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- [Narrator] Thank you for joining us for the "Future of Cities" with Richard Florida, moderated by Monica Nickelsburg.

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(upbeat music) - Hello and welcome to Crosscut Festival.

I'm Monica Nicklelsburg from GeekWire, and I'm excited to have this very timely discussion of the future of cities in America.

I can't think of anyone better to dive into this topic than Richard Florida, the acclaimed urbanist, professor at the University of Toronto, Co-founder of CityLab and author of "Rise of the Creative Class."

I'd also like to thank our sponsors, Davis Wright Tremaine and sea.citi for making this session possible.

Richard, thanks for being here.

- It's great to be with you, Monica.

Thanks for having me.

- Absolutely, so I wanna start out with a topic that's inspired a lot of hand-wringing and anxiety over the past year.

This idea of the urban exodus.

So much ink has been spilled over this fear that the pandemic is gonna haul out our once thriving cities.

And I know this is something that you've researched and studied quite a bit.

So how worried should we be about this trend?

- I'm not, and I'm just amazed at the amount of gloom and doom pessimism that a pandemic like COVID-19, it's amazing.

Like if you cycled back 13 months ago or so roughly, a year plus, the last year, it was like, Mercedes are dead, they'll never come back.

Like it was headline after headline, urban exodus, everyone's leaving.

And you know, now a year later, even the places that the New York city tabloids that were sort of the first with this are saying, great summer in New York, New York city comeback, Broadway's reopening.

So, you know, I thought it was dumb at the time.

I said it was dumb at the time.

I had the great privilege to be able to actually research this.

So what's interesting is I never really looked at pandemics in history.

Like it's not something I studied in school or graduate school, or I taught my students or that is actually a big, there's not even a big literature about it if we're being fair.

But you know, if you look back at it, which I did a year ago, you'd see that, you know, this urban exodus is temporary.

People tend to leave cities, especially rich people, and they get a lot of attention, but there are two other kinds of people who left cities.

One is families like, so we saw accelerated family formation moments.

Like if you have a kid or having another kid, or, you know, you're thinking about a kid and you were thinking about moving sometime you just move.

And the other one was young people like, you know, cities are filled with young people, half the increase in cities over the past decade were young people like in their 20s and early 30s.

Well, a lot of students, a lot of young professionals, a lot of people moved home with mom and dad.

So net net, you know, when you look at the data now that has been collected by organizations like Zillow or people who've studied the US Postal Service change of address forms, there's not that much change.

You know, there's been a little bit of out migration from New York and San Francisco, but most of even that out migration, isn't people going to Miami and Austin, we talk about that later.

It's really people going to the suburbs and particularly the big one is like rural areas like the Hudson Valley towns or the Hamptons, like they gained people.

And the question is how many of those people are there permanently and how many of them actually who worked on, you know, always splitting their time?

How many of them kind of gravitate back?

So net net doesn't look like we had a great urban exodus.

- I think you've written about another factor that's also at play here that while it's small is a big deal for the tech industry and innovation economy.

So when you're talking to tech entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, you know, the few who are leading these liberal coastal cities, what do they say is the main driving force behind their decision?

- Well, you know, I'm talking to you today from Miami Beach where we spend the winter and this winter, you know, I didn't have to go to work, worked remotely.

So we spent a winter here, you know, and so the two places people point to a lot are Austin and Miami.

And I wanna unpack them.

First of all, Austin has long been a dominant tech hub.

It's at least as liberal as San Francisco or New York.

When I wrote "The Rise of the Creative Class" 20 years ago, Austin scored second to San Francisco bay area on all my indicators of tech (indistinct).

I've been studying and visiting Austin, a guy who helped build Austin is a guy named George Kozmetsky, happened to be a professor at Carnegie Mellon a long time ago.

I taught at Carnegie Mellon in New York.

I met George like 30 years ago.

So Austin is a new tech hub, 30 or 40 years in the making.

Miami is different, and in Miami, if you'd asked me five or years ago, I would have said, it's a nice place to go in the winter.

It's warmer than Toronto, but it's never gonna be a tech hub.

And I think slowly but surely it started and, you know, I've tracked some of this, but I think what's going on here is different.

And I think part of it is taxes and the fact that, you know, Trump got rid of this, the SALT deduction, which means the ability to deduct your state and local taxes from your federal return.

So I think for rich people, that made a difference at the margin.

I think, you know, people realized they could work remotely.

And some people like warm weather.

