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Americas decentraliztion, also makes us unique. Granted, I wish every city could have the vibrancy downtown, that NYC, DC, SF, BOS, CHI, PHILLY, ETC, has. But it is not so...On the flip side, decentralized places like LA, Miami, Houston, Atlanta, etc, SEEM(from the Northeast cities I've been to) to have more places better spread out throughout the metro with more vibrancy, amenities, etc, with the expection of NYC(being it has 5 large vibrant boroughs).
I know things are changing, and investment, development and people are moving back to many downtowns throughout the country, but aside from a few notable exceptions, American downtowns seem like ghost-towns, surprisingly for me, even during business hours. I thought Aussie cities were suburban-centric and while they are, our downtowns generally seem a lot more lively than comparably sized downtowns in the US. Of course European and Asian downtowns beat either, so I'm wondering if the US has the 'deadest' downtowns of any country on earth?
Take San Diego, for instance, with a metro area of 3 million. It's downtown felt deader than Perth, with half the population. Memphis, with about the same metro population as Adelaide, had the activity of an Australian city of about 200,000-300,000. Cities like Austin and Nashville were better, of course NYC, Boston etc are the exceptions, but I'm wondering if as a rule, downtowns are more like Memphis or Boston?
what do you mean when you say "downtown"? would you include a restaurant / bar district that was not "main street" so to speak, but was within the metro area somewhere?
what do you mean when you say "downtown"? would you include a restaurant / bar district that was not "main street" so to speak, but was within the metro area somewhere?
To me it is beyond this type of district, that exists everywhere. it is where there is energy and vibrancy 24/7 with what you speak plus people, jobs, culture everything not a singularly focused part time destination to me there is huge difference
Lots of kneejerk answers bemoaning the cultural emptiness of American cities. What should be considered here is that American downtowns used to have a very vibrant culture. Heck, go back in the newspaper archives and read about it yourself. The real deterioration began a few decades ago. Today, the relatively quiet downtowns are very much the unintended consequences of governmental social engineering in the 1950s and 1960s. Three factors:
1) The astonishing rise in inner-city crime. The rate of violent crime per 1,000 QUADRUPLED from 1960 to 1993. Even today, with tougher enforcement and better security measures, that rate has only declined to 3 times 1960 figures. And most of that crime is inner city. There are many factors to this, from the misguided public housing policies of the 60s that only served to create dense poverty pockets in the downtown areas to more lenient sentencing. Only as inner city crime has begun to decrease are people actually considering looking back downtown for their entertainment.
2) Forced Busing. A Federal judge's disastrous ruling created the emptying out of the inner city. In his ruling, he attempted to even out educational disparities by having black kids bused to mostly white schools and vice versa. This incited a full-scale disaspora to the suburbs. Oddly enough, most middle- and working-class families weren't wild about walking their eight-year-olds to the curb and watching them get bused to an inner-city school ten miles away. The people who sneeringly use the term, "White Flight" never used their children as guinea pigs in some ill-fated social experiment, and seem to choose private schools for their kids. Meanwhile, middle- and working-class parents had no choice but to vote with their moving vans. Interestingly enough, black parents also have joined the exodus to the suburbs over the past twenty years, enrolled their kids in suburban schools, and typically have had little trouble assimilating.
So there you go. Ill-considered government programs having predictable effects. The automobile culture didn't cause American downtowns to empty out. Instead, American downtowns emptied out, creating the automobile culture. Think about that the next time you consent to another harebrained government effort.
You know what I found depressing, is visiting Cork (city) Ireland. With a population little more than 125,000, the downtown area is far, far more vibrant then the vast majority of U.S. cities, especially those in the Midwest.
Yes, definitely. Taking a few cities such as New York aside, most downtowns are just dead. When i first came to Milwaukee I was really shocked to see that a city of 600,000 people probably has less activity (besides crime) going on in its downtown than my small home town of 8,000 people in rural Europe.
So there you go. Ill-considered government programs having predictable effects.
I'd say that they were well-intentioned government policies but terribly implemented in most cases (i.e., school desegregation/busing). And taking a retrospective view, I don't think we could say that the effects were predictable. Hindsight is always 20/20.
A third factor would be urban renewal which set a paradigm in motion that continues to this day. Pedestrian-scaled commercial buildings that were conducive to urban activity were razed to make way for sterile mega-projects that did very little to engage pedestrians. Coming fresh out of WWII, we despised anything considered traditional and historic and wanted to embrace the "wave of the future," so to speak. So sad we now have to live with those consequences. We're still in the era of the mega-project dominating downtown development--developers aren't building single two- or three-story commercial buildings alongside each other in downtowns because of expensive land prices which make such an endeavor financially unfeasible--but at least more focus is given to commercial uses at the street level which encourage pedestrian activity.
I'd say that they were well-intentioned government policies but terribly implemented in most cases (i.e., school desegregation/busing). And taking a retrospective view, I don't think we could say that the effects were predictable. Hindsight is always 20/20.
Well, I would respectfully disagree. There were plenty of dissenting voices. Lots of people opposed forced busing when it was implemented and they were ignored or categorized as a bunch of knuckle-dragging bigots. It was a classic case of a bunch of ivory tower ideologues ignoring reality in favor of implementing a grand scheme. Nobody, and I mean nobody, wants to put their kid on a bus and have him or her shipped to an inner city school.
The same is true of housing developments. A good sociologist would have understood the effects of taking all of a community's poor people and bundling them together on what would be, in effect, a reservation.
In that sense, I would argue that both of these examples, in addition to your excellent citation of Urban Renewal, were poorly-conceived and hastily implemented. And we pay the price to this day.
But I think the point is either the city is compact (i.e NOLA) or has better non car oriented transit options to create the environment for a vibrant core. Also people actually need to live there in mass; without it will never be as vibrant save select times
This is where density does actually matter
Americans are either working or walking the aisles of SlaveMart, or some other big box store, buying the goods their Colonial Masters have manufactured.
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