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The United States fights against the slow agony of its 'downtown'

2023-03-19T10:40:02.814Z


The centers of large cities are far from recovering from the blow of the pandemic and the generalization of teleworking, to which is added the increase in crime. Washington and San Francisco take the brunt of it


Benson Jewelers had been in the "mid-range" jewelry business in Washington since 1939.

A couple of weeks ago, this company, which Ken Stein inherited from his father, closed the premises it had occupied since 2007 on F Street, a stone's throw from the White House.

It was a mixture of things, Stein said on his last day in the already empty store: customs, like so many others, changed — “women prefer to spend on travel, not on rings” — but the finishing touch was given by “the pandemic , teleworking and that the officials have not yet returned to the office ”.

Total: in the last Christmas campaign, the source of half of his income, he only made $60,000 (about 56,000 euros).

Only the rent account amounted to 11,000 per month for 100 square meters.

Stein admitted that the one in Washington was never a “

downtown

vibrant".

"But this is something else: and that thing looks like a slow death."

Only on that block have a bank branch, a restaurant, two clothing stores and a department store with discounts disappeared in recent months, a business that is certainly difficult to kill, because who is bitter about a bargain?

And in the office building that housed those stores, Jae, whose convenience store is barely surviving, says that the number of tenants is constantly dropping.

So pressing is the crisis that the city's Democratic mayor, Muriel Bowser, launched her third term in January launching a plan to add 650,000 square meters of apartments by 2028, with which to attract

downtown

(downtown) to 15,000 new residents.

Bowser has come across a federal version of the original "Come back tomorrow" by the Spanish writer Mariano José de Larra: many officials, who make up a third of the center's employees, do not want to hear about fully resuming face-to-face work, the Administration of Joe Biden seems unwilling to commit its short reserves of political capital to a showdown with the unions, and the Republican Party has begun to lose patience: the House of Representatives, the only one they control, passed a law in February to “cut off the unproductivity problems derived from teleworking”.

Its initials in English (the ingenious acronyms are crazy about them in the Capitol) are SHOW UP.

"Appear" in Spanish.

The debate about the future of

downtown

is not exclusive to the capital.

It's not new either: the conversation has been going on for more than six decades, as readers of Jane Jacobs' classic

Death and the Life of Big Cities know.

(Captain Swing).

The discussion has gone through the most varied crises: from the increase in crime to bankruptcy;

of the homelessness crisis

and opiates to rampant inequality or gentrification and its discontents, and from racial segregation and urban zoning to the rise of mall culture

(

those shopping centers that are here, more than a business, a state of mind).

The pandemic accelerated many of these processes three years ago, but above all it gave teleworking an exponential boost.

The American cities that based their model on offices are paying the consequences of that decision.

"They were ruthlessly organized around efficiency, and that has made them less resistant," says Harvard economist Edward Glaeser, author of

The Triumph of Cities

(Taurus, 2011), reviewing the history of "one of the great creations of Humanity”, which, he argued in that successful essay, has contributed to their well-being, intellectual progress and economic growth.

A stamp collected last November in the 'downtown' of San Francisco.Carlos Rosillo

Glaesser published 10 years later a kind of sequel titled

Survival of the City

(The survival of the city).

Signed together with his faculty partner David Cutler, it bears the subtitle "Living and thriving in the age of isolation" (still without translation into Spanish).

They wrote it based on the idea that the great story of overcoming cities is also that of their victories over the pandemics of the past.

In it, they wondered how he would get out of the last one.

And they responded with optimism.

“The coronavirus epidemic was a painful process,” Glaeser admitted in a videoconference interview with EL PAÍS from his motley office at the university, where he has been going regularly since the summer of 2021. “But it has no comparison with others: for example, the Plague of Justinian, which gave the finishing touch to the Roman Empire.

Recovery in some parts of Europe took a millennium.

It won't be like that this time.

The cities resist.

And they always come back."

In addition to Glaeser and David, the search for answers has engaged an army of urban planners, economists, geographers and other experts who are debating whether this is a full-blown 1970s-style crisis, or if it marks the end of the long whiplash of the Great Recession of 2008.

A group of these experts has come together in the Downtown Recovery project, which studies the recovery of the centers of 52 American cities (and 10 Canadian ones) of more than 350,000 inhabitants.

To the usual metrics (percentage of vacant offices, use of public transport and spending on retail trade) they have added the analysis of human activity based on the tracking of mobile phones.

From there they extract a percentage that compares life before the pandemic, whose standard marks 100%, with that of after.

Medium-sized cities, thanks to telecommuting, favorable taxation and a greater supply of large houses with room for a home office, have done better, although real estate pressure is expelling many of their former neighbors.

Jane Jacobs, pictured at the door of her home in Toronto, Canada, in 1968. Frank Lennon (Toronto Star via Getty Images)

Of the

downtowns

studied, only four, all medium-sized, exceed 100%.

Salt Lake City leads the ranking, in Utah, with a recovery of 135% compared to 2019. Washington is at 73%.