Some people like resort living more, and especially people with families who might've gone to like an outlying suburb, they think Miami or Coral Gables, you know, or Palm Beach is a nice place to live, but I think there's something different going on.

And I think what people are reacting to is the restrictions that went along with the pandemic, the kind of what they would consider the extreme or lockdown restrictions that were put in place in San Francisco, in New York that were quite very effective.

I also see this with...

There's a lot of Torontonians moving to Miami a lot.

I would say after New Yorkers, Torontonians are the next major group.

When you sit down and ask these people who might be in the financial industries, the real estate industry or tech industries, why are you moving to Miami?

The answer that comes up is, "I can live my life here."

And I find this to be fascinating.

So, for me, to be honest, like I've actually liked living here more than I thought, our kids are in this little pod school, and they've gone to school every day.

I didn't, I've not gone to a store.

I did go to the pharmacy like, but I'm fully vaccinated.

Well, we could go to pick up a prescription, but like, I haven't gone to a store in a year.

I've gotten everything delivered.

I'm kind of like really careful, my wife's really careful.

We've never been in an inside restaurant.

We've only met friends outside a few times, but what these folks keep saying us is like, I like my personal liberty, I like my freedom.

I can manage my own risks.

So I think another part of this story that no one's talking about is that, you know, Silicon Valley, when I started to study it 30 or 40 years ago was like an open frontier where people could do anything they want.

And there was Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranks and the Grateful Dead and Jobs and Wozniak.

And nobody bothered you.

New York was always a place like the craziest artists and creatives and innovators went and they could do their own thing.

These were places that really risk-taking people would go.

I think that Miami offers them that now.

It's a place that risk oblivious people, that people who really want, and risk-taking people like entrepreneurs and innovators, don't like restrictions.

So I think the open climate here is, I'd say the climate that allows you to manage your life or pursue your life or live your life freely is a big part of what's attracting people to Miami.

- So, that's really fascinating.

Is that a trend that we can expect to continue in the longterm, or is it really tied to the pandemic and the temporary restrictions that more liberal coastal cities have put into place?

- You know, this is a big question.

If you believe, and I've read a lot of this, but I haven't made, if you believe that the vaccines will get rid of this and say, end of summer, it's gone, then I think all those back close to normal.

Although I think Miami does emerge as America's third grade global city.

I think it's New York, LA, and then Miami, Miami is just grown.

It's a big city at 6 million plus people, the Metro, you know, it's always been a headquarters of Latin America.

So yeah, I think Miami status improves at the margin.

But if you think this virus is endemic, and if you think it's seasonal and effected by cold weather, then it's a different calculus.

And what got me so interested in this is, you know, I love real estate, I'm like a real estate junkie.

I read all these sites and you read these things like, somebody bought a house on Zoom for 20 million, and then the next week you write somebody bought a house on Zoom for 30 million, and then you read, somebody bought a house on Zoom for 50 million.

Why would people on a Zoom call?

That's a lot of money even for a rich person.

So my hunch was that many of these people are hedging the downside risks, that they believe that this pandemic won't be over come the end of summer, that there will be flare ups, that there will be seasonality, so I think, you know, when I think about this sorting that we've seen from, you know, talented people, if you will, a high human capital people, highly educated people, techies, and what I call the creative class to the coastal cities, you know, plus Austin plus Denver.

So the coastal cities like New York, Boston, Washington, and then, you know, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, LA, and then a few like Denver and, you know, Austin in between.

I think you can complicate that sort by saying now there are risk averse places and risk oriented places.

And that we're seeing a new sorting based on that, particularly with highly ambitious, highly entrepreneurial people who tilt libertarian.

I'm not saying that's everyone, but the Peter Teal's of the world who tilt libertarian, I think they are, and their counterparts in the finance markets and their counterparts in real estate, I think they are looking for places that allow them to undertake more risk and to them, I think that's what the appeal of Florida and Elon Musk.

That's what the appeal of Florida and Texas is.

It isn't just low taxes, it isn't just open governance.

I think it's this idea that these are places that are less restrictive.

So yeah, I think we could begin to think about places in those two categories as lasting categories.

And by the way, I think that innovators and entrepreneurs have always gone to risk oriented places.

I think that's what Silicon Valley was back in the 1960s.

I think that's what New York has been.

And from the 1920s, 30, 40s, 50s, probably up until now, I think cities have always been places that risk oriented people felt comfortable.

I think that now, though we're seeing this different sorting and yeah, I'm not saying it's going to be lasting, but it's something we should keep our eye on.

