Economy White Paper Series

The demise of dense downtown areas in the United States has been predicted throughout, and long before, the COVID-19 pandemic. But according to our new analysis, downtowns are far from dying and today continue to be the largest job centers in most regions across the nation.

While the report identifies new and unique challenges facing downtowns due to pandemic-driven shifts in behavior and preferences, these changes are not likely to outweigh the things that have traditionally drawn businesses and workers to centralized urban areas.

“A century ago Henry Ford predicted that cities were ‘doomed’ due to the mass production of cars, and those same predictions have come with every communication innovation since, from telephone to fax to email to Zoom,” said Taner Osman, Research Manager at the Center for Forecasting and the report’s author. “The prized benefits that central cities generally deliver – better access to workers, business services, infrastructure, and networking and innovation opportunities – have made downtowns much more resilient than people believed over the decades and firms still want a presence in these areas despite higher costs.”