[UPDATE: The day after the governor's address, Iowa Department of Public Health announced that 182 Iowans had died of COVID in the previous week; COVID-related hospitalizations rose to 923 from 792, the highest in over a year; and the 14-day positivity rate rose to 21.2 percent.]
The Iowa legislature begins its 2022 session this week, and if early remarks by Republican leaders are any indication, it looks to be another year of fabricating problems to solve while ignoring the actual problems. Iowa's 188 percent increase in deaths from COVID during the previous week make it 5th in the nation, while its vaccination rate of 59 percent is falling farther behind the nation as a whole (63 percent). Hospitals and caregivers across the state suffer from overwork and stretched capacity (Parker 2022). But as far as the Governor and the legislature are concerned, the pandemic is beyond over. It was not mentioned at all in the Condition of the State address, except in connection with her demand that "Schools. Stay. Open." At least that's more than climate change or systemic racism or economic inequality got.
What climate? My backyard, August 2020. A rare December derecho followed in 2021
We in Iowa like things cheap. We're also into nostalgia, and self-congratulation (and taking credit for federal government spending). After introducing a couple who moved to Iowa, where people are nice, from California, where people are not nice, Governor Reynolds presented her "bold" vision for the "state of opportunity:" cutting income taxes to a flat rate of 4 percent, with no tax on retirement income no matter how wealthy you are; cutting "onerous" regulations on child care providers and training teachers; banning "explicit" books from school libraries; and using state education funds for private schools. Also, there were plenty of swats at the federal government, bureaucrats, employable people supposedly making a living off unemployment benefits, and people in other states who refuse to teach and want to ban police. In Iowa, we like our rhetorical meat like we like our politics: very, very red.
"Explicit" book banned in Ankeny
Senate leader Jack Whitver, R-Ankeny, told Iowa Public Radio's "River to River" yesterday that Iowa is looking to its western neighbor South Dakota as a role model, while rejecting that of its eastern neighbor Illinois. Illinois certainly has its share of problems, but it has way outpaced Iowa and South Dakota in job creation: Illinois increased employment by 4.1 percent between November 2020 and November 2021, while Iowa was less than half of that, at 2.0 percent, lower than any of its neighbors except... South Dakota (1.8 percent). South Dakota leads Iowa in deaths per 100,000 people from COVID, 286-254, and it is 10th in the nation in occupied ICU beds per capita. And as an added bonus, its porous tax system has made it a haven for foreign money laundering (Cenziper, Fitzgibbon and Georges 2021)!
South Dakota and Iowa are low-tax, low-service states, competing with each other on the basis of cheapness. That's a policy choice, and seemingly one that majorities in both states are happy with. But it is a choice, one that reflects a worldview that the cheapest product is the best. People in a marketplace don't always choose the cheapest product, though. Some prefer amenities, a social experience, or ethical values. We in Iowa are choosing the cheapest life. Our policies will attract those who share our values of cheapness and nostalgia, like those people Senator Whitver referenced who work in Iowa but live across the border in South Dakota because the taxes are lower. The 21st century may have other ideas.
Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds to state Republicans' latest round of electoral victories in November by saying "they validated the direction we are taking the state" (Pearce 2020). She doubled down on that Tuesday night during the Condition of the State address, praising the state's response to COVID and the August derecho, as well as its budget surplus. She did not mention the state being 7th per capita in COVID cases (17th in deaths), nor its reliance on federal grants for economic relief. Dislocations to businesses and students by the prolonged pandemic were attributed to overzealous precautions, to which she is determined to put a stop.
It has become an article of faith for a considerable chunk of Iowans that the pandemic is relatively benign, and requiring precautions such as facemasks are a blatant attack on our individual liberties. "Our liberties we prize and our rights we will maintain," goes our state motto, possibly written by someone who had a sense of responsibility to his fellow humans, but also possibly an early form of "You're not the boss of me!" Which would be an okay motto as well. The chamber seemed somewhat empty, as some members were (wisely) attending remotely. About half the members shown when the camera cut away from Reynolds were wearing face masks. The front page of Tuesday's Cedar Rapids Gazette showed a crowd of anti-mask protestors at the Capitol. The legislative leadership has said they will not require masks for committee meetings or floor proceedings. Representative Art Staed (D-Cedar Rapids) reported unmasked colleagues at each of the three committee hearings he attended Tuesday.
So Reynolds's call for public schools to open in-person rings hollow. Of course, students should be in school. Besides what must be an accumulating pile of research on the issue, I can testify from my experiences in 2020 going between in-person and online instruction that the very best students do well either way, but the farther you get away from that standard the more trouble students have with online instruction. So let's get students back to the classroom!
Washington High School, Cedar Rapids, was closed for repairs until this month (Google Screenshot)
But what has Governor Reynolds, or anyone in Iowa government, done to make that possible? Besides demanding it, I mean. She's resisted shutdowns and mask mandates, and overruled districts that have tried to do pandemic measures on their own. Tuesday night she called for a bill "that gives parents the choice to send their child back to school full-time." She also wants to expand open enrollment [to Des Moines and Waterloo, IPTV commentator O. Kay Henderson explained afterwards] and charter schools, as well as "education savings accounts for students who are trapped in a failing school." There will be no spending increase, though, because she wants to cut taxes again. She was full of flattery for teachers who went to extraordinary lengths for their students this year, but is proposing nothing to make their jobs less difficult or more safe. Minority leader Todd Pritchard (D-Charles City) called this part of the speech "a little bit of warfare with out public schools."
We want to do what other countries have been able to do during pandemic, without any personal inconvenience or going to the efforts they did.
From education Rerynolds pivoted to red meat about BLM protests. Reynolds did wear a facemask on her way out of the chamber... and hugged a whole bunch of people.
