This week Christopher Leinberger and Cushman & Wakefield published a new report called Reimagining Cities: Disrupting the Urban Doom Loop. This report and its companion interactive website offer in-depth research and solutions to turn around American cities (specifically Walk urban places (WalkUPS)). WalkUPS have been declining since 2019 due to the pandemic, rising disorder (or its perception), and a shrinking office market.
The report's research is based on a sample of 15 U.S. cities in two categories - gateway and secondary cities, focusing on the regionally significant walkable urban places. There are 208 WalkUPs in these 15 cities. These include four types of WalkUPs: Downtowns, Downtown Adjacent, Urban Commercial and Urban Universities.
The bottom line is that many of these WalkUPs are in an urban doom loop - a downward spiral of lower office occupancy that drives lower rents, lowers valuation and lower property taxes, decreases services, and increases crime. The reason for the doom loop is that these WalkUPs violated portfolio theory; they put too many of their eggs in the office basket.
The leading solution is to re-balance the real estate product portfolio of WalkUPs. This research has developed an optimized real estate product portfolio for these WalkUPs that optimizes real estate valuations/property taxes and GDP produced in these WalkUPs.
The key recommendations include reducing the office share of the portfolio (especially Downtown), increasing the residential share (especially Downtown), increasing the for-sale housing in all WalkUPs, and, most unexpectedly, increasing the various components of “Play” in all WalkUPs. This is a reflection of the emerging “experience” economy layering on top of the existing “knowledge” economy.
Robert Steuteville published an interesting and deeper overview of the report in CNU's Public Square that relates it to New Urbanism.
While many of Michigan's cities and towns have not seen the "urban doom loop" at levels of the cities in the report, the recommendations of rebalancing, or maintaining a balance between living, working, and playing within the downtown provides for a more resilient place.
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