Author Archives: legallysociable

The top US cities for Fortune 500 company headquarters, COVID-19 edition

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In an article about working remotely, the Wall Street Journal included this graphic about the locations of the headquarters of Fortune 500 companies:

Fortune500HQLocations

This is an interesting topic to raise as more workers are laboring away from the office. What will happen to headquarters?

One option would be that headquarters remain even as organizational workforces scatter. There will always be a need to at least occasionally hold meetings or access resources or project a presence in a major city. Cities would like this as headquarters are a status symbol.

Another option is that headquarters move to locations more central to their workers or more attractive for workers. This is more unlikely but the same factors pushing workers away from major cities – high housing costs, traffic and congestion, density with threats of pandemics – could affect headquarters as well. It could be a big strategic move to follow workers to a city not on the list above.

The effects of either could be big for cities. Consider New York. It is the clear leader in terms of headquarters, it is a leading global city, and it is not just a center for business but also for news, entertainment, the arts, and other spheres. Even if the headquarters stay, the loss of high-status employees hurts. If the headquarters leave or become shells of themselves, there could be a loss of status.

Will the suburbs be more appealing moving forward because of COVID-19?

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With discussion of COVID-19 in cities plus urban residents leaving for suburbs, does this mean people will view suburbs differently going forward? Ian Bogost suggests this will be the case:

photo of roadway during daytime

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But after the anxious spring of 2020, these defects seem like new luxuries. There was always comfort to be found in a big house on a plot of land that’s your own. The relief is even more soothing with a pandemic bearing down on you. And as the novel coronavirus graduates from acute terror to long-term malaise, urbanites are trapped in small apartments with little or no outdoor space, reliant on mass transit that now seems less like a public service and more like a rolling petri dish. Meanwhile, suburbanites have protected their families amid the solace of sprawling homes on large, private plots, separated from the neighbors, and reachable only by the safety of private cars. Sheltered from the virus in their many bedrooms, they sleep soundly, dreaming the American dream with new confidence.

Safety has always warmed the suburban soul. The American dream is sometimes equated with property ownership and the nuclear families such properties house—but really, they are just hulls for a more fundamental suburban aspiration: individualism, which the suburban home demarcates and then protects…

The pandemic will improve suburban life, perhaps in lasting ways. Take the automobile commute: The exodus from the office has dramatically decreased traffic and pollution, a trend that will continue in some form if even a fraction of the people who abandoned their commutes continue to work from home. Dunham-Jones, who is also my colleague in Georgia Tech’s college of design, thinks that even a modest rise in telecommuting could also increase the appeal of local walking and bike trips. Families have two cars, but nowhere to go. They are rediscovering the pleasures of pedestrianism…

The suburbs were never as bad as their stereotypes. The little boxes might have been all the same, but the ’50s suburban plots also flowed continuously into one another, with unobstructed front and backyards, forming unified communities. And those communities were in some ways far less homogeneous than their legacy recalls, even despite the scourge of redlining and its serious, long-term effects.

There is a lot to consider here. A few categories of thoughts in response:

  1. There is an underlying contrast between how elites and urbanites viewed suburbs versus how many Americans have viewed suburbs for decades. Even as majorities of Americans now live in suburbs, there is a well-established line of suburban critiques. Is the individualism Bogost discusses a feature of suburban life or a terrible thing to promote? Do suburbanites really have individualism or does it end up looking the same across suburban single-family homes?
  2. The suburbs are aspirational. This reminds me of the argument by historian Jon Teaford in The American Suburb: The Basics: “Suburbs are an expression of the American desire for freedom and the right to pursue one’s own destiny.” (219) At the same time, the path taken to pursue these aspirations involved exclusion. Can these two competing interests – private freedom in a single-family home yet excluding who can access this – be reconciled in the future, let alone in assessments of the past?
  3. It is hard to know exactly what suburbia is under discussion. Complex suburbia is here. Bogost mentions at least a few visions of suburbia today including New Urbanist communities and neighborhoods of McMansions but we could also consider ethnoburbs, working-class suburbs, suburban job centers, and more. Which suburbia is the preferred one in the minds of Americans or which one should policy try to promote or is a varied suburban landscape more ideal?
  4. COVID-19 is theoretically a temporary issue to face. Once it passes or is controlled or societies learn to live with it, it is hard to know what consensus regarding places might emerge.