Iowans are brave and good and tough, and if you come to our state, you had better be, too!
The complete text of the governor's speech is here.
Some bars and restaurants have remained takeout-only, despite the Iowa government's laissez-faire attitude towards the pandemic
None too soon, the U.S. Senate is taking up renewal of the CARES Act this week. Emergency relief for individuals, businesses, state and local governments, and hospitals was passed in March as the reality of the coronavirus pandemic hit America. (See highlights and details here and here.) It's hard to remember March, but it seemed then that the pandemic's unusual virulence required a drastic social shutdown, and that to keep the economy from tanking during the emergency. Paul Krugman compared the response to a "medically-induced coma" to create space for dealing with the virus. To get the patient (all of us!) through, the CARES Act pumped $2 trillion into the economy, and additional legislation added about another half trillion (Amadeo 2020). That's a lot of money... I can remember when one of President Jimmy Carter's budgets in the late 1970s was the first to pass the half trillion mark for the entire year!
Now we're heading into late July. Partial reopenings in May and June brought some flickers of economic life, but only somewhat, and the pandemic continues. Retail sales are back to pre-pandemic levels, but not across the board and unemployment remains high (Maheshwari, Corkery and Schwartz 2020; Rosenberg 2020). "I'm less optimistic today than I was 30 days ago," Marriott chief executive Arne Sorenson told The New York Times. "The virus is in so many different markets of the United States" (Gelles 2020). So, now what do we do?
The coffeehouse across the street from my campus closed March 20, and now folks are carrying off the pieces. (It might have gone out of business anyway.)
House Democrats passed a $3 trillion extension to the CARES Act in May called the Heroes Act, extending unemployment benefits at current levels, issuing another round of stimulus checks, providing much more aid (about $1 trillion) to states and cities, and including money for hazard pay for essential worker, testing and tracing, student loan forgiveness, food stamps, housing support, the U.S. Postal Service, and an employee retention tax credit (Werner 2020). Senate Republicans are negotiating this week with President Trump on a roughly $1 trillion alternative likely to include, liability protections for businesses, another round of stimulus checks, school aid conditioned on opening in person, much less aid to states and cities, extended unemployment benefits at a lower level, tax credits to businesses for adaptive measures as well as employee retention, and quite possibly no money at all for additional testing. Trump's desire for a payroll tax cut now seems unlikely to be included (Werner, Kim and Stein 2020; Carney 2020; Pethokoukis 2020). Among other proposals, Democratic Senator and former presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren has suggested support for child care providers, and Black and Latino neighborhoods, along with a national eviction moratorium and anti-corruption provisions (Warren 2020).
What happens to rental housing if renters can't pay?
Back in the day, I worked with Paul J. Quirk of the University of British Columbia on research on the Presidency and Congress using theories of conflict resolution. Paul argued that policy makers ought to maximize joint gains by identifying complementary interests--goals shared by parties to the conflict--and negotiating the remaining conflicting interests. Joint gains solutions are superior to split-the-difference styles of compromise, or to stalemate (Quirk 1989, Pruitt and Warr 2013, Fisher Ury and Patton 2011, Lewicki Barry and Saunders 2020).
Off the top of my head I'd say there are four complementary interests involved in negotiating CARES bills, pretty much the same now as in March:
sustain the economy. The economic health of the country is risked by any shutdown, or even specific restrictions or regulations. Production and sales should be preserved as close to ready-to-go until it's safe actually to go. And, while emergencies call for bold measures, government finances should not be so extended by borrowing that normal operations are impossible once the emergency ends.
protect public health. It should be clear to all by now that this virus is serious business, and neither wishing it away or yelling at people is going to work. Social activities need to be restricted until some modicum of safety is achieved, even at some (a lot of?) economic cost.
enable essential work and schools. Any vital work should be facilitated and, where necessary, protected. This particularly includes, but is not restricted to, those who provide health care, food, and public safety.
protect/sustain the most vulnerable. Not everyone can work from home, or have a reservoir of savings to see them through the emergency. If people's work is essential, they need the rest of us not to endanger their health; and if people are laid off, their jobs should be there when it's safe to return, and they should be sustained until then.
There are also conflicting interests. These include ideological conflicts (does aid create a disincentive to work, and is that bad? should we use aid to shape a more climate-friendly future?), economic interest conflicts (do hog farms, airline companies, e.g. qualify for aid under one or more of the criteria above?), and political conflicts (how will these measures affect candidates' political prospects in November?). Generally, the group that wants a solution more has to give more on conflicting interests. For example, in 1991-92 President George H.W. Bush stood to suffer politically from a poor economy (and he did), so had to accommodate congressional Democratic demands for tax increases. It's more difficult to assess the current situation: President Trump's political standing has suffered since March, but even so Democrats may be more concerned than Republicans about who might get cut off from assistance.
These lists of complementary and conflicting interests are pretty much the same now as they were in March. But the context has dramatically changed. Unlike March when a lot of us were thinking in terms of 3-6 weeks of shutdown, it is now four months on and obvious that the pandemic is going to be with us for quite awhile yet. Policies that were successful in other countries--contract tracing, widespread timely testing, and plenteous personal protective equipment (PPE)--are nearly impossible to implement effectively with the disease so widespread. There have been hopeful noises about vaccine(s) in production, but even under a best-case scenario that remains months away. Demagoguery by a frustrated President and his allies in the media have led many people to reject even the most minimal precautions.
Swiped from diazhub.com. Used without permission.
So it's not now practicable to resume normal economic and social activity, nor is it now practicable to shut the economy and society down for the duration of the pandemic. We've had a half-assed shutdown that's made people poor and still potentially contagious.
America, I am... really disappointed in you.
