Category: urbanism

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.)

Is sustainability for Commies?

Here’s something I keep wondering: If you drew a Venn diagram with one circle being people who say they believe free markets need little intervention and that government has no business telling people what to do with their property, and another circle being people who think there’s a liberal conspiracy to force apartment buildings and stores into suburban residential neighborhoods now restricted to single-family houses on large lots, how big would be the part of the Venn diagram where the two sets overlap?

My guess: Huge.

Somehow some people have gotten the idea that land in a city (and suburbs) would, if left to the natural laws of economics, shape itself into quarter-acre and half-acre lots with one house sitting in the middle. They don’t seem to get it: Valuable land, without zoning restrictions, would attract higher income-producing uses. Apartment buildings. Stores. Office towers. It’s government intervention that is keeping all those high-priced neighborhoods near Charlotte’s SouthPark mall as single-family homes. Large-lot subdivisions are often built in times and places where that’s considered the highest and best use (to use real estate speak) of the dirt. But as cities evolve, a lot of those neighborhoods hold land that becomes more valuable for other uses. Examples: Myers Park, Dilworth, Elizabeth, Barclay Downs. Keeping those valuable areas zoned for single-family residential may or may not be wise public policy – that’s a debate for another day – but it’s clearly not letting the free market have its way. So why have some parts of the tin-foil cap crowd decided that efforts to build more high-density neighborhoods, i.e. “sustainable development,” is a global socialist plot using a U.N. policy called Agenda 21 to co-opt municipal governments all over America?

Think about it: Wouldn’t big-government socialists be the ones wanting regulations to override private ownership, via single-family-housing zoning?

It’s part of a larger mystery.

Why did preserving the environment come to be seen as “liberal” instead of just, well, smart? Seems to me the liberal-conservative battles ought to be fought over the best methods with which to ensure resources aren’t depleted and water and air remain clean. After all, those things are important necessities for human life, not to mention long-term local and national economic health. Some would argue government regulations are the best method. Others would argue that regulations don’t work, or aren’t enforced, or that a private market approach works better, as in cap-and-trade programs. But why would anyone argue that to be a true conservative you shouldn’t care about the environment?
 
After all, the environmental movement has had plenty of Republican champions, including President Richard Nixon. Former N.C. Govs. Jim Martin and Jim Holshouser and Charlotte’s long-time U.S. Rep. Alex McMillan are all Republicans who understood the importance of conserving land and using government to try to ensure clean air and water.

Indeed, after Republican City Council member Edwin Peacock III, who chaired the council’s Environment Committee, lost his seat in November, I called longtime Charlotte environmental activist Rick Roti to get his sense of Peacock’s role. “He has been, especially for a Republican, a more balanced leader,” Roti said. Understand, Roti doesn’t just blindly compliment politicians. He has served on multiple stakeholder committees, chaired the Charlotte Tree Advisory Commission and is now president of the nonprofit Charlotte Public Tree Fund. He has seen the sausage being made, from up close, and probably has psychic scars to prove it.
So what I’m about to say probably betrays my own inadvertent stereotyping. Out of routine, I asked Roti what party he was in. “Republican,” he said. “People are often surprised when I tell them that.” Uh, yep.
He favors Republican financial policies, he said. “When it comes to the environment, they’re [the Republican party] not where where they need to be.”

What does this have to do with sustainable development and Agenda 21? Only this: One of the key goals underpinning advocacy of sustainable development is to improve and protect the environment by helping people live in ways that use less energy: Less driving, more walking and bicycling and transit. Living closer together, to save building energy and make transit easier (see the part about less driving). Of course, one hugely important reason to do this, in addition to saving a lot of money and energy, is to try to combat human-caused global climate change. But for some reason, that, too, has become a red-blue litmus test. If you believe the world’s climate scientists, you must be a liberal elitist.

Again, it seems to me the liberals and conservatives ought to be arguing over what’s the best way to fight climate change, not about whether it exists.

