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Downtowns are dead, dying or on life support, says urban policy expert

fortune.com

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Re: Downtowns are dead, dying or on life support, says urban policy expert

#31

Post by chrisco255 »

nunez wrote: post #30

1000%. Go to basically any downtown in any city that isn't one of the big ones. All of the buildings, street art, and street grid are frozen in the 70s, 80s, or 90s. All of the "action" (if you can call it that) is either in a suburban town square (that's mostly an outdoor mall) or spread out throughout neighborhoods in the suburbs. And you can bet your ass you'll need a car to get to them. Between COVID having decim…

This has been true for decades though, decades before Covid, shopping malls drew retail traffic away from downtowns followed by the growth of big box stores like Wal-Mart. Now, online competition from Amazon and ecommerce has put many malls on life support.

Re: Downtowns are dead, dying or on life support, says urban policy expert

#32

Post by chrisco255 »

deprecative wrote: post #26
JambalayaJim wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our lockdowns simply can’t be worse in the future, at least not in living memory. The people who have lived through them simply won’t stand for them.

If people behaved rationally and with empathy we wouldn't need to lock down. But because we have a bunch of selfish pricks we'll always need lock downs. People cannot be trusted to do what it is good for the whole if it even slightly inconveniences the individual. In western culture(The United States in particular), I don't see that changing any time soon.

Large swaths of the U.S. never had lockdowns or had minimal lockdowns and it was the correct choice not to. The idea that you can hide from or wait out a disease as viral as the common cold is laughable.

Re: Downtowns are dead, dying or on life support, says urban policy expert

#33

Post by devbent »

JambalayaJim wrote: post #25
RoyalHenOil wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We won't learn. On the contrary, we have actually become stupider about handling disease: Hospitals are even more understaffed now than they were before the pandemic, and anti-vaccine hysteria has gone mainstream. If we get hit with another major pandemic in the relatively near future, we will be even less prepared for it now than we were with Covid, and I predict our lockdowns will be even worse because of it.

Our lockdowns simply can’t be worse in the future, at least not in living memory. The people who have lived through them simply won’t stand for them.

> The people who have lived through them simply won’t stand for them.

If another disease like the first COVID wave comes along I'll damn well vote out any politician who doesn't support lockdowns.

When there is a super virulent disease spreading rapidly that we don't know the long term effects of (and we still don't years later!) a lockdown is the logical response until we have some idea wtf is going on.

Re: Downtowns are dead, dying or on life support, says urban policy expert

#34

Post by KptMarchewa »

fbdab103 wrote: post #23
1over137 wrote: post #17

This really should have USA in the title, it's seems an issue particular to there.

Wouldn't the vast majority of articles on this site require that tag?

Vast majority of articles is about tech, where country is mostly irrelevant.

Re: Downtowns are dead, dying or on life support, says urban policy expert

#35

Post by specialist »

chrisco255 wrote: post #32
deprecative wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If people behaved rationally and with empathy we wouldn't need to lock down. But because we have a bunch of selfish pricks we'll always need lock downs. People cannot be trusted to do what it is good for the whole if it even slightly inconveniences the individual. In western culture(The United States in particular), I don't see that changing any time soon.

Large swaths of the U.S. never had lockdowns or had minimal lockdowns and it was the correct choice not to. The idea that you can hide from or wait out a disease as viral as the common cold is laughable.

With 20/20 hindsight, what proved to be the tradeoffs between lockdowns and not?

Re: Downtowns are dead, dying or on life support, says urban policy expert

#36

Post by [deleted] »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #13

It seems very likely that one reason downtowns have so much office space is because it's employment that's inoffensive in terms of city planning and zoning while potentially promising good salaries historically more associated with noisy, polluting industrial spaces. I remember seeing an article where someone was against zoning that completely eliminated industrial uses in their town or something. She felt that it wa…

[deleted]

Re: Downtowns are dead, dying or on life support, says urban policy expert

#37

Post by nobodyandproud »

ggm wrote: post #22
sdwr wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't want to be that guy (am that guy :( ), but the word is "preceded" - came before. "Proceeded" means came after, and has a direct subject.

Can't edit now. Thank you for being "that guy". Dear reader. Please read what I wrote in the sense implied by "that guy".

I will proceed to reread the preceding GPs (I won’t).

Re: Downtowns are dead, dying or on life support, says urban policy expert

#38

Post by 4death4 »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #13

It seems very likely that one reason downtowns have so much office space is because it's employment that's inoffensive in terms of city planning and zoning while potentially promising good salaries historically more associated with noisy, polluting industrial spaces. I remember seeing an article where someone was against zoning that completely eliminated industrial uses in their town or something. She felt that it wa…

Is there really such a thing as clean industry? Seems like wishful thinking.

Re: Downtowns are dead, dying or on life support, says urban policy expert

#39

Post by ecshafer »

4death4 wrote: post #38
DoreenMichele wrote: post #13

It seems very likely that one reason downtowns have so much office space is because it's employment that's inoffensive in terms of city planning and zoning while potentially promising good salaries historically more associated with noisy, polluting industrial spaces. I remember seeing an article where someone was against zoning that completely eliminated industrial uses in their town or something. She felt that it wa…

Is there really such a thing as clean industry? Seems like wishful thinking.

Machine shops are pretty clean. The noise is kept mostly in the building. They use just electricity for power. There’s no real chemicals in use. Any spot welding or forging can be done with induction forges. Trucks bringing material and shipping out is noise and pollution, but no different than a grocery store.

Re: Downtowns are dead, dying or on life support, says urban policy expert

#40

Post by gottorf »

specialist wrote: post #35
chrisco255 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Large swaths of the U.S. never had lockdowns or had minimal lockdowns and it was the correct choice not to. The idea that you can hide from or wait out a disease as viral as the common cold is laughable.

With 20/20 hindsight, what proved to be the tradeoffs between lockdowns and not?

With the power of hindsight, we can rely on all-cause excess mortality data since 2020 to see how effective the lockdowns were, and whether the extreme disruption to daily life was worth it. See this study[0] that showcases Sweden, whose public health policy around Covid was basically a big shrug, with the idea that it was pointless to try and control the spread of a highly transmissible respiratory virus. It has fewer cumulative excess deaths compared to its neighbors Norway, Finland, and Denmark; all highly developed countries with similar demographics and cultures as Sweden, but with much stricter restrictions.

Within the US, a recent Lancet study[1] showed that when adjusted for a variety of health factors (age, rates of diabetes, etc.) -- that is, if every state had the same distribution of health profiles within its population -- then Florida, which had no restrictions on everyday life since later in 2020, had a lower cumulative death rate than California, which had some levels of mandatory masking even earlier in 2023 as well as a higher overall vaccination rate[2].

Looking at all-cause excess mortality is useful, since it avoids the question of who really died "of" Covid vs. "with" Covid, and takes into account the ways that lockdowns were harmful to health (e.g. drug overdose deaths from loneliness and despair).

The available data indicates that the biggest determinant of how susceptible a population was to Covid is its age and overall health (which the US fares quite poorly against many other countries, being both older and more unhealthy on average), and that lockdowns were more or less ineffective in saving lives. And that's even without thinking of the generation of children who grew up during those lockdowns, whose schooling is several years behind and will carry that burden for the rest of their lives.

[0]: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/sweden-covid-and-excess-...

[1]: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

[2]: https://usafacts.org/visualizations/covid-vaccine-tracker-st...

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