The way the suburbs were
built was a big mistake. Housing affordability is the
primary challenge in the marketplace right now, and
frankly, it's going to get worse. We can't afford to live in
this city if you're a working class New Yorker. Make houses more attainable
for people. For too many years, the
United States has not produced enough housing to
meet the demands of a growing nation. People are moving out of the
city. They're buying bigger houses. Life is better spent live. Just think about how much
better it was when you were around other people. That's what cities are
delivering. America's real estate
industry is racing to build more homes, but builders
are losing confidence in the market. Housing affordability is the
primary challenge in the marketplace right now, and
frankly, it's going to get worse as interest rates
increase. The cost of housing far
exceeds what some of the essential employees workers
need in order to have housing. Architects say that these
and other concerns could ease over time with better
planning. Suburban retrofitting has
the potential to transform people's lives. What started as a fantasy
concept for vacationers is now hitting Main Street
USA. Developers call them mixed use districts or
master planned communities. The Howard Hughes
Corporation just announced its purchase of 7000 acres
30 miles outside the city for a master planned
community. These new neighborhoods
bring people closer to stores. The change could
chip away at the country's larger issues. The central thing that
everyone building suburbs fails to grasp is that this
is a great one life cycle product. It's really not a
multiple life cycle, regenerative kind of thing. Can master planning solve
the nationwide housing supply shortage, and what
would it mean for the future of America's suburbs? The first thing to know is
that nearly half of the renters in the country are
struggling to pay their bills. We know that the laws of
supply and demand drive housing prices. For too many years, the
United States has not produced enough housing to
meet the demands of a growing nation. The second thing to know is
that more people are moving away from major cities to
places like Fairfax, Virginia. I'd like for us to make
houses more attainable for our people. Evelyn Spain is a planning
commissioner for Fairfax County, Virginia. It's a popular suburb
outside of Washington, D.C.. Fairfax County has over a
million people. So you can imagine there's
a lot to learn and a lot to apply to make life
equitable and inclusive. Fairfax County is in many
ways typical. It's still the, you know,
single family home community, but it's
changing a little bit. The American city has been
amazingly dynamic, despite powerful built-in
limitations on land use. Thinking about that old
model of a dense core where everybody works, that's a
20th century, if not a 19th century model. June Williamson has studied
these new developments for over two decades. She calls them suburban
retrofits. Part of what's driving
retrofit is the understanding that this
kind of growth machine paradigm that was pursued
somewhat aggressively in the 20th century has kind of
stalled out. And the rush to outlying
areas has often been so great that the congestion
of the highway has become as bothersome as the
congestion of the city. These preexisting properties
that aren't generating the tax income that they had in
the past but they've already been heavily invested in
can be very carefully rethought and have new
things layered into them. Among several of the
highlights in her book is the Mosaic District. It feels less like a
parking lot and more like a college campus. The developers there thought
about making a better mix of uses and really making a
destination that had a much higher percentage of public
open amenity space. And part of this was in
recognition that people can now shop at home and click
on their computers just to have things delivered to
them. But what's really missing is the opportunity
to have social engagement with other people. If you walk through these
new neighborhoods, it'll feel nice. Maybe too nice. You know, gentrification is
often a word that's used by people who are saying,
okay, we're looking at this construction activity and
we're thinking about cost concerns or traffic
concerns and the like, but to young households,
construction is the way that you add those homes of the
future. And so a complaint that's
often made is, well, you know, it's typically higher
end housing that tends to be built. Well, the challenge
is it's impossible to build 20-year-old apartment
buildings. The only way to get
20-year-old apartment buildings is to build t
oday. In places like Fairfax, long
term residents risk being pushed out to make room for
new development. We also need to make housing
more affordable for our aging community so they can
age in place. Some of the most popular
trends in city planning started in retirement
communities. Developers call them master
plans. I think the defining
characteristic of a master planned community is a
sense of neighborhood. Even Walt Disney had an idea
