From Philadelphia to New York, Detroit to Salt Lake City, Los Angeles to San Diego, cities are experiencing the post-pandemic era very differently. And while there is no one-size-fits-all solution, there are fundamental principles that any city can use to guide its approach to recovery.
In today's episode of The CityAge Podcast, brought to you by FLO EV Charging, we explore this topic in depth with Tracy Loh. She is a Fellow with the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Center for Transformative Placemaking at Brookings Metro, a part of the Brookings Institution, a think tank in Washington, DC.
Tracy and Lisa chat about the future of downtowns, commercial real estate and pandemic recovery, as well as picking their own favorite cities to live in.
From Philadelphia to New York, Detroit to Salt Lake City, Los Angeles to San Diego, cities are experiencing the post-pandemic era very differently. And while there is no one-size-fits-all solution, there are fundamental principles that any city can use to guide its approach to recovery.
In today's episode of The CityAge Podcast, brought to you by FLO EV Charging, we explore this topic in depth with Tracy Loh. She is a Fellow with the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Center for Transformative Placemaking at Brookings Metro, a part of the Brookings Institution, a think tank in Washington, DC.
Tracy and Lisa chat about the future of downtowns, commercial real estate and pandemic recovery, as well as picking their own favorite cities to live in.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to the City Age Podcast sponsored by Flo, a leader in electric vehicle charging. I'm Alan Markovich, managing director of City Age, and I'm here once again with Lisa Chamberlain from the Center for Urban Transformation at the World Economic Forum.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
Hi, Alan. It's nice to be back,
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Lisa. You've heard the expression it takes a village, right? Of
Speaker 2 (00:18):
Course.
Speaker 1 (00:18):
Well, I think that African proverb that it takes a village to raise a child, applies to city building just as much, and I think today's guest, Tracy Lowe is a great example of that. Building a vibrant, successful sustainable city takes so much more than the public sector. Sure, it does take the government and policy makers, but it also takes investors, creators, academics, industry associations, developers, chambers of commerce, nonprofits, and think tanks, and that's where Tracy comes in. Tracy Lowe is a fellow with Brookings Metro, which is part of the Brookings Institution in Washington dc a think tank that conducts in-depth nonpartisan research. You spoke with her recently. Lisa, how would you describe her focus?
Speaker 2 (00:58):
Tracy is part of the Ant and Robert M. Bass Center for transformative placemaking. Since the pandemic, she has been focusing on downtown's commercial real estate and pandemic recovery for obvious reasons.
Speaker 1 (01:11):
That's an important focus, but it's also quite a wide range. Given your background, I'm guessing you found the breadth of the conversation invigorating. Was it challenging too?
Speaker 2 (01:20):
Well, I don't know if challenging is the right word, because she is so articulate. I really enjoy talking with her, not just because of her in-depth grasp of the current situation, but just how clearly she's able to convey what different cities are experiencing in a very nuanced way. What I would say is that she's so clear-eyed about conveying what the differences are between cities and how they're recovering and how the local context matters so much there. From Philadelphia to New York, Detroit, salt Lake City, San Diego, these cities are all experiencing the post pandemic era very differently and she's very knowledgeable about all of that. And while there's no one size fits all solution, there are fundamental principles that every city can use to guide their approach to recovery, and she draws that out in a very clear and compelling way.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
Here is Lisa's conversation with Tracy Lowe from Brookings Metro.
Speaker 2 (02:15):
Tracy, welcome to the City H Podcast.
Speaker 3 (02:17):
Hi Lisa, it's great to be here.
Speaker 2 (02:19):
You're an expert in cities and placemaking. Let's start with the big picture. You've been writing a lot on this topic and in one article the phrase fiscal time bomb was used. What are the drivers of this fiscal time bomb and how could this play out if these issues going addressed?
