This is almost entirely because we’re not going back to our business district offices. The cities, as places where people live, are fine.
At least so far. I can’t speak to each individual city’s tax base derived from those offices.
At least for DTLA, it seems like too much of a drop to just be that. There are some office buildings, sure, but when I lived there pre-pandemic, you could take a walk and only see a small number of people dressed like they were on lunch break from an office job. Plus, LA having multiple office-zone places, DTLA might actually have a lot of people who were commuting to Culver City and are now working from home.
Is there a baseline of cell phone usage in general? Are more people using wifi instead of connecting to the towers?
Dug further and found that their source has since updated their methodology and LA is now at 83%, which seems a lot more realistic than 65%. Also, they count daily unique devices, so the former Downey-DTLA commuter who now works at home from Downey contributes to LA’s drop, while the former DTLA-Culver City commuter who now works at home from DTLA doesn’t change anything.
Thank you for your work
Perhaps the decline of physical stores as well
I can only speak for my own city, but yes, the stores and restaurants that serviced the office workforce have taken a hit. It’s as-yet unkown/undecided what will become of the office district. Converting large office buildings into housing is no cheap or simple task. Just the plumbing alone is completely wrong for it.
Forget plumbing. First there has to some will to make those areas residential which is absent.
It’s a 7x7 mile city with ten golf courses and thousands of unhoused people.
In California, Oregon, and Washington the state governments stripped cities of most of their powers related to zoning in regards to blocking conversions to mixed use residential. As long as there isn’t heavy industry right next door (aren’t crazy, no one wants Houston), mixed use residential zoning is hard for cities to deny.
Los Angeles has the problem (benzene, hydrocarbons, heavy metals) of all the oil wells, pipelines, refineries, crude oil storage, and other oil field infrastructure hidden behind facades all throughout the city. The city and county are an active oil field, something that should never have been approved when there is residential or light commercial literally 25ft away from camouflaged wells, pipelines, and crude oil storage tanks. Then again people over a century ago probably shouldn’t have looked at the natural tar pits and thought to themselves “this is a great place to build a city”.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/09/oil-wells-in-la-nearby-residents-grapple-with-health-problems.html
New residential arguably is unethical in this situation, especially if it’s lower income housing. Btw, this is the reason building new public schools has been almost impossible in Los Angeles and existing schools all have soil that if there were alternatives would mean shutting them down. Los Angeles and Houston are more alike than anyone likes to admit. Can’t do the type of super fund site remediation (clean up) at the scale actually needed because it would mean tearing the city down to the bedrock to replace all the soil.
Are downtown areas really the best type of data to analyze potential “ghost cities”? This feels like a misrepresentation. The residential designated areas in San Francisco and Los Angeles for example are over capacity and there has been a shortage for over 2 decades at this point.
Downtown areas by definition are the commercial enterprise and business sector of a city. The “vacancy” number here is looking at dead office spaces and commercial real estate, it isn’t even possible to build designate residential areas in a downtown commonly.
This is also mostly due to the pandemic, and increasingly larger numbers of workplaces switching to remote work.
Further, the death of brick and mortar stores, shopping malls, and other commercial enterprises also contributes to this number.
I’d argue that once the commercial enterprise and business sector of a city dies off the rest necessarily follows. People living in suburbs and and the periphery tend to have jobs downtown. So, once the jobs start disappearing then people have to go find work somewhere else too.
It’s true that remote work is a factor in this, but general economic downturn is playing a role here as well. Consumer spending is down, and this is causing a lot of the stores to shutter due to lack of business. There’s also secondary impact from remote work here as well, since less people coming downtown means less business.
The whole organization of the cities is ultimately a reflection of economic organization. We’re now seeing a shift to remote work in some sectors as you mention, but also lots of other economic changes happening in parallel with that. So, I do think it’s fair to say that cities are now dying out because the economy that used to support them is disappearing.
