The Emergence Of Ghost Cities In USA and Canada
The Emergence Of Ghost Cities In USA and Canada
This is almost entirely because we’re not going back to our business district offices. The cities, as places where people live, are fine.
At least so far. I can’t speak to each individual city’s tax base derived from those offices.
20At least for DTLA, it seems like too much of a drop to just be that. There are some office buildings, sure, but when I lived there pre-pandemic, you could take a walk and only see a small number of people dressed like they were on lunch break from an office job. Plus, LA having multiple office-zone places, DTLA might actually have a lot of people who were commuting to Culver City and are now working from home.
Is there a baseline of cell phone usage in general? Are more people using wifi instead of connecting to the towers?
Dug further and found that their source has since updated their methodology and LA is now at 83%, which seems a lot more realistic than 65%. Also, they count daily unique devices, so the former Downey-DTLA commuter who now works at home from Downey contributes to LA's drop, while the former DTLA-Culver City commuter who now works at home from DTLA doesn't change anything.
10Thank you for your work
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Perhaps the decline of physical stores as well
7I can only speak for my own city, but yes, the stores and restaurants that serviced the office workforce have taken a hit. It’s as-yet unkown/undecided what will become of the office district. Converting large office buildings into housing is no cheap or simple task. Just the plumbing alone is completely wrong for it.
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Are downtown areas really the best type of data to analyze potential "ghost cities"? This feels like a misrepresentation. The residential designated areas in San Francisco and Los Angeles for example are over capacity and there has been a shortage for over 2 decades at this point.
Downtown areas by definition are the commercial enterprise and business sector of a city. The “vacancy” number here is looking at dead office spaces and commercial real estate, it isn’t even possible to build designate residential areas in a downtown commonly.
This is also mostly due to the pandemic, and increasingly larger numbers of workplaces switching to remote work.
Further, the death of brick and mortar stores, shopping malls, and other commercial enterprises also contributes to this number.
10I'd argue that once the commercial enterprise and business sector of a city dies off the rest necessarily follows. People living in suburbs and and the periphery tend to have jobs downtown. So, once the jobs start disappearing then people have to go find work somewhere else too.
It's true that remote work is a factor in this, but general economic downturn is playing a role here as well. Consumer spending is down, and this is causing a lot of the stores to shutter due to lack of business. There's also secondary impact from remote work here as well, since less people coming downtown means less business.
The whole organization of the cities is ultimately a reflection of economic organization. We're now seeing a shift to remote work in some sectors as you mention, but also lots of other economic changes happening in parallel with that. So, I do think it's fair to say that cities are now dying out because the economy that used to support them is disappearing.
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