1. Joel Kotkin writes (American Affairs, only one free article for non-subscribers),
To survive after the pandemic, great cities need to become healthier, less centralized, and less dependent on mass transit. Urban areas must find ways to facilitate walking, biking, and driving, ultimately in sterile autonomous vehicles. Cities will have to become more dispersed, cleaner, better ventilated, and less transit dependent.
2. Richard Florida and Adam Ozimek write (WSJ),
The most lavish office towers in superstar cities like New York could survive and even thrive as brand statements for major companies and amenity-filled experiences for their tenants. Even in the midst of the pandemic, the premier office districts of New York and San Francisco remain the priciest in the country. But older buildings in less exclusive commercial areas in those cities are sure to suffer. And office and commercial rents are likely to decline even further in those second- and third-tier cities that have been losing business and professional services to larger cities for some time.
I don’t think that a lavish office tower holds much appeal. Certainly not for me. About the future of New York, I probably err too much on the side of pessimism.
Lots of people want to live in Berlin even though it isn’t the business center of Germany. It isn’t hard for me to believe that NYC can be fully occupied at lower (but still positive) prices. Even if business doesn’t have to be in the city, lots of people will want to live and play there. So you can be very bearish on NYC real estate but not very bearish on the city itself.
New York City without its businesses (finance) will be Cleveland.
Weren’t the 70’s in NYC worse than Cleveland has ever been?
Cities will have to become more dispersed, cleaner, better ventilated, and less transit dependent.
In other words, they’ll have to become less like cities and more like suburbs.
+1 lol. Exactly. But, there is a slight difference. The white nationalist sleeper cells are primarily located in the suburbs and they need to be located (if possible) and purged from society. Everyone knows the existential risk posed by them.
True that, and then, what’s the appeal? Kotkin will be correct if people become permanently scarred by the pandemic, essentially becoming paranoid germaphobes. I hope that is not the case. I for one intend to be more touchy-feely than ever after this. Also, which is more likely – i) we become conditioned to lockdowns and social distancing and readily submit to it in the future or ii) we become more averse to lockdowns and social distancing? I don’t know what the answer is from a societal perspective, but I certainly am inclined toward ii).
I would look to Asian cities after sars.
Right. And those didn’t change much at all. Northeast Asian Megacities are operating basically the same way as they have been for decades, and will continue to do so after this pandemic is over. They don’t need new urban technologies to deal with infectious diseases. Instead, they have adequate social technology and state capacity.
Having to undertake hugely expensive and/or centrally-regulated capital or automation projects to substitute for deteriorating social and state capacities is like treating symptoms and not the disease.
There were big changes in Asia in behavior, especially at the retail level. For example, in Taiwan, HK, and South Korea, many of the small stalls that used to wash pots and pans in a desultory way and just reuse metal utensils with lazy washing, switched to lots of disposable plastic and styrofoam and more frequent and fastidious cleaning. Anecdotally, I’ve heard people say they got fewer stomach aches from eating street food than before. Also Asians became more willing to follow rules after a pandemic and using masks more frequently. Consider that quarantine rules are strict in those places and set fines and punishments unheard of for the West. In Taiwan, they charge up to USD $30,000 for people escaping quarantine and going back to work. This is considered reasonable by the population at large. I don’t expect the same here but still behaviors will change — often in contradictory ways I suspect.
On towers and ventilations, my pet theory is that New York and New Jersey were so badly hit by the virus because so many people live in apartment buildings whose HVAC systems didn’t ventilate sufficiently to keep the ambient viral load down to none infectious levels. Of course I have no hard evidence and some sources claim HVAC is entirely unrelated to virus transmission. https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20200916/coronavirus-and-apartments-whats-the-risk
Nevertheless, whole building air sanitizing systems seem like a great business opportunity and marketing feature. I know that I am considering HVAC, ventilation, and ability to open windows as I shop for a pied-à-terre in a large city.
It perhaps also bears remembering the idiocy of the “public health” Mengeles who shut down the parks and deprived millions of healthy, fresh air and sunshine, undoubtedly leading to the deaths of tens of thousands sentenced to confinement in unsanitary indoor air. As the kids once upon a time used to
say “Question Authority!”
+1 I am also suspicious of HVAC systems. Even in new buildings they never seem to work well.
Nope. Plenty of places in the world with dense apartments and conventional ventilation did much better.
NYC did so bad relative to the rest of the US because it was the Perfect Storm of the forgivable and the unforgivable.
For one thing, it got hit first and testing capacity was still scarce. The ICUs put bad-coughers on ventilators when the doctors didn’t know better, which probably killed lots of people who could have survived.
