# US downtowns by use and square footage

By [Brandon Donnelly](https://brandondonnelly.com) · 2021-07-10

austin, cbd, central-business-district, costar, downtown, honolulu, new-york, new-york-times, real-estate, urbanism

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![](https://storage.googleapis.com/papyrus_images/86cd6a68eb70bb4b38d68f697ffd6a0d.jpg)

This is an interesting chart from [the New York Times](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/07/07/upshot/downtown-office-vulnerable-even-before-covid.html) showing the breakdown of (real estate) uses across the largest downtowns/CBDs in the US. It was put together using satellite data and data from CoStar, including their boundary definitions for each downtown/CBD. The point of the chart is to show that some US downtowns are heavily dominated by office square footage. But if you look a bit closer, there are other interesting takeaways. Look at retail in Honolulu, hotels in Austin, and how much residential many US cities have in their CBDs.

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*Originally published on [Brandon Donnelly](https://brandondonnelly.com/us-downtowns-by-use-and-square-footage)*