- So what does that mean for the Seattles and Portland's of the world that are known for more liberal policies and maybe tend to emulate European cities a little bit more than these more libertarian, you know, risk attracting towns.

- So I think that, look Seattle, home to Microsoft, home to Amazon a leading tech, it will be fine.

San Francisco will, you know, I look at the deltas in this.

When people track like the San Francisco bay area share of US venture capital and it goes from like 25% to 23%, you know, and the next place is 10, you know, San Francisco bay area isn't going anywhere.

What you might see at the margin is the rise over Miami a little bit, you know, but it's never gonna be San Francisco.

So I think the incumbent cities will do well.

I think they might lose, I think what remote work does is enable really rich people.

So, you know, if you own a hedge fund or an investment fund or a real estate fund or a tech company, you can move out of San Francisco or New York, you can move your residents to Florida or Texas, but you can keep your company there and you just pay less taxes, you know?

So I think remote enables that to happen, but I don't think it enables you to bust the part of the cluster.

I think the cluster that is Seattle, the cluster that is San Francisco, the cluster that is New York.

And a lot of, it's really interesting.

A lot of these creative class types, the people, the innovators, the techies, you know, look, the way I would say this, how many of my current, when I taught at Carnegie Mellon, Carnegie Mellon kids wanted to go to San Francisco.

The number one destination they liked back then was Austin, even more than San Francisco, they kind of like Boston.

They like DC, they like to crunch your places.

You know, they like crunch your, they skew kind of socially more liberal.

Maybe they're economically conservative a little bit, but they skew socially more liberal.

They're not attracted by red state politics, that kind of repulses them.

So I think the established tech hubs were made attractive to those folks, but the people who run the companies probably skew more libertarian.

So they go elsewhere.

But I don't see Miami, maybe it's just me, I don't see them being like the number one destination for MIT and Carnegie Mellon or Stanford engineers.

Now, maybe they could pick up like European or Latin.

Like when I was visiting, I visited MIT as a visiting professor in 2019, the fall of 2019.

Like when I talked to the Latin folks at MIT, they're like, yeah, Miami would be great for us, but not that, you know what I'm saying?

Not so much the US kids.

So yeah, I think there's a difference, but I'm not, I think there might be some, and there might be some rise of the rest generally, but I don't think it's gonna alter the playing field all that much.

- Sure, you hit on something we talk about at GeekWire a lot, which is that the Elon Musks and Peter Teals of the world, the managers of big technology companies do not necessarily reflect the ethos of the average tech workers at those companies.

- I think that's exactly right, but I think, you know, they can play a big role in helping a second tier community become better.

So look at the way we say this and you and I have talked about this, if you wanna think about the rise of the rest, you can't think about like everywhere America, you know, and as much as I may have complained about Amazon's, you know, incentive extraction campaign, their analysis of cities was probably the best I've ever seen.

You look at that short list of the 20 finalists.

What was it?

Miami, Toronto, Denver, Austin, Dallas.

I forget Atlanta, Boston, Washington, DC, New York, Philadelphia, that Indianapolis, Columbus.

That's a pretty darn good list of the actual places that you think about, and I think one other thing, I think what the pandemic really does for like the regular professional tech worker, the GeekWire reader, I think a lot of those folks awful like rural areas.

I think some of them like urbanism, especially when they're young in like a city like Seattle or San Francisco, or a lot of them love New York, Manhattan and Brooklyn, but as they start to have kids, they don't like the suburbs.

Like they don't like the traditional generic suburb.

That was the American dream, but they really like a place like Hudson Valley, New York, or they really like a place like Bozeman, Montana.

There is some thing about rural America that speaks to these people.

And I think that's the other part of this that I'm seeing a lot of that group of people once they have a family say, you know, San Francisco's pricey and New York's pricey, I'm gonna go to this really cool, small part of rural America, you know, but a very hip part of rural America, a Bozeman or Hudson Valley kind of creative class rural America, and I'm gonna start my life there.

I think that's the other big change the pandemic brings.

- Yeah, absolutely.

And I'm glad that you brought up kids because while families moving out of cities to the suburbs is not a new phenomenon, there is this new phenomenon in the US that's getting a lot of attention with the newly released census data that shows the birth rate dropping to historic lows, record lows.

And that's more acute in cities than anywhere else.

So you touched on this briefly, but I wonder if you could tell me a little bit more about why kids are disappearing from America's cities and what's lost when they do.

- You know, we've actually done research on this.

