Upzoned

Manhattan has been among the most populous, economically vibrant, and in-demand places on the planet for generations. But you wouldn’t know that from looking at its retail vacancy rate.

At least that’s the premise of a new article from CityLab entitled “How Manhattan Became a Rich Ghost Town.” According to author Derek Thompson, 🎶 [Hamilton voice] the greatest city in the world 🎶 has been plagued by a surprising paradox: a hyper-productive development pattern that’s placed the world’s largest concentration of wealth and customer volume right outside shop owners’ doors, paired with sky-high commercial real estate rents that even the most successful stores somehow can’t afford. The result? On the most valuable land on the planet, as many as 20% of storefronts are sitting empty—a phenomenon City Lab attributes to a combination of greedy landlords holding out for big chains, slow retail sales growth failing to compete with rising rents, and the gradual erosion of all physical retail in the face of Amazon.

But in this week’s Upzoned, Chuck and Kea reveal the surprising reason why we shouldn’t trust our first instincts about why storefront retail is dying, even in the cities where it seems best poised to thrive. And then they explain why, if we want to re-activate these crucial elements of our streetscapes, we should be asking ourselves a fundamentally different set of questions—and taking a fundamentally different set of actions to reverse the troubling trend that’s stealing many of our most crucial third place businesses. (Hint: it has a little something to do with the insanely weird way commercial mortgages work.)

And then in the downzone, Chuck talks a book about game theory that’s currently blowing his mind, and Kea shares a recent podcast series that’s challenging her to think about the strange forces that shape an important element of our everyday world: the clothes on our back.

If you’re plugged into the urbanist blogosphere, you’ve probably heard something about the new federal Opportunity Zones by now. And you might even think they sound pretty good. After all, anything that incentivizes investment in underserved areas sounds like a pretty good deal—and by eliminating capital gains taxes on new development in some of the poorest regions of your state, there’s no doubt that the money will come pouring in.

But Upzoned hosts Kea and Chuck aren’t so sure. Is a big bucket of money really what these neighborhoods need? Will outside developers really build the kind of locally responsive, fine-grained stuff that would make these towns strong and lift up the people who are already there? What would a better Opportunity Zones program look like—or is using a federal program to develop a neighborhood like steering an ocean liner with a canoe paddle?

And then in the Downzone, Chuck and Kea talk about their recent reads. Hear Chuck’s final thoughts on Mariana Mazzucato’s The Value of Everything, and get the behind-the-scenes scoop on Kea’s recent interview with author William Knoedelseder on his new book Fins: Harley Earl, The Rise of General Motors and the Glory Days of Detroit.

Failure is an essential part of the scientific method—negative results help us rule out erroneous theories and hone our understanding. And the value of an instructive failure is not limited to laboratory science. In all human endeavors, including city building, our missteps give us vital information that helps us do our work better next time around.

On this week’s Upzoned, Kea and Chuck discuss the New York Times article Congratulations. Your Study Went Nowhere.  The article deals with the phenomenon of publication bias in science: studies yielding negative results are less likely to be published and widely disseminated than those that appear to confirm their hypotheses, and this tendency can lead to bad science. Kea and Chuck take this and run with it, carrying on a broad philosophical conversation about why humans in all disciplines could stand to celebrate their failures instead of shying away from them. Then, in the downzone, Chuck gets a little weepy about seeing Hamilton with his family, and Kea discusses the Flint water crisis as it's portrayed in Michael Moore's new documentary, Farenheit 11/9.

Are house flippers exactly what the Rust Belt needs to recover from decades of systemic disinvestment, or a dangerous speculative game that fragile places shouldn’t be playing?

That’s what Kea and Chuck are talking about on this week’s Upzoned, and it’s a lively debate. Chuck, who lives in small-town Minnesota, is excited by the idea that ordinary people with a few basic home-repair skills can turn their sweat equity into a decent living while gently helping neighborhoods recover from decline. Kea, who grew up in Cleveland and Michigan and now owns and manages a handful of apartments in her new hometown of St. Louis, MO, is a little more cautious: she’s seen developers like the kind Chuck’s describing, but she’s seen far more flippers buy buildings en masse, do shoddy renovations, and transform neighborhoods in a way that’s far from gentle. And when cities give tax increment financing to help these speculative flippers do it even bigger, things can get even uglier.

Listen in to hear them hash it out, and dig into the arguments from Reuters's recent article, How Tech Jobs Helped Rust Belt Become House Flipping Hot Spot.  And then in the Downzone, Chuck and Kea talk about Extant, a sci-fi TV show that Chuck’s been bingeing, Chuck’s most recent read (The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy by Maria Mazzucato), and Florida by Lauren Groff, a collection of place-based short stories that Kea loved.

In Episode 2 of Upzoned from Strong Towns, Kea Wilson and Chuck Marohn discuss an article on big-box stores and the taxes they pay. Many of these companies argue that their taxes ought to be lower. Find out what we think of this argument.

In the first episode of Upzoned, Kea and Chuck used this article from the Texas Observer as a springboard to talk about the challenges of meeting basic water needs in North Texas and other super-dry desert climates.