10th Anniversary Post: The Future of the Suburbs

We've always viewed our nation as a place with unlimited land and natural resources.--
PETE SAUNDERS

Ten years ago, I was gearing up to teach the next generation of first-year Coe College students about urbanism. Maybe that's why Holy Mountain was full of urbanist basics like cities blowing their stash on big amenities, gentrification, and suburban sprawl. My post on suburbia was full of assumptions that now seem very much of that time. Following Leigh Gallagher's The End of the Suburbs: Where the American Dream is Moving (Portfolio/Penguin, 2013) I expected suburbia to be transformed by increasing economic inequality, consumer preferences for urban living, environmental issues, fiscal issues, corporate clustering, and secular declines in urban crime. 

When I revisited the topic six years later, those assumptions already looked dated. "Since I wrote [the 2016 post], the return to the city appears to have ebbed; it's early to judge, but it's certainly not proceeding at the pace of 2005-2015 (Frey 2022, Cortright 2020). Meanwhile, American society has been shaken by a series of earthquakes" including the Trump administration, Black Lives Matter protests, the pandemic, altered workplaces, economic changes, and climate disasters. There was a trend of suburbs adopting urbanist elements like central squares, small businesses, and bike trails.

Today I read two essays on suburbia, which is indeed transforming, in some places, but very much maintaining its preeminence in American geography. Bill Fulton (2026), an urbanist I admire but not enough to pay for his Substack, answered a question from someone in Texas about the Dallas metropolitan area, which is growing by leaps and bounds, even as "Downtown Dallas specifically is sucking wind" (questioner's wording). This is not what we were asking ten years ago, when McDonald's was moving its headquarters from Oakbrook to Chicago, and CRST moved from the edge of town to downtown Cedar Rapids (Cortright 2016, Smart Growth America 2015). There may be more to this behind the paywall, but the discussion of metro Dallas sounds like we're back to the 1980s, and 2005-2015 never happened.

Addison Del Maestro (2026) examines the housing crisis from the perspective of high-demand, high-price cities. More people seem to want to live in the hottest cities than can fit there, which drives prices up, making them unaffordable. While it's also true that "lots of smaller cities and towns have also seen price increases, because basically all communities pulled back on housing production for a few decades," some cities have features or cultures that attract a disproportionate percentage of the mobile population. I conclude that, while San Francisco prices spiral--their price-to-median-income ratio is over 10!--those who can't afford them retreat to the suburbs, somewhere or other. In Cedar Rapids, you could buy a downtown condo for $400K, or you could pay half that for something 15 minutes' drive away. So, you get some of the amenities of urban living at an affordable price. Note that Del Maestro is still assuming consumer preference for urban amenities.

Pete Saunders (2026), however, argues consumer preferences for new construction are even stronger than those for urban living. He cites a study by economist Kenan Fikri showing that the Economic Innovation Group's measure of the most prosperous neighborhoods--measured a variety of ways, notably not including taxable value per acre--shows the most prosperous are also the newest. Saunders reflects:

Historically, I understand why Americans have always favored new over old. We've always viewed our nation as a place with unlimited land and natural resources. We have a residential and commercial development investment structure that adheres to the same philosophy that bank robber Willie Sutton used when asked by a reporter why he robs banks: "Because that's where the money is." We can go anywhere. We can do anything. We've put no limit to our desires.

Does it matter where people choose to live? Well, yes it does. This is a blog about public policy, though, not individual ethical choices, and I'm not here to argue that people should never choose to live in low density areas. (Contrast that stance with that of Ross Douthat, cited in Del Maestro's post, who wants to "break up" existing high-demand cities, where it should be said a lot of people also live.) But we should not ignore the social costs of sprawl, particularly on municipal finances and the natural environment (but also community feeling and physical fitness). The future of suburbia seems strong; but will it prove adaptable to big changes coming?

Saunders, again:

In a nation that's prospered with the expansion of suburbia and the Sun Belt, what happens when they feel a tinge of obsolescence? When the five-bedroom, 4,000 square-foot McMansion can't be sold because the nation is getting older and has smaller households? We'll see.

