Reimagining Cities-Disrupting the Urban Doom Loop

This optimal product portfolio is notable for a few reasons:

Work:

• Despite the recent negativity toward office, Work should be, on average, the plurality of space in WalkUps. Work has the highest mean percentage estimate of the three categories at 42%. This finding is consistent with the economic role that WalkUPs play in cities and society and reminds us that office is essential to a 21st century knowledge economy. While WalkUPs are shifting from being more production-focused to more consumption-focused, they are still where a great deal of GDP production (and office work) occurs today (and will in the future). • It still suggests that many WalkUPs have an above optimal Work share in their portfolio, particularly Downtowns. Downtowns have 70% of their portfolio share in Work. Our model suggests this is well above the optimal mean share of 42%. The mean of the Downtowns in our 15 cities is 65.1%, which is above even the higher end of the conditional 90% margin of error. Miami and Phoenix are the exceptions with Work shares in the low-40% range. Five Downtowns—all of them gateways—have shares above the margin of error band on the high end; the only gateway within the band is Los Angeles (barely an exception, at 60.1%). • Some have too much, and some have too little. Not every WalkUP needs to shed office space—65 WalkUPs have Work shares below the low margin of error estimate. The majority of WalkUPs (87) have a Work share over 42%, while 39 have Work exposure above the conditional margin of error band. • Live has the second highest mean estimated target at 31.4%. This finding is consistent with the fact that residential is an attractive use in today’s underbuilt housing market, while it also reflects that WalkUPs are not “bedroom communities,” where residential tends to be between 80% to 90% of all inventory. In other words, we are broadly underbuilt in the housing market, but it is not optimal for housing to have the dominant market share in all WalkUPs. Live:

76 Cushman & Wakefield