‘Downtown Is for People’

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Only Connect

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How are U.S. cities rebuilding aft= er the pandemic? Richard Florida on the resilience of urban life in = America.

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Urban Sanden

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Mayors from across the Uni= ted States gathered in Washington, D.C., last week to explore an u= rgent challenge they’re all navigating three years after Covid-19 dis= rupted the world: the need to revive their downtowns. American cities are e= xploring a range of initiatives to build post-pandemic futures, including t= he revitalization of commercial storefronts and the transformation of offic= e buildings into private residences. They’re meanwhile continuing to = face significant issues exacerbated by the pandemic, such as crime and publ= ic disorder, as well as structural changes it accelerated, such as the grad= ual and inevitable spread of remote work. How are these cities thinking abo= ut moving from short-term disruption to long-term reconstruction?

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=09=09=09=09=09=09=09=09=09=09=09=09=09=09=09Richard Florida is a professor at the Rotman School of Management at the University of T= oronto, the founder of the global advisory firm the Creative Class Group, a= nd the author of numerous books on urban life—including 2002’s = The Rise of the Creative Class. As Florida sees it, early-pandemic= fears about Covid’s fatal effects on the world’s cities may ha= ve been understandable, but they were never historically realistic; cities = have been assaulted by violent disruptions as long as we’ve had them.= These fears were also blind, though, to trends that had been underway for = decades, if not longer. Downtowns have never had a fixed role in modern urb= an life; they’ve always been in flux; and the promise of the moment, = Florida says, is that they’re starting to adapt in ways that could re= alize their longstanding potential for human flourishing.

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Graham Vyse: What= would you say are the most substantial, lasting ways the pandemic changed = American cities?

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=09=09=09=09=09=09=09=09=09=09=09=09=09=09=09Richard Florida: If we look back to the spring and early summer of 2020, there were wide= spread predictions about the imminent death of great cities around the worl= d. They were more than predictions, really—almost an axiom: New York = was over, history; it would be abandoned. London, never coming back. Paris,= taken for dead.
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But if we look back through the hi= story of the world’s great cities, they’ve all survived much wo= rse—not only pandemics, plagues, and pestilence but great fires; eart= hquakes, tsunamis, other natural disasters; and, of course, the horrible im= pacts of war. So it was implicit to me that our great cities would survive,= however terrible the tolls of Covid, and ultimately thrive beyond it. That= said, it was also clear to me that Covid would change things—if in r= elatively subtle ways.
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In the U.S., the axiom about the i= mminent death of the big cities depended on a belief that people would aban= don New York and San Francisco for the hinterlands, or for far-off suburbs,= or for Miami and other smaller metropolitan areas—and we would see t= his great reshuffling of the American population. Of course, this did happe= n in a way; but it didn’t begin with the pandemic—it was the ac= celeration of a trend long underway—and ultimately, it didn’t e= nd the life of American cities.
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Vyse: What was al= ready underway, and how did the pandemic accelerate it?
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Florida: Starting= around 2000, young Americans had begun moving back into cities. At the tim= e, most people paying attention had been expecting U.S. urban populations t= o continue declining. But there they were, young people, moving back in. It= was quite surprising. That trend started to accelerate after 2010, driving= a big urban revival in America—when about half the population increa= se in U.S. cities was among people aged 25 to 34.
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The same trend also drove a massiv= e surge in housing prices in superstar cities like New York, San Francisco,= and Los Angeles—along with places like Boston, Seattle, or Washingto= n, D.C. And by 2020, the same people who accounted for the urban revival of= the 2010s were now well underway in forming families and moving away.
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Meanwhile, new digital technologie= s were already starting to help enable this movement, even if most people w= eren’t yet using them. I myself had no idea what Zoom was before Marc= h 2020. But then there was this rapid adoption of these technologies, which= helped spur the movement away from large metro areas and their high housin= g prices.

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Most of this movement was relative= ly local, to nearby suburban, exurban, and rural areas—Hudson Valley,= for example, was the number-one destination for people getting out of New = York City—though some of the movement was to new places altogether, l= ike Bozeman, Montana; Park City, Utah; Nashville, Tennessee; Austin, Texas;= and Miami, Florida. Some of that was permanent, some was temporary.
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Today, though, this trend has dece= lerated or stopped. Many of the urban refugees responsible for it wanted wa= lkable neighborhoods with a little downtown center. If you look at Miami, f= or example, housing prices in neighborhoods like that might have increased = three to five times over the last few years. It used to be affordable to bu= y a single-family home in these neighborhoods; now it’s become out of= reach for anyone but the very wealthy. So now you see this counter-trend o= f people returning to the bigger cities, enabled by a labor market that&rsq= uo;s creating more opportunities for dual-career households.

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Josh Appel

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More from Richard Florida at T= he Signal:
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“If we look at the d= ata on remote work, it was already increasing before the pandemic = from about 1 percent of workers in 1980 to 5-6 percent in 2019. Now, just a= few years later, that’s about tripled to 18 percent. These numbers d= isproportionately represent workers with families who’ve decamped to = farther-off suburbs and exurbs, saying, I’m not going to deal with th= is ridiculous commute anymore. But the overall rate of remote work has ende= d the downtown’s role as a central business district. That doesn&rsqu= o;t mean downtowns as such are over; it means they’re changing. And I= think they can change for the better. In fact, I think they could be enter= ing a moment of renaissance and finally becoming what they should have been= all along..”
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=09=09=09=09=09=09=09=09=09=09=09=09=09=09=09“More and more,<= /strong> downtown is for people. Less and less, it’s a place they go = to work and then escape from at the end of the day. It’s at once a ce= ntral cultural district, a central entertainment district, a central nightl= ife district, a central recreational district, a central social district&md= ash;or as I call it, a central connectivity district. What the downtown is = becoming, and has to become, is no longer primarily a place for people to g= o and plug their laptop into a cubicle, a place they don’t really wan= t to be, because it’s not really a great place to work. It’s a = place people want to go to, a place where they can connect.”
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=09=09=09=09=09=09=09=09=09=09=09=09=09=09=09“Ultimately, dow= ntown has to be remade as a neighborhood—as a connectivity d= istrict. And the more cities understand this, the better they’ll be a= ble to guide themselves through this new moment of reinvention. They’= ve reinvented themselves before, and they’re going to do it again&mda= sh;into something very different from what they were built to be after Worl= d War II.”

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= Continue reading ...

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The Signal explores urge= nt questions in current events around the world—to support it and for= full access:

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