The answer right now is "we don't know" but there is some interesting anecdotal and survey evidence beginning to suggest that large cities with big CBDs are already losing people and may well lose jobs. Wendell Cox reviews a few things (along with some tracing app models) in New Geography:
New York "...lost 420,000 of its residents between March 1 and May 1, as people fled due to COVID-19. This is a huge number, about 95 % of the entire population gain of New York City from 1950 to 2019."Cox points out that many of these may well return but its surely the case that some will not if they don't have to (worth noting that those leaving were overwhelmingly from the city's wealthier areas and communities). Real estate brokers, Redfin conducted a survey:
Survey shows more than 50% of people in New York, Seattle, San Francisco and Boston would move if work-from-home became permanentAnd in-between the two extremes (100% office-based and 100% home-based) there's a bunch of people who may well work 3/4 days-a-week from home allowing them to justify a much longer commute on the office days. Jes Staley, chirf executive of Barclays is on record as saying the bank will “not revert fully to its pre-January working habits.” For Barclay's, which already has multiple smaller locations, the answer might be a return to suburban and small town high streets making use of what remains of the bank's dispersed real estate.
Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Shopify, Google and Microsoft have all announced an intention to move more strongly to supporting home-based work patterns rather than returning to their current 'campus' style office complexes or city centre blocks. In the big, expensive cities - London, New York, San Francisco, Sydney, Madrid - will people currently living in small flats or shared accomodation opt for home working and relocation to a lower cost location?
All this may not seem a huge deal but link it to a decline in tourism as people opt for countryside over city as well as a generation who start looking beyond the big city for employment. The city doesn't die but it will need to find a new model - less crowded, more poly-centric and dispersed - to fit with emerging employee preferences. It also present an opportunity for places in London's exurbia (Ashford, Colchester, Milton Keynes, Bedford) to get more strongly connected to the big city economy by offering workplaces near enough to London for access but far enough away to be affordable and accessible by private transport.
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2 comments:
You All have very politely avoided saying what dumps these cities are, and becoming more dangerous.
Who knows with more time and energy breeding might become more popular.
Cities like London only become Londons due to the magnetic draw of prosperity and servicing it. There is a multiplier effect in play, whereby every substantial job in London breeds three or more jobs in supporting the infrastructure behind that job.
If the Covid-19 aftermath starts a drift away from such abysmal city existence, that multiplier effect suddenly reverses - for every job moving out, then three or more support jobs will disappear.
Follow that through to your next post on overcrowding and that problem may soon solve itself: once the jobs move out, the people move out, the congestion of the infrastructure, including housing, moves out too.
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