Decades of rebuilding downtowns to accommodate vehicle traffic and commuters is the problem.
- people commuting from the Styx often do not reside within the same county they work in. County/City budget revenues decreased
- even if those residents happen to live in the same county or municipal area, cities were rebuilt to accommodate vehicle traffic. Highways cutting through urban cores. Areas where people once lived are replaced with parking lots/garages.
- city budgets further decimated by having to increase coverage of services (water, electric, sewage, …). Increased coverage requirement means new infrastructure. New infrastructure means more maintenance cost as the years progress. Also, first responders often stretched. Cities struggle to hire the correct amount of people to cover area
- poorly zoned cities with single use zoning are largely to blame as well. Many cities have dedicated commercial or residential only zones. Thus creating this strong coupling on vehicle commuters to come to office, spend money on lunch, then fuck off back to their shitty suburban home. If cities rezoned and allowed for more diverse zoning (mixed use, higher density). The problem of businesses that relied on commuters becomes a non-issue since that is largely replaced by walkin traffic.
- poorly designed cities replacing walkability with “vehicle accessibility”. This means the city has to maintain expensive road infrastructure. Also makes it very difficult to consider alternative forms of transportation to get to/from restaurants, entertainment, general living, grocery store.
It’s “the sticks”, not “the Styx” unless they’re coming from a Tommy Shaw concert or commuting from the bowels of hell. :)
If anything they would be commuting to Styx.
Wait, is this another trick to make me go back to the office?
I wouldn’t say thats what it is, but it is used for that
I use to go downtown somewhat often, but I don’t have the money to do it these days.
That’s one of the biggest factors for me, too. Of course the elite want to blame it all on WFH, but there are plenty of people who would still go to downtown areas to eat and shop and go to bars, but who the hell can afford that these days? If wages were even close to keeping up with the cost of living, I’d guess there would be more downtown activity.
WFH does has some effect on people going out. Personally, I have the financial means to still go out on occasion, I just don’t. When I used to have to drive in for work, I would eat lunch out about once every other week (I have an old, bad habit of treating myself to lunch on pay day). That’s a sold meal which is now gone from that area’s economy, and I’m sure there were a lot more. Beyond that, I find that there is now a greater mental barrier to the effort required to get dressed up and go out for a meal or shopping downtown. I’m like Professor Farnsworth from Futurama, “well, I could go out. But, I am already in my pajamas.”
That said, ya it’s not all WFH. Even with the financial means to go out, the current economic environment means that I’d rather not spend $100 eating an over-priced, poorly cooked meal somewhere downtown. I can spend $50 on some really nice ingredients, grill up a couple steaks, cook vegetables which aren’t overcooked to be limper than a eunuch’s dick and eat potatoes which don’t taste like they came out of a box. The other $50 can go into savings and I don’t face social pressure to put on real pants.
In the middle of the 20th century there was a huge migration of people out of city centres and into suburbs. Some of my relatives bought up properties back then and made bank when the city expanded. I don’t expect inner cities to remain quiet forever, but the way they’re used might change.
huge migration of people
White people. Because due to desegregation, they were suddenly required to have black people in their neighborhoods if those black people wanted to buy a house there. So they ran away from the black people.
Not everyone lives in the US. While aboriginal people in Australia also tended to stay in the inner city they make up a much smaller proportion of the population, and the divide between city and suburbs was more along socioeconomic lines than racial ones; it just happened that due to racism the Aboriginals were in the lower socioeconomic group.
Shock and horror… White people mooooooved…
No one said it was shocking or horrific. Just typical systemic racism.
Redlining is systemic racism, people choosing to move away is just regular old racism.
The biggest draw major cities can implement is not designing their city centers around cars.
Cities could be like amusement parks, not whatever they are now.
The 8000th “Covid killed cities” article, just shifting the goalposts and jumping around to different cities with different metrics out of context to make it seem worse than it is.
Capitalism killed cities, not COVID.
Urbanization has been increasing globally for hundreds of years. Nothing killed cities.
Therein lies your problem – USA is just barely civilized.
cars kill cities
They do too, but the cost of living (a problem exacerbated by capitalism treating property as an investment) has pushed workers out of cities, which kills the ability of businesses to keep employees, and thus the downtown empties of businesses like restaurants.
Walmart, suburbs, and the Internet killed downtowns IMO.
Are you saying that you don’t think cities are having issues?
I’m saying cities aren’t dying. Cities reinvent themselves when they have issues. Oh no, the textile industry is leaving NYC after WWII and the area those factories were in is considered a slum, the city is dying… and now that area is SoHo.
If this article was just trying to say “cities are still working their way back to pre-covid commercial activity levels” then sure, there is a temporary issue from a generational pandemic, agreed. But if you think people are going to stop moving to cities long term you are just wrong.
I mean the author is basically saying what you’re saying. the title definitely left off a keyword from the title : "[Traditional] Downtowns are dead, dying or on life support… " with their definition of traditional downtowns being only business focused downtowns, rather than muxed usage downtowns
Gotta agree. I travel extensively and have seen downtrodden town centers as well as vibrant ones. There are multiple factors, not just “white flight” which has had decades to be mitigated or shift culturally. One of the truths is that people are generally moving to urban areas. That’s where the jobs are. That means leaving small towns. However, if that small town is near an urban area it stands a good chance of getting an economic boost as move in or people looking to “get away” dump money into the tourist market. Yeah, crime and poverty do a lot to keep economic improvement away, but even places like Oakland in California, a hotbed of crime in the ‘80s/‘90s, has seen an economic boost and an overall improvement as rising property values made the area more desirable. Towns will grow or shrink as economic opportunities leave or arrive.
