Reimagining Cities-Disrupting the Urban Doom Loop

INTRODUCTION, METHODOLOGY AND LEXICON

About This Study Most studies on the “urban doom loop” have focused on the problem rather than the solution. History has repeatedly shown that cities can overcome doom loops with a strong vision, rapid reinvestment and quality place management. In this study, we highlight some notable U.S. city success stories, and we are the first to analyze the real estate product portfolio in regionally significant geographies referred to as WalkUPs 4 —as it exists today versus the optimal product portfolio needed to optimize both the real estate valuation and GDP of WalkUPs. We also provide recommendations for how the current product program can transform into the optimal product program. Finally, we demonstrate how the optimal product program will drive increased tax revenues that can subsidize the rest of the city and social programs in the city budget.

the news each night, added fuel to the fear that cities were dangerous places to live in or visit. Compounding this public health crisis was civil unrest in 2020, followed by a spike in crime in many U.S. cities. Are U.S. cities dying? Has technology allowed us to conquer distance by working from anywhere? Can doom loops be reversed? Our research answers these questions. We have selected 15 U.S. cities for a deep dive into the recent past and probable future of several types of American cities. 5 The concept of urban doom loops is often exaggerated, but city declines did occur long before the pandemic. Cities in the U.S. began a steep population decline starting around 1950. Of the 15 cities we examined, 39% of the metropolitan areas’ population lived in these cities in 1950. By the end of the 20th century, the ratio was 18%. In other words, cities would have had to double their population growth from 1950-1999 just to maintain the population share they had in 1950. The population decline of cities reflected the late 20th century flight to the suburbs and disinvestment in American cities. It also showed the rise of “Drivable Sub-urban” 6

THE ROLE OF CITIES IN METROPOLITAN DEVELOPMENT

The media has written extensively about the “end of cities” and doom loops caused by the negative impacts of the global pandemic on American cities. The stories and images of death and sickness in 2020, highlighted on

4 WalkUPs are one of the four types of places in the Places Lens©, which are described in detail later, which divides 100% of the metropolitan land mass into a four-cell matrix. WalkUP is the shorthand for a regionally significant, Walkable Urban place. 5 The cities included in the report’s analysis: Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Los Angeles, Miami, New York (Manhattan only), Philadelphia, Phoenix, Raleigh, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington, DC. These cities intentionally represent a diversity of geography, city size, industry mix and demographic makeup so as to identify trends that might look different in large, gateway cities versus other major markets in different parts of the U.S 6 “Drivable Sub-urban” is a comparable and opposite term to Walkable Urban. The transportation system for Drivable Sub-urban places is only cars and trucks. There is no other way to get to this kind of place and once there, most workers, residents or visitors use cars and trucks to get around the place. Sometimes there are not even sidewalks to walk on and, if there are sidewalks, they are rarely used since the distances are so long and unattractive for walking. “Sub-urban” is the form of the place...literally it is beneath urban density, meaning that the floor area ratio is between 0.05 to 0.8 to allow for most of the land to be dedicated to surface parking lots or landscaping. For most real estate product types (office, retail, residential, etc.) there is more absolute amount of parking square footage than building square footage. The building lot coverage ratios tend to be 0.2 to 0.4, meaning most of the land is surface parking lots or landscaping.

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