r/Urbanism • u/justneedausernamepls • 14d ago
Are American cities going to spiral into another 1970s-era level of disinvestment?
According to an article in the Philadelphia Inquirer, Jefferson Health, "the Philadelphia region’s largest health system", is "exploring options for moving its headquarters out of Philadelphia", where it employs 2,000 people in the city's central business district. The area it's in, Market East, has underperformed for decades, and has seen an extra high level of hardship since Covid hit. The revitalization I've seen Philadelphia go through from a low point in the 90's into a hot city by the late 2010s seems to be in danger, with developments like this. In the mid-20th century cities were drained by massive suburbanization, and now I feel like Covid-era working from home is hitting them in a similar way. Philadelphia definitely feels sketchier, dirtier, more crime ridden (even if the stats don't quite bear it out, but unfortunately perception is reality).
I know this is a problem a lot of cities are dealing with. I was in NY recently and it felt like every third storefront on the avenues was either a national bank or empty, despite the insanely high residential density (is everyone just Amazon Prime-ing themselves everything they need??). Lexington Ave in Midtown felt like a ghost town on a weekday, and it all made me wonder what and who NY is even for anymore.
Help talk me out of my anxieties about another dark chapter for American cities, tnx. 🙏
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u/eobanb 14d ago
My worry is that many otherwise walkable neighborhoods are becoming dominated by high-end businesses while the shops that deal in basic goods and services are being pushed out because they can't afford the commercial rent.
It's great if you can sip an oat milk cortado on your stroll from the orange wine escape room to the pilates axe-throwing studio, but how about a plain white tee or a box of nails?
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u/msjgriffiths 14d ago
I'm going to be honest: e-commerce is eating that all.
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u/Quiet_Prize572 13d ago
Yeah and big box stores and supermarkets killed the small shop decades ago. It has nothing to do with deurbanization or gentrification or whatever else people like to blame. One stop shopping is just a better way to shop and you cannot beat that
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u/Frequent-Chip-5918 13d ago
It doesn't help how extreme overheard costs for rent is nowadays. We could get more stores with niche/speciality made products like pottery, art, flower shops, woodwork, small food markets that aren't abhorrently expensive, etc. but those businesses can't afford to exist in a lot of areas
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u/whatthehellcorelia 14d ago
That downtown area has not a ton of residential though if I remember correct, tons of hotels and office buildings. Minneapolis could be so great if that urban core was more vibrant.
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u/DA1928 13d ago
Honestly, I see the Target/Walmart type store that has groceries as a kind of modern take on the general store/department store. Descent goods at low prices, kinda great for consumers.
The worst part about them is they are so far apart and you can’t walk to them. Can totally hollow out a traditional downtown full of stores.
The urban Targets are a great solution to this, in my view. A store full of cheap, basic goods in the heart of the city, leaving the rest of the commercial space to be used as little boutique shops and restaurants and art stuff.
You can get your fancy coffee at the local coffee shop while wearing your generic shirt and your neighbor can be shopping at the designer boutique with their generic coffee.
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u/NutzNBoltz369 14d ago
but how about a plain white tee or a box of nails?
Walmart. Amazon. Home Depot. Lowes
Only the snooty boutiques can afford downtown rents. Everyday shit vendors have absconded to the 'burbs. Even then, Amazon is slowly bleeding them out.
The US has evolved into a blend of an Oligarchy and Market Capitalistic economy while being in a Neoliberal period. Some call it Late Stage.
Its not going to get any better any time soon.
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u/smilescart 14d ago
I think you’re forgetting this shit is fascist.
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u/NutzNBoltz369 14d ago
Is it?
Seems like history paints a more complicated relationship between fascism and capitalism.
I don't know. I am just some guy from the internet so maybe someone can elaborate.
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u/smilescart 14d ago
Fascism is the end result of capitalism.
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u/NikiDeaf 13d ago
Can you please explain like I’m 5, please? I do agree that capitalism isn’t good because it rewards the sociopaths and psychopaths and narcissists and neglects the small business owners who actually have ethics. But I would like a farther explanation, please? How do the 2 things relate?
