The fate of the “city” has been trending big time the last few days. Everyone is trying to figure out if the NYCs, San Francisco, and LAs of the world are starting their permanent decline.
There’s way too many variables in my view to predict. There’s only so much land to build suburbian and exurbian infrastructure. Commuting congestion will drop but intersuburb/interexurb congestion will increase due to people using cars for more short trips, especially if single-occupancy driving continues. And as The Brookings Institution‘s William Frey stated in a CNN video, maybe what were seeing is just an acceleration of what has been the natural order of things. Millennials flock to cities, eventually grow out of them and move out, and the next generation – Gen Z – comes in.
I wonder if the medium sized cities (250K – 750K people) will hold their population better than megacities.
And of course you can’t leave out the impact of political polarization, where some commenters say cities are “liberal cesspools of corrupution.” and need to die in favor of sprawl. Yes you will see that.
Funny thing is – people talk about the benefits of having more space in the suburbs – but the suburbs eventually get packed and no one has space anymore…
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/time-leave-city-jessi-hempel/
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