Opinion | The Migrant Crisis and the Urban Death Spiral

Cities are organic entities. They have life cycles. They can thrive and grow or suffer and shrink. As secretary of housing and urban development, I learned this firsthand. Detroit wasn’t always the Detroit of today. San Francisco today is different from San Francisco 10 years ago. New York, Los Angeles and Chicago aren’t what they were 20 years ago. It’s time we opened our eyes to reality. Many cities are going backward.

We are experiencing an unrecognized urban crisis as cities grapple with post-Covid realities. Cities were created primarily as locations for employment. Post-Covid remote work, Zoom meetings, abbreviated workweeks and increased mobility change the basic urban equation. Fewer people need to be in the city to work, and during Covid many adopted new lifestyles and locations. We still aren’t getting people into the office five days a week and may never again. That drop in population ripples across the urban economy, affecting real estate, restaurants, retail and more, and costing sales, income and property-tax revenue.