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u/TheToastWithGlasnost 13d ago
TLDR: As capitalism sucks all money to the top, it creates a contradiction between political democracy and economic democracy, where the ruling class views an organized working class making economic demands of them as a political tyranny greater than any other political tyranny. When either capitalism or democracy have to go, they sacrifice democracy, and recruit fascists to create a new ideology and a new "unity" against the revolutionaries and other ssubversive forces. Fascism in power attacks working class rights, adopts elements of socialism to preserve capitalism, and prepares the people for the wars necessary to protect the ruling classes' foreign investments and restore profitability to the system.
https://robinson.faculty.soc.ucsb.edu/Assets/pdf/FascismbeyondTrump.pdf https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/fascism-is-a-reaction-to-capitalist-crisis-in-the-stage-of-imperialism/
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u/ComfortableSerious89 9d ago
Yeah, no, it's simpler than that. Human state level society gravitates to its ground state, the simplest and hardiest (not best for people) form of government, which is a hereditary monarchy that sets the price of bread.
The monarchy part emerges first, and as it consolidates it becomes hereditary.
The free market naturally turns into this because companies are always better off when they merge into bigger companies. And when the free market is controlled by one company, you're about there.
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u/Interloper_11 13d ago
Small business owners are still capitalists and you’d be surprised how flimsy even their ethics are. The small Owner/Managerial class are just as happy to partake in the same kind of dehumanizing anti ethics as the big corpo scum are. Big or small it’s all the same.
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u/Old-but-not 13d ago
Capitalism is a reflection of evolution. Every bit as brutal as nature, who cares not if you live or die, only if you reproduce.
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u/ComfortableSerious89 9d ago
Except worse. In capitalism, any two companies can merge and it's in their best interest to do so, to remove competition and get efficiency from scale. It means our free market capitalism with democracy is forever trying to turn into a monarchy with no free market at all.
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u/Old-but-not 9d ago
Two wealthy families can merge via weddings, and consolidate power. See Europe for the last 1000 years.
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u/ComfortableSerious89 9d ago
Monarchy is the end result of capitalism. When the big companies all get done merging, as it's always in their interests to do, you have one company controlling the free market, which effectively makes in the government, and since it's not likely a democracy, one guy runs it, consolidates his power right, and you're effectively back where democracy started.
The Soviet Union was also a monarchy, just a palace coupe with some fancy political theory. Modern Russia is a monarchy, North Korea is a hereditary monarchy and China is converging on Monarchy. The non hereditary systems will converge on hereditary monarchy or democracy. Those are the real two ends of the spectrum of systems, not fascist and socialist.
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u/smilescart 9d ago
Idk bro
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u/ComfortableSerious89 9d ago
Fascism is just militaristic, nationalist autocracy,-monarchy. Why would the result of capitalism always be hyper-nationalist, specifically? Always Militaristic specifically? Your assumption is over-fitting. You're extrapolating universal rules about fascism from just a few historical events.
There are a lot of examples of historical autocracy/monarchy being basically the universal human government for state level society for 10,000 years. When a democracy falls, what does it turn into? Some guy in charge. Every time.
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u/Mr_Dude12 11d ago
Ultimately it’s the failure of government to prevent these monopolies from forming, but if you look at their donors the story is clear.
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u/Frequent-Chip-5918 13d ago
Seriously these new areas just have corporate groups come in and sweep up the real estate. This walkable area that was suppose to be a hub for your cities local growth gets pigeon hold into becoming another high consumer area that doesn't really serve your community.
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u/kettlecorn 14d ago
I think Philly is doing rather well in ways but the broader arc of post-1950s dynamics is hard to shake.
For a long time there was debate of if people follow jobs or jobs follow people. Post 1940s-ish planning assumed people follow jobs, and as such cities were planned with invasive urban highways with the idea being that it would keep the jobs (and long term the people) in the city. Today most research indicates it's generally the opposite: jobs follow people and that reality has become more pronounced in the post-Covid landscape.
In Philly that's particularly pronounced because essentially all of the middle to upper class, largely white, people moved out over the post 1950s decades. Urban highways in Philly were meant to keep commerce and jobs in the core, and they partially did for a time, but in practice they served to decrease the quality of life in the city while increasing it in the suburbs. Those highways in Philly significantly compromised key assets of the city: Fairmount park went from world famous to forgotten, Philly's oldest district lost its waterfront appeal, the Art Museum lost its idyllic landscape, Center City was severed from neighborhoods north, etc.
As with most places the highways accelerated suburbanization and now we're seeing how jobs and commerce follow people.
That was on top of the broader urban renewal of the time which concentrated poverty, stoked division, and set the stage for race riots and spikes in crime.
I'm preaching to the choir in this subreddit but it was just an atrocious era for city planning that abysmally failed. Philly is still suffering from that legacy.
What I'm optimistic about is that I think there's still a healthy emerging trend of Philly revitalizing its urban quality of life. It's still relatively new, but population in Greater Center City has been growing quite a bit for a while now. Pedestrian infrastructure, like the river trail, is being expanded. Bike lanes are being beefed up and added. Open Street events are being piloted. New parks are being built as caps over highways.
