8 minute read
THOUGHT LEADERSHIP
SEEKING COVID EXILE IN THE BURBS
the pandemic as a driver of suburban migration
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Grayson Perry presented by Victoria Miro at Art Basel, Hong Kong [2019].
Meanwhile, outside, the flow of traffic slows, blood cells en route to the heart splutter, the city lights blink out until the power plant shuts down. Auxiliary generators brought in aren’t enough. What’s left isn’t a metaphor. It’s us. John Baranow.1
In a piece titled All These Stories About People Fleeing Cities Are Total Nonsense (Curbed, 2020), Jeff Andrews argues that the “narrative persists, but supporting evidence is weak at best”. He concedes, that there are people who have lost their jobs and have decided to leave their cities for more affordable areas. Widespread adoption of work-from-home policies may also give people who didn’t want to live in cities in the first place an option to leave.
One of the most fascinating – and contradictory – trends emerging out of the Covid-19 pandemic is the so-called evacuation of the city towards the suburbs. The claims are widespread including fearing the death of the city.
BY LLEWELLYN VAN WYK, B. ARCH; MSC. (APPLIED), URBAN ANALYST
It is noteworthy that those who have moved have had the luxury of choice: In New York City, the wealthier parts of the city emptied out after the pandemic hit. Not unexpectedly, some of those people may not return – and the impact is visible on the rental market.2
The US Census Bureau data released in November 2021 supports this notion. Despite the attention given to Covid-related migration out of cities, college towns and other pandemic-impacted areas,
overall permanent migration levels in the US plummeted to a historically low level during the first year of the pandemic.3 In fact, a smaller share of Americans changed residence between March 2020 and March 2021 than in any year since 1947. Internationally regarded demographer, William Frey notes that the statistics do not negate the reporting of pandemic-related permanent or temporary movement for specific areas, in fact, mobility declined enough among broad segments of the population to lead to this historic migration low. It must also be remembered that the decline is a continuation of a decades-long migration decline, as well as a general demographic stagnation across the nation.
As Frey explains, population movement within the US represents an opportunity for individuals and households to improve their own social and economic wellbeing, as well as an opportunity for communities of all sizes to attract people who can contribute to their labour forces and consumer and tax bases.
It is true that the advent of remote work resulted in new disruptions to the concept of work, from how employees think about workplace benefits to more enlightened definitions of work-life boundaries. Diane Shi notes that the “pandemic has prompted workers to not only think about how they work, but where”. A 2021 report from Urban Land Institute and PwC demonstrates that workers’ interest in new homes and single-family real estate is on the rise with most growth occurring in the suburbs. However, interest in migrating differs among age groups with younger workers more likely to say they have moved away from their physical office locations than older workers.
Many academics are studying Covid-19’s impact on urban centres: William Strange, a professor of real estate at the University of Toronto, is one of them. As he notes, the data confirms that the attraction for downtowns so far is weakening. He acknowledges that no-one knows for sure what is going to happen in 2023 or 2024 when the effects that are being seen now may not be due to Covid but of remote work.4 Numerous observers believe that Covid-19 will have a lasting impact on large, dense cities and their commercial real estate, though the changes that will happen are speculation for now.
The data suggests that residents are leaving the city for surrounding suburbs. Trends outside of the US are more difficult to discern largely because of data scarcity, and so the Qualtrics survey of 4 000 global employees is useful in this regard as it includes workers from non-US locations. Speaking to the results, Leisl Nielsen from Qualtrics summarises the findings in a novel way when she says that the “world is in the middle of an experience transformation”.5 It has taught us that a new and better way of working is possible.
We have learnt, she suggests, that workplace flexibility and productivity go together and many even found more meaning in their work during the pandemic than they did before. 1) The ability to travel, move and live away from an office while still working their jobs gave many the flexibility they want to keep once the pandemic is over. 2) Remote work made many workers not only feel more productive but improved their purpose, wellbeing and sense of community. 3) Respondents want some of the changes to remain and others to go back to normal. Pandemic-era changes that are desirable include outdoor seating at restaurants, kerbside grocery pick-up and pre-ordered shopping. Business travellers on the other hand want to get back on the road – or in the air.
