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.” Continue reading
