Downtowns are dead, dying or on life support, says urban policy expert
fortune.com
fortune.com
I remember seeing an article where someone was against zoning that completely eliminated industrial uses in their town or something. She felt that it was possible to allow for clean industry without ruining the environment, but that's harder to regulate. It's easier to say "Nope. No industry. It's dirty and polluting." than to have regulations which allow for industry but require it to meet certain standards of air quality, etc.
She lost. The zoning or regulatory changes she was against went through.
At best, the short term fixes are ameliorative. Free parking and lunch vouchers isn't going to "fix" this problem, and as the article also says (as have others published here) conversion to residential is a mixed bag: it is increadibly costly, major code issues abound, and from sales records has a high failure rate in the market: expectations of value differ.
I tend to think there's a massive listed property trust write down either gone through, overdue or waiting for China to finish falling over. Once the dust settles, the cost of re-development of the city core will differ.
I hang on a forum for city planning [*] regrettably called skyscrapercity.com -Regrettably because in fact, most cities are not skyscrapers and most cities with skyscrapers don't need more of them. I know I am an outlier in this belief in my home town (Brisbane) and it is fantastically difficult to bust through the persisting claims "taller is better" -In short (hah) it isn't always so, and it isn't the vision of the city we want to either work or live in, as this article points out.
It's not covid, it's us. We've been heading here for a long time. We don't like living and working in Canyons. Livable cities have a 15 minute circumference to everything you need including water, parks, shops, and services. They are built on a human scale which typically tops out at 8 to 10 storeys and have a small Central Business District scaled to the commerce needs. A very few world cities need more, and all of them are under significant stress regarding land cost, building cost, and heritage preservation. It is actually rare for WW2 to deliver scale opportunities for rebuilding, as it did in Rotterdam and Tokyo. I don' think proposing large scale bombing of major capital cities is a good planning move.
You say that, but don't underestimate the awfulness of London's planning departments: https://academic.oup.com/joeg/article/21/6/869/6213370
That's a great article btw. Thanks!
And it would mean living in a downtown area, which most people don't want to do.
In my town, the downtown area was a train wreck for decades, but they seem to have fixed it. They started by putting residential units around, but that had little effect. Since then, though, they've build quite a lot of boutique and fancy hotels. That did the trick. Downtown is lively now.
But it's also still not a place that people who live in the city go. It's for tourists. Good as a profit center, but it certainly didn't make the area a part of the community.
Also, I think a key word missing from the title is "traditional". The sentence from the article reads "Traditional downtowns are dead, dying or on life support across the U.S. and elsewhere".
Our cities are no longer places for people to live. They are places for people to drive to. Normal people can't afford to live in them anymore so they don't. Now that people aren't commuting either downtown will have to adapt or die.
“older, denser downtowns reliant on professional or tech workers and located within large metros”
Or are you claiming that those things don't exist (in any quantity that matters) in the downtowns of most cities?
Walking over a dead body on my way to work was enough for me to never return to the office.
If the city doesn't enforce the laws on the books yet will hold me accountable for defending myself when the police won't I am not putting myself in a position to answer for laws against the lawlessness.
I didn't mind after midnight crime when I lived downtown. It's now high noon crime with defenders of law are the enemy.
If we get hit with another major pandemic in the relatively near future, we will be even less prepared for it now than we were with Covid, and I predict our lockdowns will be even worse because of it.
BLS doesn't agree with you[0]. After a big drop with Covid, when a bunch of older hospital workers decided it would be a good time to retire, the employment number matched pre-Covid figures by late 2022, and exceeds it now.
> anti-vaccine hysteria has gone mainstream
Rates of typical childhood vaccination (like MMR, DTaP, etc.) dipped only a little, from 95% pre-pandemic to 93% in 2023[1], so there's no evidence to suggest that anti-vaccine hysteria is "mainstream". And I would wager that the 2% difference can be largely attributed to, again, the poor public health policy choices surrounding Covid.
[0]: https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CES6562200001?amp%253bdata_t...
[1]: https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/issue-brief/headed-...
> BLS doesn't agree with you[0]. After a big drop with Covid, when a bunch of older hospital workers decided it would be a good time to retire, the employment number matched pre-Covid figures by late 2022, and exceeds it now.
If demand is higher for care, they could have more total employment and still be more understaffed.
Within the US, a recent Lancet study[1] showed that when adjusted for a variety of health factors (age, rates of diabetes, etc.) -- that is, if every state had the same distribution of health profiles within its population -- then Florida, which had no restrictions on everyday life since later in 2020, had a lower cumulative death rate than California, which had some levels of mandatory masking even earlier in 2023 as well as a higher overall vaccination rate[2].
Looking at all-cause excess mortality is useful, since it avoids the question of who really died "of" Covid vs. "with" Covid, and takes into account the ways that lockdowns were harmful to health (e.g. drug overdose deaths from loneliness and despair).
The available data indicates that the biggest determinant of how susceptible a population was to Covid is its age and overall health (which the US fares quite poorly against many other countries, being both older and more unhealthy on average), and that lockdowns were more or less ineffective in saving lives. And that's even without thinking of the generation of children who grew up during those lockdowns, whose schooling is several years behind and will carry that burden for the rest of their lives.
[0]: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/sweden-covid-and-excess-...
[1]: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
[2]: https://usafacts.org/visualizations/covid-vaccine-tracker-st...
If another disease like the first COVID wave comes along I'll damn well vote out any politician who doesn't support lockdowns.
When there is a super virulent disease spreading rapidly that we don't know the long term effects of (and we still don't years later!) a lockdown is the logical response until we have some idea wtf is going on.
The thing is, we relied on the novelty of something like covid to enforce lockdowns in the first place. Without that overblown fear, voluntary compliance simply won’t be there.
And any government that wants to impose lockdowns will be forced to implement a military response, akin to what China did during covid. That kind of response + hindsight to how useless it is won’t go well.
Go to basically any downtown in any city that isn't one of the big ones. All of the buildings, street art, and street grid are frozen in the 70s, 80s, or 90s.
All of the "action" (if you can call it that) is either in a suburban town square (that's mostly an outdoor mall) or spread out throughout neighborhoods in the suburbs. And you can bet your ass you'll need a car to get to them.
Between COVID having decimated downtown small business and the push into the metaverse, things do not look good for town squares in general. I would love to see the resurgence of walkable suburbs that are small and self-supporting, but it seems like the general "we" wants bigger houses, more chains and more isolation.