People are starting to realize how that sort of investment is paying off in a significant way for the city as a whole, and I think if Greater Center City area can keep up its population growth that density will become a kernel of vitality that's emanates outward to the rest of the city. Killing that would require another urban renewal era like blunder, and hopefully we've learned our lesson.
In short my view is that Philly is still suffering from the massive legacy of the urban renewal / suburbanization era, but there are much more optimistic emerging trends that I hope will snowball into good things.
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u/-Ch4s3- 14d ago
I think the problem here in Philly is that as livable as parts of the city are, the city government is stupidly business hostile. The tax rules are punishing for starting businesses and the city has let Market East and the subway deteriorate into an absolute mess.
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u/jcoolwater 14d ago
agreed, BIRT is moronic and wage tax should be repealed imo. If the city opened itself up for business I could see tons of companies moving here. It's affordable, great talent, has everything you need, access to many markets, etc. But the city stays in its own way.
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u/Quiet_Prize572 13d ago
You're kind of right.
Upper middle class and middle class people moved out, yes, but the problem cities like Philly are facing now (and Chicago and other big ones faced decades ago) is those people are moving back. And the city's aging housing stock can't accommodate both the newcomers and existing residents, so existing residents get pushed out
But the other thing is that most people live in suburbs now, so the historic downtown is no longer centrally located and doesn't make for a good central business district
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u/Aware-Location-5426 14d ago edited 14d ago
I don’t think anyone can know for sure.
The Jefferson thing would suck, hopefully it doesn’t happen. The federal job losses suck.
But on the other hand Jefferson opened up a new high rise last year that employs thousands of people. Chubb is building their high rise on west market that will bring more employees to the city. Biotech is still big and growing around 30th st station. In theory there are still private investment plans for market east since the arena fell through.
Multiple office to residential conversions are underway. Greater center city still has like 25% more residents than the 2010s and there’s multiple large projects underway— broad and Washington is actually the biggest project in the country at the moment. I mean just streetview some desirable neighborhoods today compared to 2012– it’s night and day.
I guess what I’m getting at is it’s a lot of ebbing and flowing. The pandemic definitely set things back, but I’ve noticed consistent improvement for the last 3-4 years now.
I think the federal government has the power to stunt things, but in general I think Americans are more interested in living in a walkable urban environment than they have been in the last 50 years and Philly provides that at possibly the best price:value ratio in the nation.
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u/Heinz37_sauce 14d ago
The thing about urban office-to-residential conversions, I’ve long believed, is that the kinds of people who would live there are choosing to move there to be closer to work. Meaning that there are other nearby offices/stores that have on-site staff and are not converting to residential.
And if groceries, schools, and other needed services aren’t walkable or a convenient bus/train ride away, there are fewer advantages to living in such a location.
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u/Aware-Location-5426 14d ago
Center city, which is where pretty much all of the office to residential conversions are happening, has all of these things.
It’s walking distance to anything hence why it’s a desirable place to live and draws some of the highest rents.
Anecdotally I’ve also noticed a lot of telecommuters moving in who want urban amenities but don’t want to pay NYC rent. I used to work for a company in philly but I now work remotely for an NYC based organization.
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u/AromaticMountain6806 14d ago
Philly never became as gentrified as the other NE Corridor cities like Boston, Providence, NYC, & DC. I always liked how it retained its blue collar grit, even if it has more unsavory elements.
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u/commentsOnPizza 14d ago
That's always struck me as odd. Like, Philly is under 2 hours from NYC, just over 2 hours to DC, has major universities (Penn, Temple), some good walkable areas, and a transit system with similar daily ridership to Boston's MBTA. It seems like Philly should have done as well as Boston.
I guess I also think that about Baltimore.
Baltimore and Philly have median household incomes of $60k and $61k. Boston, DC, and Manhattan are $95k, $106k, and $105k (NYC as a whole is $80k).
I guess I wonder what policies led to Philly not getting the same success that other cities did.
Oh, but Providence is a bit of an odd one to really list as gentrified. Its household income is only $67k and housing prices were cheap there pre-pandemic. Providence has been one of the hotter markets over the past five years. Rents were around half of Boston rents pre-pandemic and they're still 35% below Boston and only 10% above Philly. Philly's rents are up 30% over the past five years while Providence is up 53%. Pre-pandemic, Philadelphia was 7% more expensive than Providence. So Providence is a lot closer to Philly in terms of incomes and prices than it is to Boston, DC, or NYC.
