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- [00:00]
A
Foreign.
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B
Hello, and welcome to the Cities edition of Slate Money, your guide to the business and finance news of the week. We've been promising this one for a while and it is finally here. I'm Felix Salmon, the Axios. I'm here with Emily Peck of HuffPost. Hello, I'm here with Anna Shymansky of Breaking Views. Hello, and I'm here with Richard Florida. Introduce yourself, Richard. Who are you and where are you from?
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C
I'm Richard Florida. I'm originally from Newark. Sometimes I'm called an urban theorist. I actually have a PhD in City and regional planning. I teach at the University of Toronto. Also I'm a distinguished fellow at nyu. And I, I live in Toronto most of the time. But we've been hanging out in the warmth of our condominium in Miami beach, which we never had until we moved to Toronto. But Toronto is sufficiently cold that you want a place to go that's warm in the middle of winter. But we got stuck here longer than we usually are.
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B
We are having you on to talk everything about cities. We're going to talk a lot about New York, which is the epicenter of the crisis, and why it's the epicenter of the crisis and why other dense cities have not seen what New York has seen. We're going to talk about restaurants, we're going to talk about retail, we're going to talk about suburbs, we're going to talk about all manner of questions related to the intersection of density and Covid. We're also obviously mostly in the numbers round, going to be talking about some of the numbers that came out during the jobs report this week, which was extraterrestrially terrible, I think is one way of putting it. All that coming up on Slate Money. So, Richard, it is awesome to have you here. We mentioned density apropos of something random like once a couple of weeks ago and got this slew of emails going. You have no idea what you're talking about. Seoul is a very dense city and has had two deaths. This has got nothing to do with density. Covid has nothing to do with density. And I guess the main common denominator here was basically you New Yorkers. You think it's all about you and you want to say, well, just it's not our fault that New York was the global epicenter. It's the fact that New York is dense, but really it's got nothing to do with density. If you look at all of the other dense cities, can we New Yorkers feel a little bit like it's not our fault we're dense or is that completely.
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C
No, I think the person who's done the best actual research on this is a guy named Jed Kolko. And Jed is a, a really good urban economist who happens to work in the private sector. He worked for like Zillow or Trulia, I think, and now he works for a job site called Indeed. But he writes for really good places like he's written for 538 or the Upshot Jed ran regressions. And you know, density is a factor. It's positive and significant with regard to however you look at Covid cases or COVID deaths. And if you take New York out, it's still positive. If you look at the distribution of places in the United States that have gotten hit with this, more urban places have higher incidents than more suburban places have higher incidents than more rural places. That said, everything those critics said was probably accurate. It's one of many factors that helps propagate the virus or make places more vulnerable. And so two things I would say. The first is New York is one group of kinds of places that got hit horribly with this big dense global cities that have lots of tourism and a lot of flow of people. And then you know, have, and people will debate this, have a level of crowding, have people living in multi generational families, may have a subway now we can talk about that. There's a big debate about that. But also, you know, these industrial supply chain centers that are linked to Wuhan like Detroit through automotive supply chains and northern Italy, you know, not only through automotive supply chains but through fashion goods, handbags, dresses, shoes, and then these global ski slope jet set resort places, ski slopes like Rocky Mountains and Verbier and alpine places. And then there are a bunch of other factors that put places at risk. And I think the two people focus on are density and lockdown. And I think both of them density makes it worse on balance and lockdowns make it better on balance. But there are other, and we can talk about that. There are other factors that make a place more or less susceptible to this damn virus.
- [04:38]
B
So I'm fascinated by the supply chain thing. The way you're saying that Milan had the supply chain in the fashion industry and Detroit had the supply chain in the auto industry. Is that just because one of the things about supply chains is they're also people corridors and you get a bunch of business people flying backwards and forwards to their suppliers and that travel back and forth spreads.
- [05:02]
C
Yeah, so that's what I meant to say. It's not coming through the parts. It's coming through the people who are going, U.S. workers going to China to look at plants, Chinese workers coming to work in Detroit or coming to work in Milan. There's a lot of Chinese workers who work and I think it's probably coming, it may be coming from managers but often workers are moving back and forth, they're learning new production systems and when engineers, maybe it's engineers and workers who are kind of working on the line together trying to sort stuff out. So yeah, it's coming and that's not to say it doesn't come through other mechanisms. You know, Detroit does have a very big global airport and Milan is a global city and had the fashion week. So there are probably other things but I think there's been enough evidence to suggest it's been those supply chain linkages and the people flows across those linkages that have been important.
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A
And so I'm curious your thoughts on Germany and like why Germany obviously has cities is also involved in supply chains, especially related to autos, but obviously hasn't had quite the same levels.
