The Forces That Will Reshape American Cities
Date Posted: July 7, 2020
Posted In: COVID-19 Updates, Ideas,
From Bloomberg CityLab: While our current pandemic and the economic fallout from it won’t lead to the end of cities, these intertwined crises will lead to subtle and nuanced changes in both urban and suburban America, mainly accelerating demographic and economic shifts that were already underway. One set of forces, enabled mainly by newly acquired fears of crowded buses, trains, stores and parks—a kind of collective enochlophobia—will act to pull some people, mainly families with children, out of urban centers and into their suburban and rural peripheries. This is nothing new: Families have been gravitating away from the most expensive cities for some time now.
The crisis will also activate another set of forces that will push other groups of people and businesses toward the urban center. Cities will get even younger as urban centers become more affordable. The precise weighting of these two forces cannot be predicted, but will turn on how severe and long-lasting the current crises turn out to be. If they are short-lived, most of the changes in cities and urban areas will be fleeting. But if the coronavirus and its related economic, fiscal and social upheaval continues over a protracted period of two or three years or more, the changes will go deeper.
As history demonstrates, the main effects will be to accelerate shifts already underway in how we live and work. Most of all the intertwined crises of urban America and the political movement that has grown up around them and in their wake create a powerful resetting moment when it is possible to remake our cities, suburbs and entire metropolitan areas as more just, inclusive and resilient places.
The Pull of the Suburbs
There is no doubt that the current crises have impelled some, particularly families with young children and also the old and the vulnerable, to decamp to the suburbs or even rural communities. For families, fear of Covid-19 has put a premium on private amenities like backyards and home offices, while reducing the appeal of more public amenities like parks or even restaurants, theaters, galleries and museums found in urban centers. Parents understandably want to avoid exposing their children to the virus via public playgrounds. Streaming a movie with family has become more appealing than sitting in a movie theater with strangers. Having a few trusted friends over for a backyard barbecue seems much more desirable than a crowded or even a socially distanced restaurant. Working out of a spare bedroom is much safer than heading to a downtown office building or co-working space. All of these desires can be far more easily satisfied in the suburbs, and almost always for a lot less money than in urban neighborhoods like Tribeca, Park Slope, Nob Hill, Georgetown or Beacon Hill. There is likely to be an uptick in rural gentrification as well, especially to smaller cities like Hudson, New York, that have lots of natural amenities and lovely main streets, but are still within a few hours of driving from a major urban center.