for a new neighborhood that better mixed technology and
daily life. But Walt never saw his idea
realized. However, in the 1990s, the
Walt Disney Company assembled a team of city
planners, which in turn created Celebration,
Florida. This neighborhood has 26
miles of walking trails and an open air shopping
center. There are about 10,000 residents in the
community. Disney recently announced a
major expansion in this space. The idea has been so
popular that copycat retirement communities
sprang up all around Florida. Today, the fastest
selling master plan community is nearby. It's The Villages. That's also the fastest
growing metro area in the entire country. Companies
like Blackstone have poured billions of dollars into
real estate too. Blackstone's privately held
real estate investment trust is spending big to repair
old apartment buildings. And it launched a $1
billion affordable housing fund. Other investors like
UMH Properties sell manufactured homes. The CEO says that taking
production offsite saves a lot of money. Everything is based on
location, age of community, all those things. But we're capable of
providing the brand new houses. Low as $900, $950 per month. Investors are pouring money
into these neighborhoods because they have hidden
benefits. Take a look at this chart to see why. It's comparing the
maintenance costs for a typical commercial lot
versus something more like the Mosaic District. From the government's
perspective, it's a no brainer. The smart growth
is more cost effective. Still, these new designs
are just a small share of the overall housing market. If you're thinking about the
traditional master plan community, the big suburban
development with thousands of units, that's only about
three and a half percent of total single family start. So it's a small share. Teardown construction, 6%. Two thirds of the home
construction in this country is undertaken by small,
privately held companies. And they don't get a lot of
attention. They're the ones out there building
townhouses, building duplexes, doing teardown
construction and remodeling our aging housing stock. Smaller developers like
James Rouse brought master planning to the middle
class with suburban cities. The developer created
Columbia, Maryland, a city full of master planned
communities. The ten villages that
comprise the city surround a big mall. People spend more time in a
mall than they do anywhere else except home. More than
they do in church, more than they do in school. Is that good or bad? Well. The problem that the New
Urbanists were trying to solve was really how to
stop making bad suburbs. How do we create a better
version of this thing that we're out building? The central thing that
everyone building suburbs fails to grasp is that this
is a great one life cycle product. It's really not a
multiple life cycle, regenerative kind of thing. The financial community
believes that adding housing to older shopping centers
could have a meaningful impact, both for their
bottom line and for the public good. Dead malls and
sleepy retail districts have become a common issue in
America. I think we often neglect to
recognize that we actually have created a development
pattern that is a throwaway development pattern. It is
a one generation of success and prosperity. And then essentially we
walk away from it and allow it to go through a cycle of
decline. Maybe if it's located well
enough, we'll do some heroic thing to rescue it. But we're basically just
allowing it to fall apart. That comes with all kinds
of costs, related costs, social costs, political
costs, cultural costs, economic costs. Charles Marone has compared
U.S. land development to a Ponzi
scheme. He made this chart to
summarize the problem. After one or two life
cycles, infrastructure maintenance costs add up,
sinking public budgets. That can put local
governments in a tough position. They have to
either add debt or raise taxes. Planners believe
that there's a better way. So it's really about
diversifying these places and adding other choices
for which we believe unmet demand does exist. Whether it's a medium
density townhouse community that's more of an urban
village or a suburban exurban master planned
community that has a large amount of housing, these
are all ways of capturing economies of scale from the
development and the construction perspective. If you have a business that
has a bad business model, will growth help it? Yeah, growth will help it
next quarter, next year, like growth is going to
help. But unless you fix that, business model it's
really just going to bankrupt a lot more people. Marone believes that towns
across the country have been covered by bailouts from
higher levels of government. For example, federal
spending covers the cost of capital for road building
if you bring a highway to your neighborhood. As a result, Northern
Virginia looks like this. And those highways impact
more than the budget. Commercial developers have
long tried to build neighborhoods that
encourage walking over driving. There are many
reasons for that. Sedentary lifestyles
