Noah Smith, Columnist

Suburbs Can Woo City People By Being More City-Like

The ’burbs of the ’70s won’t cut it anymore.

August 14, 2020 at 10:30 AM UTC

Noah Smith is a former Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He was an assistant professor of finance at Stony Brook University, and he blogs at Noahpinion.

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Photographer: Tom Kelley Archive/Archive Photos/Getty Images

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America’s urban landscape is on the cusp of change. As big cities struggle, suburbs and smaller cities have a chance to win over fleeing workers, boosting their tax bases. But in order to be attractive places to live, they’ll have to look a bit more city-like.

Many big U.S. cities were already struggling before the pandemic struck. Powerful local homeowners known as NIMBYs blocked new development and transit, making urban cores less affordable and less convenient, and slowing the urban influx that began around 1990. Now Covid-19 is hitting big cities the hardest: