Five years after COVID, Downtown Dallas has adapted to new work realities

This month marks five years since the COVID-19 pandemic brought the world to a standstill.

And while many aspects of life have returned to normal, the way we work has seen a dramatic shift.

Remote and hybrid work have transformed our professional lives and places like Downtown Dallas have been adapting to it.

When the pandemic forced offices to close in 2020, remote work became a necessity. It’s something the nonprofit Downtown Dallas, Inc. has been tracking closely as it keeps an ear to the pulse of everything that makes downtown Dallas thrive.

“We track our daytime population very closely,  how many workers are in and out every day – and what we've seen, rather than really a shift to remote work, we've seen a shift of flexibility,” said Evan Sheets, VP of planning and policy for Downtown Dallas, Inc., or DDI.

The term ‘hybrid work’ has become a norm for numerous offices and workspaces across multiple industries, where workers split their time between the office and remote work each week.

“Now, that said, office work continues to remain really strong. And DFW, in general, led through most of the pandemic and continues to lead in having people back in the office, filling up these buildings on a daily basis,” Sheets said.

He said big companies like Dallas-based AT&T and DART, as well as banking giant JP Morgan Chase have made a push for a full return to in-person work this year, five days a week.

"We think remote work will be shifting more toward in-person work just because it's the trend we track today. And we don't expect that to change. We tick up about 3% to 4% every year, year over year annually, with people coming back into the office,” said Sheets.

Even rush hour traffic has changed slightly with the new norms five years post-COVID.

Hybrid work has brought new patterns we never saw before 2020. Sheets said Fridays and Mondays are seeing lower volumes than they were before, especially on holidays or after certain event weekends, where people have more flexibility on when to work from home.

But the middle of the week is still just as busy as ever.

"We see that we'll likely continue to have more people coming into the office than having a remote work experience. A lot of people that moved out and further away, they're seeing that their companies are asking them to be in the office more and more and so a lot of those folks are looking to get back into the city,” said Sheets. “So we have a lot of people moving into downtown and we've continued to have really strong residential growth in our neighborhood in downtown."

Looking back at the beginning of COVID, DDI observed higher vacancies in downtown office space because of that period of uncertainty.

“There was hesitancy to sign new leases without knowing exactly what you needed,” he said. “And so now what we've seen is a lot more certainty in the market. We've seen leasing tick upward.”

For existing offices, DDI said it is seeing a lot of renovations, as demand grows for higher quality office space that makes up for the shift away from home.

Some of the open office space has also been converted to residential opportunities as demand for housing grows with the growing North Texas population.

If you think about the buildings downtown, these buildings are often over a million square feet. They're huge properties. And so within that, some of the vacant space that's been freed up is being converted to residential. So we're continuing to see multiple sectors benefit from the overall changes in the work experience within downtown,” said Sheets.

As for new office space construction, Sheets says they've slowed nationally. For the first time, he added they haven't seen any new office starts in Dallas in 2025.

However, he says that could be an opportunity for existing properties to absorb new leases and fill up prime real estate in downtown with different types of projects besides offices. This data is all a science that can help plan new visions for downtown.

" For us, it is a science. It's something that we have to track on a daily basis to know what the health of the community is and then how we can be good stewards to make sure we're having a vibrant, exciting, interesting downtown on a daily basis,” said Sheets.