Here’s a final thought about the relationship between sustainable development, and policies, and politics. It’s in an op-ed in the Boston Globe, “A frugal answer to zoning pitfalls, needlessly slashed,”  in which Paul McMorrow, an associate editor at CommonWealth magazine, writes about the congressional move to de-fund an Obama initiative, the Sustainable Communities program. Lodged in Housing and Urban Development, the program was trying to get multiple federal agencies – EPA, HUD and the Department of Transportation – to work more efficiently together and to promote policies to curb sprawling development. (Clarification, 1/6/12: I consulted with officials in the HUD Office of Sustainable Housing and Communities, which coordinates federal policy with DOT and the EPA. They say the office remains very much alive, as is the Partnership for Sustainable Communities, the collaboration among the three agencies. What lost funding is the grants program, which in 2011 awarded a $5 million regional planning grant to the Charlotte region, among $96 million in regional planning and community challenge grants around the country.)

 
McMorrow notes that sprawl is fiscally wasteful for governments: “If we’re going to build new homes and businesses anyway, we should at least construct them in a way that’s not deliberately wasteful,” he writes. “This wastefulness applies to the open space that sprawl consumes, as well as the enormous cost of developing and maintaining the infrastructure serving new suburbs and exurbs.”

EPA video spotlights Charlotte, Dilworth

New video posted on the EPA’s Web site lauds the city’s Urban Street Design Guidelines and the East Boulevard Road Diet, which illustrates the city’s transportation design goals. Check it out. Mayor Anthony Foxx, ex-Mayor Pat McCrory, council member Susan Burgess, ex-council member and current city department head Patrick Mumford and others talk about how great the Urban Street Design Guidelines are.

It stems from the city’s National Award for Smart Growth Achievement, announced in December, in the “Policies and Regulations” category for the USDG.

Yet the developers’ lobby, the local Real Estate and Building Industry Coalition, as well as influential, long-time real estate magnate John Crosland Jr., are still urging the city to dial back – or un-adopt, or never actually codify into ordinances, or otherwise eviscerate – those same USDG. They don’t like the requirements for modestly shorter blocks, or the width of the planting strips (wide enough so street trees will survive) or the general policy to build more streets and sidewalks in new developments. It’ll add cost, they say. And yep, it will.

But what’s the cost of congestion? What’s the cost of not being able to ride a bicycle or walk anywhere? What’s the cost of street trees that die? What’s the cost of having to retrofit streets and build sidewalks into already built neighborhoods – at taxpayer expense. The costs exist. It’s just a question of where you inject them into the growth process: at the start, or later on and spread among a wider group of payers, i.e. us taxpayers.

Visions of the City

If you’ve an interest in city-building and city design, mark these lectures on your calendar.
UNC Charlotte’s School of Architecture’s spring lecture series is “Visions of the City.” It’s part of the inaugural year of UNCC’s new Master’s degree in Urban Design housed at the School of Architecture.

The first is in uptown. The rest are at the School of Architecture on the UNCC campus, Storrs Hall 110.

Jan. 20, 6-7:30 p.m. – “Design After the Age of Oil” – Gary Hack, Knight Theater, co-sponsored with Charlotte Center City Partners.

Hack is professor of urban design at the University of Pennsylvania. He is former chair of Philadelphia City Planning Commission and has prepared plans for more than 30 cities in the United States and abroad, and was the lead urban designer in the team of Daniel Libeskind’s winning design for redeveloping the World Trade Center site in New York. Free, but you must rsvp to: rsvp@charlottecentercity.org

Feb. 3 “Cities After the End of Cities” – Robert Fishman – 5-6:30 p.m., UNCC Storrs Hall.

Fishman is professor of architecture and urban planning at the University of Michigan and a nationally recognized expert in urban history, policy and planning and, more recently, “ex-urbs.” Among his books are “Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia (1987),” and “Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century: Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Le Corbusier (1977).” His most recent work is on “ex-urbs.”

Feb. 17 – “Planning, Ecology and Emergence of Landscape” – Charles Waldheim – 5-6:30 p.m., Storrs Hall, UNCC

Waldheim is professor and department chair of Landscape Architecture at Harvard University. He coined the term “landscape urbanism.” Professor Waldheim’s lecture will provide a historical survey of the role of landscape architecture in the formation of cities and regions, and examine several recent projects in North America that propose landscape and ecology as creative drivers of urban design. Such propositions will suggest potential models for planning, informed by contemporary understandings of landscape and ecology as new media of urban design.

Feb. 24 “Recent Work” – Yung Ho Chang. 5-6:30 p.m., UNCC Storrs Hall.
Yung Ho Chang is a professor and heads the Department of Architecture at MIT. He taught in the U.S. for 15 years before returning to Beijing to establish one of the first independent practices in China, Atelier FCJZ.