Downtowns Don’t Deserve to Be Rescued
17th February 2022
The Antiplanner takes a stand.
The usually sensible Megan McArdle writes in the Washington Post that “Downtown is in deep trouble.” Where she becomes insensible is that she thinks that is a bad thing, arguing that city governments need to take action to lure businesses back into downtowns.
When otherwise sensible people think of a city, they imagine a dense, job-filled downtown surrounded by lower-density residential areas. Yet, as Washington Post writer Joel Garreau wrote more than 30 years ago, downtowns “are relics of a time past.” In fact, he said, downtown-centered cities were the “nineteenth-century version” of a city, and that “We built cities like that for less than a century.”
The basic point is that ‘downtown’ was a solution to a problem that cities no longer have, and carries with it disadvantages that we no longer need to tolerate. Read The Whole Thing.