This debate which stretches at least to the early 1900s is not over even as COVID-19 changes the terms.

If workers can live anywhere, does this increase or decrease placelessness?

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A theme is emerging: today’s workers with technology and COVID-19 might be able to avoid going to an office. But, if they can live anywhere, what does this do for a sense of community and connecting to a particular place?

young male taking boxes out of luggage boot of car

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The coronavirus is challenging the assumption that Americans must stay physically tethered to traditionally hot job markets—and the high costs and small spaces that often come with them—to access the best work opportunities. Three months into the pandemic, many workers find themselves in jobs that, at least for now, will let them work anywhere, creating a wave of movement across the country.

Recessions tend to damp migration. Americans typically move with a new job already in hand, and hiring plummets during downturns. The 2008 financial crisis limited Americans’ mobility because millions of homeowners found themselves underwater on their homes, unable to sell without taking a loss.

But this time might be different. Home prices haven’t yet taken a major hit. And the forces at play are novel. Confronted with the prospect of not being able to easily fly in for a visit with an elderly parent, grown children are suddenly questioning why they live so far away in the first place.

Many newly remote workers are finding they prefer somewhere closer to family or fresh air. Others are giving up on leases they can’t afford, chasing opportunities in states that are reopening faster or heading back to hometowns.

On the side of more community and rootedness:

1. People can live in places they want to live rather than choosing a place for a job. Whether they live somewhere to be near family, find housing, enjoy the outdoors, or some other reason, workers will be inclined to invest more locally.

2. Working from home schedules can offer more flexibility, freeing people up to participate more in local activities.

3. The commute is eliminated, freeing up time as well as getting rid of the illusion that driving through an area is the same as knowing it.

4. People might stay longer in places if they can simply change jobs from afar rather than having to move when they switch jobs or careers.

On the side of less community and rootedness:

1. Spending time at a workplace can build community, both in the building as well as outside the workplace.

2. Corporate actions at the local level will connect less with employees who are not physically there and involved.

3. More businesses may have headquarters in one place (often desirable for big cities and high-status suburbs) but workforces – and all the benefits that come with it such as their spending or jobs numbers local politicians like – will be elsewhere.

On the whole, this could be good for employees who can invest more time in places of their choosing while businesses then have more tenuous connections to the places where they are officially located. In a country of suburbia (often considered non-places) and relatively easy travel, anchoring employees in places for longer could help lead to more rootedness.

Remember the suburban voters in 2020

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As COVID-19 and police brutality pushed the 2020 presidential election off the front pages for months, recent poll data suggests suburban voters are breaking one way in national polls:

And while Trump has an edge with rural voters, Biden crushes him in the suburbs – which often decide how swing states swing.

Fifty per cent of suburban registered voters told the pollster they planned to vote for Biden, while 36 per cent said they’d vote for Trump.

And in Texas metropolitan areas:

A Quinnipiac University survey released last week found Trump leading Biden by 1 point in Texas. Trump leads by 2.2 points in the RealClearPolitics average.

Texas Republicans are primarily worried about their standing in the suburbs, where women and independents have steadily gravitated away from the GOP since Trump took office.

Republican support has eroded in the areas surrounding Houston, Dallas, Austin and San Antonio, four of the nation’s largest and fastest growing metro areas. Democrats defeated longtime GOP incumbents in Houston and Dallas in 2018.

More background on trying to find a suburban “silent majority”:

The suburbs — not the red, but sparsely populated rural areas of the country most often associated with Trump — are where Trump found the majority of his support in 2016. Yet it was in the suburbs that Democrats built their House majority two years ago in a dramatic midterm repudiation of the Republican president.

Now, Trump’s approach to the violence and unrest that have gripped the nation’s big cities seems calibrated toward winning back those places, in the hopes that voters will recoil at the current images of chaos and looting — as they did in the late 1960s — and look to the White House for stability…

Five months before the general election, according to national polls, the political landscape for Trump is bleak. But there is a clear window of opportunity: Trump remains popular in rural America, and he won the suburbs by 4 percentage points in 2016 — largely on the backs of non-college-educated whites.

There are millions more potential voters where those came from — people who fit in Trump’s demographic sweet spot but did not vote. They live in rural and exurban areas, but also in working class suburbs like Macomb County, outside Detroit. They are who Republicans are referring to when they talk about a new “silent majority” — the kind of potential voters who, even if disgusted by police violence, are not joining in protest.

