When Places Lose their “Presence”
I graduated from college into the recession of 1990, one that would send unemployment up to 7.4% in March 1992, a few months after I decided to go abandon the job market and go to grad school. I’d worked as a barista for the now-defunct Cafe Roma. It was located in a downtown office building, and we encountered rushes you could set your clock to. In between them, there was nothing to do. We were service workers, and had to be there for the next rush, but our boss did not like us to just stand around chatting. She invented endless and always unnecessary tasks to keep us from any activity that would make the job more enjoyable. Mine was hardly an unusual experience. Throughout the industrial age, this is how all jobs have been arranged. As much as anything, you were paid for being there rather than what you were doing. You were paid for your presence, even if what you were doing did nothing to benefit the company.
All of this has been true for a century or more—since bosses started overseeing factory floors and large, centralized offices. Not every job can be easily structured around a group of people working in a single place, but it became the default model in most situations. And because we structured our workplaces this way, we slowly began reshaping our built environment, the way we get around, and how we lived in cities and towns. Although a few dreamers imagined different ways of working, that’s not what employers wanted. Instead, we spent decades accepting the basic paradigm and then trying to fit everything from management schemes to parking lots to office design into the model. But no one ever questioned the fundamental structure of work: do people actually need to be together to do their jobs? It was an iron law that the answer was yes. But because it lasted so long, the pandemic didn’t just force bosses to consider different models, but acknowledge the reality that emerged. Decentralized work—some, not all—is possible. Now there’s no going back.
The consequences of this are real and profound. I started thinking about it after listening to Charlie Warzel and Anne Helen Petersen make the rounds promoting their recent book Out of Office. (Offices, in particular, are really going to change.) But I’m less interested in the way new models affect the workplace than the ways they affect everything else. If you build a city around the “presence” model—transportation systems capable of handling massive rush hours, buildings with vast office space, businesses like restaurants and taverns to feed and water all those daily migrants—what happens when they stop showing up? What happens if they just don’t leave their homes?
Concentrating Workers
The way cities work seems intuitive enough. Certain pockets contain concentrations of workers. In some places, like downtowns, they might work in offices for larger companies; in other parts, they might work industrial jobs. Office parks are common in suburbs, and every city has industrial tracts. Sometimes cities have campuses for especially large companies. (Nike and Intel’s giant sites reside outside of Portland.) We even used to place our retail in large, centralized hubs, like malls or retail strips. All of this made sense because we could connect them with roads and rail lines, and place parking nearby. In the mornings, people all started commuting in one direction, and at night they went back the other way.
In most cities, neighborhoods recreate this same kind of structure in miniature, with offices, stores, restaurants, and pubs all placed where people can easily get to them. During the great brewery/taproom explosion of the past decade, drinking holes proliferated, not just in those downtown hubs, but in the smaller, more regional neighborhood hubs, or among dense shopping districts. Because people were moving around in a weekly cycle, their whereabouts were predictable. But with Covid, those arrangements started changing. We’ve focused a lot on downtowns, and rightly so. This summer, researchers at UC Berkeley found that of 62 cities in North America, only four saw their downtowns recover from Covid; a third still had half or less traffic than pre-pandemic.
Not Just Downtowns
But here’s the thing—it wasn’t just downtowns. Cities as a whole were still suffering. According to that same UC Berkeley study, only 16% of cities saw life return to normal across the metro areas. People hadn’t switched from having that after-work pint downtown to heading out of the house for one at the neighborhood local. No, once the ecosystem started changing, it changed all over. Bodies are not fixed in space—change one thing and others change, too. Once people were in their homes, it seems, they were less likely to go back out.
Earlier this week, I met with a brewer for an article I’m working on. He told me his taproom volume came back after the pandemic, but only to about three-quarters its original level. It has plateaued there and he is assuming it’s a permanent change—or anyway one that will be very, very slow to improve. His brewery has more than one taproom, but none are in the downtown core. The neighborhood joints, which you’d expect to be coming back to normal, haven’t.
How does this play out? Those regular morning and evening traffic jams don’t happen reliably the way they once did. Sometimes, by contrast, you’ll encounter a bunch of traffic when you never used to—on weekends or in the middle of the day. I live in a part of town with a lot of restaurants, and before Covid, people would start flooding in around 5:30 on Friday and Saturday evenings. They still do … sometimes. Half-hour waits seem to be a thing of the past, and periodically you’ll walk into a pub or restaurant that was formerly always busy and find it deserted. Other times, though, it may be packed. This wreaks havoc with staffing, trying to figure out how much food to have in the walk-in, and when your business should actually be open for business.
This is all observational, but it’s backed by the real-world data. OpenTable has amazing data dating back through the pandemic on restaurant reservations down to the city level. As you can see in the graph above, most cities are still below their 2019 baseline. Last weekend, just two cities had recovered (Boston and Dallas), a few were almost back, but several were in bad shape: Chicago (-14%), Seattle (-17%), New York (-24%), and Portland (-33%).
Things are changing, and in unpredictable and varied ways. I suspect many of us had the idea that life would eventually snap back to normal. But deeper changes seem to be at work. People’s lives have changed, and they’re working and living in different places and different ways. The repercussions of those changes are likely to be substantial and lasting. The new normal won’t look like the old normal, and it won’t just affect the office. Everything down to the way we eat and drink and spend our time seems to be under permanent change. It’s a weird, new world out there.