associated with suburban form produce heightened
risks of obesity and diabetes, dying in car
crashes, developing addictions and modest
amounts of physical activity, which can be
encouraged and supported by how we build places and
plan them are a really low cost cure. Still, one development can't
change the status quo. The Mosaic District is
still in an excerpt. The legacy of road building
in Northern Virginia has made it unsafe for
pedestrians in some cases. The local planning
commissions want to make walking safer. What if a person has trouble
walking? Or what if a person has
trouble hearing? How do they gain access to
these new opportunities, to the new housing that's
coming in place in our communities? Things like that, we need to
be more aware of. While these new suburbs have
rolled out across the country in recent years,
homebuilders are looking at a tough market ahead. They say that sourcing
quality labor and building materials has never been
more difficult. Housing affordability is the
primary challenge in the marketplace right now, and
frankly, it's going to get worse as interest rates
increase this year. The ability to build with
density, to build with scale, are ways that you
can bend the cost curve in the right direction and add
more housing to the market. The reality is, is we're
going to have fewer road miles two decades from now
than we have today. We're going to have fewer
streets, fewer pipes, fewer things that we have to
maintain because they're going to fall apart and
we're not going to fix them because we don't have the
money. Still, many are searching
for solutions. I think it really is
important to have that longer time horizon in mind
so that we're not arguing about our past values and
desires, but but about the future. Of course, design
matters. A skilled architect, a
skilled urban designer can introduce these different
housing types and have them blend in and appear very
compatible with detached standalone houses. But to be inclusive, we need
to think about everybody and how everyone is going to be
affected by the new development here. Between remote work and the
pandemic, more people in businesses are moving to
the suburbs. The de-urbanization trend,
that's a real thing. People are moving out of
the city. They're buying bigger
houses. We have seen that the
housing market was incredible in 2021. The pandemic itself, it has
changed housing preferences and location preferences. America leads the world in
suburbanization. I think the U.S. is
distinctive in that suburbanization has been
particularly large in magnitude here in the
United States. It's creeping up again, of
course. But there's an opportunity here to rethink
some of those patterns and reset the norm. I think the way the suburbs
were built was a big mistake. The cities needed
to get bigger, but they should have been built very
differently. To combat the economic
challenges of sprawl, some suburbs are building up
rather than out. Where we build housing,
where we don't build housing, and what kinds of
housing we build have big implications for the
economy, for climate, and for patterns of racial and
economic segregation. The roads in the sprawling
suburbs contribute to the nation's $1.2 trillion
maintenance funding gap. How else does suburban
sprawl shape the U.S. economy? Over centuries, developers
built mini homes in a pattern that experts call
suburban sprawl. The farther out you go from
the center of the city, we tend to build lower
buildings, shorter buildings, more spread out
and more space. It gives a little bit more
of the illusion that you live off in the country,
far away from other people. This style of housing is the
foundation of the American suburb and the American
dream. The one thing it does enable
people is to kind of escape the city. So there is a
benefit to the cost and individuals are deciding
based on their private benefits and costs and
making a decision they think is optimal. Sometimes that
can have negative externalities for the rest
of society. The New Deal of the 1930s
sped up suburban sprawl in the States. The bill
created a Federal Housing Administration which
standardized neighborhood design. It made mortgages
more affordable. And Fairless Hills is
typical of the growing new community. The FHA guidelines made
country style living a middle class reality. They also created problems. They prescribed rules to get
an FHA loan. No sidewalks, curvy
streets, dead end streets and made it hard to walk. They also enforce a minimum
lot size, which spreads people out and inflates the
scale of the suburbs. If that's an expensive
community with expensive land, it means that the
price of buying into the community is going to be
very high. That means automatically
the only people who can afford to move in there now
are people who are pretty wealthy. A large minimum
lot size doesn't say no Black people or no Latinos
can move into the neighborhood. But it turns
out that income and wealth are really strongly
correlated with race, in part because of
longstanding discrimination. Many suburban towns also
