THE RETURN OF THE MEDIEVAL.

In the rent gradient.  "Walkable urban areas are popular but have an affordability problem."  Well, yeah, you don't have to buy an indulgence any more to live next to the cathedral, but if you're able to make markets all over the world using contemporary information technology, and you want to walk to the office, isn't that going to make the rent gradient steeper?  "Remove the constraints, watch the reallocation to housing and office towers commence." So it is, yet again, and the poor and the ethnics are hardest hit.

It's an emergent phenomenon, and the sort of technocratic order the article suggests is not likely to work well. "To spur walkability and equitable access to walkable areas, cities can advance zoning reform, foster non-car transportation options, preserve and invest in affordable housing, and plan for walkable neighborhoods to be resilient to climate impacts, the report states."  The problem is, the preservation of the houses closest to the office towers is going to make precisely those houses more valuable, and the implicit transportation cost of walking, even with slow motor car traffic in cities, and even slower bus or rail transit, makes the rent gradient even steeper.

While it’s well documented that many office-dominated downtown economies have suffered amid remote and hybrid work trends, walkable urban neighborhoods and urbanizing suburbs grew during that period, “demonstrating a preference for walkable places beyond the traditional downtown.”

“The so-called ‘death of the city’ has been overstated, again, as walkable urban price premiums and increased market share of office, retail, multi-family rentals and for-sale housing real estate in walkable urban places held up, despite impacts from the pandemic,” said Christopher Leinberger, managing director at Places Platform, in a statement Wednesday.  “These findings provide a strong economic base and cement walkable urban places and development as the wave of the future as we move toward a more connected, environmentally-sustainable way of life.”

You can take away the jargon, and the phenomenon is still the same. To the extent that people are willing to pay a premium for the opportunity to walk to work, that rent gradient is going to get steeper.  The economic geography of cities in the United States will be more like Paris or London, with the poorer quarters in the inner suburbs.