Dense residential area tend to have the full range of services, more interesting restaurants and bars, more fun, more interesting. If people are spending more of their day there, I would expect a flourishing of these kinds of business. At the end of the day, some storefront owners will need to move to other areas to take advantage of changes in demand.

Cities are very dynamic things. They are constantly changing and renewing themselves. Neighborhoods come up and go down. There is no stopping it.

I think it's part of the general swing back to a healthier work-life balance, and really ... that would be fantastic!

But why would people want to live where they don't want to work?

- Residential districts in China and many former Soviet countries. Big concrete blocks, with the bottom floor lined with small stores. They're absolutely delightful places to live.

- Urban residential districts in the US aren't quite in this style, but a city like Cambridge will have small shops within walking distances of virtually all housing.

The critical thing is that the shops are a lot more pleasant and human than US business districts. A massive lunch hour line at some overpriced (probably due to high-rent and long lines everywhere) sandwich place isn't very human. A small business run by the owner is. One of the differences is that in residential settings, business owners and residents are part of a community -- they get to know each other, sometimes for decades. Business districts have people moving in and out too frequently for that.

"Peak density" is also a lot worse than "mean density." Both a customer and a business owner is better served with traffic spread out throughout the day, rather than nearly 100% of business crammed in during breakfast and lunch hour.

I lived in Cambridgeport near Central Square in Cambridge, MA. There was indeed a small convenience store/variety shop almost within sight of my apartment. In six years, I bought something from them only once that I can recall. I used to walk quite literally past them to Whole Foods to save money. (When Whole Foods is killing you on price, you’re going to have a tough go of it.) Looking on Street View now, there’s paper over the windows and a notation of “permanently closed”.

I’m in a different neighborhood of Cambridge now. There are local shops here as well. Except for the food places, most are empty of shoppers almost all of the time. I don’t know what’s different to make these shops not particularly useful, but most purchasing seems to happen at the larger supermarkets and big box stores a few miles away (or online). Those have better selection, much better pricing, and are faster/more convenient in aggregate.

I don’t blame the local stores if they have to set uncompetitive prices due to rent or whatever other factors, but consumers also don’t have to buy products at uncompetitive prices.

But everything that is old is new again. Now we shop at three different supermarkets! To get the best prices or quality or specialty item or whatever.

Maybe they'll invent a super-duper-market or something like that next, and we'll go back to a one-stop experience.

That really isn’t true. At least in China, the most common living arrangement in big cities is the gated apartment complex, their might be some retail on floor one, but it is usually on the other side of the gate, and the gate you can enter or exit from is often not conveniently located to access that retail easily (given my experiences living in Beijing). If they did away with the fences/gates, things would be much more convenient.

Sure, if you think only of residential one family house areas (but which true city centers have those) or poorer skyscraper suburbs that is true, but another story?!

This is only true in American suburbs. You have horrible one family dwellings only, and you space them far out on empty sections with massive roads between them.

This is the problem, and its also what is actually unsustainable.

In Europe they are common and have been flourishing again even as cities flounder.

Pre pandemic my local town center in the London commuter belt was in a death spiral. Now its expanding.

I grew up in a district which has 150k inhabitants and an effective population density of 4.6k people per square kilometre (11.8k people per sq mile) and it was much like a city within a city, with all the shops, services etc. Everything within walking distance.

It even has somewhat of a regional identity and a political movement which capitalizes on that.

To this day I see it as the sweet spot of population density - it's dense enough for the things you mentioned, but at the same time doesn't feel crammed.

The place I work had diverse companies in a 'tech park' - Amazon, Google, and many others inside a gated office space, the total population of which could easily surpass 10K.

We used to have a common and very vibrant food court, even though each company used to give free cafeteria food, employees used to walk to the common food court for variety - of both people and food.

Also, since there was so much traffic of well paid, propensity to spend people, office park operation office used to arrange for paid fun stuff during lunch hours, which used to lend lot of colors to dreary office days.

During Covid the food court vanished along with all fun activities (consequently all those people who used to run those). The company cafeteria obviously closed as well and even when it has started now, they are pale shadow of earlier operations (less staff, owners of food counters working as staff).

