Middle America’s ‘doom loop’
ou may have heard that America’s cities are in trouble. From the “death of downtowns” to the “urban doom loop,” the plight of America’s superstar metros — and their central business districts in particular — have been a frequent source of concern for economists, politicians, and commentators.
Most of the concern has been focused on coastal cities like San Francisco and Seattle, which have seen the usual stream of commuters shrink to a trickle due to remote work’s hold on the white-collar workforce. But Midwestern cities are also facing a crisis of their own — struggling to attract workers, residents, and visitors to their downtowns. And while many coastal metros experienced a “golden age” in the decade before the pandemic, cities in America’s heartland have been struggling since well before COVID came around.
In order to pull out of their tailspin, economists and urban planners say many Midwestern cities need to get serious about improving amenities and boosting quality of life in their downtowns. Instead of being places where people are forced to go to work, leaders need to make their center cities into a destination that people actually want to visit.
“What I really think it comes down to in these places is that there’s nothing special about any of the downtowns in any of these cities that would be attractive to new residents,” Michael Hicks, a professor of economics and business research at Ball State University in Indiana, told Insider. “The cities just don’t have the fundamental amenities that would attract people.”
Hollowed out
A good way to gauge just how much trouble Midwestern cities are in is to take a look at how many people their downtowns are actually attracting. Standing in the middle of the city square and counting people can be a bit tough though, so researchers at the University of Toronto have been analyzing anonymized cellphone data for the past few years to track the number of people physically present in central business districts each day. The granular, individual-level data provides a fuller picture of downtown vitality — both before and after the pandemic — than other measures such as office vacancy rates and mass-transit ridership. The conclusion the study draws for the heartland is bleak. Five of the bottom 10 cities in the tracker’s most recent data, which measured the period from December 2022 to March 2023, were in the Midwest: St. Louis, Indianapolis, Minneapolis, Cleveland, and Kansas City, Missouri. Nine of the 13 Midwestern cities tracked in the study were in the bottom half of the rankings.
Other indicators of central business district health — from office workers to vacant real-estate space — are similarly stark for many of these cities. Jacob Frey, the mayor of Minneapolis, recently said he expects his city’s downtown workforce will max out at about 75% of its pre-pandemic numbers, and a recent study showed that 21.2 million square feet of office space in the city is sitting vacant. In April, Salesforce announced it would give up one-quarter of its office space in the Indianapolis Salesforce Tower, Indiana’s tallest building. The Midwest as a whole has also struggled to attract new residents and hold onto its existing residents in recent years. Between April 2020 and July 2022, the region saw a net decline of more than 400,000 residents. And things could get even worse for downtowns if they fall into the so-called “urban doom loop.” Commercial property taxes make up a large chunk of many city budgets, so as office vacancies rise, the decreased revenue could force leaders to curtail municipal services or make cuts to key programs. Declining services and quality of life in turn pushes residents out, leading to a self-reinforcing exodus. Without serious changes, these midsize cities in the middle of the country could be quietly sliding into oblivion.
“The writing on the wall is not great,” Karen Chapple, the director of the School of Cities at the University of Toronto and the author of the downtown recovery study, told Insider.
‘The collapse of the Midwest’
The original sin that led to the Midwest’s current predicament can be traced back to boneheaded choices made 70 years ago. In the early part of the 20th century, Midwestern cities boomed — attracting workers and families seeking out manufacturing jobs and education. Downtowns were bustling places for shopping, living, and working.
That all changed in the 1950s. Many Midwestern cities relied on a single industry or even a single company to buttress its economy. Cleveland had the steel industry, Detroit was built by autos, and Akron was home to tire manufacturers. So in order to keep businesses from leaving town, leaders began to single-mindedly focus on attracting businesses — even if it meant making peoples’ lives harder.
“For the second half of the 20th century, most Midwestern cities really focused on bending over backwards to accommodate businesses,” Hicks said. “They bulldozed neighborhoods, they did eminent domain for all kinds of highways to get the products moved from factory to customer more quickly. And they neglected the fundamentals that people have liked about cities for 3,000 years, which is you can meet with people, you can walk to a place to eat, it’s safe.”
This urban transformation turned Midwestern downtowns into “nothing but skyscrapers and highways,” Amanda Weinstein, a professor of economics at the University of Akron, told me. “The thought was, cities are just for jobs and that’s all they really are.”
After years of being ignored, workers’ community ties began to fray and they started to look for greener pastures. Many Rust Belt residents left for the Sun Belt, Weinstein said, which promised affordability and a higher quality of life. Even those central-city residents who weren’t lured by warmer locales eventually migrated out of the city to leafier surrounding suburbs.
“The collapse of the Midwest is really the story of, ‘As soon as the job went away, I got the hell out of this shitty town,'” Hicks said.
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Just an aside into the source of these people’s data for their study. They relied on cell phone location data, ie your personal tracking data.
Every swinging dick can screw up studies such as this one. All it takes is the decision whether to take the tracking device with you, or to leave it inside the house as you leave the house.
My personal tracking device leaves my curtelege for maybe three hours once every two weeks. All other movements from this place are sans phone.
I’d like to reduce the movement of that device, working on it. If you work at it a bit, make the leaving of the phone a goal each day, it becomes easier to leave the tracking device behind.