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The Urban Revival Is Over
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- rhapsodic 9y agoI unabashedly prefer living in the suburbs over cities. But I'm glad the "Urban Revival" happened, and I hope it continues. In my own city, the rising home values have made it economically viable to pour money into formerly decaying row houses that were built for working class families over a century ago. So at least a lot of the ancient, unsafe wiring, plumbing, lead paint, asbestos, etc., is being dealt with by people who can afford to foot the bill.
- Apocryphon 9y agoHasn't this already been forecasted as part of a regular cycle? All of those tech yupsters in SF will eventually start families (maybe later than sooner), and will move back to the suburbs to have kids instead of deal with the space/schooling issues of the city. Edit: Richard Florida is a very famous urbanist, but take his predictions with a grain of salt. He has been wrong before, self-admittedly so (https://jacobinmag.com/2017/08/new-urban-crisis-review-richard-florida https://jacobinmag.com/2017/08/new-urban-crisis-review-richa...). The descriptive aspects of this article might be right (the urban rush is slowing or reversing, for certain reasons), but his prescriptive descriptions- maybe less so.
- coldtea 9y ago>Hasn't this already been forecasted as part of a regular cycle? All of those tech yupsters in SF will eventually start families (maybe later than sooner), and will move back to the suburbs to have kids instead of deal with the space/schooling issues of the city. Only this doesn't make any more sense now than it did sense. People are born every year, not in spurts. Thus the flux of "tech yupsters" coming into SF should be as constant as those getting married and going to the suburbs -- keeping the state steady. If that isn't the case, it's not because "those tech yupsters eventually started family" (which every generation does at some point anyway), but because the influx of young tech people to SF had peaked at some point in the past.
- jackcosgrove 9y agoThe Millennial generation has already peaked, and the generation that came after it is smaller and will drive less demand. More generally, people are born in spurts. The baby boom generation and their children, the millennials, are larger than adjacent generations.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- zanny 9y agoTangentially related, but I am really disappointed in how little actual renewal the "revival" brought about. Except in extremely concentrated urban cores like in Manhattan almost every city is still by far dominated by 20s style row houses that stalled out the renewal process (because the yuppies that were moving into cores had no interest in those). Gentrification and renewal came to blows right in the middle and left what was probably the greatest blemish on the urban unchanged... because those were where the actual poverty was all along in the first place. The urban cores that got "renewed" were never squalor and dilapidation - they might not have been as trendy, but city centers have too much general access to be that useless no matter the popular trends. Unless you have a city like Detroit they just cannot degrade that much. Which really means all this hype about renewal is really just vapid air. Nobody is putting big money into actually innovating on the city concept, its all about buying politicians for favorable zoning over actually making anything lasting and meaningful out of the interest in urban renewal.
- redwood 9y agoEspecially when garbage chains come in and replace mom n pops. Might as well be back in the suburban strip mall
- freehunter 9y agoIs it possible that the "urban renewal" just didn't hit already-popular and not-in-need-of-renewal cities like Manhattan? My city was almost completely dead as recently as the 90s. Very high crime, lots of abandoned buildings, no businesses in the city center, only poor people lived downtown. Today there is a brewery on every corner, food trucks parked outside every day, live music almost every night of the week, and tons of people who don't own cars making it because downtown is an amazing place to be. And you talk about Detroit: Detroit was one of the biggest benefactors of the urban renewal. Sure it's not back to its pre-1968 glory days, but downtown is a safe and entertaining place to be, plenty of young people hang out, Woodward Ave in particular is hopping pretty much every night of the week. It went from being the place you warned your kids about to being the place you take your kids for a weekend while you watch a baseball game. It's easy to look at Manhattan and say "so much for urban renewal", but look at smaller cities in the Rust Belt. Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, Detroit, Grand Rapids, Cleveland, Cincinnati, St Louis. All cities that just 20 years ago were a death trap if you were there after dark, and certainly not a place you want to live. Now it's hard to tell their downtown cores were ever abandoned in the first place.
- rmrfrmrf 9y agoKind of a sloppily-written article, tbh. The stats are good, but the shift at the last paragraph to "why we should care" is very weak. And while, yes, I'm sure the White House's policies aren't doing urban revival any favors, it seems to me that we collectively need to stop freaking out every time the wind changes direction. Who's to say that whatever artificial incentives we create to shore up city populations won't have unintended consequences of their own?
- hn_throwaway_99 9y agoThere is really one one reason cities are not gaining population as fast (or they are losing it) as they have been relatively recently: the astronomical cost of living in major urban centers. The article points this out, but I think it's conclusion, that urban revival is over because of this, is pretty odd. Prices are so high because there are still way more people that want to live in central cities than there is housing. If the urban revival were truly over, so many people wouldn't want to live there.
- pj_mukh 9y agoThis is also my first thought when people say "Well, nobody wants to move to the Bay area anymore, everybody's leaving". Well, why is the rent still so high?
- Nicholas_C 9y agoNo one lives in SF anymore, it's too crowded.
