Brian Kurtz, president and CEO of the Downtown Tulsa Partnership (DTP), delivered an upbeat update on the state of downtown during a recent Tulsa Regional Chamber Executive Committee meeting.

More than $600 million of development is in the pipeline downtown, and since 2008, about $1.56 billion in public and private investment has poured into downtown, he said.

Kurtz drew his figures from a 33-page “State of Downtown Tulsa” report the Downtown Tulsa Partnership released in May.

“We cannot talk about how downtown and development is performing right now without really understanding the impact of COVID and the pandemic,” he said. “But we know these office buildings really emptied overnight in March of 2020.”

The city’s downtown has made strong gains in return-to-work rates, and by March of 2023, downtown had experienced a 70% return to in-person employment, he said.

As for housing, the roughly 5,000 people living downtown represents about a 25% increase since 2010, Kurtz said.

Rental units make up close to 85% of the downtown residential market, but there is a demand for an additional 4,000 rental and owner-occupied units in the area over the next 10 years.

“That is across the spectrum of affordability, from low-income workforce housing all the way up to luxury housing,” Kurtz said. “There is a need for housing period downtown.”

Downtown welcomed nearly 2 million visitors in 2022.

“Our visitor data is essentially back to where it was pre-pandemic on a monthly basis in downtown,” Kurtz said. “Fridays are certainly the busier days.

“…And we are able to tell that they are staying in downtown for an average of more than two hours. They are coming into downtown, seeing a show, going to dinner beforehand and staying for a drink afterwards.”

Enthusiasm also is growing for the Arena/Medical District, he said. In the works in that area is a Veterans Affairs hospital that will occupy the former Kerr-Edmondson state office complex on the west side of downtown.

The hospital will be affiliated with the neighboring Oklahoma State University Medical Center and is part of a larger, $450 million project that will include a 100-bed inpatient mental health facility and OSU Pharmaceutical Research Lab and Clinical Center.

The medical complex will be the largest construction project in downtown Tulsa since the Williams Center in the 1970s, according to a Tulsa World story published in January.

“We are ecstatic, and I think this entire community should be tremendously excited and very grateful for the amount of investment that is taking place on the western side of our downtown,” Kurtz said. “These projects are game changers for the way a city of our size is operating.”