This probably bears repeating: the American suburbs of today are not solely populated by wealthy, white, conservative voters. This is the era of complex suburbia where different racial and ethnic groups as well as varied social classes live throughout metropolitan regions.

Relatively little media coverage has examined how COVID-19 or police brutality has affected suburbs or how suburbanites feel about all the change. While just over 50% of Americans live in suburbs, coverage emphasized urban areas. And what do suburbanites think when they see these images of urban life, policing, and protest that they may or not understand on an experiential or deeper level?

“The Great Reshuffling,” “extension cords” to suburban living

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New terms are arising to describe the possibility of more people moving to the suburbs with remote work becoming more popular:

green rectangular corded machine on grey wall during daytime

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Zillow Chief Executive Rich Barton has coined the coming changes in where and how workers live their lives “the great reshuffling.” Redfin’s lead economist Taylor Marr says his company is registering stronger demand in terms of homes under contract in places like Seattle and Austin, Texas, where there has been spillover from bigger cities. These are tech hubs where a lot of remote work was already happening and they have been more insulated in terms of layoffs, he said.

Zillow’s chief economist, Svenja Gudell, says she doesn’t expect residents to cut the cord entirely from their cities, but that they may opt for an “extension cord” into the suburbs where they can get more space, more outdoor areas and, of course, a home office.

To be honest, I’m not sure I like either term that much. “The Great Reshuffling” could apply to all sorts of population changes. Suburbs as “extension cord” implies that suburbs could not exist without cities; this has some truth to it but is also open to some scholarly debate.

All of this is fairly speculative at this point. Yet, given the tendencies of Americans toward the suburbs, it may not take much to push people out of cities and to more property for their money. Cities appeal to many Americans but the suburbs are the places many default to.

It is also interesting to consider what cities might benefit the most from people fleeing high prices in particular places. If the residents of Manhattan or the Bay Area or Seattle could go anywhere, where would they go? Would other locations in those metro areas prove attractive (people get to maintain their connections, access culture and familiar places) or would they leave for cheaper housing markets, family elsewhere, or locations with other kinds of amenities (warm weather, access to nature, etc.)? The ultimate winner here might the ever-expanding Sunbelt.

Connecting urban planning and coping with COVID-19

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McMansions might provide a lot of space for sheltering in space but an urban planner in Australia says neighborhoods of McMansions did not do as well during COVID-19:

bird s eye view of town

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McMansion-dwellers in suburbs far from jobs and services and uninviting to pedestrians fared badly during shutdowns, says a prominent Perth urban planner; meanwhile, residents in self-sufficient neighbourhoods with compact homes were much better equipped…

“Those in low-density neighbourhoods find it easier to stay at home, but they are forced to leave regularly in their cars for essential services and goods,” he said…

“For just $80,000, a home owner can build a 40-square-metre micro-workspace or granny flat that could assist a business to start up, or house essential workers – nurses, teachers or police – who often cannot afford to live in a McMansion,” he said…

Communities needed well-connected, shaded, pedestrian-friendly streets, front porches facilitating casual social exchanges while allowing social distancing, and walkable town centres with offices, restaurants, beach facilities and apartments.

It is interesting to compare this assessment to discussions in the United States. In places like New York City and San Francisco, journalists have reported on the move of wealthier residents away from density and to the suburbs. In these narratives, suburban homes and communities provide larger residences and more distance from others.

Yet, in the argument above, it sounds like the urban planner is arguing for New Urbanist-style suburbs as the middle ground: walkable places that offer some density and local community are better for dealing with COVID-19 that either really dense places or isolated suburban communities.

This might depend on what the highest priority is during COVID-19. If the goal is avoiding other people, public places, and mass transit all together so as not to catch the coronavirus, then neighborhoods of suburban McMansions could make sense. People today can have all sorts of goods delivered. And if suburban life is about moral minimalism, McMansions allow everyone lots of space. If the goal is to balance interacting with people and society alongside practicing social distancing, traditionally-designed suburbs could make more sense. Isolation takes a toll on people, COVID-19 or not.

Arguments like the one above are common among some urban planners, architects, and urbanists: neighborhoods full of suburban tract homes do not provide for community life and social interaction, depend on cars and limit opportunities for other forms of transportation, and waste resources. Whether COVID-19 helps advance this perspective remains to be seen.