If experience is any predictor, it won't spur a rush back to central cities, but rather to a new version of suburbs. And the most vulnerable will, again, be left in the dust, not to mention the natural world.

ORIGINAL POST: "The Future of the Suburbs," 18 July 2016

SEE ALSO: "The Future of the Suburbs (II)," 8 August 2022. Compare the current versions of the American Prairie Project...

house (Source: drhorton.com)

townhouses (Source: drhorton.com)

...with what they were showing four years ago:

(Source: cedar-rapids.org)

...though even then, to quote Daniel Herriges (2020), "What would you even walk to?"

10th Anniversary Post: Can Cities Change Their Luck?

 

The hit 90s TV series Friends was a harbinger of the "back to the city" years:
Where are today's "friends" living?

(6/13/2026) Ten years ago this month, I looked back on what had been the best ten years for American central cities in a long, long time. By 2015, the "back to the city" movement that had been growing for decades had burst into full flower. From 2005-2015, the U.S. population grew by 8.4 percent; the combined population of the central cities of the 51 metropolitan areas with more than one million population grew almost exactly the same (8.2 percent); however, this masks a wide variety of individual experiences. Using the crude measure of central city population to measure progress, I classified these 51 cities into four categories: 

• STARS (at least double the US population growth 2005-15): 14 cities
• ABOVE AVERAGE (exceeding US population growth rate): 12 cities
• BARELY KEEPING UP (increasing but at less than the national rate): 11 cities
• FALLING BACK (losing population over the period 2005-15): 14 cities

The three fastest growing cities over this period were (1) Charlotte, North Carolina 35.4%; (2) Austin, Texas 35.0%; (3) Raleigh, North Carolina 32.1%. The cities at the top mostly reflected the knowledge economy that emerged along with the Internet, so they were the ones who were most successful at attracting the technical professionals that starred in the new economy. Most were found on the coasts or in the Sun Belt of southern states. (See the map at Saunders 2026b.)

Public Square, Cleveland in 2017

The three biggest losers of population between 2005 and 2015 were (1) Detroit, Michigan -23.6%; (2) New Orleans, Louisiana -14.3%; (3) Cleveland, Ohio -14.1%. New Orleans's decade began with the horrors of Hurricane Katrina; the other cities in this category tended to be older industrial cities in the North which had been stars of the midcentury economy but now were known as the Rust Belt.

U.S. Census data for the ensuing ten years show continuation of some cities' previous experiences, whether positive or negative, while other cities saw interesting changes. From 2015-2025, the U.S. population grew somewhat more slowly, adding 6.6 percent. There are now 56 metropolitan areas of more than a million population in the United States: We've added Tucson, Arizona; Fresno, California; Grand Rapids, Michigan; Omaha, Nebraska; Tulsa, Oklahoma; and Greenville, South Carolina. At the same time, the New Orleans metropolitan area fell under a million, but I left it in the dataset. 

Significantly (I think), the total population of these 57 central cities increased only 3.0 percent between 2015 and 2025, less than half the growth of the U.S. overall, and a very different experience from the previous ten years. There were fewer "stars" and more in the middle categories. Interestingly, the number of cities losing population was very slightly less, though eight cities gained between 0 and 1 percent, which barely put them in the "barely keeping up" group.

STARS (13+): 8 cities	ABOVE AVG (6.5-13): 15 cities	BARELY KPG UP (0-6.5): 21 cities	FALLING BACK (<0): 13 cities
Orlando FL 23.2 Jacksonville FL 17.2 Charlotte NC 16.6 Greenville SC 16.6 Seattle WA 14.7 Atlanta GA 14.1 Okla. City OK 14.0 Salt Lake City UT 13.4	Raleigh NC 12.2 Tampa FL 12.1 Miami FL 11.1 Columbus OH 10.2 Nashville TN 10.2 Omaha NE 10.1 Kansas City MO 9.6 Sacramento CA 9.3 Las Vegas NV 9.0 Providence RI 9.0 Denver CO 8.5 Richmond VA 7.7 Austin TX 7.6 Fresno CA 6.8 Phoenix AZ 6.6	Buffalo NY 6.4 Indianapolis IN 5.6 Cincinnati OH 5.3 San Antonio TX 5.3 Minneapolis MN 4.7 Houston TX 4.4 Louisville KY 4.3 Washington DC 3.2 Grand Rapids MI 3.1 Tucson AZ 3.1 Tulsa OK 3.1 Dallas TX 2.3 Pittsburgh PA 1.1 Boston MA 0.9 San Diego CA 0.8 Chicago IL 0.4 New York NY 0.4 Philadelphia PA 0.4 Portland OR 0.4 Riverside CA 0.2 Virginia Beach VA 0.2	Hartford CN -1.6 Rochester NY -1.8 Los Angeles CA -2.6 San Jose CA -3.6 Detroit MI -4.1 San Francisco CA -4.5 Cleveland OH -6.3 Milwaukee WI -6.3 Memphis TN -7.0 New Orleans LA -7.0 Birmingham AL -7.8 Baltimore MD -8.3 St. Louis MO -11.9

