What will they look like? Some 20 or 30 or 40 years from now, when our children are our age, what will American cities look like?
This is a hypothetical question in the most normal of times; it is an impossible one during the age of coronavirus. And yet we delve into it, inspired by continued construction in Vancouver’s core.
“We’ve never seen this level of activity in the downtown,” Chad Eiken, the city’s economic development director, said in a Columbian storyarticle last week. “By bringing more residents to the downtown as well as workers, there’s more support for the local businesses. And as we know, the more rooftops we get in the downtown, the more likely it is that we’ll get a grocery store, so it’s really important that we get income levels up but also the number of units in the downtown.”
And so they build.
And they build.
And they build.
Led by The Waterfront Vancouver, downtown looks like a giant table of Lego sets in various stages of construction. With ambitious developers retaining faith in America’s great urban revival, the mantra seems to be that if you build it, they will come.
This all appeared inarguable a year ago. Americans spent the past four decades increasingly realizing that they actually do like living near one another, and they actually do like living within walking distance of a grocery store and retail shops and a wide selection of restaurants.
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