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C
Well, I mean, I mean I think you could also say the same thing about San Francisco and other places. I was just talking to this really interesting epidemiologist who said it's a very heterogeneous, not only disease, it's a very heterogeneous way it hits places even if you look at the map of the United States. But I think Germany is very interesting from an urbanist perspective and I didn't think of this until you asked this question. It is the one place that cities don't follow a power law in. Urbanists always say this where the big city is kind of twice as big as the next two cities and the next four cities are half as big as the next two. Germany because of the partition has all of these kind of mid sized cities. So it doesn't have a king City, that's 1, 2. Germany, although it has a subway, tends to be. Its cities don't tend to be skyscraper cities. They don't have giant buildings. Obviously it's a car place and you know, probably, and I don't know this for a fact, its age distribution may be slightly younger than some at some of these places. Although I know there are a lot of Germans who are overweight. Maybe they are on balance healthier than other places. But I think just stepping back, when I look at the list of factors, density is one for sure. Crowding is more important though. And I think, you know, when I wrote a piece for City Lab and I said there's rich people density and poor people density. I'm sitting in a condominium in Miami beach in a very dense neighborhood in South Beach. I'm sure maybe Felix is sitting in Lower Manhattan, but I haven't been. I mean, I go out for a walk. I'm too chicken to ride my bicycle because I'm afraid I'll fall and have to go to the er. But I go for a walk every day. But I haven't had to go to a store since March 13th. I mean, that's just everything I want comes to me, even though I'm in a condominium building, you know what I'm saying? In a pretty dense area. But if I was a less fortunate person, if I was a frontline service worker, I'd have to go out and work with other people. And in fact, New York has a very high percentage of those kinds of people, frontline service workers. And I'd probably have to take transit to get to work. Crowding is a big factor, not just density, if you live in a multi generational household. So ethnic communities, immigrant communities, the Hasidic community, age, duh. I mean, one of the reasons northern Italy was hit so hard was because age. But there's a couple I want to mention that I think are really interesting and I think you guys might find interesting and listeners might. There have been a lot of critics of urbanism who've criticized cities like San Francisco because they're childless. And that's a very relevant criticism that people with families have been forced out of these places because they can't pay the rent. Well, if children, if we close schools, because children are vectors, and the jury's out on that, whether they are or not, but let's say they are. Well, if you're a city like San Francisco, which has the lowest percentage of children at home of any city on the United States, you're going to have less spread that way. Similarly, if you're healthier, if you're fitter, if you're younger, which San Francisco is, low levels of obesity, low levels of diabetes, low levels of hypertension. And then finally on the flip side, if you're a city with high levels of social capital, and I think this is very true of northern Italy, some of the classic studies of social capital have been about northern Italy. The tight family linkages, community linkages, civic and social ties. You know, Lyman Stone said on Twitter the other day, and I really like Lyman's work. We don't grant everything, but I like. He's like one of the great tragedies of this may be that social capital ends up being a propagator of the virus. So it's to say that there are many factors in addition to density, characteristics of the population and characteristics of places that might make a place more or less vulnerable to this damn virus.
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B
Let me ask you about transit because that's one of the things you said that, you know, the jury's out on. I know that Milan and London are putting a bunch of effort into trying to create sort of human powered alternatives to transit in terms of bike lanes and wider sidewalks and that kind of thing. One thing you mentioned about Germany is they have a bunch of transit, but it's often like well ventilated S Bahns rather than the sort of packed subway systems that we associated with places like Tokyo or New York. What's your view of subways and is this like a real sort of existential threat for subways systems around the world? Is this something huge for them?