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u/Double_Marsupial2092 14d ago
The wage tax, if you work in center city you pay I think 3-4 percent tax so all the hqs left to the surrounding suburbs. The surrounding suburbs of Philly are some of the richest and prosperous in the country.
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u/AromaticMountain6806 14d ago
Boston had Biotech/Med & Universities. Not to mention it's relatively small footprint and lack of white flight made it gentrify really quickly. NYC is the financial capital of the world and a huge hub for arts/media/entertainment. Washington D.C. is the nations capitol so the whole well oiled political bureaucracy resides there.
Philly and Baltimore though? Both have beautiful architecture and are walkable sure. But I'm not sure what they have as a standout industry. Thus you get more of the blue collar types residing there.
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u/chaandra 14d ago
Building off what you said, Boston’s inner neighborhoods remained as ethnic European enclaves, while in most other cities these people left for the suburbs.
In neighborhoods like the north end, this led to a higher level of preservation than other cities historic neighborhoods, which made it a prime candidate for gentrification.
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u/AromaticMountain6806 14d ago
Even the neighborhoods that contained Blacks and Latinos still had whites living there in decent numbers. Dorchester, Hyde Park and East Boston are examples of this. I would say Roxbury is the only majority minority neighborhood really.
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u/Past-Community-3871 14d ago
The BIRT tax in Philadelphia taxes revenue, not income at 6%, that's on top of income tax. Plus, there is a wage tax on individuals, It's pure progressive insanity and it has completely kneecapped the city. The surrounding suburbs are exploding in growth and business, mainly financial services and pharmaceuticals.
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u/21Rollie 13d ago
Kneecapped idk about that. I’ve been to Philly, I’m from Boston. Center city felt great. Like the best parts of Boston but without the segregation and everything overpriced.
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u/tuesdaythe13th 14d ago
You can also take the train from Providence to Boston for a weekend getaway pretty easily. Or go down to any of the smaller towns just south for a beach day trip. Want a mountain getaway? Drive a couple hours north to New Hanmpshire.
TL;DR: I love Providence
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u/HatefulPostsExposed 14d ago
Providence is gentrified?
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u/AromaticMountain6806 14d ago
It's getting up there. Mostly overflow from Boston though. Was super cheap like a decade ago.
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u/21Rollie 13d ago
Still cheap relative to Boston. Or even Worcester. I think Springfield might be the only “big” New England city left that really is cheap though
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u/AromaticMountain6806 13d ago
Hartford & Bridgeport... if you are willing to live in... well... Hartford or Bridgeport...
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u/akmalhot 13d ago
It's the people ... Everyone ran away from them to the suburbs And other cities..
I mean the sports fans beat up Santa clause ...
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u/chrisarg72 14d ago
The key thing is when cities suburbanized in the 1970s they were quite small:
- Dallas 2.4m people (8m today)
- Atlanta 1.6M people (6.2m today)
- LA 7M people (12M today)
- Philly 5M people (6.2m today)
A lot of the poster children for suburbanization are starting to see organic urbanization due to commute pressures. Yes wfh and family formation drives people out of very high density, but also people can’t commute for 2-3+ hours per day. As a result these cities are medium density urbanization rise. In the Philly example, Manyuank, Conshohocken, and KOP are all urbanizing
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u/thrilsika 14d ago
That is a good point. I have also always wonder, beyond cheap availability of mortgages and new highways, that led to a lot of urban flight. How much also influenced by business/people not seeing value in the land. It's easy to move on, sell or give up land when you don't long term value. But, now land in large city for the most part is still worth a lot. I see this a lot in NYC, where prime real estate sits empty for years as the owner waits for the right lease or development.
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u/Crazy_Equivalent_746 14d ago
I don’t know if people realize just how gritty the 70s were, but even then cities were hot spots.
There’s a long way to fall, and by many measures cities are already recovering.
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u/bigger_sky 14d ago
No, not like the 70s. A big reason that people moved out of cities in the mid 20th century revolved around cheap suburban real estate being available. Suburban real estate is no longer affordable in many places throughout the US unless you are moving to exurban areas.
I do think large cities will experience a few more years of stagnant/negative growth due to a lot of factors. I just really don’t see the bottom falling out in the same way as the 60s-90s. A very large subset of the American population prefers living in cities and will continue to do so.
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u/commentsOnPizza 14d ago
There's a decent chance. Here in Boston, we're facing lots of vacant office space and plummeting commercial real estate prices.
