Reimagining Cities-Disrupting the Urban Doom Loop

GDP AND FISCAL POWERHOUSES

While WalkUps make up an extremely small amount of land mass, they punch well above their weight in terms of GDP contribution. 69 In order to quantify economic performance, we produced a unique dataset where we ascribed GDP down to the city and WalkUP levels. The 15 cities included in this report reside within metropolitan areas (MSAs) that produce a considerable amount of GDP. By our estimate, the 15 MSAs that include these cities contributed $8.8 trillion in real GDP in 2023, or a whopping 39% of the estimated U.S. total. 70 Cities within these 15 MSAs produced $3 trillion of that, or 13.5% of national GDP. The WalkUPs in these 15 cities collectively produced $1.7 trillion of that, suggesting that the WalkUPs in our study account for 7.6% of U.S. GDP, and that WalkUPs alone contribute to over half of city GDP (57%) despite being such a small amount of land, averaging just 3% of the land mass.

WALKUP SHARE OF GDP AND LAND MASS Relative importance of 15 sample cities and their WalkUPs

% of U.S. GDP

Land Mass (Sq. Acres)

% of U.S. Land Mass

Real GDP, 2023

Downtown

$804,833,137,742

3.6%

12,734

0.0005%

Downtown Adjacent

$437,824,666,843

2.0%

17,771

0.0007%

Urban Commercial

$387,456,251,017

1.7%

17,296

0.0007%

Urban University

$76,280,472,977

0.3%

13,873

0.0006%

WalkUPs

$1,706,394,528,580

7.6%

61,675

0.0025%

Rest of City

$1,311,153,241,512

5.9%

1,966,466

0.0807%

All City

$3,017,547,770,092

13.5%

2,028,140

0.0832%

Non-City

$5,770,130,114,336

25.8% 74,084,660

3.0386%

Metro

$8,787,677,884,428

39.3% 76,112,800

3.1218%

U.S. GDP

$22,376,900,000,000

2,438,096,000

69 All references to GDP are in real, not nominal, terms. 70 https://www.bea.gov/data/gdp

42 Cushman & Wakefield