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C
So we'll get to the facts in a minute. What such as they are, but I don't think the facts matter. I think people are going to be scared of trains and subways. And we saw that in China transit ridership was down. People turned the cars and I think it's like getting in a crowded elevator, getting on an airplane, going up into a tall building. I think there's just going to be a fear. Now how long that fear lasts, Is it two years, three years, four? It won't be forever. It'll be for some time. So I think there's going to be fear. And that the New York Times reporter who wrote that she had a kid and she bought a car and people pilloried her, which was horrible. I mean, I certainly understand why she bought a car. The facts seem to be mixed or there's some debate. Now Jeffrey Harris at MIT is a pretty serious guy. I mean, I've talked to Jeffrey. I don't know him personally. I've looked at his cv. This is a guy who's a scientist. I believe he's a medical doctor, holds an appointment in economics at mit. This is not a silly person. He's pretty convinced and that paper convinces me as a reader that he's probably got a point. He wrote this very interesting paper that the main transmission vehicle in New York City was the subway. And one of the things he seized upon is also the distance of commute. So people who are on the subway for more time, the neighborhoods, I should say the places where commutes were longer had high. Now, there are other factors in those Neighborhoods, they're poor, they have more people with preexisting conditions. But the point of his paper, which is pretty carefully done, and this is a guy who has both an economics and a public health background, was that subways were important vectors. And I guess my mind is it, it doesn't really matter if he's right or wrong. Fear is in the atmosphere. Fear is in the environment. Certainly I think, you know, I keep thinking of the streetcars. Like in Toronto where they had the streetcars, people feel better. I agree, Felix. It's very interesting about this. I was skeptical that places would really start to change their streets into, into pedestrian thoroughfares and bikeways. But when, I mean, Milan announced this and you know, Bogota, Bogota has a long history of doing this and who else. Seattle announced it, when Toronto announced it the other day, that kind of surprised me because the current mayor, who's a good guy, a really competent person, not Rob Ford by any means, but as part of. He's a conservative, so part of his coalition is a Rob Ford coalition. I wouldn't have thought that they would do it, but. So I think for a time being we will see some shifting. Not forever we may see them shift back, but I think we are going to see some shift in transportation to cars and also to non vehicular modes of transport.
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A
I'm just curious if we saw like in previous kind of more localized, you know, epidemics, sars, that kind of thing. You know, if we saw a significant period of time after that that people in different Asian countries didn't use public transportation or did people go back relatively quickly.
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C
First of all, it's something I'm going to look at. I have not done that. I mean, which is really strange that I didn't because I have a stack of books on pandemics and articles and I, I thought, I've read everything. And I think it's probably because I was not focused on those mini epidemic, not mini, but smaller epidemics that I was focused on things like cholera or the plagues or the Spanish flu. It's clear that there was residual fear after the Spanish flu for a while and as much as two, three, four years going out, people were scared, they were scared of other people. The whole article that was, moms were scared to hold their kids and that damaged kids. I mean, so I think so. Certainly when I moved to Toronto now there was not a fear of transit. But when I moved to Toronto, I remember I went to see my doctor and he like pointed his elbow at me and I'm like, What is that? And he's like, that's the SAR shake. So, yeah, my assumption is there was not only. Now, I did talk to a bunch of people in Hong Kong because they have a very good Urban Land Institute there. They said that people were very quick to mobilize. I mean, not only what you've read, but they said as soon as people heard about a virus, they saw lineups in front of pharmacies and in front of stores and that, well, that's that for when people were going to get masks and so forth. So you're probably correct that there was a whole set of mobilizations. And I do think this fear. What we can say is that what we know about China is that people were reluctant to go back to transit, even in a society which is very used to using transit as a major mode of transportation. But I don't think this will last forever. I think we're looking at a couple, three, four years max. I mean, it could be, if we do something good, it could be much shorter.
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D
One thing I was going to ask related to, you know, how long people's fears last, how long people's behaviors change, if the changes are permanent. I guess the big question for me and a lot of other people right now is what does the future of the city look like? What are the changes that will be with us for a long time? You know, will the street closures last? Will cities become more pedestrian focused as more restaurants go under? What does that mean for, you know, and we'll talk about that later. But I guess I've been thinking a lot about whether or not it's true or not. Your perception is the dense city is more dangerous. We see people moving to the suburbs here in New York, a little anecdotally anyway. So I guess what is the city going to look like culturally? Like, what's the vibe? You know, that's what I'm sort of curious about most now.
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B
Yeah, let me, let me, let me push that off to the next segment because that's going to be a big one. I just want to do. I just want to ask a little question first before we get to the big question. My little question is about my favorite form of transportation, which is the most efficient form of transportation ever invented. More efficient than walking, more efficient than biking, is the elevator. That 100% seems to me to be the, the real bottleneck in a lot of cities, certainly in New York, but I think in, you know, San Francisco, any, there's a huge number of cities where, where even if everyone could Just magically get to wherever they work without having to take transit and without having to take cars and they could just teleport to the front door of the building. You still have an elevator problem. And I've been trying to do the math on elevators and it just doesn't work. How does this elevator problem resolve itself?
