As cities proceed wrestling with myriad issues, most noticeably empty workplace buildings resulting from elevated working from dwelling, urbanists Edward Glaeser and Carlo Ratti within the New York Instances
NYT
suggest a brand new position for cities—the “Playground Metropolis.” Whereas they’ve some helpful concepts, their evaluation ignores financial, structural and fairness issues dealing with cities which the “playground” idea may truly make worse.

What’s the “playground” thought? Glaeser and Ratti say cities ought to embrace the shift “from vocation to recreation” and make cities extra very important and enjoyable to dwell in—what they name “the Playground Metropolis.” Cities ought to “entice the wealthy and gifted,” reconfiguring neighborhoods into walkable protected areas with numerous facilities.

The authors have a look at empty workplace buildings in New York and different cities, with “occupancy round 50 % of prepandemic ranges, harming landlords and the native economic system.” These low occupancy charges are pushed by the pandemic-induced improve in working from dwelling (WFH), which now appears to be a extra everlasting function of the labor market than many (together with me) anticipated.

Analysts like Nicholas Bloom at Stanford suppose this represents a everlasting shift in job location for a lot of, particularly higher-paid and extra educated service employees. Different specialists, like Wharton College professor Peter Cappelli, argue WFH isn’t settled but, because it presents many issues to each employers and staff, starting from supervision to productiveness to onboarding new employees.

However nonetheless WFH in the end performs out, there’s no query concerning the contraction dealing with business actual property (CRE), particularly workplace buildings. Banks with giant CRE portfolios are being battered within the markets, as refinancing comes due in a time of rising rates of interest and falling occupancy.

So what ought to cities do? There’s quite a lot of curiosity in repurposing workplace buildings for residential area, though that’s a expensive and typically troublesome course of. Anecdotal proof suggests we haven’t tipped into full-scale conversion, partly as a result of constructing house owners and banks haven’t accepted that WFH and depressed workplace demand is a long-term drawback.

However are the pessimists proper about WFH and its long-term impacts on business workplaces and downtowns? Some information assist their argument. Workplace occupancy continues lagging—the Kastle “barometer” measuring keycard swipes in ten main metros nonetheless hovers round 50%, up considerably from 43% in March of final 12 months, however not rising sharply.

However as Glaeser and Ratti level out, cell phone site visitors in the identical workplace zip codes isn’t down almost as a lot, signaling extra individuals within the downtowns than are going to workplaces. Different information level in the same route. In distinction to workplace occupancy, restaurant reservations, Broadway theater attendance, and direct spending on journey within the US at the moment are near pre—pandemic ranges.

Glaeser has lengthy been a proponent of cities as expertise hubs for the prosperous. His 2011 best-selling ebook Triumph of the Metropolis, has a chapter entitled “Is London A Luxurious Resort?” arguing cities like London and New York entice “expert individuals” who “present the concepts that gasoline the native economic system,” so catering to their pursuits is a viable financial technique.

The present piece is express. The authors say New York and different cities have to “view town as a for-profit actual property improvement firm wholly owned by a nonprofit poverty alleviation-entity.” Town must be stored “engaging to the wealthy” and use income for training and “assist for the poor.”

However that’s what American cities typically had been turning into nicely earlier than the pandemic, with the expansion of prosperous, white government-subsidized suburbs surrounding core cities. As I argue in my current ebook, Unequal Cities, America’s metropolitan type has a single regional economic system with a core metropolis surrounded by actually a whole lot of politically unbiased and infrequently hostile governments.

American suburbs had been constructed and sustained by tax breaks on dwelling mortgages, zoning that prevented racial integration and development of multifamily housing, transportation insurance policies favoring automobiles over public transit, and political hostility to cities from state and federal governments. Funding for public training rests on native property taxes, the place wealthier suburbs seize the lion’s share even whereas relying on the core metropolis’s financial vitality.

If working from dwelling completely shifts a big quantity of higher-paying work to wealthier suburbs, that can harm metropolis tax bases and in addition lower-paid service jobs in constructing cleansing and safety companies, eating places and hospitality, and different sectors. That in flip will additional scale back metropolis spending on necessities like police, sanitation, and training, to say nothing of facilities for the rich.

So the “Playground Metropolis” thought isn’t so new. It’s what a lot of our cities have skilled for many years, by means of a poisonous mixture of financial neglect, suburban dominance and hostility, and structural racism in housing, training, and employment. Overcoming these forces is now much more difficult for cities with the elevated pressures on their workplaces and downtowns.

Glaeser and Ratti have some good concepts for making metropolis neighborhoods extra engaging and insurance policies for extra speedy conversion of workplaces into residences. However their neglect of structural financial forces and our fragmented metropolitan political geography makes their “playground” answer insufficient for full financial restoration, or progress on inequality.