So I actually did research on the US and then the Swedes have like the best data in the world, and I have a Swedish colleague Charlotta Mellander, so we just wrote a paper on the declining fertility rate, birth rate in city.

So it's actually something I'm kind of dangerous, I know a little bit about.

You know, first of all, we've seen family size shrink over the course of the last century, right?

That says as societies become developed, that Gary Becker kind of invented this theory, as societies become more development, you have fewer kids and you invest more, right?

So my parents both had seven kids on a side, I have two, right?

And, you know, maybe if I was younger and could do it over, I'd have more kids actually.

I mean, they're great, but I didn't, I had kids older in life and we have two, but you know, anyway, we don't have seven and nobody I know has seven.

Maybe somebody has three or somebody one person has four, but, so, yeah, I think there's a couple of reasons.

One, people are postponing marriage.

Like they just, we just get married later and you end up, you know, we're on record at this.

We had 17 IVFs 'cause we postponed our family formation until we got older.

So I think that's part of it.

The age of first birth that the birth child has a big, you know, I mean, the math just gets difficult when you're having kids in your 30s or 40s versus kids in your teens or 20s.

I think that American cities are really hard places to raise kids.

And I don't think this is the case in Canada or Europe, like in the United States, schools are just really hard to navigate in urban areas.

Public schools are problematic.

Often private schools are not only costly, often private schools are not in the urban core.

Oftentimes private schools were built in the suburban hinterlands long ago and they're not in the city.

So then people just say, when they have a family, you know, it's expensive to live in the city, it's hard to live in the city and there the schools are far away, so I'll move.

And yeah, I think with COVID the birth rate decline is, you know, it's scary.

You know, I was scared to death.

I'm not an anxious person.

I actually called my doctor and said, "Can you prescribe me anti-anxiety pills?"

And he said, "No, you don't need them like chill out."

And I didn't, I was freaking out and I'm not an anxious person.

So I think a lot of people postponed it, they got scared, right?

And who would wanna give birth?

Like if you could manage your way around it, who would wanna give birth during COVID when your loved ones couldn't be with you and you're scared, but yeah, I think it's a long run problem.

And I think it's something we need to be concerned about.

I think, like I can say in Toronto, Toronto is a city, even though it's expensive, that's filled with kids way more than any US city I know, and kids give cities a really great vibe.

I think cities with kids are great, but I just think it's a hard thing to do in the states.

- Yeah, and I mean, there is some debate over how concerned we should be about this.

There are plenty of studies that show, for example, that the best thing you can do to reduce your carbon footprint is to not have children.

But I don't know if it's discussed as much what the economic and societal issues are that are associated with a low birth rate, can you talk about that a little bit?

Like should policy makers be trying to encourage young people, especially people in cities to have kids?

- So, I don't know, but I can tell you, my parents scared the daylights out of me about, you know, one of my uncles got his teenage girlfriend pregnant and got married young and didn't finish high school.

Like, and I'm the parent of two girls.

Now, my girls are four and five, but you know, I'm not gonna scare them like that.

Like I'm gonna tell them to actually having kids is the greatest thing you can do and it's really important.

I just think a more general awareness instead of saying, kids make you not happy, which is a whole literature on this that say your happiness declines when you have kids.

The other thing is probably support.

Like, you know, I had kids later in life and we have a nanny 'cause you know, I made more money.

Like I think it's really hard if you don't have support.

And our childcare system is so awful, so better support, like social supports to have kids, and yeah, I just think there's a way to turn this around.

I mean, we've depended on immigration, right?

In America, we depended on immigrants coming here, having more kids than we do.

Like my grandparents having set, you know, seven aside, coming from Italy, Southern Italy.

But yeah, I think there's stuff we can do, and I think we're better off for it.

You know, I think we've become a society.

I hate to say this Monica and maybe somebody will chop my head off, I think we've become a society that's kind of biased against kids.

We send out a message that it's hard, that it's hard work and it's no fun, but also that it's expensive, that it ties you down, that it's an encumbrance on your personal freedom.

And I, you know, I'll tell you the truth.

If my wife wasn't persevering and didn't have those 17 IVFs and was this chicken as I am and had given it up, I would have missed the greatest joy of my life.

That's tell, and I'm a guy who said, I don't want kids.

You know, I'm fine with my profession, I'm self-actualizing, I would have missed the greatest joy in my life.

So maybe that's what you should tell people.

Like these things are really miraculous and they're fantastic, and to build a society which reflects that rather than as a society that says, if you have these kids, you're gonna give up something and it's gonna be hard.