separate land by use. As a result, homes are
generally far away from industrial and commercial
areas. Local governments adopt this
so that they have some control over what gets
built where. But it also can make it
difficult to build the housing that people want to
live in, in places they want to live. These guidelines were
formalized with zoning laws. These are sets of
regulations. There are subdivision codes, as well
as just regular zoning codes that exist in most
municipalities across North America that provide a
framework for what you can and can't build. And these
are used as planning tools. Restrictive zoning codes
have long limited the supply of land for housing in
cities like Minneapolis and San Francisco. Many workers in these
cities haven't been able to buy or even rent homes near
their jobs, which slows economic development. These old trends are still
shaping development today. It was in the 1940s when the
United States population crossed that threshold from
being predominantly rural to predominantly urban. And all of the growth since
then has really been a shift from rural to suburban. And since the 1960s, people
have been trying to modify the zoning to let people
mix uses and have stores, apartments, offices, all
mixed together, which is what lets you have these
sort of lively neighborhoods. In recent years,
neighborhoods outside of cities with large job
markets have boomed while the population in America's
heartland declines. As a result, the
maintenance costs associated with suburbia are adding
up. When a suburb grows, the
tax base within the nearby city is expected to
decline. Which reduces its ability to
fund local public goods, including schools,
including policing and so on. And so those individual
decisions, even though they can be good at the
individual level, can have externalities for the city
as a whole. So the spread out
development that's typical of the suburbs, it entails
higher per capita government costs relative to the
denser urban areas. If you're building roads and
sewers and all of the houses are located half a mile or
a mile away from one another, you need more
asphalt and more concrete and more pipes. Suburban towns often
struggle to finance their long term infrastructure
costs. And population growth
nationwide has slowed to 0.1%, a record low. That means that the
financial pressure on suburban towns is mounting. All of the declining cities
in the Midwest face this problem that they just
don't have the income from their current tax base to
pay to maintain something that they built 50 years
ago when they were three times the size. So new, so powerful, so
revolutionary is this force that we have hardly been
able to appraise its influence. Federal spending can hide
the true cost of suburbia. Local governments use
property taxes in particular to pay for a lot of these
costs. So if you've ever wondered
why do you have potholes on your neighborhood street
and not potholes on the interstate it's because
they're paid for by different levels of
government. America has a $1.2 trillion
funding gap for upkeep of roads, bridges and tunnels. The American Society of
Civil Engineers says new spending in 2021's
infrastructure bill helps, but it doesn't cover the
full costs. If further improvements
aren't made, the country's failing infrastructure
could cost each family over three thousand dollars a
year by 2039. Another problem? People don't realize how
much of their income goes to their car. In the past, the suburbs
became more popular as cars fell in cost. To take account of
inflation and once you take account of the rise in
people's incomes, the real cost of car ownership today
is lower than it was. Of course, if you get a
frontier car such as a Tesla, which has features
which weren't available in the 1950s, you can pay a
lot of money and it can be very expensive. Since the 1990s, households
have increasingly relied on credit to finance their
cars. AAA says the annual cost of
vehicle ownership has risen to nearly $10,000. Making matters worse, the
2008 recession has destabilized many suburban
households. On average, people in the
suburbs are now employed at lower rates and have
declining incomes. Home prices have also been
subdued when compared to central cities. Some call
it the suburbanization of poverty. There's typically a greater
availability of land in the exurbs and the land and
housing that's on it also tend to be more affordable. Experts say remote work and
tasteful planning could make the suburbs better. New growth and density could
be directed through redevelopment and infill
projects. There are so many of these
surplus properties out there. Many of these infill
projects place residents closer to commercial areas,
which could create opportunities for
entrepreneurs. If we focus on millennials,
for example, they have things that they really
like. They have bars, r estaurants. So some of those
preferences they carry with them. And so what that
creates, it creates opportunities for someone
to open up a business that caters to these needs. And I think that sort of
plays a big role in that shift of employment to the