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C
So I think the elevator problem and the transit problem are very similar. I think they're very similar problems, although the math is probably different. And fortunately I've talked to a lot of commercial real estate developers because I just find them fascinating and they've got a big problem on their hand. And they agree with you, Felix, that the big bottleneck is the elevator. One thing people say right away is you're going to have queues all the way down the street, but how will you deal with that? You're going to have to do more remote work. And they're already talking with their tenants and large companies. You saw today, I think that Google said remote work until late 2021. Remote work until late 2021, that's a long time. So more remote work. And what about 40% of us, according to the studies, can do remote work? So more remote work is one. The second thing people are talking about is staggered commutes. So on the one hand staggered days, you come in every other day or every third day. And the second one is staggered times. So people will come in at 7, that's 7:38. And that's not because of transit, that's because of exactly what you said, Felix, to take the cues out of the elevators. People are talking about not just temperature sensors at the building entrance, but elevator sensors to make sure that people aren't crap. To make sure you feel safe. Look, I mean, I live in a small condo building. We have elevators. I've not gotten into the elevator with anyone else in. How long is it now? Almost two months. No, not quite two months. Almost two months. I've been scared to get in an elevator with one other person. And I'm not saying, I guess professors are kind of risk averse generally speaking, but I'm not that risk averse generally speaking. If I'm doing that, other people will do it too. So I think you're right about the big bottleneck and I think that bottleneck. The other thing that people are beginning to talk about is do you have some short term rebirth of the suburban office park? In other words, do you start to refashion some of these suburban office parks so that people from, in the case of New York, Connecticut, New Jersey, Westchester county can go to work closer, work in an office closer to where they live some part of the time, as well as coming to the main headquarters office or central office in New York part of the time. But I think you're right, it's transit and elevators that are the bottlenecks.
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B
Okay, so now let's talk about like this, the more longer term future and what this and like what kind of changes might last for longer than a couple of years. Emily, you had a few questions along those lines.
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D
Yeah, I mean, I'm really. We all remember after September 11th, everyone said new York City was dead and over. We said back then more people would move out of the city, offices would move out of the city. La la la la la. None of that really happened. The city came back bigger, stronger than ever. Just didn't happen. So now you're hearing the same thing here in New York. I am very New York centric. I suppose that, you know, you have already the stories in the Times about people who are moving to Westchester and Connecticut and so on, and you're already hearing like all the restaurants are going to go away, so the cultural life of the city and the reason people move to cities, which is for the dining options. A lot of the time that's going away and people are afraid of cities now, but at the same time, people are making arguments like the cars are gonna go away. There's gonna be. It's gonna be a vibrant time for the city, actually. So, yeah, I'm curious, Richard, what you think?
- [20:06]
C
So I've been thinking about this a lot. That's basically what I've been doing. I'm writing a big feature which will be out in the next issue of the Atlantic. In the magazine, it's already grown to over 7,000 words, so it's kind of unwieldy. And I have a three part answer. And we can break this into chunks if you want, or I can just spew it all out. First of all, urbanization throughout the course of history has been a far stronger factor than infectious disease. It has never disrupted infectious disease propagated by density before we had even modern public health. Never mind modern medical technology, the possibility of developing antivirals or a vaccine. Infectious disease has never stopped the force of urbanization. I always give two illustrations of this. My parents were born in the 1920s and are the youngest members of their respective families of seven. So it means all of my aunts and uncles were born during the Spanish flu. No one told me I was born. Now you know how old I am I was born in 1957, in the middle of the 57 epidemic that attacked infants and toddlers. My parents never mentioned it, like it killed 100,000Americans. My parents had never said anything. Now, the point is that urbanization has always conquered this. One of the things we know from the historical studies, which is very interesting, is that people tend to come towards cities after pandemics. Throughout history, people moved from the countryside to Italian cities. In the Spanish flu, people moved to cities. So I don't think that New York or LA or San Francisco will lose their status as superstar cities. I think the concentration of finance, entertainment, media, high tech in these cities will remain. Which leads me to the second part of the answer. I do think there's a set of pull and push factors that we can't ignore. This time we already mentioned fear of transit, fear of trains. You said, Emily, people want to go to the suburbs. I think for people who are older and vulnerable or people like me who I have two little kids, people who have kids. And I hear this a lot from dyed in the wool New Yorkers. Yeah, I'm probably going to move. And when you really ping on it, the thing is not just the restaurants, it's. They want a backyard and a lawn and a swing set and a car to move their kids around in. But, you know, people with kids have always moved to suburbs, right? And that move is. I mean, you know, maybe they mitigated it. My brother waited till he was 13 to move out to Ridgewood, New Jersey, till his eldest daughter was 13 to move out to Ridgewood, New Jersey. But that move is typical remote work. People will be able to remote work. Some people will say, the hell with it, you know, I'm gonna go to Hudson, I'm gonna go to Beacon, I'm gonna go to Woodstock, or I'm gonna go to Nashville. There'll be people who say that. But the other thing, and I think your question. There are a lot of young people. Like, I saw the pictures of Washington Square part, and I said, If I was 22 or 23, the first place I'd be heading is New York City. Like, there's no way you're going to keep me down on the farm. And I do think, you know, and my colleague Derek Thompson, the piece he wrote on retail, kind of said this New York could become affordable enough that not only young people, but, like, truly creative people, like musicians and artists could afford to move back there. Like you could imagine. Like, now it's not going to go back to 75, but it could go back to like 1998, relative prices. I don't know, I'm making this up, but you could see like musicians and artists and they're very anti risk averse, they're risk oblivious, they'll go anywhere. So I think you'll see this swapping of population, older people. I think the other thing, and Felix once wrote this great quote about the towers being the physical manifestation of R greater than G or G greater than. I think it's R greater than G. I think these pied a terre people and the wealthy aristocrats and oligarchs are headed out of town. Like I just, they came there for fancy schmancy restaurants and theater. I just don't see those people hanging on very long. So. So maybe, and you know, maybe this is hopeful thinking, overly optimistic thinking the city will go back to something like it was. But you know, this, it depends on how long. If this is over in six to 12 months, the effects will be very small. If it lingers for 18, 24 months or longer, the effects will be bigger.