To the content of the bill! Setting priorities involves making choices, deciding who in these desperate times gets benefits, and who doesn't in spite of hardship. It amounts to "picking winners," about which there is justifiable cultural ambivalence. And yet choose we must, in a world where the invisible hand is infected with coronavirus, and government has resources that are substantial (so it has responsibility to act) but not limitless (so it can't fix everything).
In the immediate crisis in which we found ourselves in March, it probably made sense to think only of getting through it, and to shovel money out the door while making as few choices as possible. It probably had some good effects, but clearly was marred by lack of oversight, and the greater ability of those with power to access the resources, leaving the most vulnerable citizens and businesses in the lurch.
Now we seem to be in it--the pandemic crisis, I mean--for the long haul, so it behooves us to think more carefully about the choices involved in the next round of aid. Who should receive assistance? There are many people who could claim economic losses from the pandemic and the shutdown. We could put them into three categories:
those who, if they were to lose their job, might bring down the whole society (health care workers, teachers, child care, firefighters, public transit at least in major cities e.g.)
those who, if they were to lose their job, would have difficulty replacing that income (blue collar and service workers, locally-owned small businesses)
those who, if they were to lose their job, could hold out until they find another (white collar workers, corporate CEOs)
These are just examples, but my point is the decision-making should resist putting people, however well-connected or sympathetic, into higher categories than where they truly belong. It may be that we can afford to compensate everyone for lost income, but we probably can't, so we should prioritize by need.
Besides assistance to affected individuals, businesses, and governments, there needs to be considerable investment in pandemic mitigation like testing and contact tracing. I don't know how much, but it needs to be enough to change the situation on the ground and move us towards the end of this.
What's the future of the Postal Service?
Finally and most uncomfortably, we're now operating in a time frame where we need to think about the long-term impacts of COVID assistance. Can we still imagine that we are going to put things back the way they were, or are we thinking about what society will look like after the emergency? For one example, Joseph W. Kane of the Brookings Institution argues that resources need to be directed towards making America more resilient to climate change, because state and local governments will be facing increasing incidence of disasters with depleted financial cupboards. He calls, among other things, for small-scale green infrastructure projects, attention to income- and race-based equity, and greater community engagement in planning (Kane 2020; see also Bliss 2020). At the same time, President Trump seems to see the crisis as an opportunity to reshape Social Security and the Postal Service. Should emergency assistance during the pandemic aid be constructed to reform the public welfare system (Rachidi 2020)? As Holy Mountain is all about working towards inclusive, sustainable, prosperous communities, thoughts about the CARES Act inevitably turn to the sorts of outcomes that would help bring them about.
I've avoided specifics on provisions and amounts; what I'm finding, which should make us somewhat sympathetic towards the politicians who must make these decisions, is there's not a firm standard by which to evaluate the competing claims. But these are some principles that can be used to evaluate whatever comes out of the Senate this week, and the Congress as soon as possible after that. Maybe each party could take a billion, with a third billion devoted to pandemic mitigation? Negotiations being what they are, we should expect some flaws and some unhappiness, but I hope there will be some progress towards a common future.
PRINT SOURCES
Fisher, Roger; William Ury; and Bruce
Patton. 2011. Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement
Without Giving In. New York: Penguin, 3rd ed.
Lewicki, Roy J.; Bruce Barry; and David M. Saunders. 2020. Negotiation.Boston:
McGraw-Hill Education, 8th ed.
Pruitt, Dean G., and Peter Warr. 2013. Negotiation
Behavior. Burlington: Elsevier Science.
Quirk, Paul J. 1989.“The Cooperative Resolution of Policy Conflict.”American Political Science Review 83:3(September 1989):905-921.
Will more Americans vacation outdoors after the pandemic?
In the halcyon days that were the middle of the last decade, my Corridor Urbanism co-founder Ben Kaplan did a series of what he called Urbanist Goodreads... annotated bibliographies of writing on a particular topic. I am shamelessly stealing this format as a way of starting to sort through the vast array of writing on how the pandemic will affect the future of cities. Today's topic: the future of social life.
People relate to each other in all sorts of ways, of course, but social life is shaped by technology as well as law. The third places of yore whose loss Ray Oldenburg lamented (The Great Good Place [Paragon House, 1989]) were done in by interstate highways, single-use zoning, and big houses with prodigious home entertainment systems, among other things, even before the advent of social media. The sudden shutdown of regular life in March made people aware of patterns in their lives they might previously have taken for granted. If you're not commuting, going to sports events or performing arts events, going to church, hanging out in bars and coffeehouses, or attending meetings, you might suddenly feel the loss of a valued activity at the same time you feel liberated from other things.
In Iowa, we seem to be over the pandemic, even though the pandemic is not yet through with us. Liz Martin of the Gazettetook a picture of a packed Lake MacBride beach last week. Precautions, schmecautions--wherever I go I'm in a minority wearing a mask, if not indeed the only one. But we have had two and a half months of restrictions, though nothing on the scale of the Northeastern U.S. I have missed coffeehouses. Though I can take out coffee, or make my own, there's nothing like sitting with a book or a friend while staff and customers do their things around you. I miss the performing arts, though--surprisingly for a lifelong Cubs fan--not sports so much. (The Cubs are on the downswing, though. Maybe I'd feel differently if I rooted for the White Sox or Cardinals.) I don't miss multiple nights out at meetings where people wanted me to do stuff.
I think I've learned I should be frequenting more coffeehouses and performing arts events, and spending less time at sports arenas and meetings. Hey, we all need to contribute to the commonweal, but as Oscar Wilde said about socialism, "The trouble is it takes up all your free evenings." I've enjoyed my suddenly free evenings, and maybe I can defend some more of them once the lid comes off.
What will people rush back to after the pandemic? (Bars and beaches are definitely on Iowa's collective list.) What will they leave alone? How will new public health regulations or city design affect our choices?