Some factoids from this pile of data:

• Three cities were in the fastest growing group in both periods: Charlotte (+57.9% from 2005-2025), Seattle (+36.7%), and Oklahoma City (+35.5%).
• Nine cities lost population in both periods: Detroit (-26.8% from 2005-2015), New Orleans (-20.4%), Cleveland (-19.6%), St. Louis (-19.2%), Birmingham (-15.4%), Baltimore (-11.4%), Memphis (-9.3%), Rochester (NY) (-2.4%), and Hartford (-1.9%).
• Atlanta, Georgia dropped 1.4 percent in the first period, then leapt up 14.1 percent in the second. Salt Lake City, Utah moved up two categories, from "barely keeping up" to "stars."
• San Francisco, California increased 17 percent in the first period, but dropped 4.5 percent in the last ten years. Five other cities moved down two categories: Boston, Massachusetts; Portland, Oregon; San Antonio, Texas; San Jose, California; and Washington, D.C.

Mural, North Beach, San Francisco, 2014

Each one of those cities has a particular story to tell. And the next ten years promise new stories: Some Midwestern states--not Iowa, alas--have experienced increases in people moving in from elsewhere in the United States ("More People Coming" 2026). The Trump administration's success at strangling international migration to the United States will continue to impact cities even after Trump has left the scene.

All of this leads to the question: Is the urbanist moment over? My post ten years ago optimistically pointed to widespread success among central cities, with potential lessons for the less successful ones. Or do the experiences of the last ten years reflect broad adjustments (limits to growth, sectoral changes in the economy, changes in societal preferences in response to the pandemic, new TV series, or something else)? (Another possibility is that all these findings are altered by changing the unit of analysis to parts of cities, cf. Sanders 2026a).

Betting things will turn around soon?
Cleveland, Ohio has a downtown casino, and soon so will Cedar Rapids!

ORIGINAL POST: "Can Cities Change Their Luck?" 20 June 2016

PCI Pays Property Tax. A Lot of It, Actually.

 

Was dead-ending 2nd Avenue a mistake, 
given the property tax volcano that is PCI?

(Truth in blogging disclosure: Your author is a frequent visitor to the Physicians Clinic of Iowa medical mall, including Forefront Dermatology, PCI Labs, and PCI Urology. He is grateful for the care he receives. He pays $29,637 per acre in property taxes on his house.)

(3/16/2026) A few days ago, I was in a discussion of the city's (lamentable, I still say) decision to close two blocks of 2nd Avenue SE to traffic to accommodate construction of a new Physicians Clinic of Iowa facility. An outgrowth of that discussion led me to the city assessor's site where I found, much to my surprise, that PCI, far from being an untaxed nonprofit, actually pays an impressive amount of property tax, even on a per acre basis.