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D
That Derek Thompson piece was extraordinary. I mean he, he basically compared it to like a forest fire. Like the city will be reborn the way a forest is after a devastating fire. Like from the ashes will rise cheap rents and the artists will return, sort of like a whole new ecosystem.
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C
And just to build on what you said though, what you said, which was so interesting, people made that same prediction after 9 11. So I don't want us to fall victim to it. People said that after 9 11, not only would wealthy people and families and their people were scared to death then, but New York would decay. And of course, as you mentioned, New York had its greatest boom, the great Back to the City movement. Because I wrote Rise of the creative class in 2002 and I remember the critics, oh my God, you're nuts. Everyone's going to go to the suburbs. And my great mistake was I under predicted, I always blame, I under predicted the extent of the urban revival. I completely miss that this accelerates so greatly after 2001. So I do think we have to be careful. And what I did say though at 2001 and in 2008 in a piece I wrote for the Atlantic, it would give us a chance to reset our cities, a kind of a brush fire that we had the opportunity, if we were intentional, to actually make our cities better. And in neither case did that happen. They became more hyper gentrified, more expensive. So I think we have to be cautious this time, especially if this is over quickly. It may not be the automatic reset. And maybe New York gets hurt a little more. But San Francisco looks like it got through this pretty much unscathed. And that's the real unaffordable city in America. Even much more unaffordable. You think about its resilience to the virus, it's because it's hypergentrified San Francisco not to pick on it. I do love the city of every city in America has the lowest percentage of frontline workers. It has the highest percentage of professional and remote workers. So it's already super gentrified. So I think people are saying that, but it's hard to say right now. One, I don't think the city will be devastated, and two, I hope we can remake it in a good way, but I'm not 100% sure that's the case.
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B
Let me ask you about brush fires, because the one little baby low to the ground ecosystem that is likely to get burned down, much more likely to get burned down than any of the others is restaurants. And specifically single restaurants, which are just one restaurant owned by one person. Not the chains, but the small business restaurants. And I think Emily is absolutely right that restaurants are one of the main reasons why people move to cities and put New York to one side. What does this mean for say Charleston or somewhere which is, you know, where people, which has really built up a restaurant culture and people visit because of restaurants and it's become, you know, a super exciting place because of restaurants. If those restaurants go away. You know, it seems to me that there's a bunch of like muscle memory. We had Dan Barber on this podcast a couple of weeks ago, basically saying that if it goes away, it doesn't come back very quickly. You need, you need all of the sort of cross pollination going on in real time. And if that goes away at all, it takes a very, very long time to come back. And I worry maybe not about New York because New York is unique, but a bunch of the sort of second and third tier places that have really used restaurants in particular to punch above their weight that this could be very bad for them.