I think it's more social, and the public policy is support, right, an ecosystem of childcare and support, but more, it's a societal norm in a sense that having kids is a joyful experience.

- Well, as someone who's expecting their first, I'm happy to hear you say that.

- Oh, congrats, holy God, congratulations.

And you're younger than me, so you did it right.

- I don't know if that's right or wrong.

- Letterman always said this, and I don't mean like, folks, I don't mean it, David Letterman always said this, if you had one thing to do over here, he'd have a kid, more kids and more kids early.

And I would say I agree, - Well, many right ways to do it, but I appreciate you think that.

Switching gears a little bit, how do you expect the pandemic to change how we think about urban planning?

Like, will we be able to look back on this moment in history as a time when our cities fundamentally changed?

- Well, first of all, I think we've gone overboard with public health and that's hard to say now, even when the pandemic is still so serious, but look, I think we put public health in charge of too much.

And we use 19th century public health tools to address the 21st.

Like we never had the ability to work remotely like this before.

We never had the ability to kind of shelter in place and to understand I have delivery and I have Zoom.

So look, I think the first thing we have to do is put more urban planning and more economic development in the conversation.

And you can almost look at societies where public health kind of controlled the conversation and they've had more problems.

So I think the follow on the mental health effects, the physical health effects, you know, the 400,000 backlog procedures in Ontario, Canada, where I live, those are the mental health effects, the effects on kids who weren't, you know, especially high schoolers or early college students.

I think we need to put more multidisciplinary approach with economist and economic development.

I've been saying this, we need not only to plan to shut down a society, we need to plan to reopen a society.

I think the urban, the city form stuff will be, it's always the same, right?

It's more light, it's more air, it's more outside.

I think those are the things that will last, the restaurants outside, the more bike lanes, that was the accelerant, right?

That was already happening, but it's now accelerated and enabled mayors and city councils to do that.

I think the big change in cities is gonna be the change in the central business district.

I think the central business district is kind of the last hangover of the industrial age, where you pack and stack people in these towers.

And I think the central business district is gonna change and we're gonna have more interweaving of living and working.

I don't know if that's gonna come as a result of changes in urban planning, but it's gonna come out as a result of changes in what we live.

Like I would say the pandemic has allowed knowledge workers, the 20% to 30 of us who do knowledge professional, technical, engineering, scientific, creative work.

It's enabled us to dictate the terms of work a little bit more.

And I think that search for work-life balance is gonna become more important.

- So will those knowledge worker jobs not be returning to cities, at least not to their downtown cores?

- Well, I think that these are changes at the margins.

So let's say before the pandemic 5% of us worked remotely full-time and now maybe 20% of us can and the people who would likely to work more remotely are like me and you, we're different ages, but you're having a child, I have two kids.

The people who have families are more likely to say, you know, I wanna work remote.

I wanna spend more time with the kids.

I want more space, right?

I want more affordable house.

I want that's what every survey of remote workers, I want more space, I want more affordable housing.

I wanna spend more time with my kids.

They all say the same thing.

For young people though, who are embarking on their career, they're gonna do what they've done in the wake of every other pandemic, going back to the middle ages, zoom back to cities as they are already doing, because that's where the jobs are.

That's where the better wages are.

And that's where more young people are, dating and mating market.

So I think what happens is the office in the central business district has to become a better place.

They're pretty horrible.

Like, now central business districts have been changing.

They've been getting better.

They've been getting more mixed use.

They've been getting better restaurants, not just grab and go.

But even if you look at tech companies, they're not really in the big office tower districts, they're in the neighborhoods adjacent, San Francisco's Mission and Soma, you know, Lake Union in Seattle and those areas, not necessarily the downtown core per se.

In New York or in SoHo and Tribeca and Chelsea and parts of Brooklyn, not in Midtown in the financial district.

So I think we see those central business districts start to change.

And I think, you know, I've been writing a lot about this.

The office is more like a place to meet and have social context, not just plug in your laptop and sit there and work.

So, and I think the whole business district becomes much more of a live work neighborhood, 24 by seven, vibrant.

And so your day at the office isn't a day at the office, it's like a local business trip where you go, you grab coffee, you meet with some people, you then go to the office and have a meeting and you then, you know, go back and have lunch with people in the same thing.

And I also think the office experience gets spread out.

So partly the office is in your house, partly the office is in this downtown place where lots of people come, but partly the office is a coworking space close to where you live, if you live in a suburb.

