Rebuilding Place in the Urban Space

"A community’s physical form, rather than its land uses, is its most intrinsic and enduring characteristic." [Katz, EPA] This blog focuses on place and placemaking and all that makes it work--historic preservation, urban design, transportation, asset-based community development, arts & cultural development, commercial district revitalization, tourism & destination development, and quality of life advocacy--along with doses of civic engagement and good governance watchdogging.

Tuesday, October 20, 2020

No we're not in this together: it should be obvious that people and places with more resources fare better

 A couple articles in the Washington Post start with the argument that an exogenous event like a pandemic should be a great equalizer between the well off and the impoverished.

-- "A pandemic should be the great equalizer. This one had the opposite effect"
-- "Not even a pandemic can break rich cities’ grip on the U.S. economy"

You don't have to be a Marxist to understand that's not how the world works in capitalism.  

People with more resources do better than those with fewer resources.  (An easy way to figure this out is to read the weekend sections of the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times, and the Friday Mansions section in the WSJ, the lifestyles portrayed are nothing like how "regular" people are able to live.) 

This is most pronounced with health care outcomes such as life expectancy ("The Association Between Income and Life Expectancy in the United States, 2001–2014," Journal of the American Medical Association, 2016).  Members of higher income households tend to live almost 15 years longer.

Concerning the pandemic, people who have more resources have health insurance so they don't stint on going to the doctor, can withstand gaps in income from hospitalization or quarantine, live in less crowded conditions, etc.

Similarly, cities and metropolitan areas with more resources do better than those places with fewer resources too.  Metropolitan areas do better than rural areas too (" Getting Health Care Was Already Tough In Rural Areas. The Pandemic Has Made It Worse," NPR).

Although some areas can be more vulnerable than others, depending on the nature of their advantages and if their economy is especially concentrated and homogeneous--for example cities like Houston and Tulsa are vulnerable to downturns in the oil industry ("I get tired of the articles that ascribe Houston's economic success to its lack of zoning" and "A follow up on an earlier point about Houston and extractive economies"), and how Michigan was once the center of the US-based automobile manufacturing industry.

Or, at least in terms of manufacturing, Greater Seattle and Boeing, and Boeing's decisions over the past two decades to move away from Seattle because the jobs are unionized.  The company moved its headquarters to Chicago in 2001 ("Inside Boeing’s Big Move," Harvard Business Review) and has been decentralizing plane manufacturing to Wichita and Charleston.  They've just announced that all 787 plane production will occur in Charleston. ("Jilted again, the problem isn’t Boeing, it’s us," Seattle Times).

Although many argue Boeing's moves destabilized the company's core competencies ("How Boeing Lost its Bearings," The Atlantic). 

And even when earthquakes or other natural disasters occur, people with more resources tend to do better, the less well off live in areas more prone to flooding etc. There are studies about how the rebuilding effort in response to hurricanes stokes the local economy, although those studies don't fully take into account the economic losses.

But it's pretty clear that low income households (and poorer areas) suffer disproportionately.

-- Greater Impact: How Disasters Affect People of Low Socioeconomic Status, US Department of Health and Human Services, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration

Although if "crowding" is something that has to be avoided for many years as a result of the pandemic, the "competitive advantage" of cities -- agglomeration -- is wrong-footed.  

While I believe that over time, with vaccines and other changes, cities will come back from the current situation, where office districts are ghost towns, with the resultant decline in businesses and cultural spaces of all sorts, it will come with great pain in terms of closed up businesses, empty buildings, and a massive revaluation of commercial property.

-- "The next economic crisis: Empty retail space," Politico
-- "Pressure on New York City Commercial Real Estate Worries Investors," Wall Street Journal

This is separate from the issue of too much space devoted to retail and the impact of e-commerce on physical retail, both of which has led to a shrinkage of many retail chains, and the continued bankruptcy and dissolution of companies--for example Neiman Marcus has shrunk and Lord & Taylor, the oldest department store group in the US, is shutting down.  Although the pandemic has accelerated this process.

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5 Comments:

At 1:55 PM, Anonymous charlie said...

"Same storm, different boat"

 
At 4:06 PM, Blogger Richard Layman said...

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-10-09/questions-about-private-fire-crews-in-wine-country-inspire-concerns-over-equity-safety

 
At 11:39 AM, Blogger Richard Layman said...

The Guardian: The Guardian view on Johnson and Greater Manchester: the politics of a pandemic.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/oct/20/the-guardian-view-on-johnson-and-greater-manchester-the-politics-of-a-pandemic

 
At 2:42 PM, Blogger Richard Layman said...

I missed your comment on the Portland article. I just came across and responded.

http://urbanplacesandspaces.blogspot.com/2020/10/one-thing-that-portland-doesnt-get.html

Thanks for further pushing.

Great
Portland, Oklahoma City

Decent
LA, Seattle

Good one offs
KC, Cincinnati, Tucson

Failure/Complications
DC area, NYC, Toronto, Montreal

S***, I guess this could be my dissertation...

 
At 9:17 AM, Blogger Richard Layman said...

here's something you've been saying for sometime:

https://www.ft.com/content/98f5e207-98b0-4221-b7b3-c5cd12d048f1

Why the urban poor will be forced to leave big cities

I just didn't really think about this much, over equity grounds, access and "the right to the city."

But the reason that the poor congregated in cities is because when city land values declined, the poor could afford property.

Of course, now that urban location (we'll see how much the pandemic changes this outside of the superstar cities) is seen as valuable, of course, the poor will be outbid. (I've written this for years anyway.)

 

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