COVID changed downtown Boise ‘massively.’ Can recovery occur — and even a ‘boom’?
Phoning from an isolated room at St. Luke’s Boise Medical Center, bar owner Ted Challenger had every reason to feel down last month.
He’d just been taken off oxygen during his second extended hospital stay because of COVID-19. And his three downtown businesses had been shuttered or shackled by coronavirus restrictions for the past year.
Instead, Challenger could barely contain his enthusiasm about the future.
Downtown Boise has been battered by the pandemic. Probably transformed forever, he acknowledged between coughs.
But like a tree that has been pruned, it might just grow back stronger.
“I feel like we’re going to go on one of the biggest restaurant and bar booms we’ve ever seen — in our entire history,” said Challenger, who owns the Amsterdam Lounge, StrangeLove and Dirty Little Roddy’s. “Everything’s going to change. Massively. ... It’s already changing. But I’m happy with it.”
Exactly how — or whether the changes are big or small — is anyone’s guess.
Will office workers come back, giving restaurants coveted lunch crowds? When will conventions return, so that stores and shops will see much-needed foot traffic? Many restaurants that closed have seen their spaces gobbled up by new places eager to open— but will those thrive? Will 8th Street return to its heyday? Will downtown restaurants be hopping this summer?
“I think there’s a lot of optimism that business is going to be strong,” said Dave Krick, who opened Bittercreek Alehouse at 246 N. 8th St. in 1996. “Once we get the population to the point where most have access to the vaccine and are feeling pretty good about it, there’s going to be a strong recovery of business, we hope. But I think we still have some structural issues. One of those being, are people going to come back to their offices.”
Since January 2020, 27 downtown Boise businesses have closed, and 16 of those left during the pandemic, said Jennifer Hensley, executive director of the Downtown Boise Association.
During that same span, 43 new businesses opened, and another 15 are slated to open soon, she said.
“If you look downtown, you can see two empty storefronts, and one of them was empty before the pandemic,” Hensley said in a phone interview. “So I think we’ve been super-resilient.”
However, Hensley added, “nobody is 100%, and businesses are not doing wonderfully. There’s still a lot of recovery that needs to take place.”
Office workers in Boise
Scott Schoenherr, a partner in Rafanelli & Nahas, a Boise commercial real estate development and management company, is confident that workers will return to offices as the pandemic finally subsides. But not all restaurant owners share that outlook, as Bittercreek’s Krick pointed out.
In June or July, Schoenherr’s company plans to begin moving tenants into the new 10-story 11th and Idaho building, across the street from the Boise Plaza building, which also is owned by Rafanelli & Nahas.
The new building is 20% leased, and Schoenherr said he believes they’ll have 50% occupancy by the end of the year.
“What happened in 2020 is there was just a lot of uncertainty,” Schoenherr said. “Everyone was saying, ‘We don’t know what to expect. ... We don’t know if people are coming back to the office.’”
That’s what frightened people like Dan Carruthers.
When the pandemic hit, he felt the impact instantly at his sandwich shop, Tasso, at 401 S. 8th St. in BoDo. Regulars vanished into thin air. “Probably three-fourths of our customers were more than once-a-week eaters,” said Carruthers, the co-owner and operator. “ ... And they all started working from home immediately.”
When Tasso’s lease ended at the end of summer, Carruthers closed it, planning to relocate to a different, more affordable downtown location. But it didn’t pan out. He now plans to reopen Tasso in downtown Eagle next month.
Carruthers would like to return to Boise and open a second location, he said — just not downtown.
“Probably going to avoid the core, honestly,” he said. “ ... Everyone’s learned how to work at home. It’s going to be awhile before people are back down there having lunch, if they ever are. I don’t know.”
Conventions, events and business
During the past 12 months, the coronavirus dealt a devastating blow to convention business not only in Boise, but nationwide. It affected the improved Boise Centre — a $47.5 million expansion completed in 2017 added 80% more floor space — as well as hotels, restaurants, gift shops and other stores.
“The groups of 500, 600, 700 are gone,” Bill Connors, president of the Boise Metro Chamber of Commerce, said in a phone interview. “They have dried up.”
Boise lost 121 conventions and meetings, leading to a loss of $40 million for local businesses, said Carrie Westergard, executive director of the Boise Convention and Visitors Bureau. That’s because the average person who attends a convention from out of town spends about $400 a day, said Pat Rice, executive director of the Boise Centre.
In a normal year, the economic impact of the Boise Centre is about $25 million. Between December 2019 and February 2020, the Centre was flying high, with room tax revenues up $200,000 and operational revenue up about $60,000, Rice said. It was on pace to set attendance and revenue records.
