American cities are hollowing out. A trend that began before the pandemic is sapping major metropolitan areas of residents.
“The era of urban supremacy is over,” Joel Kotkin, the executive director of the Urban Reform Institute in Houston, recently told New York Times columnist Thomas B. Edsall. The evidence Edsall marshaled in defense of this proposition is compelling.
American cities are hollowing out. A trend that began before the pandemic but was supercharged by it is sapping major metropolitan areas of residents who can afford to relocate – e.g., the tax base. With rare exceptions, most of them business-friendly urban centers situated in warmer climates, great legacy metropolises like New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Washington D.C. are hemorrhaging residents. Their downtowns are rapidly atrophying. Commercial and office space sits unlet. Retailers are closing their doors amid the dual pressures of rising property crime rates and reduced foot traffic, contributing to lower margins.
All this becomes a self-perpetuating cycle – the “urban doom loop,” as Edsall’s experts floridly call it. Businesses and commercial centers close, drawing in fewer workers. Jane Jacobs’s “eyes on the street” – residents who know their neighborhoods, who belongs there, and who doesn’t – disappear. This creates conditions in which crime thrives and commercial activity dries up. As those who once contributed to the unduly-vilified process of gentrification trade convenience for the space and liberty of the suburbs, the neighborhoods these urban colonizers once contributed to become less attractive. The cycle reinforces itself, and no one knows what to do about it.
Of course, those best positioned to do something about it labor under perverse incentives that prevent them from abandoning the vicious cycle to which they’re committed.
An urbanist craze in favor of “people-oriented cities” consisting of mixed-use blocks devoted entirely to pedestrian traffic has overtaken the American Left. This movement has contributed to the revitalization of urban planning, although not the sort that produced Le Corbusier’s soulless mid-rises and avenues that “go from no place to nowhere.” Today, the watchword among urban reformers is “density,” but that’s precisely what the erstwhile city dwellers are fleeing.
“These areas need infrastructure and tax structures that encourage building houses, particularly affordable single-family ones,” Kotkin continued, “houses that a couple who work at Walmart can afford.” Those exist, albeit in short supply, in the suburbs, but they have fallen out of fashion in major metros. Kotkin adds portentously that “the party that addresses this will win.” If single-family homes are what the voting public demands, they’re not getting it.
“The boom in multifamily construction is also happening nationally,” Axios recently reported after zooming in on the construction landscape in Minneapolis. “The demand for new apartments is being driven by an aging population and growth in single-person households,” the dispatch continued. In 2022, multifamily unit construction grew nationwide to 35.1 percent of all housing starts – the highest rate since 2015. According to the National Association of Realtors, the market is “6.5 million new single-family homes short of population and household formation growth.”
Cities that have prioritized urban density for its charm and convenience may inadvertently contribute to the factors pushing residents who can work remotely to flee. Elected officials who understand the plight of American cities and what they face understand that making it easier for suburban residents to commute is how urban centers can have both walkable density and a thriving tax base. But that would require building things, and the inflated costs of public construction are becoming prohibitive.
A plan to widen and increase toll lanes in Maryland’s I-270 leading into Washington D.C. stalled out last year as federal transportation officials pored over costly, sprawling environmental impact studies. Washington state Gov. Jay Inslee’s proposed budget this year baked another decade of delays into the construction of the North Spokane Corridor, which began in 2001 — only 5.5 miles have been built. This week, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul pulled the plug on a light-rail link to La Guardia airport – a project announced in 2015 – after its estimated costs increased from $450 million to a staggering $2.4 billion. It’s an ominous development for the governor’s plan to build a 14-mile “Interborough Express” connecting Brooklyn and Queens, which “will move forward using light rail.”
Observing these trends, it’s hard not to wonder when the backlash against the disaggregating technologies that have facilitated Americans’ flight to the suburbs will materialize. That would at least satisfy progressive urbanists’ desire to change nothing about their approach to city building. For now, though, little seems to proceed according to the urban planners’ plans.