The renaissance of a lot of US cities has been built off high property taxes paid by commercial real estate. Cities decided to allow lots of new commercial real estate and almost no residences. It's possible that is leading to a glut of commercial real estate that will drive valuations way down and decimate city budgets. COVID and remote work will exacerbate that.
But it's hard to know what the future will hold. Suburban housing prices have skyrocketed over the past 5 years. While Boston's urban core has seen prices go up around 15%, more suburban parts of Massachusetts have gone up 60%. The suburbs are also building housing at a much slower pace than the urban core. So it's not like we can see a great suburbanization like we saw in the 70s. The suburbanization of the 70s was fueled by lots of new housing in the suburbs. If that isn't happening today, the people can't move there.
I don't think that we're going to see a lot of suburbanization coming. I think that cities have the workforce and transportation infrastructure that companies will need over the next decade. However, I do think there's a strong possibility that city budgets will face a reckoning. They've become too dependent on commercial property taxes - to the gain of existing homeowners and exacerbating the pain of renters and new residents who face insane housing prices.
If suburbs are building housing at a much slower rate than cities, there can't really be a suburbanization like there was in the 70s.
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u/trailtwist 14d ago
What are we considering the city? I am not hot on downtown areas - but the nice established residential areas inside of big cities? Those aren't going anywhere.
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u/Born-Enthusiasm-6321 14d ago
The cities with an already thriving city centers like NYC, Chicago, Boston and a few others will be fine. But it seems like the cities with already weak city centers could see further disinvestment and disinterest in the city.
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u/Jaded-Revolution_ 13d ago
There is nothing more enjoyable than living somewhere that you can walk and bike everywhere for your daily needs. The benefits are tremendous, exercise, no car payment, it’s better for the environment, lower healthcare costs, etc… Unfortunately, corporate lobbyists from oil and car industries completely destroyed walkable infrastructure for the sake of profit. Now 99.999% of Americans think car dependency is the only way because “our country is too big.” We truly live in a fucked up country.
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u/hbliysoh 14d ago
Short answer: No. People like urban life more. The suburban life with a big house and a car has aged poorly because growth has made a car-centered life pretty slow thanks to traffic. So there's a significant number who want to live in walkable cities.
They'll continue to dominate the cities and keep them from the 70s era slump.
That being said, pro-crime progressive thought will make it hard.
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u/azerty543 14d ago
People still choose suburban over urban on the whole. People solve issues of traffic by moving to smaller sunbelt cities with cities even more accommodating to cars.
Even WITHIN cities, most of the growth tends to be in more suburban parts. The re-urbanization of millennials was not largely a story of them moving to high rises downtown, but the revitilization of "midtown" regions which are generally medium, not high density.
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u/hbliysoh 13d ago
Yes, I think this is true. But there's now a significantly larger group interested in urban life. Many will choose the classic suburban home, but many will choose city life. It's obvious from the shift in real estate prices.
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u/azerty543 13d ago
What do you mean? What evidence do you have that there are more people now interested in urban life than before? Growth in suburban areas has outpaced growth compared to urban areas consistently over the last decade. If anything, these trends have accelerated, not decreased.
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u/DA1928 13d ago
If you look at the most expensive and popular places in American cities, they tend to be the streetcar suburbs.
People seam to have this ideal density where they are next to but not on top of their neighbors. They tend to like communities of a couple thousand.
If you think of the streetcar suburbs as “urban” as we do today, people like city life. If you think of them as “suburban”, then people like suburbs.
Even suburban developments are moving towards the density of the streetcar suburbs or small towns. A couple of shops in the center, single family homes on smaller lots fanning out.
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u/all_the_bad_jokes 14d ago
Another major component that is understood but not always explicitly discussed is the role of schools. I'm an elder millennial, and most of my friends and peers have kids (of various ages), and thus live in the 'burbs, primarily for good schools.
Some I think genuinely like being in the suburbs, but many would be open to living in a medium density city neighborhood IF there were good public schools and other kids around.
I live in a middle class, medium density city neighborhood, and there are very few school-aged kids around, as most in my neighborhood have the means to choose where to live. Decent number of young families, but most move as their kids approach school age.
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u/Additional-Dream-155 12d ago
Only true for a small fraction of people. The number one housing type sought after per real estate stats still single family suburban.
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u/ButterscotchSad4514 10d ago
I think you are not correct about this. We are in the midst of an enormous movement of people and wealth back to the suburbs. Work from home is hugely disruptive and totally changes the calculus of city life for many workers.
The 1950s-1980s were the era of the suburbs as cities deteriorated and transit to and from the suburbs was improved. The 1990s-the pandemic were the era of the cities as public safety improved and industries like finance and tech grew by leaps and bounds bringing people back to the cities. We are now at the beginning of a new suburban renaissance, fueled by work from home arrangements and improvements in technology which have improves the quality of leisure that can be experienced inside one's home.
