“Liz Farmer is not ready to write off cities just yet.”
In November 2020, Spectrum News Albany’s Nick Reisman interviewed me about my latest work for the Rockefeller Institute on the pandemic’s affect on downtowns. Here’s an excerpt from the story:
New York City residents, if they were wealthy enough, fled to Long Island or to upstate communities to escape the spread of the virus. And smaller cities, like Albany, have seen less foot traffic downtown and fewer people riding mass transit.
All this has a cascading effect: A drop in tax revenue being among them, but also a cultural change to how we live and work.
"We don't know for example the people who moved out of New York City and are renting a house -- are they going to make that decision permanent?" Farmer said in an interview. "It's one thing to make that decision for a year, it's another to plant roots for five, ten, fifteen years."