Are City Central Business Districts (CBD) Doomed?

Great Debates
1

I haven’t found a comprehensive discussion anywhere on the net so here’s hoping Dopers can contribute some thoughts.

It seems to me that the CBDs of cities in developed nations are failing. Partly it is the age of the buildings, partly the movement of jobs to suburbs, and partly the impact of the internet. People can shop without leaving their homes.

People can also work without leaving their homes. From what I’ve read these people are likely to go to a suburban business centre where their is a sense of collegiality - but they will not need to commute into an office tower in the CBD.

So…is the CBD going the way of the dodo?

2

You’re forty years out of date. It’s true that forty years ago it looked like the centers of cities (in the U.S., at least) were going to be emptied out, with all the businesses and residents moving to the suburbs, this turned around about 35 years ago. The centers of many cities are now bustling and expensive to live in or shop in again. This didn’t happen in every city, but it happened in a lot of them.

3

Moved to Great Debates.

Colibri
General Questions Moderator

4

Downtown shopping districts around here died way before online shopping was a thing. It was the suburban malls that did it.

5

In Little Rock in the 1950s if you wanted to shop for clothes or other items you came downtown to places like Woolworth, MM Cohn or Sears. One of the reasons why the Montgomery buy boycott was so successful was that it prevented African Americans from going downtown to shop. As shopping centers these places died out long before the 1990s when the internet became a viable means to shop. The same is true of main street USA which died out long before Walmart because a national force to be reckoned with. But there are plenty of places in New York City and San Francisco where you get do your shopping. So not all city central business districts are doomed.

Little Rock revitalized part of downtown by making the River Market a nice area. They put in the main branch of the Central Arkansas Library System, there are all sorts of little shops and restaurants to go to and there is the Clinton Presidential Library as well which doesn’t hurt things. As a result the area is a lot nicer than it was in the mid 1990s and people actually want to live in the condos and apartments there.

I don’t think all cities can revitalize their down town areas in a similar manner. But those with a CBD that isn’t viable will probably have to do something other than install the same stores I can shop at more conveniently in suburbia or elsewhere if they want to attract people.

6

Big retail fled Downtown Houston for the 'burbs long ago. We never had many residential highrises downtown, but some of the close-in residential areas began to get a bit seedy. (Not River Oaks. Not the Rice University.)

But there’s always been work downtown. There were Busts–followed by Booms & new shiny skyscrapers. Our huge, unzoned city also includes other employment centers–in campus like settings or little clusters of office towers along the freeways. Still, Downtown is busy during the day–even if the heat sends most office workers to the Tunnel System for lunch.

At night, things slow down. The sports arenas & cultural venues bring people in; there are new, interesting restaurants & bars. Discovery Green is a busy, popular new park. The latest expansion of Light Rail is ahead of schedule and will probably help encourage Downtown living & retail. (But those big stores are gone for good.) The neartown neighborhoods are losing their seediness; not always, alas, in the best way.

Other cities will evolve in different ways…

7

Downtown Seattle seems to be booming. I try to avoid it, but there are tons of stores and shoppers.

8

I never heard the term “CBD” before, but as early as the 1960’s, I noticed that Paramus NJ was the only town I knew of that didn’t have what I called a “downtown shopping area” - a stretch of at least one or two blocks, where pedestrians could stroll on the sidewalk, and enter a wide variety of retail establishments. They had a few strip malls, but there’s a big difference: In a strip mall, all the stores face a common parking lot, but to me, a downtown has all the stores on a main street (often but not always carrying the name “Main Street”), and if there’s a parking lot at all, it is on a side street hidden behind the stores.

At the time, I suspected that this lack of a downtown is what made Paramus so favorable for shopping malls, and I still suspect that.

9

My understanding is that urban blight was the big problem and that hasn’t been sloved yet. A ring of old houses and industrial buildings surrounding the downtown area which were too valuable to knock down but not worth maintaining.

I was in the US 20 years ago and downtown seemed busy albeit dangerous at night.

Interesting and thanks.

I think you are right - cities are not all the same and some will struggle to revitalise the CBD.

Until fairly recently town planners have always thought of cities as requiring a vibrant hub - a centre which draws people in for work, shopping, and events. A focal point.

However LA doesn’t have much of a downtown given the size of the total metropolitan area. Manhatten is almost all downtown by comparison.

10

Comparing the two – and I’ve been to both – I’d say those town planners had the right idea.

11

Ken001 writes:

> My understanding is that urban blight was the big problem and that hasn’t
> been sloved yet.

Sorry, but you’re wrong. “Urban blight,” as you put it, was already under way forty years ago. Many people then were convinced that it was unstoppable. They were sure that by now the center of cities would be inhabited only by those in the most dire poverty. They were sure that everyone who possibly could move out would do so and would now live in the suburbs.

