Cities Must Say “Yes” to People

New York City proposes solutions to post-pandemic depopulation

Grand Central as imagined by Midjourney

This past summer I spent a week walking around New York City, where I lived for twelve years before my career took me to the West Coast and, now, to Austin. Passing by Grand Central Terminal, the Beaux-Arts beauty where Metro-North’s commuter rail lines end, I remembered how a constant flow of people used to gush through its doors onto the crowded sidewalks of Midtown East. During rush hour one morning, I could traverse those sidewalks without having to sidestep throngs of commuters like before.

The more passable sidewalks were just one of many indicators of the way the pandemic has reshaped New York. Grand Central’s trickle of commuters reflected a 30% drop in daily ridership on Metro-North from pre-pandemic norms. Walking those sidewalks, I also passed the empty storefronts of closed businesses that once catered to the workday crowd: Paper Source—gone; GRK Fresh Greek—permanently closed; a gutted space on a prime corner of Lexington Avenue—does anyone remember what used to be there? These vacant storefronts were the street-level evidence of the millions of square feet of unoccupied office space towering above them.

While I enjoyed the breathing room on the sidewalks, I filled the void with a sigh.

What’s happened in New York is playing out in downtowns across America. Work-from-home liberated many people from grueling commutes, but it also triggered a flight to the suburbs for many urbanites. New York City lost 5% of its population, San Francisco saw 7.5% of its people flee, but even some sun belt cities like Nashville and Houston saw population declines within their urban cores. Despite the exodus, rents and home prices have soared across American cities.

Cities are now facing a perplexing problem: the urban core has become too expensive to live in but less necessary to commute to. Work-from-home is here to stay, and the people who left the cities for the suburbs or abandoned their daily commutes are probably gone for good. 

So what can cities do? 

Walking around the residential parts of New York, from Hell’s Kitchen to Williamsburg, revealed a much different city—and some potential answers. In the residential neighborhoods I visited, restaurants and bars were packed, the shops busy with customers. These are the neighborhoods where people also live and now, for many, work. I found vibrancy and economic vitality where I found people.

In a recent article, Jerusalem Demsas makes an incisive if simple point: “Cities are people.” As she explains:

When people are choosing where to live, that decision is almost wholly dominated by job availability. What that means is people attract people. It’s a virtuous cycle in which people who move have kids and want teachers and day-care providers and taxi drivers and nurses, and those people want restaurant workers and iPhone-repair specialists, and so on.

Demsas describes the flywheel effect that makes cities such desirable places to live for many. Cities are, fundamentally, networks of people who together create a whole greater than the sum of its parts. They are opportunity machines that spur economic activity—new jobs, new businesses, new ideas. The density of people in turn creates demand for culture, entertainment, restaurants, and more—which in turn makes cities even more desirable. Indeed, the high price of housing in many cities is an indicator that they are still extraordinarily desirable places to live.

The implication is that, if cities want to rescue or revive their flagging downtowns and office districts, they need to bring in more people and more types of economic activity. But while some companies are trying to resist the new normal of remote or hybrid work, office occupancy has stabilized at 30% below pre-pandemic norms, suggesting their efforts are in vain. People just don’t like to commute. 

Rebooting “virtuous cycles” to recreate the economic activity cities have lost is a lot easier said than done.

The hard work starts with a change of mind, a shift from thinking about cities primarily as places to work to places where people can live full lives. Millions of people already see the urban opportunity machine as the place to do that. We just don’t let them. Indeed, one study finds that cities like New York and San Francisco build only one new home for every twenty jobs created. Cities need to build more housing.

Instead, cities have raised barriers to housing. These most often take the form of highly restrictive land use policies, including exclusionary zoning, size restrictions, and environmental regulations, as well as expensive “impact” fees, affordable housing requirements, and lengthy and opaque bureaucratic processes. In the case of exclusionary zoning, what is being excluded from many office and business districts is the right to use the built environment for anything other than offices—regulatory shackles that bind buildings to the pre-Covid past and condemn them to a bleak and lonely future. Altogether, these barriers make it difficult or impossible for cities to expeditiously adapt to the needs of the present and provide places for new people to live. 

To that end, it’s encouraging to see a major city leader pick up the theme. New York City Mayor Eric Adams has rolled out a series of reform initiatives, aptly named the “City of Yes for Housing Opportunity,” that would roll back restrictions on land use that have made New York an incredibly difficult landscape in which to build anything.

The mayor’s proposal to allow Town Center Zoning, in particular, would ease the limitations of exclusionary zoning to permit new uses—not only housing, but other types of commercial activity that do not fall under office use. If successfully implemented, his policies could help New York avoid a looming fiscal disaster and create new virtuous cycles in the city’s office-heavy districts by making it easier to convert or replace offices, build housing, and thereby attract businesses and jobs. 

The logic is simple: if more people can afford to live in the city, more people will be able to work in the city, which means more businesses can form or hire in the city, which will in turn create new demand for street-level retail, entertainment, and other amenities used by those new employees and residents in the city. And so on and so forth.

Restrictive land use policies put the brakes on the urban opportunity machine. Removing those barriers is essential to the revival and repeopling of downtowns. Other cities struggling through similar issues of post-pandemic paralysis should pay attention to what New York is doing and consider saying “Yes” to their own reform agendas.

Hizzoner gets that New York is people—and that its future depends on attracting a whole lot more of them.

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