suburbs. Experts say the most
affordable suburbs are often also the least sustainable. So, for instance, a metro
like Atlanta or Phoenix has managed to keep housing
fairly inexpensive over the last 30 years because they
just build a lot of housing and they build these huge
subdivisions 10,000, 20,000 homes on very inexpensive
land that's essentially, you know, farmland that's
undisturbed. On the flip side, of
course, we know that there are terrible climate
impacts from building. So there really is a
tension. You can see that very
clearly in California. You see how close those
flames are to these houses. Home prices in the large
urban metropolitan areas were so expensive that
people started moving out, moving into the more wooded
areas. And then you see these
wildfires and they're not going away. In fact,
they're getting much worse. Meanwhile, suburban drivers
on belt ways are shaping the climate of the future. It's really in the kinds of
suburban settings that we would characterize as
sprawling, separated uses, car dependent, relatively
low density, this is where we see a more extreme
emissions use. Most U.S. emissions come
from personal cars. Commutes lengthened as the
country sprawled in recent decades. So going back to 1970,
around 81% of residents lived in the county where
they worked, and that declined substantially over
time by the year 2000. If remote work persists, it
could take some drivers off the road. Home appliances
are another huge source of emissions. Definitely, when you see
more sprawl in the suburbs, you're seeing much more
carbon emissions out there than you would in one large
building in a city. The U.S. has committed to
eliminating carbon emissions from electricity by 2035. But in that time period,
researchers expect U.S. auto emissions to remain
flat. That's mostly due to
suburban drivers. But there's an opportunity
here to rethink some of those patterns and reset the
norm. So what can be done to
improve residential development in the states? Many regions are tackling
sprawl head on. In Montgomery County,
Maryland, outside of Washington, D.C., 85% of
the available land has already been developed. The county revised its
master zoning code to increase the supply of
homes along a forthcoming light rail path. This is a suburb to suburb
rail line. You see them in other
countries. Paris has an enormous project underway,
but for the United States, it is really one of a kind. Leaders hope the
improvements will take 17,000 daily drivers off of
suburban roads. Experts say that expanding
public transit can make a community more equitable. Traditionally, lower income
communities have benefited disproportionately from
public transit options. But funding and executing
such projects is a feat. Residents are paying for
the $9 billion suburban D.C. rail project with an
increased tax on gasoline. President Biden's economic
council wants to encourage more changes like this. They have called for a $5
billion grant program to fund communities that
abolish restrictive zoning codes. One thing to remember is
that every part of the country has some walkable,
mixed use places that feel like sort of a main street. And we don't have to invent
this for real. We've already done this.
Just recreate what we used to do. And so that's where we are
now that the kinds of beautiful, scenic, small
towns mixed use, walkable streets that we remember
and we like to visit as tourists preexist zoning
codes and in many cases could not be rebuilt again
if you wanted to do it from scratch without
significantly revising the zoning. Other parts of the world are
experimenting with zoning reform, too. There's been some very
interesting work in the city of Bogotá documenting how a
rapid bus transit network had uneven effects on low
and high income workers in that city. Another study found that
changes to the code in São Paulo, Brazil improved the
quality of life for renters with college degrees. But those changes also
greatly sank home prices, affecting landlords. In America, homebuilder
stocks have wavered as the Fed weighs interest rate
hikes. A rising rate environment is
going to be very difficult for home buyers. It just
takes away from potential buyers purchasing powers. It means they either can't
buy a home or they can buy less of a home. And we know
that the entry level housing stock is the leanest it has
ever been. Suburban sprawl will
determine much about the American economy for the
foreseeable future. The development choices
made today last for generations. So it seems as though over
the medium term, the deck is basically stacked in favor
of the suburbs and against dense urban cores. Ultimately, people are
making those decisions for a reason, and it reflects a
very kind of fundamental economic force that you see
in many places around the world, in many different
institutional settings. You know, it took really 50
or 75 years to make the problems of the suburbs,
and it takes a long time to undo it. A cost of living crisis is
unfolding in America's major cities. We can't afford to live in
