Revisiting The Urban Doom Loop

Good trivia team name, poor modern reality.

I wrote about this once before:

THE URBAN DOOM LOOP!!!

Basically, the “Urban Doom Loop” is the idea that remote and hybrid work arrangements will kill downtowns. As they kill urban cores, cities will have a harder time collecting taxes, so cities will then tighten belts and core elements of a city’s infrastructure will suffer (I suppose this is in the absence of “public-private partnerships”).

Per Planet Money recently:

Nearly 20% of office space across the U.S. is sitting empty, a milestone that exceeds the vacancy rate following the 2008 financial crisis. It’s worse in downtown Los Angeles and San Francisco, where 28% and 29% of spaces were registered vacant in the first quarter of 2023, respectively.

Analysts worry that this trend could set off a domino effect…