Cities like San Francisco have become hyper-gentrified and too expensive for most Americans. The pandemic and its related crises may change that.
Photographer: David Paul Morris/BloombergThe Forces That Will Reshape American Cities
The pandemic will likely accelerate the pull of the suburbs for families while pushing young people and businesses into more affordable urban areas.
(The following is the third of a three-part essay on the overlapping crises that are impacting America’s cities. This installment examines the factors that will act to reshape them. Read part one and part two here.)
While our current pandemic and the economic fallout from it won’t lead to the end of cities, these intertwined crises will lead to subtle and nuanced changes in both urban and suburban America, mainly accelerating demographic and economic shifts that were already underway. One set of forces, enabled mainly by newly acquired fears of crowded buses, trains, stores and parks—a kind of collective enochlophobia—will act to pull some people, mainly families with children, out of urban centers and into their suburban and rural peripheries. This is nothing new: Families have been gravitating away from the most expensive cities for some time now.