this city if you're a working class New Yorker. The problems are acute in
downtown Manhattan. One bedroom units are
renting for nearly $4,000 a month on average. There's a reason people are
willing to pay. It drives you and it
motivates you. And it keeps you hungry. It
keeps you always thinking because, no matter what,
you know there's somebody out there hustling more. There's somebody, inventing
something new. You can never become
complacent. That's what's so beautiful about this city. People have returned to
cities to see their friends and have a good time. That's pushing rents to new
highs in places like Los Angeles, Chicago and cities
across the Sun Belt. While renters have
returned, many commuters haven't, despite the return
to office push from major companies like Goldman
Sachs and JPMorgan. More days at home could help
workers escape high city prices and long commutes. But there could be a cost
to that decision. I think it's really hard to
form high quality new relationships remotely. I think it's easier to
maintain existing connections. There's just something
about meeting in person that you can't replicate
virtually. During the pandemic, we saw
some jobs where it could be done remotely. However, new
hires dropped dramatically, about 40% for over a year
and a half. This is really compatible
with a view that firms had trouble onboarding new
workers because it was difficult for them to
learn. As prices keep rising across
the country, we ask, are American major cities like
New York still worth it ? The biggest benefit of
cities are the people. Being close to others in
your field of work can unleash powerful benefits. Economists call this the
theory of agglomeration. When there's a concentration
of an industry in the city that can make those firms
and people more productive. You know, New York City is
a good example. You have this variety of
restaurants that you just can't have in a population
of 50,000 people. There's long been a
hypothesis of agglomeration economies, which just means
that we get more productive when we are enmeshed in a
maelstrom of economic activity, both because we
can buy and sell, we can find workers to hire, we
can find employers to hire us, and we can learn from
one another. Within large cities, the
benefit that you have is the diversity. It's the
diversity of people, the diversity of culture. It's the diversity of ways
of life. And I think that is not what
is always present in smaller cities, but I think that is
an individual choice on the person to decide if they
want to stay in a larger city or not. Evin Robinson runs America
On Tech, a nonprofit that teaches young professionals
how to code. They have offices in Los
Angeles, Miami and New York City. We're looking at it from a
data perspective about where are most underestimated
communities located. And that happens to be
within or in proximity of the largest cities. Opportunities like this are
one of the big benefits of cities, and it's what makes
many consider them to be worth it despite the costs. But in the age of remote
work, Sun Belt cities are poaching talent from the
old titans in Silicon Valley and New York. People are fleeing g
overnments and places that they're not wanted or they
feel that they're not wanted, or where they're
being taxed to death. A lot of these tech
companies, they're saying, Oh, yeah, you can work
remotely. But, you know, in many cases they're also
saying like, we're not going to pay you quite the same
amount. Making it in any major city
has never been easy. I always wanted to come into
Manhattan, be a businessman in Manhattan. You can say
anything negative you want to say. There's a lot of
negative things to say about this place. It's a
financial epicenter of the world, and it drives you
and it motivates you and it keeps you hungry. It keeps
you always thinking. That's the exciting part,
right? And I'll be honest,
actually, that's what the city has lost the most with
COVID, is that it's lacking that energy. You walk
around, you don't feel that energy. You don't feel that
buzz. Before the pandemic,
Manhattan could more than double in population during
working hours. You're looking at a
visualization of data that was collected by NYU's
Wagner School in 2012. Although this hasn't been
updated since the pandemic, we can clearly see
Manhattan's heartbeat has changed since then. Foot traffic plummeted
during the darkest days of the pandemic. At one point,
consumer spending fell more than 50% across Midtown. The business community
hopes that eventually those vacant storefronts get new
tenants. Where I am most fearful is
the retail space in the business districts in the
Grand Central area. You have about a 30%
vacancy of all retail spaces. At best, we'll have
two thirds of pre-pandemic level foot traffic in
Midtown moving forward. Spending from high skilled
workers has kept major cities afloat through the
years. Tech workers in particular
have clustered into about eight major U.S. cities,
raising issues of affordability in each. Prospects for the software
engineers and data scientists in this cohort
remain strong. For example, the median
