Category: coronavirus

After Covid-19, what happens to cities? What we know – or think we know

Uptown Charlotte’s Brevard Court, before Covid-19 shut down bars. Photo courtesy of the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute

 After Covid-19, cities will change forever. Here’s a sampling of predictions I’m seeing:

People will avoid close physical encounters. Or maybe not. Maybe they’ll flock to crowded bars and restaurants after weeks of lockdown.

Stores, bludgeoned by pandemic closings and high rents, will close. So will smaller, non-chain restaurants. Cities will become blander and more homogenized.

Or maybe this: For a while small businesses will die and renters will flee. But that will reduce demand, so landlords will lower rents. Newly cheap spaces will lure innovators and entrepreneurs, artists, restaurants and shops to formerly homogenous, high-dollar areas. Their return will reinvigorate neighborhoods once dominated by national chains and luxury homes.

People will move to small towns, smaller cities or suburbs because they’re afraid – even more than before – of urban density and urban protests. Or, maybe, they’ll move after enduring years of extreme housing costs.

At the same time, more workers will telecommute – willingly or not – and office real estate will go begging. That, too, will change property values in cities, and hurt stores and restaurants catering to office workers.

As more workers telecommute, rush-hour congestion will melt away. Or maybe, rush-hour congestion will spike as people who once commuted on transit will opt to drive to work. And as more people move to suburbs, traffic there will get worse.

Or maybe none of those things happen.

We who write about cities are quick to make predictions. Some will prove prescient. Some won’t. But nobody really knows. Cities aren’t all alike. New York’s texture, way of life and pandemic experience are not Charlotte’s, or
Houston’s, or Seattle’s. And this: We humans have a long history of behaving both predictably and unpredictably.

Of course cities will change. They’re already changing – witness the widespread protests over the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd, other police killings of unarmed black citizens and over-the-top reactions in many cities as police tear-gas peaceful protesters, mow SUVs into crowds and shoot rubber bullets and pepper balls at journalists. Those peaceful protests, not to mention the window-breaking, brick-throwing acts of a few, will probably lead to change. But will that change mean efforts to end police bullying and racism, or the militarization of public spaces? We never know how cities will change until we see the changes.

It’s always tempting to accept conventional wisdom when making policy decisions. But conventional wisdom may not be based on observed reality. An example to remember: urban “renewal” and “blight clearance,” widely touted by presumed experts as improving the lives of the poor by bulldozing slums, proved to be the opposite of “renewal,” clearing away people (mostly people of color) and neighborhoods lacking money or power to stop it.

It’s likely the Covid pandemic will accelerate trends already happening: Even as the lure of urban spaces remained powerful, high housing prices had been pushing some people out of expensive cities toward less expensive places. For example, the city of Charlotte’s population grew 21% from 2010 to 2019 – despite an affordable housing shortage, but one that pales in comparison to New York or San Francisco.

You can make a good case that the country as a whole will be stronger if cities like Memphis (city growth 2010-19 was only 0.65%) and Kansas City (city growth 2010-19 was 7.7%) develop more of the strong urban magnetism that for the past few decades funneled hundreds of thousands of newcomers into New York, Washington, the Bay Area and even Charlotte. The re-urbanization and allure of smaller cities is another trend predating Covid that’s likely to speed up.

Brick and mortar retail was already ailing from online shopping in general and specifically Amazon. It’s convenient, and Americans have repeatedly proved willing to jettison even things they love like independent bookstores or browsing boutiques, in favor of convenience. (Need proof? Takeout coffee in Styrofoam cups.) We have, by many accounts, a surplus of per capita retail square footage. According to Derek Thompson in The Atlantic magazine: “By one measure of consumerist plentitude – shopping center “gross leasable area” – the U.S. has 40% more shopping space per capita than Canada, five times more than the U.K., and 10 times more than Germany.”

With extended closures from the pandemic, even more stores will probably close. However, it’s possible enough Americans will decide they like real stores – having been barred from them for months – that their behavior will change. After all, Starbucks made a fortune when Americans x realized coffee can taste better than gas station joe in Styrofoam.

