Downtown Houston - Economy

Economy

Downtown has more than 150,000 workers employed by 3,500 businesses. The Downtown District's fact sheet says that projections estimated that the employee population would grow by about 1.4% per year. Major employers include Chevron, Continental Airlines, JPMorgan Chase, and Shell Oil Company. Downtown Houston has between 35% and 40% of the Class A office locations of the business districts in Houston. As of 1997 TrizecHahn was the largest landlord in Downtown Houston. As of that year it had seven towers with 6,000,000 square feet (560,000 m2) of Class A office space; the company had 25% of all of the Class A office space in Downtown Houston.

In the mid-1980s, the bank savings and loan crisis forced many tenants in Downtown Houston buildings to retrench, and some tenants went out of business. Joel Warren Barna of Cite 42 said that this development further caused Downtown Houston to decline. In 1986 the Downtown Houston occupancy rate of Class A office space was 81.4%. The Downtown Houston business occupancy rate of all office space increased from 75.8% at the end of 1987 to 77.2% at the end of 1988. In the early 1990s Downtown Houston still had more than 20% vacant office space. Preliminary data for the year 1996 stated that around a dozen companies relocated to Downtown during that year, bringing 2,800 jobs and filling 670,000 square feet (62,000 m2) of space. In 1997 Tim Reylea, the vice president of Cushman Realty Corp., said that "None of the major central business districts across the country has seen the surburban-to-downtown shift that Houston has."

By 2000, demand for Downtown office space increased, and construction of office buildings resumed. Debbie Wilson, an office broker for Crescent Real Estate Equities, said in 2001 that many energy trading firms have offices in Downtown Houston because Downtown has many backup sources of electrical power and telecommunications resources. Nancy Sarnoff of the Houston Business Journal said in 2001 that the decline of Enron was "shifting the direction of the downtown office market from one of the strongest in the country to an area of uncertainty." The cutbacks by firms such as Dynegy, in addition to the fall of Enron, caused the occupancy rate of Downtown Houston buildings to decrease to 84.1% in 2003 from 97.3% less than two years previously. In 2003, the types of firms with operations in Downtown Houston typically were accounting firms, energy firms, and law firms. Typically newer buildings had higher occupancy rates than older buildings. In 2004, the real estate firm Cresa Partners stated that the vacancy rate in Downtown Houston's Class A office space was almost 20%. In 2009, 10% of Downtown Houston's office space was vacant.