A huge collection of reader maps of their lives in the shadow of the pandemic. Readers report and depict greater awareness of nature, micro-level details of a built landscape constrained by lockdowns, and... better relations with neighbors. I hope they don't lose these when normal life returns.
Various responses to this question add up to a city. Some major landmarks are included, as well as personal activities like working out at a gym or yoga studio, but there are also the signs of other, often unknown people that have been so abruptly removed: on the street, on the subway, on the ferry, at the hair salon, in line at the food cart. It is from these interactions that a city is built, and in time will be rebuilt.
Children, like adults, are having lurid nightmares inspired by the pandemic and the resulting quarantine, which have brought "anxiety, loneliness, and lack of sleep." Will the nightmares, and the anxiety, persist? Psychologist Deirdre Bennett suggests some ways of inspiring "mastery" dreams of overcoming the dread.
What do you do if you are out of something and a trip to the store is suddenly unappealing (or precluded by finances)? You borrow from neighbors, just like the old days, except there are now apps to help you make the connection. Of course, who knows where that toy or jar of peanut butter has been, but, Cotroneo figures, a book borrowed from a neighbor, rather than a public library, is probably a safer bet, having been passed around by fewer problematic hands.
Among other observations in this always pithy and uplifting weekly from Canada, she notes that the waste stream, already stressed by the loss of market for recycled materials, is getting swamped by excess packaging: COVID-19 fears mean everything now comes in a plastic bag inside a cardboard box inside a Hazmat suit. I suspect this feature will stick around for awhile, figuring that incentives to package goods "safely" will outweigh incentives not to stuff landfills.
The "urge to travel is hardwired into many humans," but the pandemic experience is likely to shift our modes and destinations outdoors and away from crowds. Expect more camping, canoe trips, skiing, fishing, and the like, along with usage of parks and wilderness areas. People are likely to shift from air to auto travel, and from hotels to home-sharing like Airbnb. She explains: While some people may be grossed out at the thought of staying in a private home where they don't know who's been there before... you're surrounded by fewer people than if you're in a hotel or resort, which means fewer germs. Speaking of hotels, another Tree Hugger post suggests they'll redesign to look and feel cleaner: less stuff in the rooms and more white (Alter 2020).
As many houses of worship, including mine, agonize over whether and when to return to in-person services, and some others push back against public health regulations, a United Methodist pastor asks which styles of worship are likely to endure in a post-pandemic world? Theater-style megachurches have the advantage of encouraging impersonality, albeit in crowds. Praise bands are safer to restart than traditional choirs or congregational hymn singing. But more conservative churches are playing a dangerous game restarting before it's safe: While mainline churches may have a problem with a difficulty to worship in the traditional ways, conservative evangelical churches will get their people killed[emphasis his], or at least lose credibility when they prioritize inflexible worship over sensible congregational care, informed by public health. [BN adds: A generation ago, I would have said that more evangelical and pentecostal churches would have the advantage of intensity i.e. a lot of traditional worshipers just won't return when services restart. I'm not sure that advantage is still true, however.]
I miss informal gathering at coffeehouses (here, the Early Bird, which managed the best-timed going-out-of-business ever in early March 2020)
In the halcyon days that were the middle of the last decade, my Corridor Urbanism co-founder Ben Kaplan did a series of what he called Urbanist Goodreads... annotated bibliographies of writing on a particular topic. I am shamelessly stealing this format as a way of starting to sort through the vast array of writing on how the pandemic will affect the future of cities. Today's topic: the future of the economy and work.
The economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic has been huge in the short-term, and may continue huge in the medium-term. The May 2020 report from the Congressional Budget Office forecasts an impact on real gross domestic product at the end of 2020 of negative 7.6 percent, which doesn't struggle back to zero until the end of 2030. GDP is a blunt measure of economic strength, but it certainly indicates tough times for many individuals; state governments have also seen substantial lost income and sales tax revenue (Dadayan 2020).
We began this decade with a bunch of economic questions, even in a long bull market: Can the American economy provide careers and opportunities for all our citizens? (After a ten year bull market, a quarter to a third of Americans were financially fragile, Watkins 2020.) Can governments at all levels find some degree of financial stability? Is ever-rising economic inequality a problem in itself, a symptom of a systemic flaw, or both? Now these are joined by others: Was there a better set of policy responses that could have forestalled some of this damage? (Backward-looking, I know, but possibly useful for next time?) Will there be jobs for everyone who needs one? Will some areas be disinvested as they were after the 1960s? Is there anything government can do at any levels to lessen pain and/or increase resilience? And how will the nature of work change?
The liberal think tank calls for government job creation to accelerate the recovery, although "Many of these jobs will come back as people return to normal life" anyway. Government efforts could include public works jobs, improvements to the unemployment insurance program, and subsidies for private-sector employers, either generally or targeted at certain areas or sectors. The choice of futures seems to be a bleak 2021 with familiar-looking recovery thereafter, or intense government involvement with intriguing but unstated possibilities for the long-term future of work.
May rent payments are by and large getting made, which is something of a miracle. The various shutdowns have thrown a lot of uncertainty at people's financial situations, particularly those with little savings and/or more vulnerable to job loss. The pandemic will seemingly last longer than the federal unemployment insurance and stimulus payments will. Renters' income is one link on a brittle chain that includes the businesses that would hire them and the landlords who depend on their payments for income and maintenance. The article quotes Rutgers University law professor Rachel D. Godsil: "Even [government relief] plans with the best of intentions only defer the problem." Are we heading for a rental housing crisis, then?
Texas, for example, had halted evictions (by judicial action) in March; that ban was lifted May 26, though some local protections remain (Garnham 2020). The article continues: "The number of people who could be impacted by lifting the eviction moratoriums is not known because there's no data available yet to understand who is covered by the patchwork of regulations in the state."
