Watch Now: Hyatt Place, a new boutique hotel in the Boston Building
Getting the Hyatt Place hotel erected and operational has been a marathon, and project partner Sunny Patel Chatterjee is grateful to reach the finish line.
âThis is a story of survival,â Chatterjee said of the undertaking, which has taken a few years. âWe could have shut the project down. I think the banks would have understood. The city would have understood you know because itâs a federal tax program.
âBut one of the best things that came out of it is that we worked through COVID. We had employees that we had to keep and their jobs didnât get lost. All of our subcontractors had committed to this. So if we had let them go, all those months they had committed to this project would have been gone.â
Credit RegionTrack
Oklahoma wasn’t hit as hard by job losses in the COVID-driven downturn as the rest of the country, but its job recovery hasn’t been nearly as fast, either.
More than half of U.S. jobs lost from February to April have been recovered. Oklahoma has regained less than half. Tulsa is doing even worse, with a little more than one-third recovered.
Speaking Friday at the Tulsa Regional Chamber s State of the Economy virtual event, economist and RegionTrack President Mark Snead said job recovery has also been uneven. Oklahoma roared back at first, getting back more than 50,000 jobs in May and June, but job gains have been slower or negative since. Tulsa’s recovery has been even more up and down.