- hw 9y agoThere are still many people moving to SF, especially those who work in companies in SF where the high compensation makes living in SF possible. Lots of people don't want to deal with travelling from outside SF to the city. Taking BART / Caltrain is soul sucking. Lots of young, unmarried people love the vibe of the city, and are willing to fork out part of their income to live there.
- peapicker 9y agoNice paraphrase of the famous Yogi Berra quote... ;)
- Swizec 9y ago> Well, why is the rent still so high? Rent in SF is going down actually. 2 years ago we moved into our apartment with my girlfriend and whatever price they mentioned our immediate response "YES WHERE DO I SIGN" just because we were so happy to even find a vacancy at all. 1 year ago they wanted to raise our rent $400 (about 6%), we negotiated it down to a $40 increase. Pretty good right? Well, this year we negotiated our rent down by almost $300. In SoMa. Our rent is now cheaper than it was when we first moved in. Next year we're hoping to move to a bigger place for the same price or cheaper. It's probably going to be possible. Fun fact: Our apartment building considers it a success if they get 50% of their tenants to renew the lease.
- baybal2 9y agoMore high rises are needed. American cities have too low density. America should learn from Hongkong and Shenzhen
- Finnucane 9y agoI don't know, personally I like breathable air.
- baybal2 9y agoProperly built highrise districts in Asia have larger distance in between buildings than what Americans have in suburbs
- Finnucane 9y agoWell, sure, the industrial waste has to go somewhere, right? Given China's sizable problems with air, water, and soil pollution, not sure that's really the right example.
- closeparen 9y agoHigh rises yield more breathable air by bringing more people to within walking distance of their needs and preventing vehicle trips.
- Finnucane 9y agoThat must be why Chinese cities are free of traffic problems.
- pcr0 9y agoWhat do high-rises have to do with unbreathable air? That's a consequence of being the world's factory.
- trgn 9y agoMaybe in about 4-5 american cities where there is pressure on land. For all the rest, most cities still have a lot of vacancy and abandoned areas near their downtown. Tasteful low-rise infill would already be an enormous improvement. If more cities would be look like the low rise downtowns of savannah or charleston, I expect people would love to move there and live more densely. So america shouldn't only learn from Hongkong, but also from its own past.
- redwood 9y agoHard not to see Uber/Lyft contributing to the idea that suburbs could be tolerable after all. Certainly changes the equation for me personally.
- kayoone 9y agoI don't believe that moves the needle in the grand scheme of things.
- freehunter 9y agoYeah I certainly would not want to have to Uber around town every day. If I had that kind of money to blow, I'd either buy a car or I'd live downtown and not in the suburbs.
- ghaff 9y agoI guess I can imagine subsidized Uber and other services of its ilk making it more practical to get a ride back and forth from the city for various events. But it's hard to see it making any difference in my day to day exurban life. I have a car and that's what I'm going to use on a typical (or even not so typical) day.
- bsder 9y agoPerhaps, but Uber can replace your third, fourth, fifth, etc. car. I, personally, have two older, completely paid for cars. When one eventually goes, I will not feel the need to replace it immediately since I can use Lyft to get around if my remaining car is offline.
- koolba 9y agoHow so? Changes where you go or how you get there?
- redwood 9y agoThe significant quality of life gain for car dependent areas makes me reconsider how bad it would be to live in a car dependent area.
- artursapek 9y agoI think remote work increasing in viability & popularity will continue pushing this trend over time. Many people who work in software and other computer-centric jobs (myself included) no longer feel pressure to live central to a big city for work anymore.
- kayoone 9y agonot sure, from my experience most companies still prefer on-site and when they offer remote, it's more of a tempoary perk not meant to be used permanently. Also salaries seem to be lower/high paying remote jobs are harder to get.
- closeparen 9y agoSeveral large companies that experimented with full-time remote work have ended those experiments and declared it to be a failure. I expect we will see it trend down, not up. Maybe some new, large, remote-first organizations will be born, but it seems unlikely that they would pay rich-country salaries.
- artursapek 9y agoRemote-first is the way to go, I think. That's how my current employer functions and I think it works pretty well. You definitely don't want to be the one guy who's remote and left out of lots of stuff. I also think it's much more likely to work at a smaller org than a large one. Of course, even in remote-first occasional face time is important. So some traveling is involved.
- hw 9y agoWhat this article doesn't mention is that while in some cities like SF, where rents are astronomically high, there's a huge influx of tech workers whose compensations are also relatively high. That coupled with not wanting to deal with traffic as well as younger generation of workers attracted to the city scene results in more and more people crowding into the city. The increase in development of high rise residential is also supportive of the urban revival (cultural, generational, financial) and demand in SF.
- rubicon33 9y ago" there's a huge influx of tech workers whose compensations are also relatively high" Relative to what, exactly? Relative to teachers, office workers, state employeers - sure. Relative to the cost of living? Hardly "high".
- gammarator 9y agoThe "crime is skyrocketing" argument is a bad one. It's an increase, true, but the absolute value remains low. Florida cites 5-15% increases in some cities. That's like returning to the terribly violent year of... 2010 or so? https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2016-09-19/chicago-drives-uptick-in-murders-national-crime-rate-stays-near-historic-lows https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2016-09-19/chicago-driv... We're still 300% below the violent crime rate in the early 90s.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- chrisseaton 9y agoWhat is 300% below? I'd say 50% below a figure is half that figure. So what is 100% below it? Zero presumably? And 300% below?