Here, for comparison's sake, are 2024 tax data for some properties I've researched in previous posts:

Property		size (acres)	2024 Valuation	2024 Tax Paid	2024 Pay/Acre
GREAT AMERICA BUILDING		1.05	$20,585,000	$755,780	$719,790
SKOGMAN REALTY		0.45	5,500,000	257,006	571,124
PULLMAN LOFTS		0.305	3,837,100	74,502	244,269
RAYGUN/CROSBY'S		0.386	3,070,300	82,218	213,000
TARGET (NE)		15.45	11,036,300	419,746	27,168
TARGET (SW)		15.91	11,797,200	402,998	25,330
WALMART (NE)		17.97	9,613,600	327,954	18,250
WALMART (SW)		23.89	12,350,000	421,996	17,664

Moving to the medical district, here are the major landholders:

Property		size (acres)	2024 Valuation	2024 Tax Paid	2024 Pay/Acre
COE COLLEGE		22.36	$51,770,500	0	0
MERCY HOSPITAL		15.6	194,083,700	$58,812	$3,942
ST LUKE'S HOSPITAL		15.524	100,807,700	97,580	6,286
PHYSICIANS CLINIC OF IOWA		9.403	78,771,500	2,894,632	307,940

Entrance to PCI Medical Pavilion I,
where 2nd Avenue SE used to be
(swiped from pciofiowa.com)

(NOTE: I am not going to swear by these exact numbers, because unlike the firms in the first table, these institutions all contain multiple properties, and I may have missed some or double-counted others. So don't sweat the specific numbers; the rough magnitudes are what matter.)

The one that is not like the others, which Sesame Street has taught us to seek, is PCI. Its property tax bill is comparable to some of the most valuable land in the city, at least among the parcels I've haphazardly picked. I have no explanation for this, and if you have one, I would be grateful to learn it.

PCI former location on 8th Street SE
(Google Maps screenshot from 2012)

One can't blame the City of Cedar Rapids for paying attention back in 2010 or so when PCI threatened to move to Hiawatha. On the other hand...

My ongoing rants at the MedQuarter center on its lack of walkability, and the broken connection between Downtown and the neighborhoods. Those are the fundamental problems, not the tax treatment of different payers. Closing 2nd Avenue messed with the city's street grid, and the style of development in the MedQuarter prevents more compatible development, as well as making even the core of the city car-dependent.

SEE ALSO: Sarah Davis, "The Question Every City Should Be Asking," Strong Towns, 4 August 2021

Game review: Bus

 

Bus, one of a number of games from Perplext that come in two-inch tall boxes, is a fast-playing affair with an approach to public transit that is unlike any city I've ever visited. The prophet Jarrett Walker calls these systems flexible transit, as opposed to fixed lines. Buses on fixed lines, in places like Cedar Rapids or New York or St. Petersburg or Washington, follow the same routes all the time, and it's up to the riders to figure out the best paths to their destinations. 

Example of a fixed line in St. Petersburg, Florida:
The Sun Runner runs the same loop, over and over again

With flex routes, on the other hand:

You can summon a flexible service just as you would summon a taxi, and a van or small bus will come to you, or at least very close to you. Unlike a taxi, though, it may still pick up other people during your trip, and there are usually restrictions on where you can use a flexible service to go. (Jarrett Walker, Human Transit: How Clearer Thinking about Public Transit Can Enrich Our Communities and Our Lives [Washington: Island Press, revised edition, 2024], p. 49)

The buses in Bus are not like Uber or paratransit, in that there are specific stops where they pick up and drop off passengers. What differentiates them from fixed route systems is that where they go from each stop depends on the optimal arrangement of passengers' chosen destinations. 

This approach can help the transit vehicle avoid time-wasting maneuvers such as driving into alleys and cul-de-sacs. The path of the vehicle may still be meandering, but it is less so than if it was going to people's doors. (2024: 53)

Flexible systems work at low densities, like outer-ring suburbs and rural areas, where demand for transit is very low. 

The productivity of flexible services is usually under five boardings per hour, and most estimates of the theoretical maximum put it below ten.... The low maximum capacity means that if too many people want to use the service, the transit authority has to deploy more vehicles and drivers, which raises the cost of operations. The only alternative is to make the service less flexible, by turning it back into something like a fixed line. (2024: 52)

Ready for a game of Bus?

In the game of Bus, the secret is the town is very small, with service covering four square blocks, and only 15 potential passengers. There are three places for passengers to board (the white circles marked "BUS" in the picture above), and six possible destinations (the colored circles). So, there's no wandering around county backroads, but routes need to be improvised by players, and re-imagined every time they pick up another passenger. I think that could potentially frustrate a real live passenger, but the competition between buses--the green contraptions shown in the picture below--encourages efficient routes and timely dropoffs.

