I missed the long-term downward trend
of American downtowns because the HTML boom of 1996-2000 hid the reality.
First, it was an HTML boom that we mistakenly call the Internet Bubble. It wasn't a bubble because the NASDAQ stocks went up at the same rate they came down ... over a year-long period. Second, downtown urban areas like S.F. Seattle, Denver, Boston and Atlanta benefited because what was really happening was that graphic artists and programmers in central cities were creating more than one million business websites, nearly all static HTML. After one million businesses bought their HTML website, business people didn't believe they needed anything more. The market was exhausted. The substantial Internet hardware and technology was developing in the suburbs and was not a main part of the false financial exuberance about HTML static sites.
The trend to downtown urban growth in
the 1960s resulted from the decline and geographic flattening-out of
phone rates from $7.00 for ten minutes S.F. to N.Y. in 1950 to $2.00
in 1960. Fourteen urban downtowns began to grow as financial centers
while N.Y. began to decline. The downtown urban growth slowed in the
early 1970s as businesses faced the hostile and stoned-on-pot urban
youth labor market. Businesses began moving to suburbs where the
labor force wasn't stoned (maybe some worker used cocaine instead).
The suburbs began to grow rapidly as
the technology of faxes and UPS changed the dynamics of freeways.
Freeways had originally helped bring suburban workers into the urban
downtown. By the mid 1970, the freeways into downtowns were clogged
and outer-ring freeways remained the only functioning transport
surfaces. UPS and FedEx created non-downtown hubs to move commercial
paper.
Wireless phones, pdf files and email were the final blow to downtowns. Outer-ring suburbs (see David Brooks' Paradise book on this subject) finally became the home of commercial growth and reliable workers.
I saw downtown San Francisco grow from 10 million square feet of office space in 1960 to 58 million in 2000, of which 11 million is now vacant. Offices are being converted to condo-lofts rapidly.