Downtowns are dead, dying or on life support, says urban policy expert(fortune.com)
fortune.com
Downtowns are dead, dying or on life support, says urban policy expert
https://fortune.com/2023/09/25/downtowns-dead-dying-life-support-commercial-real-estate-office-buildings/
50 comments
Is there really such a thing as clean industry? Seems like wishful thinking.
Machine shops are pretty clean. The noise is kept mostly in the building. They use just electricity for power. There’s no real chemicals in use. Any spot welding or forging can be done with induction forges. Trucks bringing material and shipping out is noise and pollution, but no different than a grocery store.
There is no clean living but a build up of filth is a sign of someone not doing their job properly. The problem isnt clean vs dirty industry, truly it is all dirty, the problem is outsourcing clean up or consequences for a lack of clean up to the public.
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As the article says, it's a trend which proceeded Covid, but accelerated under lockdown.
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.
[*] https://www.skyscrapercity.com/
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.
[*] https://www.skyscrapercity.com/
> 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
You say that, but don't underestimate the awfulness of London's planning departments: https://academic.oup.com/joeg/article/21/6/869/6213370
Osbert Lancaster "pillar to post" if I recall correctly says that the GLC and it's precursor the LCC demolished more of Christopher Wren's churches than the Nazi bombers.
That's a great article btw. Thanks!
That's a great article btw. Thanks!
Downtowns are generally the only “15 minute” cities around in any urban area.
Maybe where you live, but my commie block has basic amenities (shop, butcher, small farmers market, few bars and restaurants, park, doctor... etc) in a 10 minute walk. 10 minutes away are buses and trams that take me to whatever else I need.
> 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
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.
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.
He states the reason why people don't want to live in downtowns. It's a self afflicting issue.
Don't want to be that guy (am that guy :( ), but the word is "preceded" - came before. "Proceeded" means came after, and has a direct subject.
Can't edit now. Thank you for being "that guy". Dear reader. Please read what I wrote in the sense implied by "that guy".
I will proceed to reread the preceding GPs (I won’t).
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So basically the urban cores overbuilt office space relative to housing for four decades and now remote work has catastrophically reminded urban landowners that if nobody actually lives somewhere, you do need to convince people to commute in if you want to run a business there.
FTA: Developers over-built commercial real estate when it was profitable, and COVID just accelerated the implosion of the bubble.
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".
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".
This really should have USA in the title, it's seems an issue particular to there.
Wouldn't the vast majority of articles on this site require that tag?
Vast majority of articles is about tech, where country is mostly irrelevant.
If you go to downtown Topeka and try to find a place to hang out on a weekend morning you will notice a really strange thing. A lot of the cafes, restaurants, and places to hang out are only open for the afternoon lunch rush and happy hour on weekdays. Literally the only customers they have are people who commute into the city for work.
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.
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.
Not a single sentence about crime, drug use, homelessness, etc., but they threw in a quote from the communist manifesto to take a political jab at "capitalism". A+ totally unbiased journalism here.
No way am I going downtown anymore.
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.
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.
I'd think it would be more respectful to walk around a body rather than over it. You'd probably also want to ensure the authorities are aware.
Which city is this?
Specific one but like most larger cities in California
I'm not in California, so that doesn't tell me much. I see too much conflicting anecdata from over on the other end of the continent to form an opinion.
Cops have no duty to protect you in the United States. You might want to rethink your logical foundation for this particular hangup.
Why? Your added context only explains why a police officer might choose not to protect them. It's irrelevant because all it does is explain the observation they were making it doesn't make the observation less true.
Did you really read the article? This is about office space and those reliant on office foot traffic. None of those things you mentioned are unique nor relevant here. Seems like you just wanted something to be true to fit what you see on Fox News.
“older, denser downtowns reliant on professional or tech workers and located within large metros”
“older, denser downtowns reliant on professional or tech workers and located within large metros”
Are you saying that "office foot traffic" is unaffected by encounters with crime, homeless people and drug users? Seems to me perfectly reasonable that those things would decrease office foot traffic.
Or are you claiming that those things don't exist (in any quantity that matters) in the downtowns of most cities?
Or are you claiming that those things don't exist (in any quantity that matters) in the downtowns of most cities?
If you actually read the article and weren’t just searching for words to confirm your biases you’d understand.
COVID really messed up the improvements made to NYC's FiDi over the past decade.
I think it's important to distinguish between Covid and the absolutely irrational public policy response to Covid, because the latter is what really threw downtowns off. Pandemics will happen again; lockdowns don't need to, if we learn.
We won't learn. On the contrary, we have actually become stupider about handling disease: Hospitals are even more understaffed now than they were before the pandemic, and anti-vaccine hysteria has gone mainstream.
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.
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.
Our lockdowns simply can’t be worse in the future, at least not in living memory. The people who have lived through them simply won’t stand for them.
If people behaved rationally and with empathy we wouldn't need to lock down. But because we have a bunch of selfish pricks we'll always need lock downs. People cannot be trusted to do what it is good for the whole if it even slightly inconveniences the individual. In western culture(The United States in particular), I don't see that changing any time soon.
Large swaths of the U.S. never had lockdowns or had minimal lockdowns and it was the correct choice not to. The idea that you can hide from or wait out a disease as viral as the common cold is laughable.
To be clear, it was never to hide out or wait for COVID to leave. It was mostly to slow the spread, limit demand on our medical resources, and to ramp up time to ensure we tackled it with robust medical science. Unfortunately, most states in the country don't actually "believe" in science because Yahweh bro.
With 20/20 hindsight, what proved to be the tradeoffs between lockdowns and not?
With the power of hindsight, we can rely on all-cause excess mortality data since 2020 to see how effective the lockdowns were, and whether the extreme disruption to daily life was worth it. See this study[0] that showcases Sweden, whose public health policy around Covid was basically a big shrug, with the idea that it was pointless to try and control the spread of a highly transmissible respiratory virus. It has fewer cumulative excess deaths compared to its neighbors Norway, Finland, and Denmark; all highly developed countries with similar demographics and cultures as Sweden, but with much stricter restrictions.
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...
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...
> The people who have lived through them simply won’t stand for them.
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.
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.
And I’ll do the opposite.
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.
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.
> Hospitals are even more understaffed now than they were before the pandemic
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.
> 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-...
> > Hospitals are even more understaffed now than they were before the pandemic
> 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.
> 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.
Good point. I wonder if there is data for that. Maybe the number of insurance claims?
The "work from home" class were going to lock themselves down whether it was mandated by the government or not.
1000%.
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.
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.
This has been true for decades though, decades before Covid, shopping malls drew retail traffic away from downtowns followed by the growth of big box stores like Wal-Mart. Now, online competition from Amazon and ecommerce has put many malls on life support.
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.