Cities and states face dramatic financial shortfalls in the wake of the coronavirus; the main driver is, depending on your perspective, either lost revenue and increased obligation in this calamity, or irresponsible spending and obligations taken on before the virus hit. This controversy is playing out at the federal level as politicians debate a massive aid package. In any case, the amount state and local governments need in the next two years in order to save their credit totals to hundreds of billions of dollars; without that money there will be immediate impacts on public employment as well as senior living, mass transit, and higher education services.
The Wall Street Journal reports state and local governments cut 1 million positions in April 2020. A study by a Harvard economist estimates a $1.50-2.00 negative impact on the American economy for every dollar states and localities cut (Harrison 2020 [paywall] via Daily Deduction). Where does the money come from, if not from the national government? Tax increases large enough to make a difference seem unlikely (Zaretsky 2020).
Some towns will not survive as cutbacks are passed down the federal ladder, writes Chuck Marohn in "We're In the Endgame Now for Small Towns" (Strong Towns, 1 June 2020). Analyzing the budget of his hometown of Brainerd, Minnesota, Marohn finds locally-generated revenue accounts for slightly more than half of the town's 2020 expenditures; removing debt obligations from the table actually makes it less than half. "Brainerd is a ward of the state," he concludes, and worries what will happen when the state government retrenches in the wake of the pandemic and its attendant financial contraction. Smaller towns are in even more perilous shape; large cities like Minneapolis and St. Paul are in better condition but are also cautioned not to risk their prosperity. Writing from Wichita, Russell Arben Fox (2020) argues that the old way of approaching local budgets is more dangerous than ever now.
Like many white collar workers, I've spent the last two months working from home, and it has its advantages and disadvantages. So does office work. Do I hanker to return to my college office? Well, I have been showing up there once a week; by prior arrangement, my colleagues are elsewhere. Alter provides the guidelines of one design firm, Bergmeyer of Boston, Massachusetts, which contain (by my count) 17 rules for the conscientious employee to follow in addition to doing their actual job. Alter suggests that in the shadow of the coronavirus there are even more disadvantages to office work and the advantages are hard to take advantage of. It will be interesting to see, he muses, how many people are really, really desperate to get out of the house and how many have decided they would rather keep working from home. But do employees really get to choose? [I hear that employees are now finding all those meetings were wastes of time. Well, guess what? We knew that already... but we weren't the ones calling the meetings!] Maybe it's different for designers, but a lot of our employers own our asses and will put them wherever they want them, particularly if the burden of keeping things sanitary can be put on the employee as well.
Indeed, says Washington Post columnist Helene Olen ("Telecommuting is Not the Future," Washington Post, 21 May 2020), employers in the long run "will likely remember that money spent on real estate is often money well spent" because of better collaboration and better control. Workers, too, might find working-at-work means better work-life separation and feeling more connected/included.
The coronavirus causes some second looks at the fashion for "open" offices, especially after nearly half of workers in a Seoul call center caught the virus in February, but probably will result in revision not abandonment, writes Sarah Holder ("Even the Pandemic Can't Kill the Open-Plan Office," City Lab, 14 May 2020). Expect more space between employees, fewer client drop-ins, smaller or virtual meetings, modular furniture and room dividers, and new air filtration systems, rather than a sudden outbreak of walls.
When I do return to teaching this fall, how will it work? Dr. Wendy Bashant, a former Coe colleague spending the year at Jiaotong University in China, reports on that institution's re-opening last week: hand-washing stations and hand sanitizer everywhere, check-in tents, temperature-taking security gates, students required to stay on campus, social distancing regulations with printed and verbal coaching... but mingling during breaks hard to manage. Can American students behave even that well? I'm thinking about:
What am I supposed to do if a student in my class does not abide by social distancing practices?
How are we going to manage access and egress to classrooms and buildings?
Is Marketing going to put something stupid on my face shield?
These are surely "first world problems," in that I have the luxury to worry about stuff like this instead of how will I eat and where will I live? But few people are truly shielded from economic pain; it gets to us eventually, we're more connected than we think, and we're all better off when the system works for everyone.
Czech Village, May 2020: Where to pee in the post-pandemic world?
In the halcyon days that were the middle of the last decade, my Corridor Urbanism co-founder Ben Kaplan did a series of what he called Urbanist Goodreads... annotated bibliographies of writing on a particular topic. I am shamelessly stealing this format as a way of starting to sort through the vast array of writing on how the pandemic will affect the future of cities. Today's topic: city design.
The Urbanist movement in city design has had widespread influence in cities around the world. In my town, the core has eliminated one-way streets, sidewalks have been added to neighborhoods that had been without them for decades, there's a much more extensive network of bike lanes and trails, and two years ago we adopted a form-based zoning code for at least a small part of the city. (On the other hand, we still go in big for large-lot subdivisions, franchises, and shopping plazas on four-lane stroads.) Urbanism seeks, for a variety of reasons, to bring people into closer contact with each other.
All of a sudden, we are in a time when closer contact is the friend of the virus and the enemy of public health. How does that get figured into design? Can we still have street life and third places, or must we (for health or consumer demand reasons) spread out again? How can we have a functioning city while avoiding infections? The following pieces range from anticipating urbanist adaptations to the pandemic to deep levels of concern.
Mainly an analysis of census data showing continued residential growth in downtown areas of large cities, defined as the central business district and surrounding neighborhoods, and whether this phenomenon can be extended to other neighborhoods in the city--for an extreme example, Chicago's downtown population has grown fivefold since 1980, but the county in which it's located has lost population since 2000--and/or to downtown areas of smaller cities. They conclude, though, by noting the need for cities everywhere to "assuage fears during the coronavirus crisis and build confidence that denser neighborhoods are not threatened by future pandemics." They think they can do this, as the cities' superior infrastructure and concentration of assets will continue to attract residents and businesses, and they have always shown resilience through past crises (citing Campanella and Vale 2020).