Speaker 3 (02:36):
So every city has a different fiscal structure and basically the length of the ticker on the time bomb or whether there's a bomb at all, something that varies from place to place. So in the United States, what we've seen is that there are some cities where the time bomb has already gone off. And so those cities during the pandemic were forced to use the federal relief funds that were provided through the American Rescue Plan in order to do revenue replacement because already pretty much the second the pandemic started happening, these cities had experienced significant losses of revenue and they had to take those unrestricted dollars from the federal government and use them to bail themselves out. So in a city like Philadelphia for example, that is highly dependent on wage taxes that can only be collected if workers are physically in the city, the bomb's already gone off and they're in a really challenging fiscal situation.
(03:38):
In other cities, there is more of a lag because whether it's the dependence on revenue is primarily related to commercial property taxes or whether it's related to sales and hospitality taxes, that's also going to affect the timing. So places that depend a lot on sales and hospitality. Taxes also took a really hard hit during the pandemic, but are now in many cases seeing a strong recovery, whereas places that depend a lot on commercial property tax revenue are just now starting to see that valuations may be coming down. But there's also a whole nother set of cities that are not going to be particularly negatively fiscally impacted, where there is no bomb cities that are already adapted to having a high rate of office vacancy in their downtown and where they're more dependent on residential property taxes. And those valuations have generally enjoyed strong positive growth during the pandemic time period.
Speaker 2 (04:46):
So what's an example of a city like that?
Speaker 3 (04:48):
Phoenix and Dallas immediately come to mind as downtowns that already had double digit office vacancy prior to the pandemic, but have experienced very strong residential growth during this time period.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
So some cities are already seeing a tax revenue reduction at a time when investment is really needed. And for example, I'm in New York City where commercial property is about 12% of the budget. That doesn't sound apocalyptic, but it's certainly not helping at a time when investment in the future is really important. The CEO of one real estate company here, our XR has been saying the quiet part out loud, they're going to hand underperforming properties back to the banks. Is this a kind of soft landing approach or is it kind of admitting maybe a mini commercial property? Crisis
Speaker 3 (05:38):
Crises are all about timing, and if the city of New York experienced a 12% budget gap right now in a single fiscal year, that would be an absolutely massive crisis. That would be an extremely painful cut to make. That would be truly excruciating. So I don't want anyone to hear that 12% number and think like not a big deal. The issue is that we're not expecting to go from present valuations to zero and the drop in value, whatever the drop in valuations is going to be, it's not going to occur overnight. It's going to be a really slow wave. What is going on in commercial property is just fundamentally different from, for example, the residential mortgage crisis that maybe a lot of us remember from recent US history,
Speaker 2 (06:35):
Indeed
Speaker 3 (06:35):
With a house look, either it's occupied or not, right? It's like there are two options, zero or one, and office buildings aren't like that. Even an office building that is 50% vacant might still be a revenue positive asset.
Speaker 2 (06:55):
So you're saying this approach could be as off landing then for a place like New York?
Speaker 3 (06:59):
I think that we do have to distinguish New York in particular from other US office markets because first off, New York is the biggest office market in the United States and the next one isn't close. And New York office inventory is extraordinarily highly concentrated in Manhattan, south of Central Park, almost half of all of the office buildings in the entire New York metro region, including all of Long Island, big chunks of northern New Jersey, et cetera. Almost half of all that inventory is in Manhattan south of Central Park. So there is a disproportionately concentrated impact in Manhattan that is much less concentrated in other US metro areas. So both in size and concentration, New York has exposure to commercial office valuations that other cities do not have.
Speaker 2 (08:01):
Right. So this would be a good point I think to turn to some more specific examples of what exactly some cities are doing. And it seems to be there are different approaches as you just outlined. Different contexts require different approaches. So for example, in Chicago, the city seems to have a more targeted approach focused on the LaSalle Street corridor, while New York has a more distributed approach between lower Manhattan and Midtown. And San Francisco of course has this sort of whole of downtown approach in their roadmap for recovery plan. Can you talk about where you see progress happening? What is actually working or at least showing promise?