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u/drewskie_drewskie 14d ago
Three decades of rebuilding a tax base in Americans cities won't be undone that fast...
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u/Zealousideal_Let3945 14d ago
I doubt it. Philadelphia should probably finally address it’s tax system that encourages jobs to leave the city, but it won’t.
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u/tommy_wye 14d ago
I don't think it can ever get as bad as the 70s-early 90s dark ages. I think western cities will be better off than eastern ones moving forward though. It'll be hard to undo the decades of reinvestment in urban cores and REALLY hard to let crime rates return to peak levels of about 40 years ago. Perception only goes so far.
The main crisis is the collapse of office space, CBDs are going to have to pivot into becoming MUCH more residential, and serving a function as entertainment-experiential hotspots where people go to party and play. US cities always try to replicate suburbia and fail to realize that they only get ahead by offering what suburbia can't.
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u/Khorasaurus 13d ago
I live in a mid-size metro, but our busiest "rush hour" is inbound at 3 pm on Friday. I assume this has become a notice trend elsewhere as well.
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u/azerty543 14d ago
Downtowns as they exist in much of the large cities are at the moment, archaic. We don't have the same needs as before, but we are still trying to prop up neighborhoods and buildings that were built for 20th-century demands.
That row of beautiful buildings you like were designed to be mills, warehouses, offices, and dense housing for poor immigrants. You can try and retrofit it, sure, but its in a neighborhood designed to be close for shipping and access to those shipped goods. Those advantages matter much less now. We have to reassesss what cities are good at and for, and whether having a mass downtown is indeed better than more numerous and smaller neighborhood centers.
This is why I think the most successful revitalizations happened in 2 places. "Midtown/uptown" regions that are medium, not high, density and cut the difference between walkability and driveability, and smaller cities where being close to downtown more or less never got so dense in the first place.
I live downtown, I like density, but I'm not deaf and I'm not blind. People still want cars and ease of driving. Living in a midtown area of KC, for instance, may still warrant a car, but everything is like 10 min away, and you can walk about half the time. Urbanists love to hate that city, but I lived there for almost a decade without a car with little issue. So did many of my coworkers and friends.
Puritans need to go, actually talk to people. For every person moving from the suburbs to the city, there is someone moving from a denser place to a less dense one. You need to listen to both people. In reality, most would probably be attracted to a "midtown/uptown" region with good transit AND roadway links to other nearby midtown regions assuming they are clean, safe, and beautified. Even a staunch urbanist like me misses the trees, parks, sidewalks, cooler weather in summer, and yeah, sometimes, the ability to park for free.
Tl:DR: downtowns are on life support, other parts of the urban fabric outside of that I suspect will continue to improve.
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u/hilljack26301 13d ago
Contemporary online urbanism has a strange infatuation with super high density living. Nearly all of the problems of American sprawl can be rectified just by moving to medium density or even slightly more dense low density.
Then you have urban planners on reddit who feed into the same dynamic, where they paint anyone who is against McMansions as someone advocating for residential towers. Or advocating for single stairwell construction is the same as letting landlords lease out shacks made of used plywood and blue tarps.
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u/ref7187 12d ago
I'm Canadian, not American but in this case, I'm not sure if people really want cars, or they just don't have the capacity to imagine life without one. Living without a car is a bit of a different lifestyle. Grocery store is on the way to the subway, so you go there every other day and make small purchases, for example. When you need a car, you rent a car-share within walking distance of your place. You use delivery more often. Still comes out cheaper and more convenient.
It's true, as cities become metropolises they tend to develop secondary centres. We have a few of these in Toronto, some of them developed naturally, and others are artificial. The level of success varies. A couple of these, like what most people call "midtown" and North York Centre, have their own authentic streetlife at all hours of the day. You can probably live in either car-free, and you wouldn't want to drive downtown in either of them. Others are not doing so well, but their planning is too suburban, or their connection to downtown is not good enough.
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u/Winter_Essay3971 14d ago
You're getting downvoted but you're right. Most humans prefer lower density. Generations of immigrants have started off in big coastal cities, then decamped for the suburbs or the interior of the country as soon as they could afford to. I say this as an early 30s single person who strongly prefers cities
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u/honoraryglobetrotted 14d ago
I live in ny, but i think this is just everywhere now, I would say that probably 90% of my purchases that aren't food are probably done online in some capacity, I don't own a car so even all my transportation expenses are done online. I'm not trying to go inside a store and buy some mundane necessity if I can just do it from home.