Bus game in progress

Playing the Game

Passengers come in pairs, are picked up at the bus stop and then taken to their color-coded destinations. Each passenger card has, in addition to its pair of passengers, a number indicating the "speed limit," the maximum number of spaces the player can move with each turn. For example, the top card shown in the picture above--the one that's shown right-side-up--has a blue passenger who wants to be taken to the blue dot on the grid, and an orange passenger who wants to be taken to the orange dot. The larger number "3" means the player driving those passengers can move three spaces (or less) with each turn. The smaller number "3" above it is the number of points the card is worth at the end of the game.

Drivers can pick up passenger cards any time they stop at a bus stop, as both buses are in the picture above. The most I've had at one time is two cards' worth (four passengers).  Since routes are flexible, picking up a second pair of passengers can affect the optimal order in which they're dropped off. The key, says the website, is "absolute efficiency," not feeling sorry for a passenger you've been toting around for a while. By the way, it doesn't specifically state this in the rules, but when I play the buses must drop off passengers on the side of the street with the colored dot indicating the destination. No reckless running across these streets, as I've seen people do in real life, even on stroads like 1st Avenue East by Lindale Mall.

The game ends when one player completes five passenger cards. Then points are totaled. I tend to try to get cards with high speed limits, and ignore the points, to my later disadvantage, I'm sure. In my experience, games can be completed in less than 15 minutes.

Evaluation

I'm not sure this is the best training module for an actual bus driver, but it does get a person thinking about public transportation, albeit a rather esoteric (in my experience) kind of system. For some smaller towns, this might even inspire a better way to do transit!

The variable "speed limits" will amuse anyone who's ever driven or ridden a bus. Except for Bus Rapid Transit routes, buses move at the speed of traffic, and stop when the other vehicles do as well as to pick up additional passengers. Maybe the variable speeds during the game illustrate how a huge issue for efficient transit is our society's over-reliance on private vehicles?

Video section

One of the best songs ever about transit (3:24):

Bus instructional video (5:36):

SEE ALSO: Taras Grescoe, "Time to Buy a Farecard," High Speed, 18 April 2025

Urbanist Goodreads: What Else is Going Down Besides All This S**t?

 

Chuck Marohn isn't freaking out. Maybe I shouldn't either?
(Source: strongtowns.org)

(2/10/2025) NOTE: In the innocent days 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 dabbled in the format myself to analyze the impact of COVID on the future of cities; here's an example from June 2020. 

Now, with a runaway U.S. executive breaking the government for the purpose of retribution (Donald Trump) and/or amassing money and power (Elon Musk) and/or an ideological vision (the Project 2025 crew), and states like Iowa micromanaging localities whenever they feel like it, what is left for urbanism to think about? Quite a bit, it appears.

"Growth Ponzi Scheme Leaves Virginia Town with $34 Million Dilemma," Strong Towns, 6 February 2025

[Strong Towns grew out of planner-engineer Chuck Marohn's doubts about the rationality of some of the projects he was being hired to do. His doubts became a blog and podcast, which became an organization, which has become a movement with chapters ("local conversations") all over the world. Marohn spoke in Iowa City in July 2015.]

Strong Towns takes us this week to Purcellville, Virginia, a small town near the border with West Virginia, but not terribly far from Washington, D.C. The story reflects a theme that has been prominent throughout Strong Towns' decade-plus existence: a town can't afford to maintain infrastructure it had built when it was hopeful about growth. "I'm just saying the funds were there when the town was growing like crazy," says Liz Krens, the town's Director of Finance. Like a Greek tragedy, none of their current choices--borrow $34 million? defer maintenance?--is good. Maybe a federal grant would solve their problems, but counting on that is not responsible.

This week's Strong Towns posts also address the limitations of traffic cameras and a local group in Maine that resisted the state's plan to widen a highway through their town.

Robert Steuteville, "Hurricane-Ravaged City Bounces Back with New Main Street," Public Square: A CNU Journal, 4 February 2025

[Public Square is the online journal of the Congress for the New Urbanism, which has been promoting a return to compact, mixed-use development since they gathered in Alexandria, Virginia, in 1993. Their most recent conference was last May in Cincinnati. CNU's membership includes planners, architects, and local officials; I am none of these, but they let me in anyway.]