Speaker 3 (08:44):
So this is really early days in terms of recovery strategies specifically related to the pandemic and other disruptions of 2020 and beyond. And I think it's really too soon to say the best way to guess what strategies might be effective this time around is to look back to the great recession and the last big disruption and to see what works. So that's why I did a research piece looking at that and what we saw when we looked back to the great recession is that downtowns that were successful at growing their job market share, they were making investments in livable mixed use, walkable downtowns because that made those places also more attractive to employers.
Speaker 2 (09:38):
And I would actually throw Detroit in that mix. Absolutely. I think it's a story that's a little bit under the radar to be honest, because 10 years ago Detroit was in bankruptcy and in a very rapid period of time, especially in commercial real estate or just real estate terms in general, Detroit has vastly improved its downtown mix. They've rehabbed buildings, they've added public space. There's a lot of programming that brings people into the city, and in fact, Detroit according to cell phone activity is actually doing better than Los Angeles in terms of their recovery time or Toronto or Vancouver. So I find that kind of remarkable. Also, talk a little bit more about what are the sorts of tactical urbanism type things that should be going on with cities if they are truly trying to diversify their downtowns?
Speaker 3 (10:36):
I think there's a couple key lessons to learn from Detroit in particular. The first is that it's not the public sector that is going to save downtowns alone. This isn't just a matter of public policy because the single biggest thing that made a difference in Detroit was that Dan Gilbert and his real estate company, rock Ventures, made a major investment in the downtown. Over half of the buildings in the core of downtown Detroit, inside the People mover loop are owned by rock ventures. And they bought a ton of buildings at very low valuations and put a ton of capital into rehabilitating them and bringing them back to active use. That capital was patient capital that didn't need to get payback right away, and that could go on a quest for the right tenants. That capital was also tied to a major employer, Quicken Loans and the Dan Gilbert family of companies.
(11:39):
So he had a lot of his own jobs that he could move from suburban Livonia into downtown Detroit. So it was an employer led effort. And so one key takeaway here is that partnership between the public and the private sector is key to reshaping downtowns because the bottom line is half of the built environment is primarily owned and controlled by the private sector and the public sector doesn't have control over every lever. There's one more thing with Detroit, which is that there's also been an incredible investment in placemaking in Detroit, and that has been a joint effort between individual people, dreamers, people who care about downtown, the downtown business improvement district, the private sector philanthropy and investments in the Detroit water riverfront and in campus Martius Park have really transformed the space and how it functions and how it's activated at different times of day.
Speaker 2 (12:44):
But what happens if a city is struggling and you don't have Dan Gilbert?
Speaker 3 (12:52):
I think that every city has a private sector and that while there may not be one single person who has that kind of jobs at their command or capital at their command, their is a group of people like that. The question is, is that group of people actually getting together and talking and is that group of people, are they open to partnering beyond their group in order to create investment opportunities in the downtown that might not otherwise exist?
Speaker 2 (13:29):
I want to talk about a few other articles that you've written about. I've noticed that you do like to poke holes in conventional wisdom. So for example, you recently coauthored an article that took a closer look at Salt Lake City, which has been celebrated as a big winner and the post pandemic shakeup, the piece also looks at why San Diego's downtown activity has shown a big uptick, but that's not necessarily because office workers are back. So if you could unpack those two examples for us and what they say about how we should be really evaluating a city's downtown health.
Speaker 3 (14:03):
Sure. Let's start with Salt Lake City. So first off, I want to be clear that I don't have anything against Salt Lake City. I just went there last year and it was a good visit. I learned a lot. I think there are many positive lessons that other cities can learn from Salt Lake, but what's going on there is basically that Salt Lake City does not have a really strong employment center in their downtown. So if you look at the distribution of where office buildings are in the Salt Lake City metro area, the distribution is very different from New York that its office concentration is not really centered on the downtown. It's more like one third, one third, one third between downtown the rest of the and the suburbs. And then Salt Lake City does have an extraordinarily strong residential market share in the downtown. A lot of people wanting to live in downtown Salt Lake City, a highly accessible area.