worker at Google made over $270,000 a year in 2020,
according to SEC filings. Other workers fare pretty
well too. The purchasing power of
these specialists can shoot prices upward for housing
and other goods. Silicon Valley is kind of
maybe the most famous example where, you know,
it's really costly to live and there's a ton of
regulation and yet software companies seem to continue
to locate there. And a lot of that is
because of agglomeration economies. If these workers leave the
usual major cities, it could fundamentally change the
economy. The ability to serve a latte
with a smile was a path towards a steady paycheck. Now, when people stop
going to work downtown, those jobs disappear. If we have a shift to
hybrid work, maybe that will mean fewer people in the
offices. But you'll also see commercial rents going
down, and you'll see younger, scrappier firms
replace older and more staid firms that have sent their
office workers home. Hopefully, those younger,
scrappier firms will continue to demand things
from the urban service workers and provide
opportunity for Americans who start with less. I am more worried about
cities like Cleveland and Detroit that started on the
edge of of survival, where a decline in demand for
offices can really mean just increased vacancies, which
then spill through the urban service economy. The surge of people into
major rental markets masks the sluggish return to
normal in downtowns. Demand is still strong for
city life because, well, it's fun. In 2018, the most
recent year with data available, New York City
had nearly 20,000 restaurants and over 2000
bars. I mentioned kind of the
diversity of restaurants, but there's also the mating
market, right? Like young people want to
be in a market where they have other young people to
meet and friends, right? Like we're kind of
inherently social creatures and a density of social
connections, which cities provide, is going to
continue doing that going forward. But those connections will
cost you. Quite honestly, the cost of
living here has only gone up. It has not gone down. Quality of life has gone
down in many ways. Rent hikes are hitting some
previously affordable neighborhoods. Grocery
prices are rising, too, squeezing even the most
frugal people. Economists believe that
returns for living in a big city have flattened for
less skilled workers since the 1970s. Cities should become fairer
places. While cities are relatively
good places for adults, even for adults who don't have
fancy degrees because there are these urban service
sectors, they're really not great places for poor kids. As the likelihood of
recession increases, leaders are trying to manage rising
inequality. What we are announcing
today is the largest i nvestment in the city's
history in support of vulnerable New Yorkers
experiencing homelessness on our streets and subway. I think that that is the
most important thing to getting people back here. You know, there's a
significant decline in ridership on the subway. And a large part of that is
if people can avoid taking it, they will. Transit ridership in New
York remains well below pre-pandemic levels. If this trend continues, it
could impact the quality of service down the line. It is absolutely true that
public transit becomes safer when there are more people
who are taking it. This was Jane Jacobs's
fundamental insight that in fact, having more people
around makes places safe. The available data suggests
New York is still much, much safer than it was during
the 1970s. It may become slightly less
safe, but they're still the best means to get around
New York most of the time. Urban living today looks
like a long commute to the office that may feel
unnecessary. Or working remotely from a
cramped and expensive apartment. This makes a
return to the city seem like a raw deal for many people,
especially if they can do their jobs from home. What is permanent about the
pandemic? And what we thought was
probably permanent was this change in the productivity
of remote work. There is always a sort of
curve for the adoption of new technologies. We would have gotten all
these technologies fully adopted eventually, but the
pandemic accelerated it. The theory of agglomeration
shined in the late 20th century when fax machines
and paper dominated offices. It'll be tested in an era
of hybrid work. Our staff is coming into the
office 1 to 2 days a week. What we have seen is that
this creates more flexibility, this creates
more morale within our team and more work life balance. I really think going
forward, hybrid work is here to stay, but so is very
much face-to-face contact. It was exactly in the
industries that were most capable of enabling remote
work prior to the pandemic, like information
technology, like Google. They bought a million and a
half square feet in downtown Manhattan, even though if
they really wanted to enable remote work, they could
have enabled remote work. So are cities still worth
it? If you're 23, 24, 21,
especially, this is the time to invest in your career
and you can always come back to where you want to live.
