
The Urban Revival Is Over - Futurebot
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/01/opinion/cities-suburbs-housing-crime.html
======
hn_throwaway_99
There is really one one reason cities are not gaining population as fast (or
they are losing it) as they have been relatively recently: the astronomical
cost of living in major urban centers. The article points this out, but I
think it's conclusion, that urban revival is over because of this, is pretty
odd. Prices are so high because there are still way more people that want to
live in central cities than there is housing. If the urban revival were truly
over, so many people wouldn't want to live there.

~~~
pj_mukh
This is also my first thought when people say "Well, nobody wants to move to
the Bay area anymore, everybody's leaving". Well, why is the rent still so
high?

~~~
Nicholas_C
No one lives in SF anymore, it's too crowded.

~~~
hw
There are still many people moving to SF, especially those who work in
companies in SF where the high compensation makes living in SF possible. Lots
of people don't want to deal with travelling from outside SF to the city.
Taking BART / Caltrain is soul sucking. Lots of young, unmarried people love
the vibe of the city, and are willing to fork out part of their income to live
there.

------
rmrfrmrf
Kind of a sloppily-written article, tbh. The stats are good, but the shift at
the last paragraph to "why we should care" is very weak. And while, yes, I'm
sure the White House's policies aren't doing urban revival any favors, it
seems to me that we collectively need to stop freaking out every time the wind
changes direction. Who's to say that whatever artificial incentives we create
to shore up city populations won't have unintended consequences of their own?

------
gammarator
The "crime is skyrocketing" argument is a bad one. It's an increase, true, but
the absolute value remains low.

Florida cites 5-15% increases in some cities. That's like returning to the
terribly violent year of... 2010 or so?

[https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2016-09-19/chicago-
driv...](https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2016-09-19/chicago-drives-
uptick-in-murders-national-crime-rate-stays-near-historic-lows)

We're still 300% below the violent crime rate in the early 90s.

~~~
chrisseaton
What is 300% below? I'd say 50% below a figure is half that figure. So what is
100% below it? Zero presumably? And 300% below?

~~~
merraksh
Maybe GP meant that a is 300% smaller than b when b is 300% larger than a,
i.e. b = (1 + 3)a and hence a = b/4.

~~~
chrisseaton
By that argument '50% below 1000' is 667! That doesn't seem right.

------
zanny
Tangentially related, but I am really disappointed in how little actual
renewal the "revival" brought about. Except in extremely concentrated urban
cores like in Manhattan almost every city is still _by far_ dominated by 20s
style row houses that stalled out the renewal process (because the yuppies
that were moving into cores had no interest in those).

Gentrification and renewal came to blows right in the middle and left what was
probably the greatest blemish on the urban unchanged... because those were
where the actual poverty was all along in the first place. The urban cores
that got "renewed" were never squalor and dilapidation - they might not have
been as trendy, but city centers have too much general access to be that
useless no matter the popular trends. Unless you have a city like Detroit they
just cannot degrade that much.

Which really means all this hype about renewal is really just vapid air.
Nobody is putting big money into actually innovating on the city concept, its
all about buying politicians for favorable zoning over actually making
anything lasting and meaningful out of the interest in urban renewal.

~~~
freehunter
Is it possible that the "urban renewal" just didn't hit already-popular and
not-in-need-of-renewal cities like Manhattan?

My city was almost completely dead as recently as the 90s. Very high crime,
lots of abandoned buildings, no businesses in the city center, only poor
people lived downtown. Today there is a brewery on every corner, food trucks
parked outside every day, live music almost every night of the week, and tons
of people who don't own cars making it because downtown is an amazing place to
be.

And you talk about Detroit: Detroit was one of the biggest benefactors of the
urban renewal. Sure it's not back to its pre-1968 glory days, but downtown is
a safe and entertaining place to be, plenty of young people hang out, Woodward
Ave in particular is hopping pretty much every night of the week. It went from
being the place you warned your kids about to being the place you take your
kids for a weekend while you watch a baseball game.

It's easy to look at Manhattan and say "so much for urban renewal", but look
at smaller cities in the Rust Belt. Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, Detroit, Grand
Rapids, Cleveland, Cincinnati, St Louis. All cities that just 20 years ago
were a death trap if you were there after dark, and certainly not a place you
want to live. Now it's hard to tell their downtown cores were ever abandoned
in the first place.