(15:06):
And so if you think about this metric of unique cell phone pings happening inside the downtown, salt Lake City just had a very low baseline relative to other downtowns prior to the pandemic because it wasn't a regionally singularly massive commuter destination prior to the pandemic. And because there's such strong demand for residential growth and because that's something that Salt Lake City is really leaning into and making it possible to add a lot of new apartment inventory in the downtown, they have built a lot of new apartments in the downtown area. And that means that as those apartments become occupied, that adds new cell phone pings to the downtown that can replace the missing cell phones from commuters that aren't showing up anymore.
Speaker 2 (16:03):
It reminds me that after say nine 11 or some other major disruptions in New York, there's always been a lot of talk about distributing the office commercial concentration further out either to New Jersey or even downtown. Brooklyn was targeted maybe 25 years ago for this reason, and yet it's still very concentrated there. I mean, should the cities be trying to achieve that sort of one-third one-third distribution?
Speaker 3 (16:31):
My personal take is no, no. I think that's a massive misread of the current moment. So why do we have cities? Because there's this thing called agglomeration economies where when you bring stuff into proximity, there's an extra power boost that happens, right? Absolutely. And spread out on a piece of paper, one plus one is two, but when you put the one and the one really close together, one plus one can equal three. And that productivity boost, that boost in innovation that happens when things, when jobs, when amenities are in close physical proximity, that boost is why we have cities. That's the special sauce, that's the unique value add, that's the value proposition. And we should not be walking away from that. Zoom is not a substitute for that. What I found in my research is that cities in which jobs are more closely concentrated near each other, and I'm not talking about jobs in the same firm.
(17:46):
I'm talking about just any job physically near any other job. The regions that concentrate jobs closer together have higher productivity per job, and that's what creates wealth. Otherwise, it's just growth for growth's sake. And we should be seeking to have an economy that is creating real wealth. So I think that the benefits of proximity are not just what downtowns are about, they're what cities are about, and we should be awake to the fact that Zoom is not a substitute for that. Absolutely. If two people already know each other, sure they can reach out. They can set up a zoom that can be instead of getting together in the same office. So instead of, you can use that to interact with other people at your same firm, but the benefits of proximity come when you are physically near other people who don't work at the same firm as you,
Speaker 2 (18:51):
Right? And you're having an interaction, you're having an exchange, it's just casual on the street or something, and you realize, oh, they're working on something that's related to what I'm working on, and suddenly you have a new idea about who to work with or how to approach something
Speaker 3 (19:04):
Or just maybe who knows what it is. Maybe it's just the process of leaving the familiar setting of your home and going to another setting that is different every day because it's always full of different combinations of people and happenings. Nobody knows exactly why proximity generates this boost. But one thing that there is a vast robust Nobel Prize winning economic evidence base for is that the benefits of proximity are real. This is something absolutely that varies sector by sector, but generally speaking, the sectors of the economy that are growing the fastest are the ones that have the strongest demand for proximity. And so that's one of the reasons why I'm bullish on downtowns in the long term, but you asked me earlier about San Diego, and I want to come back to that because this gets the importance of understanding how do we measure a strong downtown? The reason why San Diego and Salt Lake City are popping so high on the downtown recovery.com unique cell phone visitation index is because in a typical US downtown, both prior to the pandemic and during recovery, more than half of the foot traffic in a downtown by that metric is tourists and other casual visitors.
