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this post was submitted on 23 Dec 2023
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GenZedong
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Are downtown areas really the best type of data to analyze potential "ghost cities"? This feels like a misrepresentation. The residential designated areas in San Francisco and Los Angeles for example are over capacity and there has been a shortage for over 2 decades at this point.
Downtown areas by definition are the commercial enterprise and business sector of a city. The “vacancy” number here is looking at dead office spaces and commercial real estate, it isn’t even possible to build designate residential areas in a downtown commonly.
This is also mostly due to the pandemic, and increasingly larger numbers of workplaces switching to remote work.
Further, the death of brick and mortar stores, shopping malls, and other commercial enterprises also contributes to this number.
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.