But then the governments knowingly did the opposite of about 20 things they should have done. Took forever to approve tests (the earliest ones were illegal!), made the approval process for anything insanely cumbersome, kept the subways running and only wiping surfaces down once or twice a day, told people to go to Chinatown, told people not to worry and to keep living their lives like normal, told people not to buy or use masks, didn’t even really try “track and trace”, forced contagious and sick old people back into nursing homes.
Instead of looking at how air flows in the halls of the city, look at the hot air coming out of city hall.
And yet:
In a press conference May 6, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said that 66% of new hospitalizations in New York for Covid-19 were people who had been staying home.
“This is a surprise: Overwhelmingly, the people were at home,” Cuomo said. “We thought maybe they were taking public transportation, and we’ve taken special precautions on public transportation, but actually no, because these people were literally at home.”
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/15/people-staying-home-can-get-covid-19-safety-tips-for-running-errands.html
A guy could win an Emmy for that kind of performance.
Also, let’s not forget the runaway bestselling book on this topic. Bold and brave leadership only arises during troubling times like these. Only a coward like DeSantis would try something different.
https://m.barnesandnoble.com/w/american-crisis-andrew-cuomo/1137496252
What fraction of people are ‘staying at home,’ whatever that means? What’s the denominator? Especially if older people are disproportionately staying at home, their natural vulnerability may outweigh their caution (basically Simpson’s paradox). They may also be lying on the survey, or still going out to the grocery store or the pharmacy. So I’m not convinced this proves anything.
Perhaps what cities really need to survive after the pandemic is an additional trillion dollars of subsidies, every year. These Autonomous Vehicles are not going to sterilize themselves, you know.
My feeling on NYC is that the pandemic drove out adults in their late-20s or 30s who were looking to leave within a few years to start families anyway. Those types of people won’t come back, even when the pandemic is (mostly) over. But young people will continue to be drawn to it for social and cultural reasons, so it will bounce back over a few years.
I also think people overestimate how well remote work will work in the long run. It’s fine for a year, when turnover is limited. But after five years, most people will not have ever met in person, and culture will be difficult to maintain. Plus, big tech companies that get the pick of the litter may fair better in the long run with self-motivated employees, but this does not describe most companies, where the temptation to slack off at home will be too great in the long run for your average and below average workers. I think companies will fall out of love with WFH over time when things return to normal. It may find an equilibrium that is more weighted toward WFH than it was before, but not as heavily as some seem to think.
“I also think people overestimate how well remote work will work in the long run. … I think companies will fall out of love with WFH over time when things return to normal. It may find an equilibrium that is more weighted toward WFH than it was before, but not as heavily as some seem to think.”
This seems right to me, and consistent with my own experience. I love to be able to telework, but as an admission against my own interest, it’s not yet an adequate substitute for frequently working together in close proximity.
A lot of technological and cultural changes still need to be made to accommodate lots of teleworking.
Technologically, I was kind of surprised that we are still mostly stuck with “email, IRC, webcams, and screen-sharing”, all of which I had about 25 years ago. They are ok, but not great.
Culturally, for those who have bellow stellar levels of character, it is quite difficult to manage, supervise, and discipline. In person, just having your eyes close-by keeps a lot of people honest, without necessarily hating you for it, since it seems passive. Online, you have to be much more active, which makes you seem like a jerk and creates lots of unfortunate frictions and drama.
The problems associated with keeping permanently discoverable digital records of every online communication is scandalously overlooked.
In the current legal environment, efforts for privacy by means of in-person conversations to evade such recording systems are essential, which puts a major obstacle in the path of making more telework progress, especially because these circumventions are most essential for the top leaders who would be making the decisions to spend lots of money on better systems. If they are meeting in person and telework is for the minions, then the minions will have crappy telework experiences.
25 years ago personal computing was extremely primitive compared to today. The first web browser launched shortly before then. That was long before smartphones, most normal people didn’t have internet and the few that did had 56k modems.
Even ten years ago, text + video chat was much more primitive than it was today. Regular people could video chat in 2011, but it wasn’t nearly as easy as it is in 2021. Services like Slack and Zoom hadn’t even launched yet.
North Dakota had one of the worst Covid waves, so why shoudl NYC lose?
Because Covid is hardly the only factor. Most of the trends were already evident before the pandemic (and last summer’s riots), but the combination of the two has accelerated things.
COVID isn’t the long term problem with cities.
They are unaffordable and ungovernable. The taxes are high, the real estate expensive, the schools suck, and even public safety has deteriorated. Some of the forces that forced pragmatism on the cities in the 1990s are spent and not coming back.
When I look at the cities I just see a bunch of really rich people who can move whenever they want paying for bloated bureaucracies and pensions and wondering when the SALT cap will come back and subsidize the nonsense. Why wait, just move away. There are plenty of suburbs and exurbs you can spend your money in that don’t have riots and street shitters. If you’re not commuting in five days a week anymore what is the point.