Since it seems the coronavirus will be with us for awhile, might tech help us manage and sustain the social restart? Maybe not, because projects will cost money cities don't have, and because anything that smacks of monitoring people raises red flags. Sidewalk Labs scrapped a project in Toronto (Hart cites Daly 2020), and survey respondents show a marked ambivalence toward contract tracing if it involves using cellphone data (Hart cites Ipsos 2020). Sidewalk Labs CEO Dan Doctoroff argues the pandemic will create more need for smart cities, and his company is looking at other projects where they could work with local investors to implement some of the features proposed in Toronto (Kiger 2020).
National and local data show that use of motor vehicles dropped dramatically during the various shutdowns around the country. (In the Cedar Rapids area, driving dropped by more than 2/3 between March 1 and April 24, but by one measure has bounced back since then.) Traffic as well as air cleared, particularly in areas with (a) early shutdowns, (b) high concentrations of information and management workers, and (c) Democratic-leaning politics. We can't survive long with the economy shut down, of course, but can we make some changes to preserve some of the benefits of low traffic? They suggest flexible work schedules and more telecommuting, replacing the excise tax on gasoline with fees for vehicle miles traveled (VMT), and redesigning streets to promote cycling, walking, and public transportation (plugging the advocacy group Smart Growth America). (See also CBC Radio 2020, which includes an interview with urbanist Brent Toderian.)
But there will be pushback, notes Ben German ("Coronavirus is Reshaping Urban Mobility," Axios, 21 May 2020). There's already evidence that driving levels are bouncing back from April's troughs in a big way, as work resumes and people are anxious about the cleanliness of public transportation. "Many transportation planners are concerned that the combination of reduced capacity, as well as fears of using transit in a pandemic world, will result in a shift towards personal vehicles," said Regina Clewlow, CEO of Populus, which provides transportation data analytics to local governments. It's up for grabs (citing Zipper 2020). [My take: Cities like New York, London, and Paris, as well as tech-heavy cities in the western U.S., have strong reasons to keep cars at bay; in other places I expect the car to regain dominance.]
Another alternative to public transportation is cycling. Electric bicycles are selling fast as another, but, again, while a few large cities are converting significant road space to cycling, they are the exceptions (Ricker and Hawkins 2020).
Architects are looking at retrofitting buildings to make them "COVID-19-ready," including long-term issues with schools and offices as well as immediate work on emergency sites like hospitals and food banks. The goal is to make public spaces "more flexible and adaptable," including more modular features.
Highlights from an Urban Land Institute webinar, "Resilience in the New Normal," featuring an investment manager, a green energy consultant, and developer and author Jonathan Rose. Toward the end of the event, Rose suggested that residences and workplaces would be relatively easy to adapt to public health and public confidence, but the stickler would be transportation: Ultimately, I could see this resulting in more use of autonomous vehicles--semiprivate or shared vehicles that come on demand and move along set courses. That would give people a sense of security and privacy with the efficiency of a mass transport system. Marc Wilsmann, the investment manager, predicted that "Once this is behind us," people will continue to value the advantages of dense urban areas. Panelists also discussed the likelihood of greater attention to air quality in buildings, spreading out workers within office by time as well as space, and--possibly counter-intuitively--continued efforts towards environmental sustainability. [Thanks to Grant Nordby for sending this article my way.]
Written before the pandemic, but with additional resonance now, academic authors look at the challenges facing cities in Africa and Asia, focusing particularly on Kinshasa, Jakarta, and Cape Town. Their challenges are much the same as those facing Western cities, but with weaker institutions, greater extremes of wealth and poverty, and the likelihood of continued explosive population growth. Individuals, unofficial groups, and even governments are described as scrambling and improvising for whatever goods they can acquire in a shifting, dangerous environment. The authors decry top-down solutions, especially those imposed by outsiders ("capital"), and advocate inclusive policy making, multi-faceted solutions (i.e. don't focus on a single silo like housing) and "experimentation" in preference to "a clean slate." They eschew statistical data, perhaps understandably, but the prose is often difficult, particularly for an audience of practitioners. More narrative might have helped accessibility; having read Trevor Noah's Born a Crime (Spiegel and Grau, 2016) helped me.
Where do you go to get some air when every place you go is crowded? This is particularly a problem in bigger cities. The writer suggests most of those cities have golf courses, cemeteries, parking lots, and school campuses that the public could be encouraged to use, and those that are already open could extend their hours later into the night. This seems like a short-term problem for the pandemic, but how short-term is the pandemic going to be? London's walking and cycling commissioner, Will Norman, is expecting multiples of current levels of both through the summer and maybe into the fall. Moreover, "We need to come out of this crisis in a radically different way." Can the public claim more open urban space, and keep it?
Other places might follow Miami's lead in turning golf courses into housing, or that of a Washington, D.C. area developer who has been making townhouses out of retail space (Bivins 2020).
Pictures of successful urbanism feature crowded outdoor cafes and places to walk dogs, but sooner or later one confronts the banal need to urinate or defecate, and where are the pictures of that? When I spent a sabbatical semester writing downtown a few years ago, I (eventually) found a total of three restrooms that weren't locked. What happens, Alter wonders, when some restroom owners go out of business, and others weary of the task of keeping their cleanliness at pandemic standards. He advocates a national program of self-cleaning restrooms: Montreal's self-cleaning public toilets cost a quarter of a million dollars each (citing CBC News 2018). On the other hand, cities are building highways that cost billions; there is always money for that.
Can parking lots in the city be converted to more recreational uses?