Cities evolve, and not always for the better. Should we be pessimistic? I go there probably more often than is mentally healthy. But sometimes changes are for the better. Here are a few of my optimistic hopes for cities, including Charlotte, post-Covid:

  • People will keep up outdoor activities. With gyms closed and Covid transmission believed to be weaker outside, people went walking, bicycling and hiking so much the state and the county closed the crowded parks and greenways for a time. I’m rooting for those habits to continue
  • I envision residents (see above) growing more vocal pushing for accessible public outdoor spaces – parks, greenways and well-designed plazas. The national Park Score measure from the Trust for Public Land annually finds Charlotte, where parks and greenways are a county responsibility, hugging the bottom of the list. And with outdoor dining encouraged, many cities are giving over street spaces and relaxing parking requirements to let restaurants move outside. Those changes are welcome.
  • As sunshine and fresh air are found to inhibit Covid transmission, and HVAC systems suspected as enablers, the value of windows that open and easy access to sunlight may change workplace building design.
  • Pedestrian and bicycle needs may get more attention. During the lockdown, people who wanted exercise noticed Charlotte is not built for pedestrians. That led to crowded parks and greenways (see above). I’m hopeful more residents will pressure the city – and the state, which owns many thoroughfares in the city – to improve things.
  • The reality that Covid is more of a threat to black and Hispanic people than others is sobering evidence of health care, employment and income inequalities all around the nation. A continuing spotlight on the health risks low-income service workers face could open more people’s eyes to the need for systemic changes.
  • We may pay more attention to pollution. With traffic reduced, the air has cleared remarkably around the globe. Will people simply resume fossil-fuel-burning ways, or will the prospect of cleaner air and water inspire changes?

Will cities change after Covid-19? Absolutely. Anything as traumatic as this pandemic will change us, and our surroundings. We’ll mourn not just the people we’ve lost, but the places – the stores, coffee shops, restaurants, dive bars, art house theaters and everything being taken from us seemingly so fast.

But cities are always changing, and would have changed regardless. We would have lost some, and maybe many of those places anyway from the forces of finance and gentrification and real estate speculation.

I keep thinking of this quote from Greek philosopher Heraclitus: “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river. And he is not the same man.”

The city won’t be the same after Covid. And we won’t be the same. That’s the prediction I’m most

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(This post ran originally on the website of the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute. My thanks for their permission to republish it here.)

Anti-vaxxers. Boosterism beating science. Sound familiar?

Charlotte’s first zoning map from 1947 shows development patterns that continue today almost 75 years later. Hanchett’s book, with a new preface, describes how government actions like zoning shaped today’s racial and economic segregation. Today’s wealthiest area of south and southeast Charlotte appears here in green at the lower right corner, because the map is not oriented north-south.

“Today’s decisions, consciously or unconsciously, rest on the platform of the past.” 
–– Tom Hanchett, Sorting out the New South City: Race, Class, and Urban Development in Charlotte, 1875-1975, second edition

People who find history boring and irrelevant must have scars from repeatedly touching hot stoves. The past has lessons, if we’ll listen. This is about a couple of century-old events in my city, Charlotte.

My original plan here was to write about the second edition of historian Tom Hanchett’s Sorting out the New South City: Race, Class, and Urban Development in Charlotte, 1875-1975. It’s a stunning book, one I regularly recommend when people ask what to read to learn about Charlotte. When I first read it in 1998, it was like having a light flick on in a darkened room; you see things you previously sensed only in shadowy outlines.

The meticulously researched look into how Charlotte’s neighborhoods went from racially diverse after the Civil War to strictly segregated told a story new to many of us – not the fact of segregation but how it happened across decades. He described how government – local, state and federal – was a key actor in creating and enforcing racial segregation. (To learn more about government’s role in U.S. housing segregation, see Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America.)

Hanchett, the retired historian for the Levine Museum of the New South, today is historian-in-residence at the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library. His powerful new preface brings his work up to date and makes the point that since current inequities of wealth, well-being and education resulted from deliberate government action, then government action can help reverse them.

But … pandemic. Most Americans are now stuck at home, trying to stay 6 feet from anyone outside, many having lost jobs. We’re all viewing the world through a coronavirus lens and living through a history-making pandemic, the most serious since the 1918-19 flu, estimated to have killed at least 40 million people globally.