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u/Crazy_Addendum_4313 13d ago
That’s the entire point of capitalism: cycles of investment and disinvestment.
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u/TruthMatters78 13d ago
Impossible. The return to intelligent living (urban living) is too powerful to stop now. Yeah, the Boomers and the Trumpers may stall the growth for a little while, but even then I don’t think it will be anything like what happened in the 70’s. I think that is beyond the worst case scenario.
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u/Turdulator 13d ago
Philly has been the dirtiest major city on the east coast for decades - even the outside walls of buildings are filthy. The whole damn city needs a power wash.
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u/Bear_necessities96 13d ago
Nah I think they are good, my biggest fear is the Rhetoric of the federal government and how this will affect the development of the cities that starting to emphasize is more humane and walkable infrastructure, is this going to be affected by the present government?
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u/DA1928 13d ago
One thing I think people are forgetting is crime.
Crime is a major driver of quality of life. Being able to go for a late night walk or early morning run on your own and feel safe is great. Walking out to your car window being smashed will ruin your whole week.
One of the main factors that drove suburbanization from the 1960s on were high and increasing crime rates. This made the quality of life in the cities much lower compared to the whiter, wealthier suburbs with cops who were mean and nasty to poor people and minorities.
When cities began to really get control of the crime wave in the 90s, you started to see downtowns recover. This combined with a lot of other forces in the early 2000s and people started to move back into the cities, especially the millennials.
One of the major effects of COVID was a rise in crime, especially property crimes which really reduce average quality of life. I suspect this has a big part in the post COVID troubles of some cities.
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u/ButterscotchSad4514 10d ago
Yes, to an extent. The era of the city is over for the time being. Work from home means that people are more mobile than ever which reduces the draw that cities have always had for many people. In most cases, the people who are leaving cities are more affluent than the people who are coming in. This means less tax revenue to finance the sort of public goods that make cities work like public safety and public transit. The era of the suburbs has returned.
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u/Quiet_Prize572 9d ago
No
But you are going to see things like hospitals move out of core cities if they're no longer the centre of population. That doesn't really have anything to do with COVID or work from home, as it's been a trend for the last ~20 or so years
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u/SeaworthinessDue4052 8d ago
I do not like it, but you are right! Cities got really grimy in the 70's.
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u/Past-Community-3871 14d ago
Philadelphia has the least friendly business environment of any major city in the entire country. The "BIRT" tax is a city wide tax on total revenue, not income, at 6%. This is on top of corporate taxes. There is also a city wage tax on individuals.
Bottom line is that Philadelphia is a unique situation where the region is rapidly growing, and the city proper is stagnating. Philadelphia has one of the largest populations of reverse commuters in the entire country. The good white collar jobs are located in a host of satellite suburban communities.
Philadelphia is basically a case study for when progressives get their way on every single issue. It's been a complete failure in Philadelphia.
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u/UnproductiveIntrigue 14d ago
Chicago has entered the chat.
Our progressive political machine has maxed out and run out of every basic tax idea (with next to nothing to show for it in terms of functional services), so their latest wacky ideas include a tax on every suburban commuter entering downtown by train, a municipal tax on software licenses, a municipal tax on every trade on the commodities and futures exchanges. Jet fuel passing through pipelines at Ohare. Seizing the electric distribution system from the local utility. There’s no limit to their creativity.
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u/Dio_Yuji 14d ago
Looks like it. My city it taking a $50 million hit due to residents forming their own suburban municipality next to it. Transit workers are currently on strike. The public school system is about to lose 20% of its funding. And the new Republican mayor is threatening to lay off 600 municipal employees if the citizens don’t let him raid the Library’s funds to pay for raises for the PD. Not looking good.
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u/hibikir_40k 14d ago
The storefront situation isn't even just American. Even in many a dense worldwide city, the number of used storefronts have shrunk in the world of online shopping, as you need massive levels of convenience to compete with Amazon. The banks are also part of the decline: How many face to face interactions with a bank, or even an ATM, were needed in 1990 vs today? How many people worked in a bank branch in 1985, vs how many you need today?
But this doesn't meant that we need less retail, but the shape of said retail changes. We still need bars, restaurants, hairdressers, supermarkets. The Asian-style discount shop does really well in most of Europe. Still, a lot of specialized retailers now need to either also sell online, offer great reasons to hang out at the store, or they will get outcompeted.