(20:30):
So if you want to build a downtown that's very successful from a tourism perspective, then that's the right metric to use and that will show you your recovery. But I don't think that the average person looks across the biggest US downtowns looks at the ones that are super dependent on tourism and goes, there is a strong resilient downtown that is able to support high quality public spaces and transit and weather disruptions. This can't just be about tourism. And that metric is I think that people underestimate how sensitive that metric is to tourism and how even downtowns that you don't expect. Like San Diego, you might be like, oh, right, yeah, the airport is in the downtown zip code,
Speaker 2 (21:28):
Right? Well, that was the point that was in the article that the airport is actually in the downtown zip code. So once people started flying all over the place, they were desperate to do something. San Diego, the downtown metrics really benefited from having the airport in the same zip code as downtown,
Speaker 3 (21:49):
Right? They benefit in the sense that air travel has recovered faster than office utilization, but actually domestic air travel is still not back to its 2019 baseline. And international travel has been even slower to recover. So even when we think about cities like New York or Philadelphia or Chicago, these are also major tourism destinations and they're also destinations that have higher shares of international tourists compared to a Salt Lake city. And so that's another reason why Salt Lake City's unique cell phone visitation volumes may look better than some other cities. It's because for obvious reasons, international travel has been slow to recover. But does anybody really think that international tourism is never coming back
Speaker 2 (22:45):
Or that it'll never be disrupted again? Right.
Speaker 3 (22:48):
And so is that the right metric for defining downtown strength and resilience?
Speaker 1 (22:56):
More from Tracy Lowe right after this. I'm Alon Markovich and I'm joined by Chris Thorson, vice president and Chief Marketing Officer of Flow. Chris, thanks for joining us.
Speaker 4 (23:05):
Thanks Alon. Thanks for having me. Flow
Speaker 1 (23:07):
Is intimately involved in decarbonizing urban settings effectively looking ahead 20 or 30 years, say 2050, let's say. How do you envision the landscape of electric charging
Speaker 4 (23:18):
The things that we're talking about today will be a thing of the past. This concept of range anxiety and worrying about where I'm going to get my next charge, that's going to be a thing of the past. We're going to see this because a lot of the individual small networks that have been out today, we're going to have more consolidation of these networks into nationally known national brand networks. Just like we've got with our cellular networks today. You don't think about how you're going to connect when you land in a new city. It just automatically happens. You automatically got your connection wherever you go. And so I think it's going to become a norm. And I think wherever you go, ev charging is just going to be an amenity attached to that other service that you're taking part in. You go to a hockey game, you go to a baseball game, you go to a football game, they're going to be in the stadiums. You're going to go to your retail store, grocery store, they're going to be in the parking lot. You're going to go to the city core or the city center, you're going to see 'em on the curbside. So wherever you go, you're going to be everywhere. They're going to be easy to use. And that's what we're designing today. And I think the future is bright.
Speaker 1 (24:26):
It may seem obvious, but why does reliability matter so much?
Speaker 4 (24:29):
It's a great question because so many things these days, we kind of take for granted that it's always going to work every time we go, and that's just not the case. Unfortunately today with EV charging, there's so many things that can go wrong. It can be the actual equipment gets overheated or something and it breaks because these things are out in the public or maybe they've been vandalized. So it's really important that the end user doesn't care why something might not work. They just need to make sure that it does work. And so it's imperative as a manufacturer and a network operator to be out there tracking whether or not these stations are up and online so that each and every time a user comes in to use one of our chargers, they know it's going to work and they know they're going to have a great experience. Because right now, people just don't trust those networks and we got to change that. And flow is really leading the way with our 98% or better reliability rating to make sure that people get charges when they need 'em and where they
Speaker 1 (25:22):
Need 'em. Chris, thank you so much for joining us today.
Speaker 4 (25:25):
Pleasure.
Speaker 1 (25:26):
To learn more about Flow EV charging, visit their website@flow.com. And now back to Lisa's conversation with Tracy Lowe.
Speaker 2 (25:35):
So we haven't touched on transit yet, but a big reason downtowns in North America are not recovering as much as cities around the world is due to our built environment basically being set up for cars. And so there's a lot of sprawl and longer commutes. Talk about the relationship between cities where transit is primarily used for commuting to work and cities where transit is used for a more variety of purposes.