The lead story this week celebrates the recovery of Panama City, Florida, which won a Charter Award at the 2020 conference, following Hurricane Michael in 2018. The award-winning plan is now being enacted, centered on a restored Harrison Street, which has again become the heart of the city. With better design, street trees and slower vehicle traffic, along with a new central plaza, the core of the city has been restored to life. “There’s a growing collection of wedding photos on the circle on Harrison Avenue,” crowed lead designer Victor Dover. “No one was getting a wedding photo on the main street before.” Note that implementation was expedited by federal COVID relief funds. 

Other current Public Square stories include an urban boulevard replacing a freeway in Toledo, proposed mall redevelopment in Michigan, and a foundation specializing in wildfire recovery, as well as a post arguing for attention to housing supply and affordability in "15-minute city" projects.

Addison del Mastro, "I'm an Antisocial Urbanist Living in the Suburbs, Ask Me Anything," The Deleted Scenes, 4 February 2025

[Addison del Mastro writes about design and a whole bunch of other stuff from his base in suburban Virginia. He's Catholic by faith and conservative by politics, which makes for unique takes on urbanist issues.]

This reflective post starts with the irony that del Mastro identifies as an urbanist while living in a suburban community. "I’m not quite sure," he confesses, "how these abstract ideas I hold about housing and community and not putting up walls around places and not being exclusionary intersect with living in an actual place with actual characteristics with actual people who were “buying” those characteristics when they bought homes here." It's gotten to the point where he feels like arguing with visitors who admire his neighborhood! I can relate, doing my urbanist writing in a large-lot neighborhood with no commercial establishments for blocks. How much change can he (or I) advocate when most of our neighbors presumably prefer the current characteristics?

This week, del Mastro's wide-ranging blog also covers reuse of old buildings, eccentric product design, and materialism, as well as his own set of goodreads.

In 2018 I would take the Silver Line to McLean
for 1 Million Cups Fairfax

Ryan Jones, "Commuter Rail to Loudoun: The Next Chapter," Greater Greater Washington, 7 February 2025

[Greater Greater Washington is a website with an urbanist mission: "racial, economic, and environmental justice in land use, transportation, and housing." They focus on the D.C. area (which extends to Baltimore and sometimes Richmond). I've been personally very attached to Washington since my semester there seven years ago.]

Jones tells the story of founding a group to promote extension of metro Washington commuter rail service westward into the Virginia suburbs (maybe as far as Purcellville!). He discusses budgeting, positive effect on road traffic, and advantages over building out the Silver (Metro) Line. Their next steps is to speak to town councils in the region. "By building a consensus town by town, we hope to gain momentum to get an official feasibility study commissioned by Loudoun and Fairfax counties in partnership with state and regional agencies..."

Besides opinion posts, Greater Greater Washington also includes their "Breakfast Links" collection of local goodreads, urbanist news from other parts of the country (including a bicycling promotion program in Denver) and opportunities to get involved around the DC area.

Pete Saunders, "Why Call It 'The Rust Belt?'" The Corner Side Yard, 2 February 2025

[Pete Saunders is from Detroit, and now lives in Chicago. He is an important Midwestern voice in a movement that can overfocus on the fast-growing towns on the coasts. His attention to black and working class experiences of cities make his voice especially valuable.]

This piece is less about policy than about nomenclature. Sanders embraces rather than resents the term Rust Belt for what was once the industrial Midwest (think Chicago, Milwaukee, Detroit, Cleveland and all those little cities in eastern Ohio, maybe Pittsburgh). It can symbolize what it could be, "a term roughly synonymous with the legend of the phoenix, the mythological bird that rises from the ashes of its deceased predecessor." Like London, which emptied out after the Romans left in the fifth century but in time became one of the leading cities of the world, the Rust Belt (or Lower Lakes, if you prefer) can rise from its knees and become something else entirely.

Stacy Mitchell's book

And there's more! 

