The Urban Revival Is Over
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
EDIT: I should add that my point is, there's no reason it couldn't remain this way forever. Urban revival could be over, even though the desire for it isn't.
As an aside, I'd say people satisfying their desire to have their own space is great thing that we should be optimizing for.
The sad part is the inflated rents don't seem to go towards these externalities either, but to landlords' pockets and land managers' margins. Even though the price is theoretically correct, the market reflects it for the wrong reasons giving the sell side an undeserved moral argument.
Rent in SF is going down actually. 2 years ago we moved into our apartment with my girlfriend and whatever price they mentioned our immediate response "YES WHERE DO I SIGN" just because we were so happy to even find a vacancy at all.
1 year ago they wanted to raise our rent $400 (about 6%), we negotiated it down to a $40 increase. Pretty good right?
Well, this year we negotiated our rent down by almost $300. In SoMa. Our rent is now cheaper than it was when we first moved in.
Next year we're hoping to move to a bigger place for the same price or cheaper. It's probably going to be possible.
Fun fact: Our apartment building considers it a success if they get 50% of their tenants to renew the lease.
Florida cites 5-15% increases in some cities. That's like returning to the terribly violent year of... 2010 or so?
https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2016-09-19/chicago-driv...
We're still 300% below the violent crime rate in the early 90s.
Gentrification and renewal came to blows right in the middle and left what was probably the greatest blemish on the urban unchanged... because those were where the actual poverty was all along in the first place. The urban cores that got "renewed" were never squalor and dilapidation - they might not have been as trendy, but city centers have too much general access to be that useless no matter the popular trends. Unless you have a city like Detroit they just cannot degrade that much.
Which really means all this hype about renewal is really just vapid air. Nobody is putting big money into actually innovating on the city concept, its all about buying politicians for favorable zoning over actually making anything lasting and meaningful out of the interest in urban renewal.
My city was almost completely dead as recently as the 90s. Very high crime, lots of abandoned buildings, no businesses in the city center, only poor people lived downtown. Today there is a brewery on every corner, food trucks parked outside every day, live music almost every night of the week, and tons of people who don't own cars making it because downtown is an amazing place to be.
And you talk about Detroit: Detroit was one of the biggest benefactors of the urban renewal. Sure it's not back to its pre-1968 glory days, but downtown is a safe and entertaining place to be, plenty of young people hang out, Woodward Ave in particular is hopping pretty much every night of the week. It went from being the place you warned your kids about to being the place you take your kids for a weekend while you watch a baseball game.
It's easy to look at Manhattan and say "so much for urban renewal", but look at smaller cities in the Rust Belt. Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, Detroit, Grand Rapids, Cleveland, Cincinnati, St Louis. All cities that just 20 years ago were a death trap if you were there after dark, and certainly not a place you want to live. Now it's hard to tell their downtown cores were ever abandoned in the first place.
Rome wasn't rebuilt in a day.
according to the stats- population wise they went from ~1 mil in 2009 to under 700k in 2016. there are a couple of decent 1x1 mile enclaves there - midtown, greektown and nearby sports arenas other than that it sucks.
>> Cleveland
much nicer than it used to be overall but plenty of areas where you have to watch your back. also, while not as drastic as Detroit, population figures are declining as well.
Milwaukee is marginally better than it used to be but barely a poster child for "urban renewal".
Can we not just agree that Detroit (et al) are better off than they were 20 years ago and that this is a good thing overall? You can nitpick "yeah but it's still not the greatest city in the world" all you want, but you might find that no one else gives a fuck about your definition. Progress is progress no matter how you want to redefine it.
>much nicer than it used to be
That's quite literally all I'm saying. That's the very definition of "urban renewal". Better than it used to be.
but them numbers don't lie either :) if some city has it's population go down by 30% I don't think this qualifies as "renewal" even if a couple of areas has gotten better within that same timeframe.
gentrification - as in very targeted/high density (in some cases literally a few blocks type deal) move of young-ish professionals into formerly dilapidated areas - it does exist no doubt and in some (very few) cases - like LES in Manhattan - can be a pre-cursor to a more global "renewal". But these types of cases are few and far in between.
I guess my point is there hasn't been a significant urban renewal to speak of lately, the kind that can be "over" because it has to kick in first before that can happen.
Think of it this way: if I refactor my app so it runs faster and hits more customer use cases, but has 1000 fewer lines of code, would you argue that it's a worse app now?
I live in the Midwest and I've seen these cities first-hand over the course of several decades, and honestly your opinion is so dramatically off from the reality of these cities that all I can say is "you're so incredibly wrong" and walk away.
You're so incredibly wrong.
