What The Suburbs Need To Be "Workshops"
The post-COVID "Suburban Workshops" are fundamentally different than the traditional suburbs. Here's how they need to change to function well in the post-COVID world.
In my post on Monday, I concluded that the exurbs – though they are adding population – aren’t adding economic power, at least as measured by the location of jobs and county-level gross national product. But I fear that one thing all these measurements don’t pick up is hybrid or remote work – people whose jobs may technically be located in some economically powerful county but who, in fact, do some of all of their work at home.
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As I’ve said before, I think the post-COVID world is broken up into the Urban Hotel, the Suburban Workshop, and the Exurban Metropolis. The exurban metropolis will be the extremely spread-out areas on the fringe of the metropolis, while the urban hotel will be the center where people must meet face-to-face. But the suburbs will be where most day-to-day work gets done – at least, white-collar work (if it’s not killed by AI).
Earlier today in his monthly post on Slow Boring, Jed Kolko – one of the most perceptive economists working today – noted that “cities aren’t back” in the sense that there’s more population growth, and growth in home prices, out in the suburbs. He’s right. Cities will play a role, but suburbs are where most people live and, increasingly, where most people do their daily work.
But this is not really what the suburbs are designed to do. Most suburbs are designed to be bedroom communities that send people off to job centers in the morning and then to stores and chain restaurants at night and on the weekends. But if the “suburban workshop” is going to succeed, it’s going to have to become more diverse – not in terms of demographics, which is already happening, but in terms of the amenities and daily activities available to the people who not only live there but work there.
Here, then, are four things I think Suburban Workshops needs to add in order to succeed in the role they’re going to play in the future.