“Then the bottom fell out,” Rice said. “Our revenues (for the year) were down $5 million operationally and almost $3 million in room tax revenue.”
So what happens now? As more people are vaccinated and the virus numbers decline, Connors is optimistic that the convention trade will rebound. He said the city is starting to rebook a lot of cancellations from last year — about 65% to 70% of what it lost.
Rice said the majority of events have been pushed to the last six months of this year or into 2022. And he anticipates that the fourth quarter this year, which ends Nov. 30, might set a Boise Centre record as gatherings return.
Rice also said they “are receiving a lot of inquiries now for additional local meetings and banquets.”
Boise’s hotel boom of the past five years made headlines and offered up hundreds more rooms as the city pushed to draw more conventions and events, and lure more tourism. The pandemic could have been devastating, but hotel business was down only about 25% in 2020, according to Westergard.
“There ended up being more regional leisure and staycation travel,” she said. And every month, Westergard added, “we’re getting a few more calls than we got the month before” on conventions.
That’s good news to business owners such as Kelsey Miller, who said her shops always get a boost from travelers.
Last March, she celebrated the fourth anniversary of her women’s clothing store, Shift Boutique. “Three days later, we closed,” Miller said by phone. Her men’s store next door, Keystone Station, remained closed for a month and a half.
Since Shift had opened in 2016 and Keystone Station a year later, they had increased sales every year, she said. In 2020, sales tanked.
But Miller said she has seen more people out and about lately. “I think we’re on the upswing, so that’s exciting,” she said.
Courtney Holden, owner of Fancy Pants clothing store, said her business survived the pandemic by shifting to digital sales, including shipping to out-of-state customers. Now the company hopes to reopen in a larger space in June next to its old shop, at the site of the former Bank of the West, 825 W. Idaho St.
Holden said sales in February and March were almost back to pre-pandemic levels, and recently, she said, summer outfits and swimsuits have been selling well. She thinks downtown will rebound.
“People are definitely traveling again,” she said. “I think this year will only get better.”
A changed downtown, and a ‘hot’ Boise
Bittercreek Alehouse and its sister saloon, Diablo & Sons, have experienced the same slow, steady bounce in early 2021, owner Krick said. “It’s been dramatic how much more business we’ve had in these first three months of the year from what we were expecting it to be.”
In the long run, Krick said, downtown bars and restaurants probably will see customers’ faces change. Like Carruthers, he isn’t confident that the office-worker population will return to 2019 levels. Consequently, downtown might support fewer offices but develop more housing, he said.
“That changes the landscape of who are the people who occupy our downtown,” Krick said. “For our business, the outcome is optimistic — for most of our restaurants and bars that are down here right now ... and just because of how Boise is positioned.”
Idaho’s capital city was a nationally hyped moving destination prior to the coronavirus pandemic. During the past year, migration from more densely populated areas has pushed Boise’s stock even higher, as potential homebuyers know.
Downtown has drawn attention from out-of-state investors, and real estate values have gone up, Krick said. “And they’re going up fast, because this is a safe place. People recognize that Boise’s probably going to be one of the hotter markets in the country. It’s going to continue to grow.”
Rising property values, higher rents and distant owners could translate into more franchise restaurants, Krick said, possibly costing downtown some of its local personality. “So that’s one thing we’ve got to work on,” he said.
That affordability is one of the main reasons that Carruthers doesn’t see himself reopening Tasso downtown.
“It’s too big and scary for me to bite off that again in the near future,” he said. “It’s so much money down there, man.”
Still, hope fills the air on Main Street.
In November, local fast-casual chain Good Burger closed its flagship store in the Kount building at 1003 W. Main St. “I’m unsure if downtown will pick up soon,” founder and CEO Nicholas Jones explained shortly afterward in an email.
The vacated space quickly was leased by restaurateurs Will and Nicole Primavera. They plan to open a second location of their Meridian burger-and-brew restaurant Sid’s Garage this spring.
“From a business sense, it’s scarier than s---,” Will Primavera admitted.
But the couple is thrilled to be expanding downtown, he added. They are even searching for a location for Donut + Dog, a Village at Meridian restaurant they shuttered during the pandemic before reopening the space as Sid’s Garage.
Why so bullish on downtown Boise?
“It’s going to sound corny,” Primavera said, “but we live here, and we believe in it.”
This story was originally published March 28, 2021 at 5:00 AM with the headline "COVID changed downtown Boise ‘massively.’ Can recovery occur — and even a ‘boom’?."