That's not apples to apples though. Smaller app == good. City population declining is not necessarily "bad" per se but doesn't scream "urban revival" either.
Then there's the largest municipal bankruptcy in US history they went through in 2013. Doesn't really help with painting a picture of a thriving community even if they managed to clean up a few blocks here and there.
>> Still better than Flint...
you're not setting the bar very high are you :)
Hm? Every city in the states that I've lived in (NYC, Denver, Portland, San Francisco, Oakland) and some outside the states (Wellington) have seen tons of growth and development, well outside of what could typically be construed as the downtown.
In my own city, the rising home values have made it economically viable to pour money into formerly decaying row houses that were built for working class families over a century ago. So at least a lot of the ancient, unsafe wiring, plumbing, lead paint, asbestos, etc., is being dealt with by people who can afford to foot the bill.
I hope that, with the return to the suburbs, we distribute those suburbs around the country instead of having a few instances of enormous sprawl. If we continue to scale just a few cities outwards until traffic gets catastrophic, we're going to be spending a hell of a long time commuting. (Even if there's transit, because transit for single-family-home sprawl will never work that well).
Electric cars should be able to mitigate the worst of the environmental impacts.
That assumes the energy used to charge the cars is clean. It also excludes the cost of laying tarmac to everywhere.
In general, humans living closer together conserves more natural resources.
Most of the increases in crime aren't felt in areas that urban revivalists move to, but rather in areas to the south and west that for all intents and purposes might as well be different cities.
The murder rate in Englewood is a poor explanation for whether or not families will remain in Roscoe Village or Bucktown.
http://www.pewresearch.org/ft_dual-income-households-1960-20...
Short commutes to urban centered jobs are VERY attractive to such families. It might mean the urban core boom is over but cities are more than just fancy downtown neighborhoods.
I, personally, have two older, completely paid for cars. When one eventually goes, I will not feel the need to replace it immediately since I can use Lyft to get around if my remaining car is offline.
Once transportation goes entirely autonomous, vehicle speeds could slowly creep up, making farther suburbs more accessible.
We're talking at least one decade, but probably several decades, but things are going to change pretty dramatically.
Edit: Richard Florida is a very famous urbanist, but take his predictions with a grain of salt. He has been wrong before, self-admittedly so (https://jacobinmag.com/2017/08/new-urban-crisis-review-richa...). The descriptive aspects of this article might be right (the urban rush is slowing or reversing, for certain reasons), but his prescriptive descriptions- maybe less so.
Only this doesn't make any more sense now than it did sense.
People are born every year, not in spurts.
Thus the flux of "tech yupsters" coming into SF should be as constant as those getting married and going to the suburbs -- keeping the state steady.
If that isn't the case, it's not because "those tech yupsters eventually started family" (which every generation does at some point anyway), but because the influx of young tech people to SF had peaked at some point in the past.
More generally, people are born in spurts. The baby boom generation and their children, the millennials, are larger than adjacent generations.
Actually the post-millennials are 69 million, over 66 millions for the millennials. And the baby-boomers were 76 million.
Relative to what, exactly? Relative to teachers, office workers, state employeers - sure.
Relative to the cost of living? Hardly "high".
Yes of course, those must be the reasons why young people liked to live in easy to maintain and affordable properties near their place of business.
San Francisco doesn't need to become Manhattan. It could jump light years ahead if it tried to be more like Queens.
Maybe some new, large, remote-first organizations will be born, but it seems unlikely that they would pay rich-country salaries.
Of course, even in remote-first occasional face time is important. So some traveling is involved.
The other failure mode is where the rich cities eat the country. Japan did that - Tokyo and Osaka are growing, and the rest of the country is emptying out. China is trying desperately to keep Beijing from growing further.
Comparing with slums in third world countries is ridiculous. The US has plenty of slums. White people and businesses fleeing cities makes it worse, not better. I don't know how you confused cause and effect so badly to think cities cause poverty.
I'm failing to see how most of US 'middle-class" suburb district do not amount to slums.
Of course walled communities near rich cities are well off, but other than that look at what these suburbs are in flyover states and poorer part of south-east
Yes, they are for sure. I'm not speaking about the at all.
What is a slum? A place where lots of people whose socioeconomic peculiarities prevent them from engaging in a meaningful economic activity. They can't get education, meaningful job locally, or have enought money to relocate. Eventually, overconcentration of such people weeds out all remaining economic activity out of the area and drives value of whatever is there down.
https://www.amazon.com/Great-Inversion-Future-American-City/...
Or are you just making the claim that the upper middle class don't go to college, don't have jobs, and don't make any money? Because that's even more ridiculous.
One city represents the entire country, after all.