Downtown Isn’t Coming Back

2024.06.18   prev     next

CHECK out Metal Leo and Nick Johnson if you want to see some really, morbidly fascinating reconnaissance of the severe decline of U.S. downtowns — especially on the west coast, and especially Oakland, California:

METAL LEO
L.A. Desolated In Ruins
L.A. Collapsed
Union Square

NICK JOHNSON
S.F. Tenderloin
Seattle
Oakland

What’s the hell’s going on, right? The economy is going great. Why would downtowns — formerly full of busy offices, banks, hotels, restaurants, and shopping — all be turning into deceased ghost towns?

Covid, of course? But Covid is o­ver — why aren’t the downtowns coming back? The suburban shopping areas largely came back after Covid (malls, strip malls, grocery stores, restaurants). But not the downtowns. They seemed like they were coming back after Covid, but then suddenly they weren’t. And they’re still not: they’re getting much worse.

Zoom

Although some people claim to like downtown (and/or detest suburbia), really, most people never liked downtown. They went there because they had to, because that’s where their jobs were. And their jobs were there because everyone else’s jobs were there. For a long time, you needed to be near your coworkers, and your employer needed to be near other employers. Thus, downtown.

For any information-processing job, the modern phenomenon of computers, tiny video cameras, and the internet — reaching its work-remotely apotheosis with Zoom, and Zoom’s me-too copycats — rendered downtown unnecessary. But for quite a while, that wasn’t obvious, because the same circular reinforcement that kept downtown going (you need to be where everyone else is, and so do they), also kept businesses from moving to Zoom: you can’t work on Zoom if no one else is using it, and neither can they.

Covid

That all changed very abruptly when the virus hit. Just like that, everyone was working from home on Zoom. And even the people who didn’t like it at first, soon grew to love it. And everyone is using it. It’s so ubiquitous now, that you can’t really work in a white-collar job without it — even from an office building.

And while Covid went away after about a year and half, Zoom did not. Nobody uninstalled Zoom from their computer, or forgot how to use it, or forgot how nice it was to work from home. A lot of companies just abandoned their office space and never went back, electing to save a lot of money (and a lot of employee annoyance) by staying remote forever. Some businesses tried to come back to the office building, but swiftly lost key talent, and just as swiftly changed their minds.

But many businesses did — slowly and hesitantly, and certainly not in unison — drag their workers back to physical office space. But where did they do that — in the now-abandoned downtown, full of empty, oppressive, megalithic office towers and shut-down shops? Hell, no. They chose a nice place to make their workers meet. A small, nice, new office building situated in a thriving, suburban shopping area. The same technology that makes it possible to work from anywhere, also makes it possible to choose an office anywhere.

Crime

So downtown stays largely empty. And with all that empty space comes a huge tax revenue hit for the city. And the city can’t just deficit-spend its way to status quo like the feds. So it has to make cuts. Deep cuts.

Some of that belt-tightening comes out of upkeep, so the whole area (already half ghost town) starts to look shabby and under-maintained. That doesn’t help. But the most profound blow is the reduction of law enforcement. When your police budget unavoidably takes a huge hit, what do you do? You narrow-in on what absolutely has to be enforced to prevent total social disintegration — violence and the threat of violence — and save a metric butt-ton of money by neglecting the things that the citizens can learn to deal with themselves.

Cars getting broken into on this street? Then don’t park on this street. Human poop on the sidewalk? Don’t step in it! Trash all over the place? Pick it up. Or don’t. Tents on the sidewalk? Go around them. Half-naked drug addicts ranting and raving on the corner? Stay inside, or move away. Your store’s getting broken into? Put up burglar bars. Massive shoplifting? Lock down your merchandise. Or just close up shop and disappear.

Once that condition sets in, there’s no going back. Call it the “urban doom loop,” or “Detroitification” — when an area gets a well-known reputation for being a half-empty, crime-ridden hell hole, it could take generations (and a lot of luck) for it to ever again become a desirable place to be.

Oakland isn’t coming back from this. Neither are most downtowns. Computers and the internet have permanently changed civilization. Covid was just the trigger that set it off.

Update 2024.11.16 ⋅ More people reportedly moving to the “exurbs”: new, suburban-style communities, dozens of miles from the nearest large or even mid-sized city, and working remotely for companies that might not even be HQed in that far-flung city.

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