Downtowns Are Dying, But We Know How to Save Them

For decades, Los Angeles business and political figures have focused their attention on creating a sleek, vibrant downtown. The common thought, as the late Eli Broad suggested, has been, “a great city needs a great downtown.”

This notion of a revived downtown is still embraced by booster groups and the Urban Land Institute. Yet despite the huge investment in such things as the convention center, Crypto.com Arena and a downtown-centric subway system, the core remains more dystopic than great.

Today, downtown Los Angeles’ office vacancy rate approaches 30%, among the highest in the nation. Office vacancies, notes one recent study released by the Central City Assn., could result in a $70-billion loss in assessed value over the next decade.

This decline is not unique to L.A. The core cities have been losing their share of metropolitan residents since the 1950s, a trend that has accelerated in recent years. According to a recent MIT study, suburbs and exurbs constitute roughly 80% of the nation’s metropolitan population, while barely 8% live in the urban core. The rest are based in traditional transit-oriented suburbs. Even the vast majority of millennials, once seen as immutably attracted to dense environments, are heading to the suburbs, particularly as they start families (albeit later in life than previous generations have).

Across the country, once-flourishing downtowns — Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Boston, Chicago — suffer vacancy rates over 20%. New office construction, declining for decades, has all but stopped. Even in Manhattan, taxes, regulations and crime are pushing financial firms, the lodestone of the borough’s economy, to places such as Miami and Dallas, where firms such as AT&T often choose suburban locations. New York, despite optimistic predictions, continues to be plagued by “zombie office space.”

Although Manhattan has remarkable cultural advantages, for most workers, it and other high-price cities no longer provide wages that compensate for the local cost of living. Brookings Institution scholar Mark Muro has noted that salaries across the 19-state American heartland region — from the Appalachians to the Rockies — are above the national average, once the cost of living is factored. All 10 of the highest-average-salary metros are small and midsize markets; none has more than a million people.

Read the rest of this piece at MSN. Originally published in The Los Angeles Times.

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Joel Kotkin is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and a senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas at Austin. He writes a regular column for The National Post (Canada) and Spiked but contributes regularly to Unherd, LA Times, The Spectator, National Review, The Telegraph and City Journal. His last book was The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class (Encounter: 2021). Also find Joel at joelkotkin.com, on Twitter @joelkotkin and Substack.

Photo: Carol M. Highsmith, donated to the Library of Congress.