These days some politicians urge reopening stores and businesses, and not a few Americans agree, saying the cost to the
economy is so cruel it counterbalances the obvious cost in suffering and death. Many states are re-opening, some more speedily and others, like North Carolina, more gradually.

So here is history caution No. 1: A remarkable Charlotte Observer article in April – “The Big Lie: 102 years ago Charlotte leaders downplayed devastation of Spanish flu” – offered a powerful look at government deceit, medical advice ignored, and the resulting death toll. Reporter Mark Washburn studied death certificates, obituary reports and local newspapers. He found that Charlotte Mayor Frank McNinch and Mecklenburg County health director Dr. C.C. Hudson brazenly misled the public about the flu’s deadly impact, under-reporting deaths by at least half. “At the height of the epidemic, when citizens were dying at the rate of more than 10 a week,” he wrote, “they under-reported the scope of the crisis by two-thirds.”

After a one-month quarantine in October 1918, as flu cases receded, the city, pressured by businesses and churches and hearing an inaccurately low total of fatalities, lifted its quarantine against the advice of the medical society. “And influenza roared back into the community,” Washburn wrote, “killing hundreds more.”

Why did they do it? Washburn has no definitive answer, but recounts how the city and county later bragged for decades of escaping the worst of the flu. Was it boosterism? Civic braggadocio? Or a way to keep businesses open, despite the deaths it caused?

Read Washburn’s full story. A complacent press took the mayor’s and doctor’s accounts as truth. Politicians cared more about commerce than people dying. Apply these lessons as you will to today’s situation.

History caution No. 2 comes straight from Hanchett’s book. It shows what happens when a marginalized community distrusts and resists health advice from the establishment.

The time was the 1890s and early 1900s. Southern agriculture hit hard times, and Charlotte’s textile mills lured thousands of workers and families from the farms. The era saw sometimes violent labor protests, a piece of the city’s past that today is all but ignored – a topic for another day. Hanchett tallies walkouts: 45 workers at the Louise Mill in 1897, 100 at Charlotte Clothing Co. and 150 at Highland Park Mill in 1900.

The mill workers lived in company-owned villages lacking city water and sewers and endured 60-hour work weeks and child labor. Wealthier Charlotteans saw how diseases spread easily in the crowded, unsanitary mill villages and among workers with “a pallor peculiar to the cotton mill.”

In the early 1900s, work at N.C. textile mills was harsh, with 60-hour work weeks and, often, child labor. In November 1908 photographer Lewis Hine visited Gastonia’s Loray Mill to depict typical scenes like this. His notes say, “Girls running warping machines in Loray mill, Gastonia, N.C. Many boys and girls much younger. Boss carefully avoided them, and when I tried to get a photo which would include a mite of a boy working at a machine, he was quickly swept out of range. ‘He isn’t working here, just came in to help a little.’ ” Photo: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, National Child Labor Committee Collection, [reproduction number, LC-DIG-nclc-01342]. See more of Hine’s photos at the Library of Congress.

Prosperous residents showed open disdain for millhands and their families, Hanchett writes. “They talked of “textile ‘trash’ and ‘the ignorant factory set.’ ” He quotes one Charlottean: “Mill operatives are responsible themselves themselves for the disgrace that seems to rest upon them.”

The owner of Charlotte Clothing Co. triggered a walkout when he used profane language in the presence of female employees. Workers objected, but the owner responded, “There are no ladies working here.”

Into this climate in 1900 arose fears of a smallpox outbreak. After a few reports of smallpox among black visitors to Charlotte, Hanchett writes, officials began a vaccination campaign. Such vaccinations were relatively new and involved scratching the arm to give a mild form of the disease, which could create flulike symptoms for a few days.

The campaign started with public schools. But when the vaccination team moved into the mill villages they met resistance. Some workers were afraid of the vaccination, saying they had been sick. (Taking time off for illness would likely cut into their pay). Some of those early-day anti-vaxxers were even jailed, including a woman and her 4-year-old boy.

The next day doctors went to the Gingham Mill with the police chief and a squad of officers. Seeing them coming, workers scrambled out doors and windows and would not return until the medical officials left.

Distrust. Misinformation leading to flawed government decisions. Resistance to health advice among people who felt scorned by the powers-that-be. Hmmm.

As Mark Twain is reported to have said, history does not repeat itself, but sometimes it rhymes.

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