Apart from nostalgia, it’s where Debbi Fields started “Mrs Fields cookies”. Yes, another Palo Alto startup from the 70s.

We need to rethink the concept of city. If we don't do that we'll end up with ghettos. But if we do and implement the transformation then we'll develop something more desirable than conglomerate of various businesses. A center of a town can very well be vibrant and inspiring without most businesses if the resulting free real estate is repurposed by galleries, theaters, restaurants, parks etc.

But we won't in the near term. This will just start to happen after all other options have crumbled and one option will still be to just hold empty housing and real estate for the purpose of mere speculation. I'm pessimistic.

Few moved out, few moved in, maybe rents adjusted a bit but I didnt check that. Same shops, bars restaurants opened, same entertainment going on.

The more European model where first floor is commercial and residential in top, it's a different story to have everyone working from home, no overnight ghost town in commercial districts.

I'd generally say that if they can fill it to a good density it can have a good local market compared to suburbs with poor density.

Imagine you're a Jamaican halal chicken shop owner and your core business is professional office workers walking by on the way home from work and stopping in for a bite. When that office worker is no longer there because he can make the same salary and cut his expenses in half by moving 1000 miles away, you're going to go out of business. Maybe you move 1000 miles away also so that you can afford your rent. This is how the cascade happens.

Theaters and museums and all those aren't why cities have a lot of people, those exist in cities because that's where the people are. when people become more spread out, those things will follow suit.

If the big apartment were a fraction of the price of the house in suburbia, maybe. But it costs way too much to build tall buildings for that to ever be feasible.

Asian and European cities work because everyone expects a smaller amount of living space. And the large houses in suburbia are simply priced out of reach for 95%+ of the population.

And that’s before the expensive taxes, permits, etc., that cities charge on top for downtown or high rise construction, which as you say partially subsidizes suburbia. So in reality it’s more around triple the cost per square foot in a North American city.

The only reason apartments bigger than a shoebox are affordable at all is because land acquisition costs when divided by hundreds of units is obviously far lower than for even the narrowest cookie cutter tract.

And why would any land owner seek to zone for less than the maximal allowance?

If you mean forced downgrading of the zoning or replacing existing suburbia with mid density developments, or subsidizing mid density as opposed to suburbia, that’s an entirely political conversation since the roadblock is zoning laws and the legislature.

And yeah, if there are sandwich shops or whatever whose business is only viable at skyscraper-level density and not at 4-6 story density then those will go to the wall. But I doubt that's a big segment. Mid density means proportionately more floor space at street level, which should be friendlier to businesses.

We may see a more pronounced downturn in city centers, and we might see a drop in density below skyscraper level (though personally I'm skeptical of even that much). But we won't see a hollowing out of the cities; at the very least, Vienna-like density still makes sense.

EDIT: And in any case there is no real benefit for the city council to stop upzoning at mid-rises only. If they’re expending the political capital to upzone they have every reason to go all the way.

In which municipality has land value declined since 2009?

And even if so, why does that mean they are forced to build anything? They can just keep it vacant and pay a much lower property tax, some folks just don't want to go through hassles even if it's somewhat less efficient.

> If you mean forced downgrading of the zoning or replacing existing suburbia with mid density developments, or subsidizing mid density as opposed to suburbia, that’s an entirely political conversation since the roadblock is zoning laws and the legislature.

You appeared to be claiming that land will be left vacant in the absence of political changes (with the frankly bizarre suggestion that land needs to be downzoned to encouraged more building). If that wasn't what you were claiming then what were you claiming?

It's called land banking if you haven't heard of it before.

I'm not sure how any of your comment follows.

And hell, worst case land prices and rents in the city center come down a bit, that's not really a problem.

At each stage the surrounding retail and gastronomy changed towards something that could support higher floor cost.

Im glad to live in America, but the way cities are laid out elsewhere makes more sense.

Most of the time, the types of bars and restaurants that rely on office workers as customers are not going to be the type of bars and restaurants you'd go in your free time when going out with friends.