• Stacy Mitchell of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance was quoted extensively in a Washington Post article on the resilient role of small businesses in the American economy, despite apathy (at best) from national elected officials. (Did you know local restaurants now last slightly longer than the average small business start?) 
• The Active Towns podcast, hosted by John Simmerman, presents a video on a "bike bus" in Montclair Township, New Jersey. 
• Happy Cities reports on a survey in Seattle finding "a remarkable relationship between street edges, building facades and pro-social behavior," suggesting a role for city design in human sociability.  
• Kristen Jeffers's latest salutes Rev. Andrew Wilkes, a pastor in Brooklyn who shows the influence of faith on urban issues like gentrification.  
• Planetizen reports the California High-Speed Rail Authority anticipates running trains between coastal cities and the Central Valley in five to eight years.

So there ya have it--urbanists are thinking about urban stuff: infrastructure and how to pay for it, rebuilding downtown, small business, public transit, cycling, trains, and shaping values which I guess includes branding. None of them even referenced national political dysfunction.

Friends, it does my soul good to think about all these people thinking about how to improve their places. It takes considerable nimbleness to negotiate around personal differences, not to mention state and national interference. I hope that what doesn't kill us will in time make us strong. But I'm still concerned that conditions for building prosperous, resilient and inclusive communities are becoming harder each day. Keep the faith, I guess.

Future prospects for our cities

(Source: vecteezy)

In the quarter-century of years beginning with "2," one of the biggest phenomena in America (and other areas of the West) has been the resurgence of central cities. After more than half a century of losing ground to suburbs, cities are "back" with lower crime, new commercial and residential development, and cultural cachet. This is in the main good news: cities are gardens of social diversity as well as economic innovation, and use natural resources more efficiently.

Challenges remain. The resurgence was particularly noticeable back in the years 2005-2015, but even then was felt unevenly across American cities. In super-successful cities like San Francisco, attracting new residents sent real estate prices skyrocketing, resulting in displacement and homelessness; other cities like St. Louis have struggled to catch the wave at all. Particularly since 2020, changing work patterns have left downtown areas with swaths of unused office space at the same time they're struggling to house people.

🚄

A panel of experts convened by the Urban Land Institute (Nyren 2024) commends public-private partnerships, specifically ventures aimed at transforming downtown land use from commercial to residential. Andy DeMoss of the Chicago firm Bradford Allen began with:

They need to focus on the core issue, which is addressing the work-from-home movement. Anything else is most likely not going to be impactful enough to move the needle. Also, a number of city departments are not fully back in the office yet themselves. They need to push their workforce to be downtown, at least three to four days a week, to set an example for the private sector.

Since cities themselves can't force workers back to the office, they can try to create 24 hour areas. They can work on attracting recreational visitors (natural spaces, retail, and entertainment, along with better parking and public transit), as well as getting more housing built in mixed use projects near transit. Chicago, Cincinnati, Miami, New York, and Fayetteville, Georgia, were touted as successful examples. Sheila Ross of HKR in Atlanta summarized:

We need to find ways to activate these spaces year-round, ensuring they remain safe and enjoyable even without events. We have to plan for every day--not just game day. Additionally, the lack of affordable and market-rate housing is a significant challenge, compounded by parking minimums that restrict diverse housing development. Downtowns need equitable access. We must consider how to transform wide, car-centric roads into more human-friendly spaces that can accommodate light rail, bike paths, and spillover activities from local businesses.

🚄

Cities need to work with private entities to build financial and political support for any development, because cities aren't really in control of their own finances. Although when private firms are doing most of the driving, the projects are likely to reflect private profit more than public interest, the alternative is reliance on the national government as well as the states, some of whom are actively hostile to urban areas. In the face of Donald Trump's return to the White House, a Brookings Institution panel speculated on his administration's impact on a variety of urban issues. Trump has famously promised to punish cities that oppose his agenda, and indeed a lot of his support seems to be based on inflicting pain. Can anything move forward in these times?

The most optimistic submissions argue that local leaders can find ways to connect what they need with Trump's priorities. Adie Tomer's section on construction argues that momentum on projects begun during the Biden administration, as well as bipartisan interest in new housing, creates opportunities for federal-local cooperation: Understanding what Trump administration officials want--and persuasively making the case for local projects--could be worth millions of dollars for many communities. It's wise to make calls to newly appointed officials, listen to agency-hosted webinars, and consume any other information that can help make submissions as attractive as possible. 