 

When America’s unofficial third place closes 400 locations

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If Starbucks is an important third place for Americans to gather and interact, what happens when the company closes 400 stores because of COVID-19 and to focus more on drive-through and carry-out business?

business cafe coffee dark

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Starbucks announced on Wednesday that it will close 400 of its roughly 10,000 locations in the U.S. and Canada over the next 18 months as the company projects to lose up to $3.2 billion in sales this quarter due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. It’s not exactly a retrenchment. The company plans to end this year with 300 more stores than when it started, even accounting for the closures—but that’s half of what the chain had originally been planning. About 40 to 50 of the new locations will only offer pickup or drive-through.

Starbucks typically closes about 100 stores every year due to leases expiring and market conditions. The decision to up that number signals that Starbucks expects the recovery from the current recession to extend far into the new year. The company did not list which locations it plans to shutter, though it did say that they would be in “high-social gathering locations” like campuses and malls. Shares for the company fell by 4 percent in midday trading as the news broke. “As we navigate through the COVID-19 crisis, we are accelerating our store transformation plans to address the realities of the current situation, while still providing a safe, familiar and convenient experience for our customers,” Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson said in a press release.

While nearly all of the company’s cafés have reopened in limited capacities without in-store seating, the twin health and economic crises continue to discourage consumers from spending and venturing out to public spaces. The shock to Starbuck’s business model has reportedly accelerated its shift to focusing on takeaway service, which it had already been planning to do before the pandemic. In November, the company opened its first Starbucks Pickup store at Penn Plaza in New York City, where customers order and pay through their phones. While Starbucks locations have long served as a “third place” where people could meet and relax, customers in recent years have been placing more and more orders for takeout, perhaps due to the company’s recent focus on mobile ordering. The company estimates that 80 percent of its orders at company-owned stores in the U.S. are to-go. Now that the virus has made people even less likely to dawdle at cafés for an extended period of time, Starbucks expects that percentage to rise.

The new stores will emphasize the use of Starbucks’ ordering app, Uber Eats, walk-up windows, and curbside pickup to facilitate social distancing. Some store layouts will also begin including pickup counters that exclusively cater to mobile orders and food delivery services. The company hopes that large U.S. cities will eventually host a mix of cafés and pickup locations that are located within walking distance of one another in order to reduce crowding.

For a long time, the presence of a Starbucks has denoted a particular status for an area or community. Will the loss of a Starbucks or even the shift from a place one can sit and gather to one that sends food and drinks out the doors and windows harm communities?

Even without COVID-19, this hints at the limited public realm Americans have where fast-food places are some of the popular places people can or will gather. Starbucks presented this possibility though as a private business they still aim to make money and will restrict certain behavior. As the article notes, this shift may have already been underway; I noted the busy Starbucks drive-through early this year on a rare work session at a local store.

Suburban police and promoting a better future for youth

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On Instagram, Congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez connected defunding the police to what suburbs do instead:

AOCPoliceandSuburbs

A few thoughts:

1. According to sociologists and other scholars who have studied American suburbs over the last century, an overriding concern in suburbs is to protect families and let children flourish. The assumption is that suburban life – with its lower density, single-family homes, more space, better schools, lower crime – will benefit children in the long run.

2. At the same time, suburbs are also based on exclusion. For decades, only white people – and certain ones at that – were allowed in many suburbs. While this is officially off-limits today, it can be accomplished in other ways such as through exclusionary zoning, drawing school district boundaries, and through police.

3. Police can and have reinforced the race and class based exclusion in suburbs. This could range from sundown towns to watching fire bombings in Cicero, Illinois to harassing motorists, residents, and protestors in Ferguson, Missouri. Wealthier suburban residents generally do not want to involve the police in their conflicts but they can and do at times.

4. Many suburbs offer limited social services. The expectation is that residents will have the resources to provide for themselves or that corporations and local charities will provide.

5. Many suburbs like having their own police department. This allows them to retain local control, important for #2 and #3 above.