And you know, the research that comes out of this shows like 25% of people who work at home work in a co-working space, remote workers work in a co-working space.

They don't work, they work in an office, 22% of them work in a coffee shop or similar, and a whole bunch of them work with somebody else in somebody else's house, so, it's not like they're just chained to the house.

So I think that the work experience becomes more flexible and you work not just in one place, but in multiple places, including your home.

- So given that dynamic, it really casts a new shadow on all of this housing that has been built very close to downtowns, especially in booming cities like Seattle, where I live.

We've seen this just explosion of market rate housing, expensive condos being built, clustered right around downtown with the idea that these well-paid, well-healed workers are gonna wanna live really close to the place that they have to be working every single day.

Are those developments in jeopardy now that we're seeing this really rapid transformation of the way that knowledge workers work?

- Well, I think urban living is a price point issue.

You know, when people ask me about why is everyone leaving New York, I always give the same answer.

I probably prefer to live in New York city than any place in the world.

All I need is a four or five bedroom apartment or townhouse that I could afford.

That would be the same price as a four or five bedroom house in an affordable city.

You give me that I'm fine, and I'll bet there are a lot of other people, so it's price, you know, those apartments.

And I think the idea of marketing, whether it's Seattle or San Francisco or New York to the globe, that was just stupid, we're gonna build these giant beautiful skyscraper towers with fantastic views, and the apartments are gonna go for $20 million and some global, super rich person is gonna buy it.

That market is pretty finite and it's not a market that really appreciates cities.

It might like to have this trophy that you look at, but it's not a city dwelling.

And that's why you got developments that were kind of almost like gated tower complexes.

So I think cities get younger, that stuff gets reprogrammed.

It can become, we saw this in Miami last cycle, 2008 with all the luxury condos that went out in the Brickell area, they couldn't sell them, so they rented them out.

And that's how Brickell became an interesting neighborhood.

Young people started to rent those condos and animate the neighborhood.

I think that we're also gonna have to look at something.

What I would say is like the mixed use building and not just the mixed use neighborhood.

I think that people are looking to be able to work a little bit more from home and that's harder.

I'm talking to you from a condo in Miami beach.

I'm actually, we rented an apartment.

I'm talking to you from a rental apartment in our condo building, which I use for work and Zooms, you know, and we had the means to wait out a pandemic and rent a little apartment that I could put a Zoom studio and do calls from, 'cause we only have a two bedroom apartment and we have two kids.

I think that having these kinds of spaces, workspaces in apartment buildings, co-working spaces, not just in urban centers, but in suburban areas.

I was talking to a group in Victoria, Washington, Vancouver, Washington that bought one of these historic, old industrial parks designed by a great mid-century architect that is thinking about remaking that as a place for living, working, co-working.

So yeah, I think the rise of the mixed use building, and I think that's not only the case in the urban area, but in the suburban area where you can live and work.

But yeah, I think right, well, most remote workers, most people do remote work jobs live in cities.

That's because most remote work jobs are in cities.

So even if 10 to 20% of them leave, that still seems most of those people will still be in cities or close to cities.

So yeah, I think they're just gonna get younger and more affordable and that's not a terrible thing.

- What does all of this mean for the workers whose industries depend on knowledge workers being in a physical place consistently?

You know, we're talking pretty exclusively about the creative class here, but there's a whole other class of workers whose jobs are really dependent on these predictable patterns of commuters.

- So we actually have very good, a whole range of research on this.

Knowledge workers have done just fine during the pandemic.

I mean, wages and salaries haven't gone down.

They've had much more flexibility to have been able to work from home, this 20% to 30% of us who end the stock market's up, the real estate, unless they changed houses, the real estate prices are up.

They've done pretty well, it's really the rest of America, so-called essential workers that have gotten decimated and essential workers tend to be disproportionately female disproportionately new immigrant, disproportionately black or Latino.

So from the incidents of COVID cases, COVID hospitalizations to deaths, which are any times from two to five times higher, to the ability to safely shelter yourself in work, not have to work around the public or others.

And I think now to add insult to these already high level of injuries, the people who get hurt in the decline of the central business district or the office district are not the knowledge workers who simply move their location of work from an office to a house and reduce their commuting expenses so their lives might get better.

It's the essential workers who work in the restaurants, retail shops, all of the service ecosystem, that services that who've been destroyed, who've seen their livelihoods destroyed.