Then thirty-five years ago they were astonished to find that people were moving back into many of the cities. Living in the center of those cities suddenly became hip again. Then it became downright expensive. This process (“gentrification,” as it’s called) didn’t happen in every city. An example where it has proceeded very far is New York, where it’s quite expensive to live, shop, or visit. An example where it hasn’t happened at all is Detroit. The real difference is that the most important businesses in New York have stayed in the city, while the most important businesses in Detroit have moved away.

What bothered me about your OP is that it sounded like you had never heard of the decay of the inner city, as if it had just happened recently. Of course it hasn’t. It was well underway forty years ago. It turned around in many cities thirty-five years ago, so it’s now expensive to live in the middle of many cities once again. Indeed, for the past three years, there have been more people moving from the suburbs to the cities than from the cities to the suburbs. (Note: in all this post, I am talking about the U.S., although some of it also applies to other countries.)

12

CBDs of nearly all US cities over a million have in fact rebounded dramatically. But CBDs of most cities under 250,000 are still declining pretty noticeably, with the exception of college (and some retirement) towns.

13

Maybe that’s a big difference between Europe and the US: until fairly recently, “town planner, whazzat?” Add that most of our towns grew up when horses were expensive and cars didn’t exist, and mixed-usage areas which I’ve seen touted by the NYT as some sort of amazing discovery are the norm in most of Europe. That helps keep them alive; areas which are residential-only, business-only or industrial-only are going to be dead during certain hours pretty much by definition. One of the worries of Barcelona’s town planners has been keeping the districts “mixed use”: some which were becoming too business-oriented were simultaneously becoming dead.

14

I have a suspicion that with rising oil prices, we’re going to see a revival of the old city-center concept- not so much because travel is slow, but because it’ll be expensive.

For example, in say… Houston or Dallas, it’s not uncommon for people to drive upwards of 15-20 miles to work from say… Sugarland somewhere to say… the Galleria/Post Oak area, or from say… Wylie to Addison.

What I think will happen is that you’ll end up with a big city center, and multiple satellite ones with people wanting to live nearer to each; you won’t see people living in Frisco and driving to downtown Dallas often in the future; you’ll see them driving to Legacy Park. Places like Garland and Mesquite will become more marginalized, not having one of these satellite city-centers to work in.

15

I recall reading a speculation in Whole Earth Review many years ago that the populations of the city and suburbs might even change places, the poor being driven out of the city by gentrification, and finding their homes in the falling-property-values suburban neoslums. Leaving them even worse off than they are now, because, while they’ll have more and greener living space in the 'burbs, they cannot afford an automobile-dependent lifestyle.

16

That’s essentially what I’m getting at, only with a sort of multi-center model rather than the 19th century single city-center model.

17

One can’t make a general statement about this. It varies tremendously from city to city. Some are thriving, others aren’t.

Cities that seem to be doing well include New York, Boston, Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco.

18

I understand that the illumination is significantly increased, and one care be relatively carefree.

19

Yes and in part it was thinking about Detroit which sparked this thread.

20

I hang out in city-planning circles and this is something we talk a lot about. Of course, shorter commutes have been predicted since I was in college and gas was predicted to someday top $1 per gallon.

I think the only way polycentric development lowers vehicle use is in a 19th century paradigm: everyone is so poor and unskilled that they live in a rent house and work at their local mill.

Once you have employers wanting to hire the brightest workers from the entire labor market, and once people have the technological means to live in the best school district and work wherever they make the best salary, a polycentric metropolis increases traffic geometrically. The trend can be abated somewhat so long as it’s possible to concentrate a huge number of jobs in a compact area served by radial transit—the Chicago and Boston model.

There’s a sort of naïve appeal to the idea that, in a polycentric metropolis, commutes would be reduced because people could work close to where they live. But this assumes a single breadwinner who will stay forever at a single job close to home or move when he takes another job. In fact, what happens is that people choose home locations based on things like school districts or big yards and then two workers drive long distances in opposite directions to work. There have actually been a couple of serious studies of this question, both of which disprove the theory:

“All else being equal, commute distances and times for auto drivers are longer in most polycentric regions than in monocentric urban areas.”
Schwanen, T., Dieleman, F.M. & Dijst, M. (2004). The Impact of Metropolitan Structure on Commute Behavior in the Netherlands: A Multilevel Approach, Growth and Change, 35 (3) 333. DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2257.2004.00251.x

“Our analysis clearly indicates that, once travel mode and key social factors are controlled for, the shift from a monocentric to a dispersed city form is responsible, in the Québec metropolitan area, for increasing commuting time.” Vandersmissen, M.H., Villeneuve, P. & Thériault, M. (2003). Analyzing Changes in Urban Form and Commuting Time, The Professional Geographer, 55 (4) 463. DOI: 10.1111/0033-0124.5504004

And that’s just looking at work trips. The tide of rising expectations means that people today want the region’s best restaurant, best musical performance, best library, best food store, etc.—NOT the one closest to them.