Speaker 3 (26:02):
Generally speaking, in the us, the transit systems that prior to the pandemic had higher regional mode share in terms of a higher share of all trips in the region being taken by transit. They also had extraordinarily high, the shares of transit trips within the system were for the purpose of going to or from work. So in the US the vast majority of travel is not related to work. It's like about a quarter of trips are work related
Speaker 2 (26:34):
Trips, and that includes transit and cars and everything.
Speaker 3 (26:37):
So that's just like if you just think about travel that's happening in the United States, only about a quarter of it is commuting. But if you look at the major US transit systems, it's like 50 to 60% of the trips that are happening on the transit system prior to the pandemic are related to work travel. And so this is one of these chicken egg situations. Some reasons why work travels are uniquely easy to serve via transit because if jobs are super concentrated in a downtown, then that gives you just one destination to serve. And that kind of concentrated demand is particularly suited to being served by transit. But it's also that a lot of these transit systems have super optimized their service in order to serve specifically office commuters. So offering extremely high levels of service, like extremely high levels of service frequency between eight and 9:00 AM and between five and 6:00 PM Monday to Friday, and then a lot less service all other times.
Speaker 2 (27:50):
But what does that mean for the patterns of people either going back to work or not going back to work and how that's impacting not just the transit system, but the city overall.
Speaker 3 (28:00):
So it shouldn't come as a surprise that people are more likely to choose transit when the service is frequent. And so if we want to capture more of that 75% of trips that are not related to work, then there has to be frequent transit service at the times when people are making those kinds of trips. Now, because of the pandemic, that's gotten pretty hard to predict. People are running little errands all day now and at night and on the weekends. It's not like work-life balance anymore. It's work-life integration. We're just kind of like bopping around doing everything at every time. So service has to become distributed throughout the day and at a reasonable level of frequency so that it's convenient and people can rely on it.
Speaker 2 (28:55):
I definitely noticed that New York City early on, there was a clear focus on making sure the trains were running on time during commute times, and I almost never had a problem at those normal sort of commuter hours. But if you went to Manhattan, so I live in Brooklyn, so if I go to Manhattan to meet a friend and we're going to go to a show and then I'm taking the train back a couple of times, it was a downright disaster trying to get back home.
Speaker 3 (29:20):
You resort to the power of prayer. This is why Mike Doty wrote, thank you Lord for sending me the F train, because there is a sense of despair that can overtake you when you are standing on the platform waiting and waiting and waiting and wondering if anyone's ever going to come get you.
Speaker 2 (29:38):
I know that feeling. I know
Speaker 3 (29:40):
That just hurt. And we got to address that feeling because those are the trips that are out there waiting to be served right now. And the alternative is being stuck in traffic forever, right? Because it would be one thing if the rise of hybrid and remote work meant that there was less demand for travel, then we could say like, okay, let's all take a step back and take a deep breath and rest. But actually what we're finding is that hybrid and remote workers make more trips than they did previously. The demand for mobility is greater than ever. It's just distributed differently. And so how our infrastructure meets that demand needs to be distributed differently, but it's doable. Demand is not spread all over the place like peanut butter. It's still concentrated in activity centers. It's just not exclusively concentrated in downtowns. It's connecting downtowns to other activity centers where people are living and go into a ball game or whatever it is. We just need to get all these things connected together.
Speaker 2 (30:55):
If you could live in any city in the world, which one would it be and why?
