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How a ‘Golden Era for Large Cities’ Might Be Turning Into an ‘Urban Doom Loop’

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.

Insofar as fear of urban crime grows, as the number of homeless people increases, and as the fiscal ability of government to address these problems shrinks, the amenities of city life are very likely to diminish.

With respect to crime, poverty and homelessness, Brown argued:

One thing that may occur is that disinvestment in city downtowns will alter the spatial distribution of these elements in cities — i.e. in which neighborhoods or areas of a city is crime more likely, and homelessness more visible. Urban downtowns are often policed such that these visible elements of poverty are pushed to other parts of the city where they will not interfere with commercial activities. But absent these activities, there may be less political pressure to maintain these areas. This is not to say that the overall crime rate or homelessness levels will necessarily increase, but their spatial redistribution may further alter the trajectory of commercial downtowns — and the perception of city crime in the broader public.

“The more dramatic effects on urban geography,” Brown continued,

may be how this changes cities in terms of economic and racial segregation. One urban trend from the last couple of decades is young white middle- and upper-class people living in cities at higher rates than previous generations. But if these groups become less likely to live in cities, leaving a poorer, more disproportionately minority population, this will make metropolitan regions more polarized by race/class.

In his November 2022 paper, “The Remote Work Revolution: Impact on Real Estate Values and the Urban Environment,” Van Nieuwerburgh writes:

Since March 2020, Manhattan has lost 200,000 households, the most of any county in the U.S. Brooklyn (-88,000) and Queens (-51,000) also appear in the bottom 10. The cities of Chicago (-75,000), San Francisco (-67,000), Los Angeles (-64,000 for the city and -136,000 for the county), Washington, D.C. (-33,000), Seattle (-31,500), Houston (-31,000) and Boston (-25,000) make up the rest of the bottom 10.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/30/o...es-future.html

Maybe someday I'll be able to afford to live in NYC if it becomes a dump again...