6. For an academic study of how this works in wealthier suburbia, I recommend America’s Safest City: Delinquency and Modernity in Suburbia. From the book description:

Adolescents, parents, teachers, coaches and officials, he concludes, are able in this suburban setting to recognize teens’ need for ongoing sources of trust, empathy, and identity in a multitude of social settings, allowing them to become what Singer terms ‘relationally modern’ individuals better equipped to deal with the trials and tribulations of modern life

Losing population in other Illinois cities

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Chicago gets a lot of attention for losing population but it is not the only Illinois city facing that issue:

RockfordCityWebsiteJune1120

Rockford, Illinois website – https://rockfordil.gov/

Decatur, in central Illinois about 40 miles east of Springfield, has lost 7.1% of its population since the 2010 census, according to the recently released 2019 population estimates. That drop is the third-largest percentage loss in the U.S. among cities with a population of 50,000 or more. Rockford comes in at No. 15 on that list. The northern Illinois city, the fifth-largest in the state with an estimated 145,609 residents, has lost 5% of its population during that nine-year period.

Rockford’s total population loss of 7,676 people over the last decade places it ninth nationwide among large cities, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, with Decatur (-5,385) at No. 15. Four of the five cities that have lost the most people since the last census are in the Midwest. Detroit has lost the most people, about 43,000, since 2010, followed by Baltimore, St. Louis, Cleveland and Toledo, Ohio…

“I think those cities are very susceptible to having populations hurt by the new service economy or the new postindustrial economy, and that’s because they have such a historical reliance, and a current reliance, on manufacturing and heavy-duty industry,” Wilson said. “And for those city economies that have not diversified, they really get hurt, they get pummeled. And what does that mean to get pummeled? People have a very difficult time living there and earning a living wage. They simply can’t make ends meet. And they become primed for thinking about leaving and trying to find something better.”…

“It’s going to create a further divide between the haves and the have-nots in places like Joliet, Aurora, Rockford,” Wilson said. “And people are going to want to leave.”

Three quick thoughts:

1. The population growth of the Sun Belt is a major force in American change in recent decades. Americans obsess over population growth and it is not in the Midwest so status and attention goes elsewhere.

2. This reminds me of Jennifer Egan’s book Look at Me where one of the main characters dreams of restoring Rockford to flourishing and growth. Yet, it is hard to imagine cities like Rockford or Decatur recapturing their past glory or entering a significant revival.

3. The narrative around population loss in Chicago often revolves around problems specific to Chicago. But, this article hints that it is a state-wide issue or a regional issue. If true, this would require a more coordinated effort across communities and groups that sometimes spend more time sniping at each other than working together (for example, feuds Illinois has with Indiana and Wisconsin rather than regional cooperation).

 

 

Bringing the Texas U-turn to Chicago

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An innovation is coming to a particularly difficult Chicago road construction site: a Texas U-turn will be in place for drivers hoping to get on the northbound Kennedy from the eastbound Eisenhower.

Google Maps image of Meachem Road and Illinois Route 390

Kennedy-bound traffic will be detoured onto the far-right Eisenhower lane and steered to the outbound Dan Ryan Expressway. From there, motorists will take a “Texas U-turn” at the Taylor Street interchange and go from there to the westbound Kennedy…

“The detour will be a dedicated lane separated by a barrier wall to restrict merging into the regular Dan Ryan lanes and requiring drivers to use the Taylor Street interchange,” IDOT engineers said.

What’s a Texas U-turn? It “refers to a roadway that allows vehicles to make a 180-degree maneuver to go in the opposite direction, usually without traffic signals,” IDOT spokeswoman Maria Castaneda said. “They were first widely used in Texas on one-way frontage roads that paralleled expressways.

“The free flow U-turn improves traffic flow and reduces congestion in certain situations because it keeps the U-turning traffic out of the cross road intersections. An example of this is at the Meacham Road interchange on Route 390.”

According to Wikipedia, the Texas U-turn is present in a number of states.

Two additional thoughts:

1. A precondition for the Texas U-turn seems to be having frontage roads along highways. There are some areas in the Chicago region where this is common – such as long the Dan Ryan Expressway – but many other areas where frontage roads are not present and properties back up to the highway. In Chicago, I wonder if the frontage roads are the result of fitting highways into the existing street grid (such as the Congress Street Expressway, later the Eisenhower).

2. It would be interesting to see how different road innovations spread across states. How do highway innovations diffuse across the United States? They may arise because of particular local conditions but then engineers and planners elsewhere see how they are applicable. At some point, there is federal intervention regarding safety and regulations. Having driven on highways across the United States, there is both familiarity with the system – similar signage, the roadways themselves look similar – as well as local peculiarities – exits on different sides, the size of on and off-ramps as well as the space between them, HOV lanes, etc.

Related post: the coming of the diamond interchange to the Chicago area.