the economics behind the recovery of normal circulation in the Uptown system, Portillo has his eye on whether the CBD can withstand the reduction in population.

“Does Uptown work as well if only half, or two-thirds, of the white-collar employees come in physically every day? If a lot more people get a lot more flexibility, can the same core of businesses survive on 80,000 people a day? How will they have to change?” he asked. “Will all the hotels we’re building now make it if the business travel market doesn’t come back for years? All of these questions are still really hard to forecast, because no one knows how many of us are going to hybrid work and how businesses, and infrastructure like transit and roads, will adjust to that.”

But Marsoun keeps his focus on the real estate in Uptown and feels like the space will still be valuable when the crowds begin to flow again.

“I think the Commercial Realtors will experience significant growth in the coming 36 months,” Marsoun said. “In those three years I would expect to see a number of relocations and expansions further growing the city. New buildings can be expected in the Legacy Union development, activity around the Spectrum Arena and Brevard Street, and the North Tryon plan promises to have our streets narrowed and congested for some time to come.”

He also points out that construction hasn’t exactly disappeared from Uptown during the pandemic either. 

“Orange and yellow vests have replaced business dress downtown for the past year,” he said. “Construction activity has continued with dazzling speed this whole time. Expansion of 5G coverage, road repair, building updates, new construction, it has been amazing. I do not see that slowing down.”

And Portillo sees the possibility of opening things up for smaller players as a result of the reorganization of hybrid schedules.

“We have seen companies move to trim and reconfigure their office space, like Grant Thornton relocating to South End and cutting almost half their square footage, or Atrium announcing they’re looking to trim 10 percent of their space,” Portillo said. “That could prevent a shortage of office space, because each of those moves opens up more space to sublease and get back on the market. So, if a lot of big companies are cutting down on their square footage in the next few years, that should open up more opportunities for companies to enter Uptown, especially smaller companies that haven’t been considered as tenants because they’re not able to take down a huge amount of square footage at once.”

But as the Queen City heals from the pandemic alongside its residents, one thing is for sure–the beat goes on.