Speaker 3 (30:59):
So I know I need to answer this question the way that you're asking it, which is like you're basically asking me which city kind of checks the boxes in terms of this kind of city attributes that I like. But I always struggle with this because people choose where to live based on economic opportunity and their social networks. And for me, those two things are extraordinarily highly concentrated in the District of Columbia. So I already live in the greatest city in the world for me, but I think that what you're asking is what place has great transit and public spaces and culture? And that is, it's a fair question to ask. I wish I could answer it better because there is still so much of the world I haven't seen. I've never been to Stockholm, I've never been to Buenos Aires, I've never been to Vancouver. So I want to see the whole world, but I have a limited data set to answer this from I think that I would choose Mexico City if I had to enter witness protection and go somewhere else right now, like a city that's incredibly vibrant, that has amazing food and people and an extraordinary transit system world-class public spaces, that's great for families and that has amazing weather, right? Let's not kid ourselves. It's 75 degrees every day, Mexico City, and I would love to live
Speaker 2 (32:43):
There. Well, I'll embarrass myself by saying I have not been to Mexico City, so I will definitely add that to my list.
Speaker 3 (32:50):
Lisa, where would you want to live?
Speaker 2 (32:52):
Well, I would actually move to London. I mean, I know that's not like, it is not exactly far flung or anything or a unique answer, but I just love how that city renews itself over and over and over again. And I do feel like it has achieved a certain balance in terms of still maintaining a certain level of democracy and openness and investing in transit and social housing and the garden. I mean, the greenery around London is just spectacular.
Speaker 3 (33:28):
I love that you raised London because that I think is the perfect kicker to close this out, which is that the answer to downtown's reinventing what proximity means and how to capture the value of proximity, it's that we know these extraordinary office concentrations that are like monocultures. They have to change and that we need to add housing in particular, but we need to add every kind of use and reintroduce that into the mix in our downtowns. But part of doing that that is not being discussed enough is that that means that the public rights of way, the streets can't just be traffic sewers that are designed to jam suburban car commuters in and out of the downtown. Absolutely. And London has truly led the way globally in re-imagining how rights of way are priced, designed, and managed in order to produce an incredible mobility experience.
Speaker 2 (34:28):
I agree with that a hundred percent. So when I was there in June, I was riding bikes all over the downtown core, and I was never honked at one time by a driver. It was incredible. You take your life in your hands in New York when you ride the downtown streets there. I felt perfectly safe. I felt respected as a bicyclist. I just had to remember to be on the other side of the road, which I did mess that up a couple of times.
Speaker 3 (34:56):
And that's what we all want is to just feel like we belong and that it's okay for us to be somewhere. And while out on the street, I've been honked at, I've had people try to run me over, I've had racial slurs shouted at me. It can be scary out there, and we have to address those feelings and create spaces of belonging and reassurance as part of re-imagining cities.
Speaker 2 (35:27):
I agree with that a hundred percent. That's a great place to end. Thank you Tracy, so much, and I look forward to talking to you again in the future. I'm sure you'll have a lot more to say.
Speaker 3 (35:35):
Thanks, Lisa.
Speaker 1 (35:37):
Lisa, I'm so glad you had the opportunity to chat with Tracy. I found myself agreeing with her on virtually everything she said. She talked about why we have cities. I love that the way she describes why we even have cities. And maybe that's just obvious, but what was your particular takeaway from the conversation?
Speaker 2 (35:54):
Yeah, I feel like the way she talks about cities is a very interesting combination of sort of clear-eyed data-driven analysis, but then adding on the emotionality to it when we're talking about the importance of cities, she's getting very passionate about why they exist and for how they impact people's lives. And also at the end of the conversation when we were talking about where would we live, and the idea that people need to feel like they belong in the city they live in, it really compliments her sort of analysis really well with the sort of humanity of why we live in cities.
Speaker 1 (36:36):
But I also thought the straightforwardness is great too. I would never want to have a debate with her.
Speaker 2 (36:41):
Yes, right.
Speaker 1 (36:42):
She doesn't even make an argument. She's so authoritative without being authoritative. You know what I mean? Yes,
Speaker 2 (36:48):
Yes, exactly.
Speaker 1 (36:50):
Well, that's it for today. We'll be back in two weeks. For more about the business of city building and our future city age events, make sure to visit city age.com, subscribe to our newsletter, and follow us on LinkedIn. See you next time, everyone.
Speaker 5 (37:05):
I.