PEAK CITY
Bloomberg reports that “the retreat from major cities has been the pandemic’s big real-estate story” and cites that “there’s been a spatial shock, whereby you don’t have to go to the city to earn money necessarily.”6 That will change cities a lot. Max Nathan associate professor in Applied Urban Sciences at University College London raises the notion of “peak city” and whether it has passed already. He too suggests that the shift to the periphery and to what many consider to be the second-tier city is clearly happening. Some governments are encouraging this, with Ireland actively seeking to create a network of remote working hubs and offering tax incentives for remote working.
Unfortunately, much of the narrative focuses on those who do not need to go to a formal workplace: many of these workers are higherearning professionals. It ignores jobs like bartenders and meatpackers whose work cannot be done remotely. These are the workers who do not have the luxury of considering location arbitrage.
The Harvard Joint Centre for Housing Studies found that spikes in mobility during the pandemic fitted popular narratives that formed
in the initial months of the pandemic, and that these spikes were primarily among individuals and were often temporary in nature. Additionally, the timing of mobility spikes during Covid-19 surges implies that the movers behind them may have been fleeing highcased areas, moving in with family or even responding to housing insecurity. But they suggest that the “stickiness” of pre-pandemic trends demonstrates that mobility is a multifaceted behaviour that responds to a host of different factors of which a world-upending pandemic is only one.7
SUPERCHARGED SPRAWL
Of enormous concern is the resultant expansion of urban sprawl, fuelled, as Patrick Sission notes, by a “desire for space and liberated by remote work, homebuyers are pushing development ever deeper into suburban outskirts of US cities”.8 The Urban Land Institute refers to this explosion of sprawl as a real estate “supernova”, an explosion taking place in hundreds of Covid-era boom towns across the US – often small satellite suburbs and outlying exurbs where low property taxes and a strong local economy have lured new arrivals.
Sission says that suburban sprawl has been a post-war American constant, but the pandemic, which pushed many people into remote work and offered families looking for more space a fresh reason to relocate, “supercharged the trend”. Consequently, development is consuming the countryside, bringing with it the litany of economic, social and environmental challenges associated with sprawl – traffic, environmental damage and city services that struggle to reach a spread-out population.
As one commentator laments “what happened to the voice and forces working against this kind of growth?”9 Smart growth and regionalism had become part of the religion of the development community he argues and yet the discussion turned so quickly.
CONCLUSION
Numerous reports suggest that the pandemic has caused a shock to big, dense cities and downtown business districts. Statistics confirms that cities saw considerable population losses immediately following the pandemic with people moving to the outlying suburbs of those areas. However, they may return, but, for now, it seems that is has affected commercial and residential rents in urban cores.
Companies will need to recognise that people’s needs and priorities have shifted during the last year. Leaders have a unique opportunity to listen directly to their customers and employees to build on what they have learned during lockdown. Urban planners and city leaders need to bury the idea of a unicentric city (the central business district) and embrace a more diverse, multi-centred urbanism characterised by walkability and transit-oriented development.
Overall, the data offers indications of an enlarged window of possibility in post-pandemic urban life. Adopting the right approach to the green stimulus could lay the foundation for a more liveable, sustainable and preposterous urban life for all, not just the 15% who can flee. The history of cities has amply demonstrated their resilience and ability to adapt to a changing world. That adaptation needs to include satisfying the changing needs of city dwellers.
REFERENCES
1. Baranow, J. 2021. Poetry and Medicine. JAMA. 2021;326(17):1751. doi:10.1001/jama.2021.12861 2. Andrews, J. 2020. “All these stories about people fleeing cities are total nonsense.” 3. Frey, W. 2021. “Despite the pandemic narrative, Americans are moving at historically low rates.” 4. Pipitone, N. 2022. “Have people left big cities for good?” 5. Nielsen, L. 2021. “Report: Here’s how the pandemic changed the future of work.” 6. Cadman, E., Pong, J., and Robles, P. 2021. “How covid has reshaped real estate from New York to Singapore. 7. Frost, R. 2021. Have more people moved during the pandemic? 8. Sisson, P. 2022. “How the pandemic supercharged sprawl.” 9. Ibid