- [27:55]
C
Well, certainly I agree with you, having gone out on the road again after some years off. Until this happened in 2002, New York and San Francisco and Chicago looked very different than the rest of the country. They had all of these really interesting amenities, but most of all restaurants, music venues, cafes, bars that were just spectacularly better than anywhere else. Cycle forward to 2018. Charleston, Nashville, Tulsa, Bentonville. I could go down like a lot. Milwaukee, Indianapolis, Columbus. I would go to these cities and say oftentimes, and this is not meant to be insulting, in New York, the restaurants they have are kind of more interesting. And certainly the coffee shops were really interesting because they were all independently owned. In New York, they're more, at least in the coffee shop space, a lot more chains, especially in Manhattan. So I go, this is incredible. And the farm to fork movement, you know, I think a lot of restaurants will go out of business. You know, I did like your colleague Henry Graebar, our alum city level peace and slate, you know, turn the parking lots that, that would work in the favor of more mid rise, mid density, smaller scale cities if you can turn all these restaurants, parking lots into outdoor seating. But I think Derek's probably right, there's probably going to be a lot of failure and then there's going to be a lot of creative destruction and a lot of new restaurants opening. One thing that would be even worse is if we all get really used to delivery. I can see it happening to me now. My delivery options are better. And I think we have an entrepreneurial community that's pretty smart that knows that we don't want to just have chain food delivered, that we want really interesting food delivered. If I can start to get really interesting food delivered to me and I can eat it in my house with my friends, am I going to want to go to the restaurant? I think there's also a delivery challenge here. But I do think the bigger picture, the bigger picture concept that I would say is if you look at cities as a balance of two forces, there's a productivity value of living in cities, being close to office, close to other talented people, close to startups, close to the center of financial action, the media. And that's a big driver of what makes cities. And then there's an amenity value. And what we saw after 2001 and 2008, the amenity value of cities surged, right? That was never the case. In fact, throughout most of your history, you had to pay people more to be in cities because there was disamenity, more disease, more infection, stinkier or smellier, more garbage bags. So now for the first time, amenity value. And I think that that balance is going to shift. I do think the value of publicly sourced amenities is going to decline and you're going to want private amenity, but that might shift the balance to the productivity value of cities. But yeah, I worry about what you're saying. And not just food, arts, culture, music, all of that stuff seems like it's going to be harder to put on.
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A
One thing, I kind of wonder though, you know, I think when we think about cities, we have a tendency to think about the largest cities. But I'm also wondering like if you do now have more people who are able to work remotely. So not everyone has to live in three cities and can actually spread out. And these are the same people who are going to want a lot of the amenities you would get in a larger city if what you may eventually see is actually just a lot of these kind of mid tier cities or places around universities that actually start to develop quite a bit more. So it's just not as centralized, but the amenities still exist.
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B
We already, we've seen that with Austin already, right? That's like, you know, you get, you get a university, you get like a low density city and people just love the openness of it and the feel of it and it just gets bigger and bigger and bigger.
- [31:28]
C
So I think we've been seeing that like, like you said, both said, I think we've been seeing that for a while. If you look at the data, it certainly shows that people are moving from larger cities to second and third tier cities. Now. I think that's a price issue. I think it's super talented people who are really at the cutting edge of finance or technology or media are staying in the big, big cities. But people who don't want to do that, less motivated by work, less ambitious, they're the ones saying, I'm not going to work to live, I'm going to move to xyz. I think college towns like Austin have been the big one. Nashville's been a big one. I've been spending a lot of time in Tulsa. I'm working with the George Kaiser Foundation. They created a program called Tulsa Remote. When I go to Tulsa, I meet people like you. I meet people from New York, I meet people from Chicago, I meet people from San Francisco, I meet people to LA who are drawn to Tulsa. We spend time in Miami. Miami beach has been a place that's attracted a ton of. We take our kids to preschool. Everyone we meet is a migrant from New York City. There's a few from London, but mainly from New York City. So yeah, and I think in fact people would prefer that than the kind of sterile suburb. I think what we've seen now is instead of going to the suburb of San Francisco or the suburb of New York, go to a Beacon, go to a Hudson or go to a smaller city in a different part of the country. Here's the issue though. One, I think jobs might be scarcer in those places, that the great irony of this is that the jobs may be in the big, big cities just because of consolidation and the need to concentrate. And that's where the action is. Two, it's not like college towns are going to be immune from this. Universities are going to get clobbered. And if kids can't come back in the fall, the economic fallout, like what you just talked about in New York with restaurants, bars, cafes, if they don't have any kids in Ann Arbor or Boulder, it's going to be metastasizing. So I think now, if you're smart, if I'm a second and third tier city, and I'm smart about it and very intentional, and I can work to support my restaurant scene and my music scene. And one of the things I've been talking to these cities about is you're not going to have a Rolling Stone show, you're not going to have a YouTube show, you're not going to have a Taylor Swift concert. You can do locally sourced culture. You can create portals where people can hire local acts, hire local artists, hire local performers, hire local chefs. You could activate your city in a different way. So, yeah, I think there's opportunity across the board, but you're going to have to be really smart about it.
- [33:54]
D
One thing I'm also wondering about in terms of the future for cities is immigration. So here in the US we're seeing, you know, obviously the Trump administration not wanting anyone to come here anymore. But if you want cities to remain these vital places, cultural hubs, if you want new restaurants to open from the ashes, you need immigrants. And I'm worried here in the States that, you know, with immigration declining, that it's going to be really hard for cities to come back from this or to come back even more unequal than before.