You're just going to have more options about where
you want to live if you invest in your career now
and make yourself a more productive employee. Cities, especially a city
like Manhattan, is 100% still worth it. You see a lot of people come
here and they go by every penny they have just to
enjoy the experience of living here for a couple of
years. And the major banks are
going to pound their chests. They say, get back to work,
be here five days a week. You will lose talent if you
force people to come in five days a week. While you've seen kind of
this migration of a lot of individuals leaving major c
ities into smaller cities, majority of the population
doesn't have the opportunity to move. And I think during a time
of uncertainty it's important that we're making
not only strategic investments but meaningful
investments into communities that need it most. Just remember that life is
better spent live. Just think about how much
better it was when you were around other people. That's what cities are
delivering. Where people are moving up and down all over
the place, you have the opportunity to learn from
them, from their mistakes and from their successes. Good luck to you.
It annoys me how little economic geography & the economy of cities is talked about in CNBC documentaries like this one. Leading cities like NYC, Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston, Seattle, & San Francisco are incredibly important to the US's national economy & the global economy. Leading cities shape economic globalization & are in turn shaped by economic globalization as well. They are home to major stock exchanges, top ranked universities, financial/business hubs, and tech startup centres that shape the national &global economy. Across the world if you are a talented & educated young person with a lot of ambition you are most likely to settle in a leading global city, not some pathetic suburb or small town.
Suburbs benefit from being located near these global hubs of innovation & creativity but they are not epicentres of innovation themselves. They have a much smaller level of economic gravity/influence compared to cities & their economy is much more localized rather than globalized. Their small population & lack of population density compared to actual cities means that they do not have the population threshold needed to support specialized urban services & businesses that are availiable to residents of large densely populated cities like NYC & Chicago. "New urbanist" "suburban retrofit" suburbs with lots of "missing middle" housing do not change this, all they do is give a false illusion of urban style living.
Urbanists, economists, & urban planners frequently forget to mention the very important & crucial role that large, densely populated, globalized cities play as hubs & influencers of economic & cultural globalization but this is a mistake. We should be advocating for the creation of leading global cities both in America & around the world & for the nurturing of urban innovation. We can do a lot better talking about cities vs suburbs than this video.
God, I hate these unfocused, interview-based, slice of life fixated documentaries of the telivision age.
Cities, next topic :)
From what I have seen. The post WWII explosion of suburbia only was successful because the suburbs appropriated infrastructure from the cities. To this day many suburban areas have not built their own water, sewer, or other systems. Almost like parasites, they forced the cities to expand farther from the services yet did not require the new property owners to foot the bill for their desire to move out further. Leaving the city with a poor population.
Add to this most cities see more commuters into the city than vice versa, for work. This drains the city of taxable income, as well as the purchasing power is not shared with the city.
Few suburban areas add to the arts & entertainment aspect of a region. Its more of an "Every man is an island" mindset.
I am curious about a couple things: - what are the ownership rates in the new planned developments? Is this a case of giving home ownership over to large companies and not being about to hedge where you live?
Surely anything a suburb is adding is what they leech from the cities, reducing overall efficiency?
They're called "sub"-urbs for a reason. They serve a purpose, but in many important respects suburbs are essentially parasites on the urban areas to which they're attached. To the extent that regional politics force cities to provide more parking and freeways and other infrastructure that mainly benefits people traveling to cities from the suburbs, but degrades the quality of life for city-dwellers themselves, it's often not a symbiotic relationship.
The distinction between cities and suburbs is false. “Cities” and “suburbs” For interwoven parts of a single urban agglomeration. In North America, at least, neither exists on its own.
Before watching the video, I'm going to guess the answer is cities, if only because packing people so closely together is more efficient, let alone because the crowding forces people to get inventive and creative about how they deal with it, inventiveness and creativity that can go on to make people achieve other great things.
Mind you, I just posted about the Guangzhou Metro (a subway system notorious for its crowds) in another subreddit, so I can see the downsides all the same.