The usually sensible Megan McArdle writes in the Washington Post that “Downtown is in deep trouble.” Where she becomes insensible is that she thinks that is a bad thing, arguing that city governments need to take action to lure businesses back into downtowns.
Chicago has the second-largest downtown in the United States, yet that downtown had only 12.5 percent of the jobs in the Chicago urban area before the pandemic, and even less now.
When otherwise sensible people think of a city, they imagine a dense, job-filled downtown surrounded by lower-density residential areas. Yet, as Washington Post writer Joel Garreau wrote more than 30 years ago, downtowns “are relics of a time past.” In fact, he said, downtown-centered cities were the “nineteenth-century version” of a city, and that “We built cities like that for less than a century.”
Frank Lloyd Wright, who died in 1959 but understood 21st-century cities better than most urban planners today, realized that downtowns were obsolete 100 years ago. “In the days of electrical transmission, the automobile and the telephone,” he wrote in 1922, a dense downtown “becomes needless congestion–it is a curse.”
As if in a delayed response to Wright, Harvard economist Edward Glaeser argued in his book, Triumph of the City, that dense downtowns were justified based on the benefits of face-to-face communications. Telephones or even video calls just couldn’t substitute for meeting with potential business partners in person, and such meetings were a lot easier to arrange if all potential business partners were within a few blocks of one another.
Yet the number of businesses in which face-to-face communications are needed has been rapidly declining, and the pandemic merely accelerated that decline by advancing new technologies such as virtual conferences. Even just before the pandemic, an average of just 8 percent of urban jobs in major U.S. urban areas were located in downtowns, a number that was as low as 1.6 percent in Phoenix. That’s hardly evidence that the importance of face-to-face communications was widespread. The pandemic is merely the coup de grâce to a dying part of urban life.
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McArdle frets that empty downtown offices “will leach blight into the surrounding neighborhood.” “Blight” is a word used by urban planners to refer to a neighborhood whose property values are so low that the property owners have no incentive to invest in improvements because the value of their improved property will be brought down by the neighboring decrepitude. I don’t believe this really happens, but urban planners love to use the word because a 1954 Supreme Court decision allowed cities to take properties by eminent domain if they were blighted. In other words, blight gives planners power.
McArdle asks, “if the heart of the city has big dead patches, can the rest of the city be healthy?” The answer is clearly “yes.” Many parts of American cities have had “dead patches,” but the rest of the cities were lively and usually the dead patches came back to life as well. If they didn’t, you would never hear anyone complain about gentrification.
McArdle points out that “public transit systems . . . were often designed to funnel workers into and out of central business districts” and that a reduction in downtown jobs means a rise in transit system subsidies per rider. Yet transit is the most heavily subsidized mode of travel in the United States; keeping such a heavily subsidized industry going is not a justification for keeping downtowns. McArdle says the only alternative is “running fewer buses and trains,” but the real alternative is ending transit subsidies.
Downtowns aren’t going to disappear. Rents may decline, and in the case of some recent high rises, owners may go bankrupt if the rents are sufficient to pay off the construction costs. But that’s a problem for investors, not for the cities: the buildings will still be there and no doubt will still be used, though maybe not by the Fortune 500 clients who were using them before the pandemic.
McArdle is making up a crisis that doesn’t exist and in doing so she is effectively supporting government subsidies to another obsolete institution. Where she normally leans libertarian, in this case she missed the target.
Rescued from what?
Economic forces and policies created by government mandated germaphobia….
New York does not require any more skyscrapers. That type of building is obsolete and no longer suited to the moguls real estate swindles. There are too many of them now — including scores of office towers that are 30 percent-or-less occupied these days, due to Covid-19 and the new mode of working-from-home, now firmly established as a corporate money-saver. The destiny of these buildings is a humongous problem for the city whom without building rents cannot pay for infrastructure. At those ruinous occupancy rates, the reduced revenue cannot pay for taxes, mortgage-financing, and maintenance. The city has also seen scores of hotels go out of business as tourist industry revenue dropped from $4-billion pre-Covid to $531-million post-Covid. These are now long-term trends. The city will continue to contract. There will be a lot of empty skyscrapers, and many of them will not be cared-for.
a 1954 Supreme Court decision allowed cities to take properties by eminent domain if they were blighted. In other words, blight gives planners power.”
So years from now, owners will simply let these 50,60,80 story buildings dilapidate, and get eminent “Compensation”.
Traditional architecture (including its roots in Greek and Roman classicism) demonstrably contributes to positive human health outcomes. Modern architecture causes illness. It either disorients its users or bores them.
”
Even just before the pandemic, an average of just 8 percent of urban jobs in major U.S. urban areas were located in downtowns, a number that was as low as 1.6 percent in Phoenix. That’s hardly evidence that the importance of face-to-face communications was widespread.
” ~anti-planner
The issue isn’t the importance of building bonds in person. The issue is how often does it need to occur.
The other aspect of that as — Target has clearly shown with it’s actions in abandoning a million sq ft in downtown Minneapolis — what in perosn office work that needs to be done, can occur on a campus 15 miles from downtown.
IDK where in the D.C. metro McArdle lives but 12 years ago she was singing a different tune, a tune much more in line with Frank Lloyd Wright:
Moreover, outside of that handful of cities, you don’t necessarily see the Northeastern phenomenon of nice houses in bad school districts, and vice versa. In newer cities, you don’t get the scads of beautiful old neighborhoods full of run-down quasi-mansions, because the newer cities were, for one reason or another, unsuitable for mass development before the advent of things like air conditioning, motor cars, or modern building materials. The building boom of the 1950s was followed by roughly a doubling of the average new American home, which means that unless you live in a city that was already pretty large around 1910, the nicest housing stock is often some of the newest. It’s also where the best schools in town tend to be. So it’s not so easy to tell whether people were seeking more house or better schools; in lots of places, those are the same thing.
Wild ass guess: She bought in a gentrifying area near those vacant office highrises and is rightly concerned about her real property devaluing. Her father was a general contractor, her mother a Realtor, so undoubtedly she’s pretty savvy about property valuations.
The world changed and evolved over the centuries. Downtowns were not proclaimed by God–they just developed like many other types of areas have over time. And phased out the same as other areas always have and always will.
The amount of funds used to “save downtowns” over the last 60 years (yes, 60 years of failure–look at the “urban renewal” of the early 60’s) has been wasted as badly (or even worse) than the funds wasted on mass transit projects.
New York can not implosively demolish its unused high-rises….they have to be dismantled….downsvaling cities for their population reality.
When China evergrande collapses….. it’s many high rises will be blown to pieces like dominoes….
I proposed years ago WTC should have been rebuilt As was……then changed my mind when antiplanner showcased the boondoggle and how much empty office space….. I argued they should have turned the whole site into a park.
City panners tend to believe stupid stuff like “that dense downtowns were justified based on the benefits of face-to-face communications.”
How many of our high tech companies relied on “that dense downtowns were justified based on the benefits of face-to-face communications.” in overpriced dense downtowns instead of the suburban business parks that fill silicon valley, or people’s garages like the founders of Tektronix & Hewlett Packard?
As usual, city planners show themselves to be complete idiots.
http://www.debunkingportland.com/Planners_Are_Fascists.html
http://www.debunkingportland.com/smart/SmartGrowthLies.html
Downtowns are getting more and more empty and unpopular, it’s not surprising because they’re getting more overcrowded and congested.