So yeah, and the research has been done, the economics research was a group out of the University of California, San Diego, and elsewhere, just shows the big impact of the decline of remote work and the decline of the office district is an on-off on professional workers, it's on essential workers, so it's a big, big deal.

And it's quite terrible, quite tragic.

- And are those jobs gone for good?

- Well, I think the jobs have changed, right?

I think that those jobs might be gone for a long time or changed.

I don't think those grab and go restaurants are gonna make it in those low end, you know, coffee shops.

I think it's gonna have to be an upgraded experience.

So some of those jobs may be gone, you know, and those jobs have shifted to delivery, to warehouse and logistics, all of the things that we've depended on, and so yeah, some of those jobs may be gone for good or they've been turned into other kinds of jobs, yeah.

- So what can policy makers do to help those people who are not looking at a return to work anytime soon?

- Well, you know, you gotta give the Biden administration credit, you know, the stimulus and bailouts and funding have done a lot to help Americans.

I mean, if you had said to me two things, one, and I hate to give Trump any credit, but, you know, with the vaccine and Operation Warp Speed, as much as it was the American private sector mainly, you know, we did okay, even with the worst president in modern memory.

And then, you know, fortunately, as America seems to always rise to the occasion, we elected a really good president, you know, or some people say a transformational president.

I don't know about that, but a really good competent person who knows how government works.

And we enacted, you know, a broad set of stimulus measures to get money in the pot, you know, more far reaching than most European societies did.

We got money in the hands of people and allowed them to survive, so I think at the national level we've done a good thing.

I think for the local level, what we've not done enough of is this, there has been a lack of awareness of understanding and planning for a post pandemic reality.

Our localities have been very reactive, very restriction oriented.

You know, all those things were important, especially in the early days of the pandemic.

But you know, since March of last year, I've been arguing, we need plans for reopening.

We need plans for post pandemic life.

We need strategies to get back up and running.

We need ways to make sure our airports are safe and universities.

We're getting there, but we're doing this in this more ad hoc way.

So I think the most important thing our cities and metro areas can do is really focus on what this post pandemic reality will be like.

And then I think what you said, not just getting open and up and running, focusing on equity and inclusivity.

And I think the big thing there was, you know, we saw an outpouring of popular support across classes, across races, across generations, that go under the banner of the Black Lives Matter movement, where people said enough is enough, this racial and economic injustice we've had enough.

We wanna see it build, you know, we wanna build back better cities to use Biden's phrase.

Yeah, I think that's what we gotta do because if not, we're gonna reopen, but we're gonna become, I mean, what we've seen, right?

Massive stock market gains, massive real estate gains, massive gains going to the 0.001%, substantial gains going to the top 20 or 30%.

And then everybody else's economic fortune while the stimulus and bailouts help, sinking, relatively speaking.

So we're gonna have to address that and build a more inclusive society going forward.

- So maybe you've already answered this, but as we hopefully enter this final chapter of the pandemic, what do you see as the number one challenge that our cities need to overcome?

- Well, you know, the one that really worries me.

is it's really two sides of the same coin.

It's the anxiety about how people go back to normal life.

So there are a lot of people like me who just lost their footing, and I know I'm not the only one.

Like I've still not been on a plane.

I don't know when I'm gonna be ready.

I was to one meeting that was sort of quasi indoors.

It was with a 93 year old man who was also vaccinated.

And we sat in his hotel room and I was still scared.

He wasn't.

And I don't think I'm the only one.

There are a lot of people who just don't have their mojo back.

And it's like a post-traumatic stress.

Someone said to me, who's a psychologist, it's kind of what prisoner release, when you release somebody from jail, it takes a long time and there's been studies of this.

So that's one, the other one I think, is this just disorder.

What I would call, that is plaguing our city's crime rate, violent crime rate, petty crime, what one downtown (indistinct) calls downtown disorder.

And I think there what's happened is the pandemic remove the kind of classic Jane Jacobs eyes on the street.

Our cities were not just vacant, they, you know, people came back, but they weren't as occupied as they were.

And into the lurch go the risk oblivious, I mean, who were the ones that are gonna go back to the city?

It's the people who have no sense of risk and they're just risk oblivious.

So in a way, our cities are occupied by the risk oblivious.

And I hear people, you know, in Miami Beach, We talk about the, people talk all the time about the chronic spring break and the partying and how much they don't like it, the people in the apartment chairs.

In New York, you hear people talking about, well, I feel danger on the subway, particularly young women.

I don't feel as comfortable as I used to be.

I feel a little bit it's more dangerous.