So, is their decision to remain in the urban areas based on revealed preference, status quo bias or something else? I honestly don’t know and I’m too afraid to ask my city dwelling friends who have their homes cased on a weekly basis and are forced to send their kids to private schools.
The revealed preference of the domestic middle class is they have been fleeing the cities for some time.
Filter on “White” for a good look at domestic migration patterns.
https://netmigration.wisc.edu/
The other look is net 30-54, where do people move in their peak productivity years. Though this will be somewhat blurred by non-domestic migration.
When I was thinking of a place to live I moved out of a dark Orange County to a dark Purple County, like so many others.
I think that inertia and extremely lucrative business opportunities keeps the rich in the cities. They can buy their way out of a lot of dysfunction. But well off people I never thought would consider leaving NYC have done so in the current crisis. In the Zoom world it just seems easier to have a house in the country as primary residence (preferably in a zero tax state) and a small apartment you can crash in when you have to visit the city for business reasons.
That doesn’t show people leaving cities, it shows them leaving some cities for other cities. Leaving NY/SF for Austin. Western and Southwestern cities (and even some Midwestern cities like Columbus) are booming. Old cities are being replaced by new cities, but the urban population overall is still increasing.
Eh, Houston, Dallas, Atlanta, etc are still losing white population on that map.
Their immediate suburbs are doing better than the immediate suburbs of some of the bigger cities, though no city limits seems to be spared.
So to build on my earlier smartass comment, people are moving out of the city parts of cities and into the suburban parts of cities.
There are some cities that have amenities that cannot be replicated anywhere else, like Southern California. There are some cities that have industry clusters that aren’t going to be replicated anywhere else in the near future, like finance in NYC. All of the rest of cities and metro areas have to earn their way, over the medium term at least.
There are some cities that have industry clusters that aren’t going to be replicated anywhere else in the near future.
The danger isn’t that they’ll be replicated in any one other place but that they’ll be distributed out into a variety of regional hubs and include teleworkers who may live and work anywhere with a good Internet connection. The big change with Covid is that working remotely has gone from being an oddball to a mainstream career option almost overnight.
I don’t think that working remotely and in a metro without a strong is a “career” option. More people will work remotely, but that will be once their careers have reached the stalling point and are really just jobs, not careers. Careers require networking to share ideas and suss out new opportunities.
Maybe teleworking shifts the relative balance of employment in a career field towards regional hubs, like maybe say Salt Lake City has a greater share of national IT employment than it did pre-pandemic. But that won’t change the fact that the SF Bay metro area has the most opportunities for people looking to advance in their career in IT. Same goes for NYC and finance, or LA and entertainment.
Now maybe enough jobs go away from metros like NYC and SF to create real problems for those cities. NYC seems especially like it could end up in a bad place simply because it needs all the revenue it can get. But I still don’t see teleworking changing anything except at the margins. For example, Charlotte and Raleigh are already full of people from the Acela corridor who launched their careers in NYC, Boston, D.C., etc., and then decided they wanted out, and had no problems finding employment and improving their standard of living by moving. Telework isn’t going to change that kind of pattern. Maybe it makes it a bit more attractive, but just means more people beating down an already well trod path.
I’ve been working fully at home for over seven years.
My wife has to physically go to places and meet with clients, but not every day. Its become clear during COVID that all she really needs to do is take a 1-2 hour car trip every other week or so to meet clients, go on site, or check in at the office. Once the need for daily five day a week commuting is removed the sphere of living might not expand all the way to the fields of the midwest, but they extend at a minimum way into the exurbs where everything is cheaper and nicer. That’s beyond the tax reach of the cities and even the inner suburbs.
IBM had huge numbers of managers working remotely – then started on an AGILE team relocation binge some 5 or so years ago, to have fewer big hubs and more workers together. Part of that was to encourage older managers to “move or retire”, with lots of them retiring. Another part was to increase productivity from smaller teams working more closely together, including physically being next to each other.
Sort of like the 24 hour coding “jams” that often get huge amounts done, quickly. For developing SW, I think good Slack channels and GIT hub type shared programming resources will allow remote folk about 80-110% (~90 sustainable) of the productivity. For lots of “knowlege workers”, better communications helps their own production BUT closer working with others who have the same boss make better team products, more often. The costs & benefits have certainly shifted away from daily in-the-office for most work.
Clean and safe cities will do OK, and will continue to be attractive if “affordable” with good schools – but the current super cities in the US mostly fail.
Uber has shown that transit can be disrupted – I expect sometime soon there will be “taxi-buses” that pick folk up at their homes Point A – along with others nearby, and drop them off at Point B – along with others before and after. For a price lower than single taxi, but higher than a bus stop bus.
Families with kids will increasingly want MORE safety for their kids – possibly even “too much”. But that’s what the parents will be paying for; plus “good schools”.
S. Sailor would say good schools = few Blacks. I suspect most honest data would not disagree.