There are going to be winners and losers, but the general trend is that urban areas are still going to be the bigger beneficiaries.
How much of the boost in Oakland was from SF just getting expensive as fuck to live in?
Quite a lot. I didn’t want to make a pedantic and exhaustive list of economic causal factors, but buyers being outpriced in a nearby area forcing them to look at previously undesirable areas can certainly be a factor.
Interesting, nah you’re good man. Not from the area nor a field anything about, just was curious
I have a strong hatred for how many storefronts are taken up by “antique shops” (i.e. dusty warehouses full of junk you couldn’t give away) instead of actual businesses in the last two small towns I lived in. Makes it so you can’t really get that much shopping done downtown.
The tax write off shops for bored housewives needing something to do.
Don’t hate on the antique shops. Hate on the big box stores that everyone goes to shop and has left the only possible business for a small store to become an antique shop.
EDIT: Also fuck dollar general
Makes sense. Downtowns are commercial districts with few, if any, residential buildings. Restaurants exist there to feed the various workers. Workers will shop after work or bring family/friends/dates to the area because it’s something they know or are familiar with.
With WFH, no one has a reason to go to downtown. Cost of living increases already make them think twice about doing so.
All in all, we’re seeing a shift from specifically zoned districts to mixed use downtowns. This means smaller stores, more walkable or mass transit focus. These cities will just need to incentivize conversion of these downtowns to include more residential structures.
we need statewide laws, preempting any local zoning laws, that allow dense residential buildings with no parking minimums in any zone that allows office uses.
Here here
Zoning is only useful for the type of place that isn’t built to keep harmful emissions confined to their land. Farms (manure smell), and some chemical industry apply and should not have housing at all. Farmers will be shocked to learn I just told them they need to move to town.
Statewide laws preempting local laws is how you consolidate corruption most effectively. We added a half cent local sales tax to permanently end toll roads 30ish years ago and the state went ahead and overruled it. We still pay thebextra half cent AND they just added ANOTHER goddamn half cent.
Florida is purple but all the state sponsored corruption, racism and meth cna sure make it seem red.
I can understand that but at the same time, it can also counteract a lot of localized perverse incentives. The majority of people might want more housing, but then at the same time there’s a significant part of the voting population (especially at a municipal level) that doesn’t want it in their community because of unfounded fears of higher density, so everybody wants it somewhere else and it doesn’t get done. Well, if you go up a level of government, it’s going to get done everywhere fairly, and people finally realize that it won’t be a problem.
Until you realize that moving it up a level means it is much harder for the individual to affect change. Higher levels means rich people have their say because they can afford to lobby for their say. At least local initiatives can be engaged with by local individuals without the need for a massive warchest to fight entrenched interests. Fight these things locally rather than kicking the can upstairs and hoping the good parts trickle back down.
I strongly think your take is ass backwards as a long term strategy, even while you can affect some short term wins. Republicans are taking over at the state level to push abortion bans, book bans, education limits, pay for religious education with public funding, eliminate equal rights, push conspiracy nonsense, enact voter suppression schemes, push pure propaganda as an educational standard, and on and on. They can’t affect these changes at the municipal level, only by grabbing power away from the local level. There’s a lot more happening in a cumulative manner that needs to be fought against than to be primarily concerned over than local rich landowners and NIMBY fuck-os trying to assert their real estate whims.
here in cali the state’s suing cities for not allowing enough housing to be built, which is literally the cause of half of everything that’s wrong with the state
What cities are preventing downtown residential construction? All the office construction was because it was more profitable. Cities are already bending backwards to developers.
Disabled parking should always be required. Not everybody can take public transit, or not without it being unreasonably burdensome and/or dangerous (think immunocompromised people for transit being dangerous).
paratransit vans have been a thing for a long time and solve this issue. the amount of traffic they cause is negligible. just follow ADA rules for disabled parking with the spaces you do end up building and don’t worry about it. disabled people are much less likely to own a car in the first place than the average person, so privileging cars does them no good
One of the most-striking experiences of my regional metro core’s death throes was needing to pee but my train was delayed. Tried walking across the way to the local train station to use their facilities but the security guy they’d hired to keep the homeless out about fought me to keep me from using the restroom.
If you wonder why your city streets and transit zones smell like piss, it’s because when you lock up your bathrooms to keep the homeless people away, they’ll piss on your street
In the town that we spent our summers in, there was a single, well hidden, public restroom on Main Street. This is a town that makes their living on tourism. You would think they wouldn’t want people have quit shopping and leave downtown to pee.
You think it would be obvious but for some reason. I’m not sure if I have IBS or something, but I am always on the look out for bathrooms and they are so hard to find downtown.
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vibrant policy making there. you should run for public office.
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Don’t forget about all the poor idiots supporting them!
“They’re a business and they need to make money!” Funny how we don’t hear this as often anymore. The people who said it before were so gung-ho about it being an absolute truth with no nuance or exceptions.
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Good. Fuck those clusterfuck jungles.
Always hate going downtown. Way too dangerous and theres too much stuff packed in too small an area.
Totally agree.
I can’t afford food for myself, and every day gets worse and worse, I’m sure I’m not alone, this is what happens when you let the working class go so far down the hole all they can afford to do is work and sleep.
Are you living in the US by any chance?
Yep.
Modern downtown includes residential developments - live and work without the need for a car.
Poorly planned cities no surprises there.
Good. Much like malls, big cities are a thing of the past. People don’t want that anymore, cities are hell to travel around, dirty, stinky, expensive and unsustainable. Most people would have a vastly better time in a well developed small/mid town area.
