"The past 30 years “were a golden era for large cities,” Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh, a professor of real estate and finance at Columbia Business School, wrote in November 2022: “A virtuous cycle of improving amenities (educational and cultural institutions, entertainment, low crime) and job opportunities attracted employers, employees, young and old, to cities.”
Scholars are increasingly voicing concern that the shift to working from home, spurred by the Covid pandemic, will bring the three-decade renaissance of major cities to a halt, setting off an era of urban decline. They cite an exodus of the affluent, a surge in vacant offices and storefronts, and the prospect of declining property taxes and public transit revenues.
Jacob Brown, a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton’s Center for the Study of Democratic Politics, elaborated in an email on the consequences for cities of the more than 20 percent of urban employees now working full- or part-time from home:
With respect to crime, poverty and homelessness, Brown argued:
“The more dramatic effects on urban geography,” Brown continued,
My Times colleague Nicholas Fandos documented the damage that even the perception of rising crime can inflict on Democrats in a Nov. 27 article, “Meet the Voters Who Fueled New York’s Seismic Tilt Toward the G.O.P.”: “From Long Island to the Lower Hudson Valley, Republicans running predominantly on crime swept five of six suburban congressional seats, including three that President Biden won handily that encompass some of the nation’s most affluent, well-educated commuter towns.”
And on Tuesday, Mayor Eric Adams of New York announced a plan to subject severely mentally ill people who are found on subways or city streets to involuntarily hospitalization.
Nicholas Bloom, an economist at Stanford, described some of the economic forces at work in an email:
Compounding the problem, Bloom continued:
That view is not shared by three other experts in real estate economics, Arpit Gupta, of N.Y.U.’s Stern School of Business, Vrinda Mittal, of the Columbia Business School, and Van Nieuwerburgh. They anticipate disaster in their September 2022 paper, “Work From Home and the Office Real Estate Apocalypse.”
“Our research,” Gupta wrote by email,
These challenges will predominantly hit blue cities in the coming years.
Their conclusions are not necessarily cast in concrete but they are bleak:
In a separate email, Van Nieuwerburgh warned:
In his November 2022 paper, “The Remote Work Revolution: Impact on Real Estate Values and the Urban Environment,” Van Nieuwerburgh writes:
One of the major consequences of these patterns, Jessica Trounstine, a political scientist at the University of California-Merced, wrote in an email, “has been segregation in fiscal capacity within metro areas.”
Tracey H. Loh, a Brookings fellow, wrote in an email that one way to view an urban downtown is like “a natural ecosystem” that has received a major shock:
Just as the pandemic has caused a surge in telework, Loh wrote, “it also caused a huge surge in unsheltered homelessness because of existing flaws in America’s housing system, the end of federally funded relief measures, a mental health care crisis and the failure of policies of isolation and confinement to solve the pre-existing homelessness crisis.”
is that both the visibility and ratio of people in crisis relative to those engaged in commerce (whether working or shopping) has changed in a lot of U.S. downtowns, which has a big impact on how being downtown “feels” and thus perceptions of downtown. These negative perceptions have become a real barrier to further recovery and are also shaping local elections, especially out west, where homelessness is worse, such as last year’s Seattle mayoral election or the recent L.A. mayoral election.
Some urban experts have a less pessimistic outlook.
Edward Glaeser, an economist at Harvard and a co-author, with David Cutler, of the 2021 book “Survival of the City: The Future of Urban Life in an Age of Isolation,” wrote by email: “Conventional economic theory suggests that real estate markets will adjust to any reduction in demand by reducing price. Some of this has already happened in commercial real estate.” Glaeser also noted that “many businesses that thought that they were priced out of N.Y.C., San Francisco and Boston markets will reconsider if commercial prices are 30 percent lower.”
In fact, Glaeser argued, while
The nation, Glaeser continued, is
Progressive mayors, according to Glaeser,
In the short run, Glaeser wrote,
Richard Florida, a professor of economic analysis and policy at the University of Toronto, stands out as one of the most resolutely optimistic urban scholars. In his August 2022 Bloomberg column, “Why Downtown Won’t Die,” Florida asks, “Can America’s iconic downtowns survive?” His answer:
Now, he argued, “Downtowns are evolving away from centers for work to actual neighborhoods. Jane Jacobs titled her seminal 1957 essay, which led in fact to ‘The Death and Life of Great American Cities,’ ‘Downtown Is for People’ — sounds about right to me.”
Despite his optimism, Florida acknowledged in his email that
Florida made the case in his email that cities have become critically important incubators:
While the future path of cities remains uncertain, Patrick Sharkey, a sociologist at Princeton, provided an overview of the problems they face:
In a paper from September, “Working From Home Around the World,” Nicholas Bloom, whom I cited earlier, and five colleagues argue that “the implications for cities are more worrisome. The shift to working from home reduces the tax base in dense urban areas and raises the elasticity of the local tax base with respect to the quality of urban amenities and local governance.”
There is reason for both apprehension and hope. Cities across time have proved to be remarkably resilient and have survived infectious diseases such as bubonic plague, cholera, smallpox and polio. The world population, which stands today at eight billion people, is 57 percent urban, and because of the productivity, innovation and inventiveness that stems from the creativity of human beings in groups, the urbanization process is quite likely to continue into the foreseeable future. There appears to be no alternative, so we will have to make it work."
The cities that
did survive bubonic plague are not able to survive Zoom.