~~~
ghaff
A lot of the urban renewal I see is very concentrated. I recently was talking
about this in a different context. A lot of Northeast port and manufacturing
towns have indeed reinvigorated an area with nice condos, restaurants, chichi
shops, cafes, etc. But, in many cases, it's an area you can walk across in 5
to 10 minutes and most of the area beyond is still rundown.

~~~
freehunter
It's a work in progress, unlike what the article says. In my city, we
revitalized downtown, then the east side of town, now they're working on the
northwest side of town. As the city becomes more popular, more businesses and
people want to move in but now property values are higher and vacant buildings
are less common, so you have to move further from the city center. It starts
at the center and works its way outward.

Rome wasn't rebuilt in a day.

------
rayiner
The urban revival never really happened. Some yuppies moved downtown in a few
cities. Big deal. Middle class people kept leaving cities in droves. Even NYC,
which boomed economically, lost middle income people from 2002-2006:
[http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20090205/FREE/902059930](http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20090205/FREE/902059930)

~~~
ghaff
The former chief economist at Trulio has written quite a bit on this theme.
One of his conclusions has been that a fairly specific demographic of college-
educated young people has moved to a relatively limited number of very dense
urban cores. Beyond that there's more of a shift to suburbs (which are urban
in census terminology like pretty much everywhere you can actually see your
neighbors).

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rhapsodic
I unabashedly prefer living in the suburbs over cities. But I'm glad the
"Urban Revival" happened, and I hope it continues.

In my own city, the rising home values have made it economically viable to
pour money into formerly decaying row houses that were built for working class
families over a century ago. So at least a lot of the ancient, unsafe wiring,
plumbing, lead paint, asbestos, etc., is being dealt with by people who can
afford to foot the bill.

------
closeparen
After adapting to life in 500sqft, a single family home just seems kind of...
disgusting. Wasteful. On the other hand, I pay an enormous premium to have a
public transit commute of only 25 minutes, while this is totally normally in
more car-oriented areas.

I hope that, with the return to the suburbs, we distribute those suburbs
around the country instead of having a few instances of enormous sprawl. If we
continue to scale just a few cities outwards until traffic gets catastrophic,
we're going to be spending a hell of a long time commuting. (Even if there's
transit, because transit for single-family-home sprawl will never work _that_
well).

Electric cars should be able to mitigate the worst of the environmental
impacts.

~~~
peatmoss
> Electric cars should be able to mitigate the worst of the environmental
> impacts.

That assumes the energy used to charge the cars is clean. It also excludes the
cost of laying tarmac to everywhere.

In general, humans living closer together conserves more natural resources.

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tptacek
The crime explanation doesn't make that much sense for Chicago, which is
geographically quite large and remains one of the most segregated in the
country (due in part to the legacy of redlining, which continued into the
1970s).

Most of the increases in crime aren't felt in areas that urban revivalists
move to, but rather in areas to the south and west that for all intents and
purposes might as well be different cities.

The murder rate in Englewood is a poor explanation for whether or not families
will remain in Roscoe Village or Bucktown.

------
davewritescode
This is somewhat nonsensical. Part of what drives the urban expansion is the
rise of two income families.

[http://www.pewresearch.org/ft_dual-income-
households-1960-20...](http://www.pewresearch.org/ft_dual-income-
households-1960-2012-2/)

Short commutes to urban centered jobs are VERY attractive to such families. It
might mean the urban core boom is over but cities are more than just fancy
downtown neighborhoods.

------
redwood
Hard not to see Uber/Lyft contributing to the idea that suburbs could be
tolerable after all. Certainly changes the equation for me personally.

~~~
kayoone
I don't believe that moves the needle in the grand scheme of things.

~~~
freehunter
Yeah I certainly would not want to have to Uber around town every day. If I
had that kind of money to blow, I'd either buy a car or I'd live downtown and
not in the suburbs.

~~~
ghaff
I guess I can imagine subsidized Uber and other services of its ilk making it
more practical to get a ride back and forth from the city for various events.
But it's hard to see it making any difference in my day to day exurban life. I
have a car and that's what I'm going to use on a typical (or even not so
typical) day.

------
Apocryphon
Hasn't this already been forecasted as part of a regular cycle? All of those
tech yupsters in SF will eventually start families (maybe later than sooner),
and will move back to the suburbs to have kids instead of deal with the
space/schooling issues of the city.

Edit: Richard Florida is a very famous urbanist, but take his predictions with
a grain of salt. He has been wrong before, self-admittedly so
([https://jacobinmag.com/2017/08/new-urban-crisis-review-
richa...](https://jacobinmag.com/2017/08/new-urban-crisis-review-richard-
florida)). The descriptive aspects of this article might be right (the urban
rush is slowing or reversing, for certain reasons), but his prescriptive
descriptions- maybe less so.

~~~
coldtea
> _Hasn 't this already been forecasted as part of a regular cycle? All of
> those tech yupsters in SF will eventually start families (maybe later than
> sooner), and will move back to the suburbs to have kids instead of deal with
> the space/schooling issues of the city._

Only this doesn't make any more sense now than it did sense.

People are born every year, not in spurts.

Thus the flux of "tech yupsters" coming into SF should be as constant as those
getting married and going to the suburbs -- keeping the state steady.

If that isn't the case, it's not because "those tech yupsters eventually
started family" (which every generation does at some point anyway), but
because the influx of young tech people to SF had peaked at some point in the
past.

