Is Coronavirus the end of New York as we know it? That's exactly what Urbanist Joel Kotkin argued
in a recent piece for Tablet magazine. This is happening at a time when the demographics of cities like New York,
LA, Chicago, San Francisco, are all going in the wrong direction, in other words young people are leaving,
population growth is very low, I think the pandemic is just one more factor.
With lockdowns and extreme social distancing bringing urban life to a halt, and New York emerging
as the epicenter of the national crisis, a debate among urban studies scholars
is breaking out over what this will mean for the future of American cities.
On one side our density skeptics like Kotkin, who believes the pandemic will only accelerate
an already present decline in urban living. While pro density urbanists, like University of Toronto Professor
Richard Florida, say that New York will do what New York has always done: bounce back.
Biggest mistake people ever make is counting New York out. If there's one place in the world
don't count out ever—
Thomas Campanella, a Cornell professor who co-edited a book called the resilient city after 9/11,
agrees with Florida. No we're not looking at the end of New York by any means,
nor are we looking at the end of cities. Very similar predictions were made in the wake of 9/11,
and there was dispersal certainly. Firms in lower Manhattan decamped to the suburbs,
they went across the river, elsewhere, but many of them came back and New York boomed as it's never
done before. In the book Campanella and his co-editor document cities that
did and didn't bounce back from catastrophe and find the disasters that
damaged critical infrastructure such as the volcanic eruption that buried
Pompeii or make land literally uninhabitable such as the nuclear
meltdown in Chernobyl are most likely to do irreparable harm cities have
recovered from pandemics fairly quickly including New York after the 1918
Spanish flu to suggest that this is sterna mark the end of the cities it's
ridiculous actually it traffic's in a long tradition of anti urbanist
posturing and predicting it goes all the way back to the found
generation in this country Oh Thomas Jefferson really launched them in his
notes on Virginia extremis compliment about how the mobs of great cities at
just so much to a nation as sores on the body politic and John Adams wrote in a
very similar pain about how the people living in crowded places in a small land
area are prone to contagions of madness and folly as he put it D densifying the
city that's not gonna happen we still have London and Florence and
Venice and all these cities that underwent terrible pandemic diseases
again and again and again the black death was at once a generation
phenomenon I remember my grandmother telling me how she as a little girl in
Coney Island remembered seeing the hearses every day going down surf Avenue
during the 1918 pandemic we have gone through these things obviously in the
past cities are not going anywhere New York is not going anywhere but
kotkin argues that what's changed is that ever improving communications
technology has made all kinds of remote work possible people are moving to
generally speaking less expensive very often smaller cities in terms of broad
historical trends urbanization has increased over the past 200 years with
the percentage of world population living in urban areas rising from 2
percent to 50 percent more recently mega cities like New York have experienced
significantly slower growth than small and mid-sized urban areas the total
world population of small urban areas with populations less than 500,000
people is 3 times that of mega cities with the median urban resident living in
an urban area with a population of 650,000 and according to the US Census
Bureau almost 92 percent of population growth within metropolitan areas has
been in the suburbs and exurbs from 2010 to 2030 or for that period but Kotkin
says New York is an immune what the pandemic may do it may just accelerate
some of this you know I think there's going to be people who are going to have
that memory of god I was living in the studio apartment in Manhattan when this
happened I was essentially in lockdown you know
which felt like a prison cell you know that's probably not going to
leave a great impression between 2005 and 2007 teen remote work increased by
about one hundred fifty nine percent according to one study with about five
percent of Americans working from home according to census data Kotkin predicts
remote working trends will continue to push more and more Americans out of big
city centers again what makes a pandemic important is that the demographic and
economic trends were already running in the wrong direction like if you take a
look at business service and high-tech employment New York LA Chicago you know
basically lagging way behind the rest of the country finance jobs have been
leaving New York for the last 20 years but Florida points out that venture
capital is still concentrated in the bay area in New York he predicts that the
corona virus pandemic will lead to more geographic concentration so at the same
time that you're having people leave San Francisco share of the tech industry the
bay area is increasing New York Sheriff finance industry is increasing LA is
still a center of moviemaking and the creative industry broadly and so I think
with restrictions on air travel the the fact that it's harder to drop in and out
of those places will cause a stop or further concentration but Florida agrees
with Kotkin that the growth of remote work will also continue to drive the
growth of smaller cities in the American heartland he points to a Kaiser Family
Foundation project called Tulsa remote which pays tech workers a ten thousand
dollar stipend to move to Tulsa and work from home
they got tens of thousands of applications from people from San
Francisco in New York in LA and when I go to Tulsa the people I meet are people
from New York from Chicago from San Francisco from LA and so I think there
is a possibility for some of the second and third tier communities instead of
trying to build a mini Silicon Valley but literally say we're going to be a
connected hub of remote workers to an incumbent economic center and I think
that can work despite is provocative headline Kotkin
isn't predicting New York's and demise rather he foresees a continued hollowing
out of its middle class with you your population growth coming from young
single workers immigrants and the ultra-wealthy
it's probably at this stage almost impossible to see a return of
middle-class families to cities not necessarily because of housing stock or
even prices is the kind of governments that are being elected that's something
that people almost completely ignored when you have governments that basically
think that homeless people can pitch tents anywhere they want that's okay
when they can shoot up in public and all that governments that are many ways very
anti business it's gonna have an effect and the problem is as the middle class
has declined in these cities the politics have gotten crazier in crazy
here I am a person of the left but when you look at the dialogue popping from
parts of the urban left you just say it's beautiful it has nothing to do with
solving the problems of our cities so that's where you could get a very broad
coalition if you're going to save the cities you're gonna have to take some
pretty strong steps which I think the current mayors are probably reluctant to
do the city has an enormous appeal but it's going to have to deal with the
crime problem with the homeless problem with the education problem or else what
it will do is it will move increasingly to a great place to be if you're rich a
great place to be if you're single in twenty five and crappy for everyone else
that doesn't work long-term for New York there's gonna be a premium now on no
bullshit no ideology can you make my city safe or suburbs safe and secure so
this he's gonna have time to really think about how to become a more
affordable City a more holistic City a better city to be a hundred percent
honest of any city in the world that you could point to over the course of the
next two decades New York has the brightest future it
still has the brightest future but it's gonna have a tough period of short-term
medium-term adjustment to get there
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