Trump to Cities, Drop Dead
This is Shutdown Corners, a newsletter about how coronavirus is reshaping urbanism
President Trump has threatened to deny cities coronavirus aid if their leaders don’t drop sanctuary city policies. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who softened his previous stance around letting cities and states go bankrupt, seems more interested in giving businesses liability protection then, as the President tweeted, “bailing out poorly run states and cities.”
Let’s count the ways cities will be cash-strapped due to coronavirus. Start with the superstar city thesis of Richard Florida, as well as Deborah and James Fallows’s philosophy around how smaller and mid-size cities have redeveloped over the last decade. The roadmap to success they lay out in their work, simplistically speaking, involves getting talented people and powerful local institutions together. How do we do that now? How does a university-based innovation economy prosper when class is on Zoom? The tech industry may be able to make a relatively less painful move to the digital realm, but what happens to all the businesses they support? The expense account economy—Airbnb, restaurants, bars, and flights, sanitized or not—will dry up, leaving many service workers without a job. The International Civil Aviation Organization predicts flights will drop between 44 and 80 percent this year alone, translating to 1.5 billion less passengers, while the International Air Transit Association predicts a 55 drop in airline business this year.
Then lets look at economies dependent on non-tech industries. Orlando, New Orleans, and Las Vegas all depend, to varying degrees, on entertainment and tourism—in Vegas, tourism generates $16.4 billion in wages and 43.6 percent of all jobs— while Miami depends heavily on real estate, which contributes $227 billion to the state economy. Then, of course, let’s look at everyone normally left out of these discussions, as well as the rural and Rust Belt cities that have been left behind. More than 16 million Americans live in high-poverty neighborhoods, according to a report released this week by the Economic Innovation Group, and we’ve failed them as a nation. The authors told me that high-poverty areas actually grew during the last decade; we basically wasted an entire recovery and economic boom. What happens now, as the bottom drops out?
I’m not going to waste time on the “density leads to more infections” debate, since so many people have already debunked it. I’m also not going to get into red/blue, rural Republican versus downtown Democrats divide. I will talk about cities as economic engines. Leaving municipalities without support or funding is detrimental to the entire nation.
Cities are already cutting vital public servants from the payroll, and due to coming budget cuts, slashing vital public services (Philadelphia will be cutting arts, litter removal, and a program to provide college aid to low-income students, and Santa Monica just cut 400 jobs). Refusing to support state and local governments—which employ more than 20 million Americans, about 8 times more than the federal government—would just be another own-goal in any effort to restart the U.S. economy. City budgets were already feeling the strain last year, and rising unemployment continues to chip away at what’s left; the Upjohn Institute estimates each point of unemployment contributes to a $22 billion budget gap at the local level.
This last decade should be a lesson in why concentrated growth in cities that ignores serious problems of equity and equality isn’t the answer. It would be a colossal mistake during this pandemic to effectively kneecap local government before we’ve even hit the depths of the coming economic shock.
The future of the office isn’t sneeze guards
“I just want to say one word to you. One word. Are you listening? Plexiglass.”
The stuff of sneeze guards at Golden Corral is part of our shiny, sleek, compartmentalized future. News that plexiglass is selling out, and being awkwardly crammed into any shared space as a means of infection control, is being seen as a harbinger of things to come, the future of offices, stores, and movie theaters. Perhaps. But I believe this pandemic will be an accelerant more than anything else, and to me, that means faster adoption of working from home, of cashier-less checkout systems and digital payments, of employee monitoring technology, and of more strict reservation systems for places like restaurants. Don’t get me wrong, I think plexiglass is definitely helpful, especially if paired with a massive investment in tracing and testing.
But look at some of the larger business stories from the past week. During an earnings call, Amazon announced it will invest $4 billion in responding to the coronavirus, including developing testing capacity and increasing worker safety. That massive expansion will put pressure on already struggling retail to keep up. Homes goods e-retailer Wayfair, which sold beds to detention centers for migrant kids, has seen a 700 percent spike in online sales since March. Delivery-only restaurant group Salted, which runs in-house brands out of ghost kitchens, has seen a spike in business.
Randy White, an analyst with White Hutchinson, a firm that studies real estate and the experience economy, believes the pandemic will “put the digitalization of place into hyperdrive.” We’re adopting habits (and fears) that may prove hard to break during a long-lasting pandemic, which means outside of home, we need less space. This IBM survey of changing travel habits released earlier this week show pretty significant shifts away from transit and ridesharing.
But I think plexiglass will certainly be the future of those who aren’t paid enough, of places where frontline workers haven’t gotten all the labor agreements and pay raises they deserve. Plexiglass is transparent, and as I see it, transparently a temporary fix for the much larger problems we have around getting coronavirus under control.
Loneliness, coronavirus, and the city
Back in early March, right at the end of the Before Times, I was preparing to moderate a panel at SXSW about loneliness, health, and urban design. Turns out it’s slightly relevant to what we’re all going through right now. That panel, now titled Connecting in Strange Times: The Antidote to Loneliness, will be available via Zoom on May 14 at 1 p.m. Eastern, and feature: Erin Peavey, an architect and design researcher at HKS; Professor Julianne Holt-Lunstad, director of the Social Neuroscience lab at Brigham Young University; and Dr. Jeremy Nobel, a leader in the field of medical humanities and founder and president of the Foundation for Art and Healing, which started the UnLonely Project. If you’re interested, please tune in.
Reading list:
Looking ahead ….
Renewables Are the Only Winners in Historic Decline in Energy Demand (Bloomberg Business)
How life in our cities will look different after the coronavirus pandemic (Foreign Policy)
Property Investors See Fiber-Optic Cables as ‘Railroads of the Future’ ( Wall Street Journal)
And looking backwards …
Classical Skyscrapers Define New York. Take a Virtual Tour. (New York Times)
The inspiring tale of an overlooked female designer who helped define mid-century modern style (CNN)
Thanks for checking out Shutdown Corners, a newsletter written by Patrick Sisson, a freelance writer in Los Angeles covering the trends, tech, and policy shaping our cities. Please consider referring to a friend, and if you were sent this, please subscribe yourself. Send any tips, feedback, suggestions, or questions to patsisson@gmail.com.