He likes building, doesn't he? Possibly
President Trump can be sweet-talked into supporting infrastructure projects,
like this reconstructed intersection in Cedar Rapids

Other pieces of a similar bent talk about policies that can help working class and nonurban constituents, including Annelies Goger on work-based learning, Joseph W. Kane on infrastructure projects, Molly Kinder on workforce issues related to artificial intelligence, and Tracy Hadden Loh on strengthening opportunity zones and access to community capital. (I'm not seeing this sort of thing at all here in Iowa, though, where for years Republicans have appealed to working class and nonurban rage without addressing their economic issues.)

Other pieces from the Brookings survey argue either that Trump's ideology will need to bend to practical local imperatives--William H. Frey on immigration, Xavier de Souza Briggs on antidiscrimination and diversity, Manann Donoghoe on climate via industrial policy disaster relief and local innovation--or that momentum behind certain policy directions is sufficient to sustain those policies in spite of Trump's opposition. Hanna Love argues that while the U.S. Department of Justice is sure to lurch towards the punitive, States can enact their own legislative reforms and investigations into police accountability, and importantly, many of the preventative investments needed to improve public safety are under the purview of local governments. Similar hopes are expressed by Mark Muro on sustaining local technology development, and Joseph Parilla on CHIPS and Science Act funds.

Derecho, August 2020:
The climate won't wait for the next election

The most pessimistic pieces involve the administration's ability to act, or to choose not to act, unilaterally, in ways that impact localities. These include Farah Khan on protecting marginalized communities, Robert Maxim on connecting underrepresented workers to the digital economy, Andre Perry on sustaining the growth of the still small proportion of black-owned employer businesses, and Martha Ross on deportation and "downstream effects." Maxim, for example, argues Growing the number of underrepresented workers in the digital economy will require new [congressional] investments in digital skills development and digital infrastructure, increased access to capital, and more robust place-based investments into underrepresented communities. And Congress remains the most essential actor for investing in tribal communities because of its so-called "plenary power" over Native nations.

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It surely will be difficult for cities to find allies in their dealings with the administration, whether their approach is cooperative or defiant. Pete Saunders (2024) argues cities always struggle in the face of American anti-urban bias. Individualism has been baked into America since the Founding, he says, beginning with how the Confederation Congress chose to organize the land between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River won in the War for Independence (accessible to speculators, centered around farms). As a result, America struggles with doing things that work toward the common good, and has a firm belief that improving the lives of individuals is the best way to improve the common good. Therefore:

American cities seem almost incapable of capitalizing on their assets, of routinely and easily making the case for greater investment from the federal and state levels of government. We struggle to make public transit investments. We struggle with implementing good placemaking practices. We struggle with undoing bad urban policies, and instituting good ones.

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If we can't agree to fund public transit or build enough housing, we're definitely not going to get to the cities Nika Dubrovsky and David Graeber imagine in their book Cities Made Differently (MIT Press, 2024). The executive version presented on the blogs Wiki Observatory and Naked Capitalism offers four visions, the most appealing of which is the City as a Family, "a city without any strangers, where everything is shared, and everyone looks after each other. There are no shops, no money, and no danger at all" (Dubrovsky and Graeber 2024). The result would be the common good, with the catches that historical communes frequently devolved into dictatorship, and while America suffers from an excess of individualism, having too little autonomy would be bad as well. Two other cities--the City of Greed, and the City of Runners, whose endless competition seems closest to our contemporary experience--are dystopian, and offer tendencies to be avoided. The fourth, Underground City, is a challenge to human physiology, as many noted in the comments.

Source: Adananette

Prediction is fraught with unknowns, but it's safe to say the city of 2029 will probably look, feel and act a lot like the city of 2025. If in the interim policies are enacted to make the rich even richer, and to reduce the problem-solving capacity of government at all levels, as seems most likely, they will be felt most immediately at the margins of society, and will only be widely impactful over time. Still, the path we are on does not seem resilient, and missed opportunities are likely to be rued later.