- [34:27]
C
Well, surely we know the main flow of people into big cities, not the second and third tier cities and not the Sunbelt cities, but the big cities in the United States, and that's New York, Louisiana, Chicago, we can go down. The list has been not yuppies. There's been a flow of highly educated people back to a few neighborhoods. It's immigrants. What has kept our cities and big metropolitan areas alive in this country is a flow of people wanting the American dream. And it's quite clear that our current president and his supporters want to end that. So I think you're right. That could be as big a threat, less a threat. I spend well more than half the year in Toronto and less a threat in A place like Toronto. I think that for countries that decide that they can pick off the people who would have come to America, that's a pretty good advantage. And also it's really interesting. I've been thinking of this as a professor, but you can think about it from a city point of view. You probably have the best talent recruitment opportunity in modern memory. Universities have hiring freezes, they're not hiring people. The immigrants are inhibited in these really, if you were a university that could really find money, you have a local benefactor, you took risks, you took risks with your endowment and you said, I really want to go after this slew of great talent that no one else is picking up. I mean, it's kind of a once in a lifetime opportunity. From a city point of view, if you're a city, whether that city Sydney or Toronto or Melbourne or whatever, Vancouver, whatever one it is, I'm just making this up. You would have an opportunity to attract talent that probably you otherwise couldn't, that probably would have come to New York or LA or something. Kind of reminds me probably of the rise of National Socialism in Germany, the Hitler period, the period of World War II where New York and LA benefited from an influx of European Jews that remade the scientific community, technical community, entrepreneurial community, Hollywood. Now it's probably not quite like that, but boy, it's. The only thing I can see is similar is you have this real opportunity to change the shape of your place by attracting all this talent that can't go elsewhere.
- [36:32]
D
A real brain drain.
- [36:34]
B
Since you mentioned Sydney, let me ask that because I see a future in the medium term where there's two different classes of countries. Basically there's the more open countries that have given up on bringing the number of cases down to zero. So that would include places like Sweden, certainly the United States and probably Canada as well, just because it has that long land border with us and it can't do anything about it. And then you have another group of countries which would include Australia, New Zealand, Vietnam, places like that, that have really tried very hard and pretty successfully to bring the number of cases down to zero and keep it there. They're going to basically say, yeah, no one can come in. And if you do come in, we're going to lock you up in the hotel room for two weeks before you can go anywhere. And that doesn't sound appealing to anyone. So how does that play out? If Sydney, which really was a very global city up until March, just basically can't be global anymore? What's the implications of that?
- [37:41]
C
So I Have a very good friend who runs the committee from Sydney. He's a guy from the Bay Area, Gabe Metcalfe, and we've been talking a lot. One of my closest collaborators, Charlotte Melander, lives in Sweden. So these are things I spend a lot of my time thinking about. One, I don't think the Swedish strategy is as bad as most people do. And I think there's been some coming around. I've listened to both the current public health minister and the guy who hired him. I forget his name, all these long Swedish names. And that strategy is very interesting because it said we're going to stay relatively open. It's not about herd immunity first and foremost, nor is it about economic stabilization first and foremost. When I listen to them, it's about not freaking people out, not scaring the bejesus out of kids, not destroying families, and most importantly, not getting this. All sorts of anti democratic stuff that we see even in our country, right? All of this nuttiness. And so that's one. The lockdown strategy. I don't know. I don't know if you can keep it away. Maybe you can forestall it long enough that a vaccine comes. But you know, I do think Sydney, I mean, look, if somebody said to me, you could go live in Sydney now, I'd probably consider it a lot more than I would have considered it before. It's sunny, it's warm, you can go outside, it's safe. But I think you're right, Felix, if it stays closed and that city, I forget the statistics. It's far more dependent on foreign immigration and foreign students than even Toronto. I mean, it is a city that is really dependent upon flows of immigration and flows of foreign students from Asia. I don't know. But I do think the places that will benefit in the long run are the places that are more open. And that raises a whole interesting set of questions. How do you make and keep yourself open and somewhat protected? If you close up too much, you have a whole set of other risks.
- [39:33]
B
Let's have a numbers round. I think we need some numbers here. Emily, did you bring a number?
- [39:39]
D
My number is 15.5%. That is the unemployment rate for women announced on Friday by the Labor Department. And that number is actually higher than the jobless rate, which is an awful 14.7%. And it's higher than the unemployment rate for men, which is 13%. And white men is 12.4%. The point of my number is that the economic devastation wrought by this crisis is really being felt by women in a way that we've just never seen before. The unemployment rate for women has never crossed double digits before, not even close. At the Great Recession it was around 8%, even though men went up to 10 at that time. So I mean, and the reasons are twofold. First is that the jobs lost were in service sectors where women really dominate. If they're not the majority, they're close to the majority. And then even in those sectors, women's job losses are disproportionately high because not only do they make up the majority of workers in those sectors, but they make up the overwhelming majority of the lowest paid, most vulnerable workers.