So I think there is the big thing is gonna be, how do we create a calmer, more normal environment, which enables people to go back to work, to go back to daily life.

And hopefully the summer, right?

As the weather gets nicer, particularly in the Northern cities, as the vaccinations get more widely spread and people feel more comfortable, that happens.

But I think this is the number one factor, this kind of disorder, I don't know what else a word for it, disorganization, disorder and it's happening.

It's not just in a few cities, you know, it's San Francisco, LA, Seattle, Portland, New York, Toronto, Miami, everyone has a kind of different expression of this.

So that's what I think.

And it's not a law and order thing.

You're not gonna put the cops on the street and fix it.

You know, it really is a question of getting people, the Jane Jacobs kind of natural room of cities back.

And that might take longer than we think.

- Well, on the flip side, what makes you most optimistic about this next chapter?

- Look, so I don't cry usually.

When I went to get my vaccine in the Unidad Community Center in Miami Beach, I walked up to this place and I saw a Haitian, Latino, Latin, you know, African-American, EMTs, emergency personnel fire 'cause it was above the firehouse where they stored the vaccine and doctors and nurses.

And I started bawling my eyes out and I said, why am I crying?

And what came back into my head was my dad, seventh grade educated guy, Italian-American, who literally enlisted in the US army the day Pearl Harbor was attacked.

And he told me this story.

He said, Rich, never underestimate the ability of America to turn around.

He said, I enlisted, they gave me a stick and a Doughboy helmet from World War 1 and said, Lou, go train in Fort Dix or wherever he had to go.

And he said, by the time we disembarked to go to England, to then storm the beaches at Normandy, you could see the translate, you know, the Navy transports coming with tanks and guns and everything we needed, field hospitals and encampments and everything you could imagine an army would need, we had.

And I saw them, I never seen this.

I'm born in 1957, Monica.

I've never seen America through my father's eyes.

I always saw America that people questioned.

To see the way we mobilized, created this vaccine, but then the distribution, which wasn't like some government-run program, it was these volunteers coming from just out of the woodwork, I was bawling my eyes out.

Like I was never happier.

So that's what makes me optimistic that if we could do this, we can do anything.

And that's not like pollyanna bullshit.

Like if we could do that, we, and I think that's got to give us more.

I've heard people your age say this is the first time I've seen anything in America that I can really say I'm super proud of.

So yeah, that's what gives me optimism.

And I think the fact that we, and I think when we look back, like, you know, when you're now new, pending new arrivals, older, my kids are older when we look back, I think we're gonna forget a lot of the pandemic, 'cause that's how we are as humans, they call the Spanish from the (indistinct), These RNA vaccines, these genetic vaccines that we invented and then rolled out so quickly, are gonna change the way my dad said, penicillin and the polio vaccine.

We're gonna look back at this and go, this was an incredible moment of innovation.

And it changed the way we treat malaria and multiple sclerosis and maybe cancer.

And so, yeah, I'm optimistic.

What makes me nervous is that we forget, that we have a tendency as human beings to forget the pain and suffering and you know, the fact that, look, we're gonna go into the roaring 2020s.

There's no doubt in my mind, we're on the cusp of the roaring 2020s, just wait till the summer.

But you know, the roaring 20s was the flappers and the jazz age and the great Gatsby and a big party, but there was a time of tremendous inequity that it took the new deal and more to solve.

I hope that this time we don't forget that we don't go into this giant party mode and forget all the things that are important to us and that we really do double down in building, you know, a better, more inclusive, that we do build back better, so that's my hope.

- Well, I think that is a beautiful note to end on.

Richard, thank you so much for joining me.

This was a really fascinating conversation and certainly trends that we're going to keep watching closely.

- Thank you, I always enjoy, you know, I always enjoy interacting with you, whether it says in print or online and hopefully, I mean, hopefully we get to do this in person in the not-too-distant future.

Just for folks listening in, you know, I've now been doing Zoom events where there are small groups of people actually in a room, so it's happening.

So I hope Monica that you and I can see each other in person soon.

- Absolutely, I hope so too.

And I wanna thank everyone who joined us for this conversation and thanks again to our sponsors, DWT and sea.citi.

There are a lot of other great sessions to catch at the festival, including a conversation tomorrow at 4:00 PM, featuring Heather McGee who authored an incredible new book, "The Sum of Us," that talks about how racism has impacted, not just communities of color, but all of us in surprising and not so surprising ways.

It's been great being with you.

And thanks for being a part of Crosscut Festival.

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