Memorial Day weekend typically marks the start of summer, but this year it happened as the COVID-19 pandemic ground towards the three-month mark, and in Iowa it is showing no signs of relenting (Lenz 2020). The State of Iowa, like many states, has thrown up its governmental hands and allowed pretty much anything to open, albeit with "appropriate public health measures in place" (see Hadish 2020, Roberts 2020). So businesses and employees as well as customers are on their own, and must choose between opening up, with all the health risks that entails, and continuing to remain closed or limiting service and foregoing income.
One expedient has been tried in a number of cities that allows bars and restaurants to serve a volume of customers while maintaining a prudent distance between them: closing streets and allowing restaurants to use that space to serve customers. City Lab reports that restaurants in an older area of Tampa, Florida, "have overtaken several streets that have been closed to traffic in order to build outdoor dining rooms" (Capps 2020). Similar initiatives are underway in Berkeley, Indianapolis, Las Vegas, New York, Philadelphia, and San Jose. Writer Kriston Capps notes that in addition to better use of space, the virus may be less likely to spread in outdoor environments. (See also Brasuell 2020.)
UPDATE: My former hometown of Wheaton, Illinois, closed some of Hale Street Saturday ("Outdoor Dining in Wheaton" 2020 [paywall]).
Not so fast, says Lloyd Alter at TreeHugger: Despite all the reasons this is a good idea, there remain hurdles of climate, rest rooms, and partisan politics, not to mention the sheer complexity of getting this done: So many rules have to be waived, NIMBYs ignored, decisions made.... They are just going to run out the clock. It's a shame, because it could have been glorious (Alter 2020).
Obstacles noted, I ask: could it be glorious in... Cedar Rapids? We're neither a large city nor a university town, but we do have older districts with dense concentrations of bars and restaurants. And we shut a huge section of downtown for the farmers' markets. We express a wide mix of perspectives on the pandemic: Some people will go anywhere, anytime, without a mask or any concern about distance, but most people I've observed are cautious and conscientious most of the time. (A few go to the other extreme, wearing a mask while driving their car or walking their dog alone.) So I'm guessing that al fresco dining on a closed street might add to an establishment's attractiveness because [a] some people might be willing to try eating outside when they wouldn't risk packing indoors; [b] it expands the capacity of the restaurant, whatever the legal limit is now (50%, I think); and [c] eating outside can be festive.
So, with no further ado, here are three core blocks of Cedar Rapids I nominate for closing on high diner and drinker volume evenings. These are blocks where there is a high concentration of restaurants and bars open in the evenings, and where there are easily available alternate routes for motor vehicle traffic. Caveats abound.
I haven't talked to anyone at any of these places about whether they even want to serve outdoors. It's also possible places in other parts of town might want to participate, but I haven't thought that far; this is just a thought experiment for starters.
Any regulation of outdoor drinking of alcohol should be suspended (See Sullivan 2020). Why do these regulations exist anyhow?
I don't know how far from the physical restaurant it is practical to serve food. For example, there are by my count 14 establishments in a two square-block area of downtown, but in that area I would close one or at most two sections of street. So some of those 14, in order to get to one of those closed-off sections, would have to carry food down the street or around the corner. I'm thinking "no," but if it's a "yes" that would open more possibilities.
Iowa is not Georgia, but it can get hot and sticky here in the summer, and sunset is about 8:30. Shade from trees in these blocks is limited, as noted below. We're probably going to need some canopies?
I don't know how different types of food are likely to take the uncontrolled climate of outdoor Iowa. The Washington Post Thursday cited Can Yurdagul, owner of Sushi Capitol in Washington, D.C., saying he was hesitant to trust sushi outdoors in the summer heat.
Offerings: American (soups, salads, burgers), Japanese (sushi and hibachi), pizza.
Ambience: Tall commercial buildings. Sight line to Cedar River. Close access to downtown performing arts venues (Paramount, Penguins, Theater Cedar Rapids).
Traffic: Average 2017 daily traffic count is 1850. Alternate routes are 1st Av and (now two-way!) 3rd Av SE.
New Bohemia: 200 block of 16th Ave SE.
Establishments: Little Bohemia, Bo Mac's, Kickstand. (Could also, by bending the closure around the block onto the dead end part of 3rd St SE, include Tornado's Grub and Pub.)
Offerings: bar food (burgers, tenderloins, steaks, wraps, sandwiches)
Ambience: Sight line to St. Wenceslaus Church. More open space and fewer trees than one would like on 16th, but 3rd has some.
Traffic: Average 2017 daily traffic count on the bridge (currently closed for construction) is 4770. Alternate route is 12th Avenue.
Houby Days on 16th Av SW, May 2017
Czech Village: 000 block of 16th Ave SW. Really why does this block allow auto traffic at all ever?
Offerings: bar food with some interesting twists e.g. Lucky's features "build your own" burgers (Kaplan 2018)
Ambience: Charming remnant of historic ethnic neighborhood, with cute shops. Some shade trees on western half of the block. In sight of Bridge of Lions over the Cedar River (when construction is finished), National Czech and Slovak Museum and Library, Kosek Bandstand, clock tower.
Traffic: Average 2017 daily traffic count on the bridge (currently closed for construction) is 4770. For through traffic, alternate route is 12th Avenue. Parking is plenteous on 15th and 17th Avenues SW.
Badly-drawn map of downtown, with data from Google
In the halcyon days that were the middle of the last decade, my Corridor Urbanism co-founder Ben Kaplan did a series of what he called Urbanist Goodreads... annotated bibliographies of writing on a particular topic. I am shamelessly stealing this format as a way of starting to sort through the vast array of writing on how the pandemic will affect the future of cities.
Of course, cities will not disappear, and they've survived catastrophes before (Campanella and Vale 2020). But the question is not whether there will still be a New York, or Oklahoma City, or Cedar Rapids, but how will this experience affect how cities look and feel and work? What, if anything, has changed, and can we still have financially- and environmentally-sustainable, inclusive, real communities?