- [40:53]
B
So there was a market that was one of the weird things about the jobs report this month was the average wages went up more than they've ever gone up ever because all of the lowest paid people got fired. And then. So that just meant the only people still working are the high paid people.
- [41:09]
D
Yep. And then the other reason, women are getting hit hard and I swear I'll stop. I'm sorry, but I just wrote a story about it, so it's like fresh in my head. The other reason is because schools are closed and childcare centers are closed. So even some women who actually could go to work can't go to work right now. So it's kind of like this double whammy. And it could really get worse even after the pandemic subsides because a lot of the childcare centers in the country are in danger of going under permanently. So a lot of women won't be able to go back to work, possibly including the people who work at the child care centers and the women who send their kids there. And now I'm done.
- [41:45]
B
My number is I love it. Just because it has lots of nines in it. $2.999 trillion. They managed to just come under the $3 trillion mark. But that is the amount of money that the federal government says that it's going to have to borrow in the second quarter, which is so beyond what, like any amount of borrowing that the world has ever seen by any entity in the history of humanity, that it's, it's just off the charts. You know, people were worried about trillion dollars. I'm old enough to remember when people were worried about trillion dollar deficits. That's an annual deficit. This is $3 trillion of borrowing in one quarter, which is, I mean, it's a little bit artificial because you normally get a bunch of people paying taxes in the second quarter and they aren't paying their taxes in the second quarter because it was put back by three months. But even so, borrowing $3 trillion in one quarter, I mean, it's just technically really hard. The sheer amount of bond issuance that you need to ramp up to do that is astonishing. Richard, what was your number?
- [42:52]
C
Well, I have it here. I actually brought a lot of numbers. I've never done this before, but the number I have is somewhat similar than Emily's. It's 8.4%. That is the percentage of people with a bachelor's degree and higher who are currently unemployed. I don't remember exactly. I should have done a little bit more homework, but it sounds like it's more than double, if I remember correctly, the level of unemployment in the Great Recession for people with a bachelor's degree. I remember those rates and sometimes I confuse professional and technical occupations with bachelor's degree people. But I remember those rates staying in the twos and threes and maybe 4% as unemployment went into the double digits. The reason I brought that number is I think that's going to put additional pressure for reopening. I think that it was one thing when the unemployment was surging among lower income, less skilled people, you know what I'm saying? Manufacturing workers, this sort of thing. But when people with a high level of degree of education, members of the creative class get unemployed, their nervousness is going to be palpable. And I think it's going to increase the pressure to reopen this economy. And I think they're going to feel, well, if we reopen, we can stay relatively safe anyway, so let's go do it. And that's why I brought 8.4.
- [44:17]
B
Anna.
- [44:18]
A
So, yeah, so I actually think I'm going to switch my number. I'll stay with the theme we have going here. I think it was 18.1 million, which was the, the number of those jobs that technically were from people who are classify themselves as temporarily unemployed. And to me, this is going to be the really interesting story moving forward about whether or not that is true, whether or not, obviously we don't know. We don't know the trajectory of the disease. We don't know how demand will recover after disease. But I just thought that was a really interesting part of that very, very large number.
- [44:49]
D
In other words, are those people going to go back to work or are these going to become permanent job losses?
- [44:54]
B
Exactly. If you're feeling.
- [44:55]
D
It really isn't clear.
- [44:56]
B
If you're furloughed, that means you're temporarily unemployed. But there will certainly be many people who are currently furloughed who never get that job back.
- [45:05]
D
And a lot of them don't want to. Like, we're doing some reporting now on workers who are getting called back, and a lot of the workers don't want to go go back. And some of them are choosing not to. So that's sort of interesting.
- [45:15]
B
Here's another number which I'm just going to throw in for shits and giggles, which is 1,200. There are 1,200 workers in Ohio who were furloughed and then their employer said, okay, we're back up and running now. Come back. And the worker said, no, I don't feel comfortable coming back. I don't feel safe coming back. Or else, or maybe I'm just not capable of coming back because I have kids at home and no way of, you know, finding childcare. Whatever the reason was, they couldn't come back. And then 600 of those employers, representing 1,200 people, turned those names over to the Ohio authorities so that they would then stop getting unemployment benefits.
- [45:56]
D
It's gross.
- [46:01]
B
And I think that's going to happen more and more often. But, yes, I think that's it for us this week. Thank you very much, Richard Florida, for coming on this show. And it's a show I've been looking forward to and very happy that we managed to do. Thanks very much to Jessamine Molly for managing to produce Juice it all from Brooklyn. And we will talk to you next week on Slate Money.