~~~
jackcosgrove
The Millennial generation has already peaked, and the generation that came
after it is smaller and will drive less demand.

More generally, people are born in spurts. The baby boom generation and their
children, the millennials, are larger than adjacent generations.

~~~
coldtea
> _and the generation that came after it is smaller and will drive less
> demand_

Actually the post-millennials are 69 million, over 66 millions for the
millennials. And the baby-boomers were 76 million.

~~~
pas
Sources, please! I never know what is considered one generation.

------
hw
What this article doesn't mention is that while in some cities like SF, where
rents are astronomically high, there's a huge influx of tech workers whose
compensations are also relatively high. That coupled with not wanting to deal
with traffic as well as younger generation of workers attracted to the city
scene results in more and more people crowding into the city. The increase in
development of high rise residential is also supportive of the urban revival
(cultural, generational, financial) and demand in SF.

~~~
rubicon33
" there's a huge influx of tech workers whose compensations are also
relatively high"

Relative to what, exactly? Relative to teachers, office workers, state
employeers - sure.

Relative to the cost of living? Hardly "high".

------
synicalx
"these new urbanites embraced the energy and authenticity — and the ethnic,
racial and sexual diversity — that are emblematic of cities"

Yes of course, those must be the reasons why young people liked to live in
easy to maintain and affordable properties near their place of business.

------
Finnucane
You'd think that with ever-increasing evidence of the havoc that climate
change is having on our coastal cities, we'd be better off actively
discouraging more people moving to the coasts and investing in other places.

------
baybal2
More high rises are needed. American cities have too low density. America
should learn from Hongkong and Shenzhen

~~~
Finnucane
I don't know, personally I like breathable air.

~~~
closeparen
High rises yield more breathable air by bringing more people to within walking
distance of their needs and preventing vehicle trips.

~~~
Finnucane
That must be why Chinese cities are free of traffic problems.

------
artursapek
I think remote work increasing in viability & popularity will continue pushing
this trend over time. Many people who work in software and other computer-
centric jobs (myself included) no longer feel pressure to live central to a
big city for work anymore.

~~~
closeparen
Several large companies that experimented with full-time remote work have
ended those experiments and declared it to be a failure. I expect we will see
it trend down, not up.

Maybe some new, large, remote-first organizations will be born, but it seems
unlikely that they would pay rich-country salaries.

~~~
artursapek
Remote-first is the way to go, I think. That's how my current employer
functions and I think it works pretty well. You definitely don't want to be
the one guy who's remote and left out of lots of stuff. I also think it's much
more likely to work at a smaller org than a large one.

Of course, even in remote-first occasional face time is important. So some
traveling is involved.

------
Animats
That's a good thing. Over-urbanization is a real problem. It's much worse
outside the US, with monsters such as Delhi and Sao Paulo, with huge slums.
The US has managed to avoid that.

The other failure mode is where the rich cities eat the country. Japan did
that - Tokyo and Osaka are growing, and the rest of the country is emptying
out. China is trying desperately to keep Beijing from growing further.

~~~
baybal2
>Over-urbanization is a real problem. It's much worse outside the US, with
monsters such as Delhi and Sao Paulo, with huge slums. The US has managed to
avoid that.

I'm failing to see how most of US 'middle-class" suburb district do not amount
to slums.

Of course walled communities near rich cities are well off, but other than
that look at what these suburbs are in flyover states and poorer part of
south-east

~~~
freehunter
That's a weird statement. Residential neighborhoods of major cities might tend
to be slums, and rural areas might tend to be slums, but most suburbs of major
cities are nice upper middle class areas. Sure if your city has five suburbs,
one might be the slums, and over the decades that might switch from one to
another to another as they cycle around, but by-and-large actual suburban
cities exist because of the middle class.

~~~
baybal2
>suburbs of major cities are nice upper middle class areas.

Yes, they are for sure. I'm not speaking about the at all.

What is a slum? A place where lots of people whose socioeconomic peculiarities
prevent them from engaging in a meaningful economic activity. They can't get
education, meaningful job locally, or have enought money to relocate.
Eventually, overconcentration of such people weeds out all remaining economic
activity out of the area and drives value of whatever is there down.

[https://www.amazon.com/Great-Inversion-Future-American-
City/...](https://www.amazon.com/Great-Inversion-Future-American-
City/dp/0307474372)

~~~
freehunter
You said "I fail to see how most US suburbs are different than slums" and then
when challenged on it, you say "no no, I'm not talking about that". So what
exactly are you talking about?

Or are you just making the claim that the upper middle class don't go to
college, don't have jobs, and don't make any money? Because that's even more
ridiculous.

~~~
baybal2
Well, I have lost the point here. It was better to say that 1. a notable lot
of 'middle class' neighborhoods are middle class in name only, 2. average
suburb of non-first tier cities got worse off over the years 3. genuine
slumification did occur in few cities, 4. more are approaching that borderline