And the red lantern is San Francisco (31%).

A trip to the capital of the Mormon cult revealed this week that the new apartment buildings are changing the air of its urban center, designed by divine influence with unusually wide streets and blocks by Joseph Smith, founder of the Church of Jesus Christ the Latter-day Saints of the last days.

“Salt Lake City has become a technology and innovation cluster,” says Tracy Loh, a Washington-based metropolitan researcher at the Brookings Institution think tank.

“These industries invite concentration, often in a few buildings.

The key is to build domiciles near those buildings.

What pushes teleworking the most is living far away.

Analysis indicates that shortening trips encourages the desire to go to the office.

If you have her close, it is very possible that you prefer to go out, and that is how you air out ”.

San Francisco's poor planning

And Washington and San Francisco?

One piece of data equates two different places in almost everything else: both are at the bottom, with just over 40%, in terms of office occupancy, according to the Getting America Back to Work

report

. ) that the New York security firm Kastle updates weekly, measuring, among other ratios, the consumption of the large blue bottles with which those refrigerators that keep the water cool are loaded.

“San Francisco is paying the consequences for wrong political decisions.

Before the pandemic, it had many more jobs, about 100,000, than homes: around zero.

It is a very illustrative case of the mistake of not building houses next to offices”, adds Loh.

“In Washington, the problem is that its

downtown

it is the largest workplace in the region [which includes portions of the states of Maryland and Virginia].

It is full of officials and employees who live in another jurisdiction.

Teleworking is generalized;

its streets are empty.

An office building in Washington, last February Andrew Harrer (Bloomberg)

Mayor Bowser aspires to change that: by building housing, but also by turning some of the now-vacant impersonal buildings into apartments.

It won't be easy.

“It's easier to repurpose the older, smaller, European-style ones for residential use.

The larger ones, built since the 1980s, are much more expensive.

They do not have enough windows, nor do they have the plumbing necessary for each apartment to have its own bathroom," warns Stanford professor Nicholas Bloom in an email, whom they used to call "the prophet of telecommuting" until one day in March 2020. a plague came and fulfilled all its prophecies at once.

“It will take time to eliminate excess inventory, because currently 30% of the offices are vacant in the United States.

The solution is that a large amount of space is left empty,

Bloom is also betting on letting things fall under their own weight for the restaurants and shops that served the workers who now only show up “two or three days a week.”

“Spending has fallen 50%, and it has moved to the suburbs, so it is foreseeable that 30% of those businesses will have to close.

In the next five or ten years, teleworking will continue to grow, because the technology that drives it will improve: I'm thinking of holograms, augmented and virtual reality….

We are going through a process of adaptation”.

In the short term, Bloom says, it can be painful for all those associated jobs, like the Washington jewelry store.

"But in the long run it's a positive natural process of creative destruction."

What to do in the meantime?

Loh advanced in her interview with EL PAÍS the conclusions of a scientific article that she is about to publish in which she offers ideas to revive the patient: “Build apartments;

invest in security, given that crime has increased since 2019;

create quality public spaces and pedestrian zones (not all streets have to be culverts full of cars);

reinvent public transport, so affected by the covid;

invest in growing industries capable of occupying offices, and creating focal points of attraction for visitors”.

One of the stops of the iconic Washington subway, which has been operating at half throttle since 2020.Al Drago (Bloomberg)

It is still paradoxical that the drawing that would come out of joining all those points looks quite similar to a… European city.

Is this recipe compatible with the ideal of suburban life, inseparable from the

American way of life

?

“It will have to be.

Surveys show that millennials and Generation Z prefer to live in walkable communities with access to services”, argues Glaeser.

“The city of the future will have to focus more on life, on pleasure, than on productivity.

What will save the centers is that people want to enjoy them, to go and socialize.

European cities have historically been better prepared for that."

The salvation of leisure

Academic Lynne Sagalyn, a real estate expert at Columbia University, agrees that leisure will be an important part of the resuscitation plan.

“It's already happening.

If you go

downtown

in a city like New York it is very difficult to find a table in a restaurant.

You will see a lot of young people.

They stay there to lead a social life for which Zoom is useless.

This shows that the centers are about more than the health of their office market”.

Sagalyn wrote in the early

1990s a pioneering study in his field entitled

Downtown Inc.

(kind of like Downtown SA), about how private enterprise was pulling American cities out of the hole.

He is also an optimist.

If it could be done then, it can be done now, she says, noting that cities "have been dying for about 10,000 years."

A century after its golden age passed in the United States, of which

art deco

memories remain in the centers, from Tulsa to Detroit and from Los Angeles to Columbus, it remains to be seen how long it will take this time to return to intone that idealized portrait of the downtown, a true American pop classic called

Downtown.

A catchy song in which Petula Clark sang: “The lights are brighter / There you can forget your problems / forget your worries.

/ Go

downtown

/ It'll be great when you're in

downtown

.

/ There is no better possible place”.

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Source: elparis

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