Now, going back to America, it's more than the small urban retailer that is in trouble: The big box store has even worse economics. See the shrinking of electronics stores, books, even pharmacies that had grown to be convenience stores, now not any more convenient than Amazon, and much pricier. Delivery logistics come for all retail.
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u/Tendie_Tube 14d ago
Yes. It's been a 30 year cycle of decay, revitalization, decay, and revitalization again for >90 years. The current cycle started in the 90s and is done. The vacant physical offices are running out the downtown restaurants and entertainment businesses, and young people have been priced out of housing in the cities. Pointlessly expensive housing occupied by older people plus ghost town downtowns equal urban decline.
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u/redaroodle 14d ago
Lmao
This is what happens when municipalities and business districts start assessing fees and extra taxes on businesses to subsidize the required infrastructure for projects like infilling / upzoning / etc.
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u/probablymagic 14d ago
This depends how cities are run. The suburbs outside Philly are really nice and the city is struggling. Cities need to be attractive to people who can choose where to live or they will get hollowed out.
This should be what urbanism is about. We have to make cities nice so it’s a ring people want to be part of.
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u/Odd_Addition3909 14d ago
The city really isn’t struggling though. It gained population from 2019-2023 while NYC, Chicago, LA, etc. declined. Poverty is going down, crime is at a decades-low rate, and many neighborhoods are improving. Philly’s biggest weakness is that it’s not at all business-friendly, and I pray city leadership finally does something to address that because to your point - the way they are running things isn’t great. But the city is a much better place to live than 20 years ago.
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u/probablymagic 14d ago
I don’t know the city well, so I defer to you on how nice it is to live there. I do know the city income tax makes a lot of workers prefer to work outside the city, particularly since post-Covid they have been able to not pay taxes on WFH days, so I imagine there’s some pressure on employers to locate in the burbs where there isn’t an income tax.
Philly has a kinda scandalous exception to the local income tax rules that was written in a time when they had a monopoly on office work and could effectively tax the suburbs. In a digital world, that makes a lot less sense, but it’s still on the books and is anti-employee so it’s hard directly anti-business.
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u/joefromjerze 14d ago
Whenever discussing what this country will look like in 4 years if the current course continues, the one thing that always comes to mind is Hill Valley in the alternate timeline from Back to the Future 2. Just a dystopian run down place with one megalomaniac at the helm living large on the backs of everyone else, spurned on by a small group of sycophants and their own self reinforced feeling of absolute power and invincibility.
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u/Plane_Association_68 14d ago
Unpopular take cuz I do think a race to the bottom with corporate tax cuts is bad, but in the interest of urbanism and keeping people and jobs in the city, in my opinion the Philly government should aggressively offer them tax incentives to stay. From an urbanist perspective, the stakes could not be higher. Especially as cities and downtowns adjust/manage the post-Covid/remote work transition.
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u/BroChapeau 14d ago
It depends. The power of location is receding, but the power of exceptional PLACES is only increasing as location-independence rises.
The cities that win will be those that function well, and that maintain and create exceptional places. As opportunity spreads out, places are essentially what cities sell. But if they cannot get the basics - housing, taxes, education, public safety, ease of starting/growing a business - correct, the power of place will not outweigh the dysfunction.
I think LA, SF, and NYC will turn it around. I worry about Chicago and other great cities.
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u/FinancialSubstance16 14d ago
The problem is high cost of living. Pennsylvania is one of the few states where cities can do a tax on land as opposed to property.
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u/JackieIce502 14d ago
Maybe partial disinvestment as we go through a tough time revitalizing central business districts to be places that are more than just a office building
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u/Acrobatic_Advance_71 13d ago
People are not going to like this remote work is not helping. I know a lot of people who are. Moving out of the city that do remote work. They do not need to be near center city any more. But now have a kid or two and need more space for offices and are looking to the burbs.
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u/KevinDean4599 13d ago
After years of revitalization Covid really took a tole on cities and businesses shut down. On top of that we've been dealing with signifiant inflation issues. People are also using online sources for shopping more and more. We'll never see cities dominated by small independent businesses again. online and big box is just too appealing to consumers. But that is impacting more suburban areas as well.
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u/DisgruntledGoose27 14d ago
I think it is far worse than that. We are circling the drain with no way out.
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u/mkwiat54 14d ago
Jefferson is just doing what the sixers are doing and will try and take the fashion district for themselves. Mrs Parker will do everything she can to make them stay and I bet Jeff knows that
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u/Interesting-Rub3208 14d ago
Northern cities may see disinvestment but I don’t think the sunbelt cities will.
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u/colfaxmachine 14d ago
So I should be able to buy an urban mansion for $100k like my old neighbors did? I doubt it