Downtown SJ's ongoing collapse part of broader trends signalling the end of traditional urban centers
Image by Google Street View
Billions of redevelopment dollars squandered. The mayor's security detail accosted. Crime, blight, and chronic homelessness. Maybe it's time to just move on from the naive dreams of a mini-Manhattan on the Guadalupe. Joel Kotkin explains in the New Atlantis how SJ's failure to build a vibrant downtown isn't simply a local failure--rather, it's evidence of inexorable changes in how modern people want to live.
In 1940, thirteen percent of the U.S. population lived in suburbs. In 2010, it was half. An analysis by demographer Wendell Cox of population trends during the 2010s showed that 92 percent of all growth in major metropolitan areas was in the suburbs and exurbs—a trend that well preceded the pandemic.
Since 2020, small towns and cities have seen a net gain in domestic migrants, while large metro areas have seen losses.
Simply put, downtowns matter less and less. We are witnessing an epochal shift away from the highly concentrated urban center first described by Jean Gottmann in 1983 as the “transactional city.” Gottman spoke of a future dominated by massive high-rise office buildings filled with professionals who commuted largely from the periphery. Yet in reality, jobs have been dispersing throughout metro areas since the 1950s.
Bumsoo Lee and Peter Gordon showed that downtowns for cities with the largest populations had dropped to 7 percent of metropolitan employment by 2000, while 78 percent of jobs were located in dispersed areas.
Office occupancy and construction of new space have both seen a net decline since the turn of the century. The same goes for businesses, as investment in corporate real estate moves away from dense urban areas.
Remote work, rising before the pandemic but greatly expanded since, allows professionals to work ever further away from their place of employment. According to a 2023 paper at Stanford, work-from-home constituted about 7 percent of workdays before the pandemic and over 60 percent at its peak.
This trend is particularly critical for high-tech jobs, a key driver in the Austin area. A 2020 study from the University of Chicago suggests that one-third of all jobs could be done remotely and up to half of the jobs generated by Silicon Valley.
The new paradigm also favors suburban and exurban buildings that can accommodate both full-time and hybrid workers, perhaps one reason why they are now outperforming many of their downtown counterparts. Focusing on freeways {Ed. note: and transit} to downtown is a bit like buying horse futures around the time of the Model T.
As we look to develop our transportation policy, our focus should be not on downtown and its dependent suburban workforce, but on connecting whole regions through roads and telecommunications. This is particularly applicable to areas like Austin, Silicon Valley, North San Diego County, Raleigh and Durham, and Boston’s Route 128 tech corridor. These areas, suggests the historian Margaret Pugh O’Mara, represent the emergence of a new urban form: “cities of knowledge.” Instead of “amorphous ‘regions’” extending out from the core, they achieve “classic definitions of cities in terms of their economic diversity and selfsufficiency.” These cities may have suburban features such as housing tracts, strip malls, and access by car, but they still fulfill many of the traditional functions of the urban core, from recreation and culture to accommodating elite business sectors.
Critics of this growth pattern have often suggested that people would move downtown if they could. And perhaps some might do so, if more spacious and affordable housing were available, and if the schools were better or the streets safer. But that’s not the reality. So for the most part, surveys, such as one in 2019 by political scientist Jessica Trounstine, have found that the preference for lower-density, safe areas with good schools is “ubiquitous.”
Even educated millennials, the key to past urban growth, are migrating increasingly from the larger coastal metros to the suburb-dominated Sunbelt. Over the past decade, the fastest-growing counties have been outside cities such as Atlanta, Dallas, and Orlando, part of a suburban migration that is most noticeable among people earning over $75,000 and those between the ages of 30 and 44.
The rise of suburbs and exurbs, and the particular success of planned towns, is not a rejection of the city but the latest adaptation to contemporary conditions. What planners need is to focus not on transportation issues based on the old model, but on how to fit into the new.
Read the whole thing here.
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