These articles address these questions very broadly; in future surveys I'll look at specific topics like design, economics, and social life. The bottom line is that there are a lot of variables in play here: how long will the pandemic last, will people bear the emotional scars of this scary time or will they put it all behind them, how quickly will the economy bounce back, and how much and in what way will people be willing to support governmental action at every level. (For the huge clean-up job the next U.S. President faces, see Wright and Campbell 2020). It probably also matters whether the city is a densely-populated, global city like New York or a medium-small city with a widely-spread populace like Cedar Rapids.
This collection of short takes is a good place to start because it gives a quick range of views along with the various assumptions that underlie them. Not surprisingly, Joel Kotkin predicts that the pandemic will hasten the move away from city centers, while Richard Florida predicts that the ongoing draw of cities will remain, perhaps aided by falling housing prices. Edward Glaeser and Janette Sadik-Khan also weigh in. The Chinese and Indian contributors are most interesting, because while their societies are very different from America, the same forces may be at work everywhere. Kiran Bedi, an local official in India, predicts that her country will feel the effects of the virus well after the pandemic is over:
Cities will lose part of their variety and social life. There will be less eating out, more home delivery, and lower consumption of luxuries. Public cinemas will turn into home cinemas. Gyms and hair salons will not be in demand for quite some time, unless good practices of social distancing and hygiene are maintained. Commercial sex will be out of business.
Life in cities will become more difficult mainly because of lingering effects of 2020's public policy failures. We're likely to see several years of stark austerity, with empty coffers for the very services and qualities that make for an appealing urban life--well-paying jobs, robust public transportation, concerts, museums, good schools, varied restaurants, boutiques, well-swept streets, and modern office spots. There will be hopping pockets of the old days with adjustments for pandemic safety, but for years, many businesses could be shuttered and even boarded up, unable to weather Covid-19 and the economic downturn. Joblessness will be high, and many of the arts may go dark.
Contributing factors include
accelerated out-migration by young adults in search of jobs and affordable houses
cash-strapped city governments deeply cutting public services
an inevitable economic contraction which the pandemic has only accelerated
massive closures of physical retail
persistent social distancing and widespread hesitancy to engage in crowded shopping
business investment turning away from office-service to manufacturing areas
restricted immigration
inability or unwillingness of the national government to backup cities or organize contact tracing or testing, and...
Marohn argues against restoration of the status quo ante, which may not be thinkable for a long while anyhow. Take advantage of the situation to build resilience, by
reorienting city policies towards mixed-use neighborhoods, encouraging entrepreneurship, and civic culture. Develop a dashboard of metrics that reflect the new priorities.
using any forthcoming national and state aid to build resilience, not more of the same old stuff. Infrastructure spending is popular for state and federal officials because it creates immediate jobs and the potential for long-term growth. For local governments, new infrastructure has some of those same benefits, but also the additional long-term liability of now having to service and maintain that infrastructure. Over time, these hasty transactions rarely work out well for local communities, most of which are already burdened by years of deferred maintenance. So, emphasize maintenance over new construction, sewer and water systems over roads, and older neighborhoods over suburban development.
The bubonic plague came to Mumbai on merchant ships, and from there spread throughout India. Local public historian Alisha Sadikot notes the outbreak led the British colonial government to end its neglect of the slums where the virus had flourished. Over time they improved the infrastructure and developed self-sufficient "planned suburbs," but only after they had forcibly displaced the poor residents. In response to the outbreak and the subsequent displacement, many people fled the city, taking the virus with them, but the population had returned within 15-20 years. As with the 1918 flu pandemic in the U.S. there remains little public memory of the plague. So, some acceleration in updating infrastructure, no benefits for the poor, and otherwise little lasting impact?
The pandemic has not so much created new challenges for cities as exposed problems that were not being effectively addressed.
If a lot of people lack access to essential services like health care or housing (or water), it makes controlling a contagious virus impossible.
Density done wrong means inadequate or unaffordable housing, which further endangers public health.
A lot of urban parks have seen increased traffic during the pandemic; design of open urban spaces can improve public health, environmental sustainability, and water management, as well as facilitating emergency response.
Better regional integration will improve response to the next emergency, whether it be another virus or some climate-related catastrophe, as well as improving resilience of energy and food networks.
We need better collection and integration of data in order to respond better to the next emergency. Here we can learn from South Korea's response to the coronavirus.
van den Berg concludes: We will rebuild our crucial economic and social fabric. It's our decision [whether] to rebuild better.
In this emotionally charged post, Walker reminds her readers that cities are complex, diverse places and what works for one part of the population may be detrimental to another. Like the planned suburbs of Mumbai built after the poor were chased out of their homes, closing streets to cars to help people who are privileged to stay home go for a run doesn't necessarily provide the same benefits to those who use those streets to get to work at essential jobs... If urbanists are pushing cities to give restaurants free roadway space without making a concerted effort to welcome [street] vendors back to those same sidewalks... they are discriminating against the city's most vital and vulnerable small businesses. Everyone's voice must be heard, and everyone's interests be considered, in planning for the post-pandemic city.
If there's anything we learn from the pandemic, it's that the 80%
[who aren't in a financial position to wait out the pandemic] matters as well. Small businesses with razor-thin margins should be
given the resources to survive this crisis. People whose work has now
been deemed essential to the functioning of American society should be
paid like it -- and with more than our gratitude. And we owe it to those
who are disaffected and disenfranchised to develop the kind of
educational system and safety that gives them an actual shot at upward
mobility.
If we don't do that? Well let's just say it's time to prepare for the uprising.
With the future of cities up for grabs, can we choose the option that provides both resilience and inclusive community?
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