- merraksh 9y agoMaybe GP meant that a is 300% smaller than b when b is 300% larger than a, i.e. b = (1 + 3)a and hence a = b/4.
- chrisseaton 9y agoBy that argument '50% below 1000' is 667! That doesn't seem right.
- Animats 9y agoThat's a good thing. Over-urbanization is a real problem. It's much worse outside the US, with monsters such as Delhi and Sao Paulo, with huge slums. The US has managed to avoid that. The other failure mode is where the rich cities eat the country. Japan did that - Tokyo and Osaka are growing, and the rest of the country is emptying out. China is trying desperately to keep Beijing from growing further.
- baybal2 9y ago>Over-urbanization is a real problem. It's much worse outside the US, with monsters such as Delhi and Sao Paulo, with huge slums. The US has managed to avoid that. I'm failing to see how most of US 'middle-class" suburb district do not amount to slums. Of course walled communities near rich cities are well off, but other than that look at what these suburbs are in flyover states and poorer part of south-east
- freehunter 9y agoThat's a weird statement. Residential neighborhoods of major cities might tend to be slums, and rural areas might tend to be slums, but most suburbs of major cities are nice upper middle class areas. Sure if your city has five suburbs, one might be the slums, and over the decades that might switch from one to another to another as they cycle around, but by-and-large actual suburban cities exist because of the middle class.
- baybal2 9y ago>suburbs of major cities are nice upper middle class areas. Yes, they are for sure. I'm not speaking about the at all. What is a slum? A place where lots of people whose socioeconomic peculiarities prevent them from engaging in a meaningful economic activity. They can't get education, meaningful job locally, or have enought money to relocate. Eventually, overconcentration of such people weeds out all remaining economic activity out of the area and drives value of whatever is there down. https://www.amazon.com/Great-Inversion-Future-American-City/dp/0307474372 https://www.amazon.com/Great-Inversion-Future-American-City/...
- closeparen 9y agoAfter adapting to life in 500sqft, a single family home just seems kind of... disgusting. Wasteful. On the other hand, I pay an enormous premium to have a public transit commute of only 25 minutes, while this is totally normally in more car-oriented areas. I hope that, with the return to the suburbs, we distribute those suburbs around the country instead of having a few instances of enormous sprawl. If we continue to scale just a few cities outwards until traffic gets catastrophic, we're going to be spending a hell of a long time commuting. (Even if there's transit, because transit for single-family-home sprawl will never work that well). Electric cars should be able to mitigate the worst of the environmental impacts.
- peatmoss 9y ago> Electric cars should be able to mitigate the worst of the environmental impacts. That assumes the energy used to charge the cars is clean. It also excludes the cost of laying tarmac to everywhere. In general, humans living closer together conserves more natural resources.
- rayiner 9y agoThe urban revival never really happened. Some yuppies moved downtown in a few cities. Big deal. Middle class people kept leaving cities in droves. Even NYC, which boomed economically, lost middle income people from 2002-2006: http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20090205/FREE/902059930 http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20090205/FREE/902059930
- ghaff 9y agoThe former chief economist at Trulio has written quite a bit on this theme. One of his conclusions has been that a fairly specific demographic of college-educated young people has moved to a relatively limited number of very dense urban cores. Beyond that there's more of a shift to suburbs (which are urban in census terminology like pretty much everywhere you can actually see your neighbors).
- santaclaus 9y ago> Some yuppies moved downtown in a few cities. Hm? Every city in the states that I've lived in (NYC, Denver, Portland, San Francisco, Oakland) and some outside the states (Wellington) have seen tons of growth and development, well outside of what could typically be construed as the downtown.
- tptacek 9y agoThe crime explanation doesn't make that much sense for Chicago, which is geographically quite large and remains one of the most segregated in the country (due in part to the legacy of redlining, which continued into the 1970s). Most of the increases in crime aren't felt in areas that urban revivalists move to, but rather in areas to the south and west that for all intents and purposes might as well be different cities. The murder rate in Englewood is a poor explanation for whether or not families will remain in Roscoe Village or Bucktown.
- Finnucane 9y agoYou'd think that with ever-increasing evidence of the havoc that climate change is having on our coastal cities, we'd be better off actively discouraging more people moving to the coasts and investing in other places.
- davewritescode 9y agoThis is somewhat nonsensical. Part of what drives the urban expansion is the rise of two income families. http://www.pewresearch.org/ft_dual-income-households-1960-2012-2/ http://www.pewresearch.org/ft_dual-income-households-1960-20... Short commutes to urban centered jobs are VERY attractive to such families. It might mean the urban core boom is over but cities are more than just fancy downtown neighborhoods.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- synicalx 9y ago"these new urbanites embraced the energy and authenticity — and the ethnic, racial and sexual diversity — that are emblematic of cities" Yes of course, those must be the reasons why young people liked to live in easy to maintain and affordable properties near their place of business.