UO researcher reflects on how the COVID-19 pandemic changed our cities

It’s been five years since the COVID-19 pandemic shut down cities and towns across the country and changed the daily lives and routines of many people. From virtual workplaces to outdoor dining, COVID-19 also changed how we use and see our cities. Nico Larco is a professor of architect and urban design and is the director of the Urbanism Next Center at the University of Oregon. He joins us to share what has and hasn’t changed in our cities since lockdowns began.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller:  From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. It’s been five years since the pandemic shut down most of public in-person life all over the world. From virtual workplaces to outdoor dining, COVID-19 also changed how we use and how we think about our city. So we’re asking five years later, which of those changes remain and how much has urban life been altered permanently?

Nico Larco is a professor of architecture and urban design and the director of the Urbanism Next Center at the University of Oregon. He joins us now. Welcome back to the show.

Nico Larco:  So great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Miller:  I want to start with changes to public spaces like parking spaces, parking spots, sidewalks, outdoor seating, patios and “parklets” – a word I don’t think I knew before five years ago. They opened up all over the country including in Oregon, including in Portland, five years ago. How much of that, infrastructure-wise, is still in place?

Larco:  We saw a huge shift over the pandemic, as you’re saying. We needed to but we couldn’t be right next to each other and so public space became tremendously more important. We saw the growth of all sorts of, what we call “streeteries” – restaurants overflowing out into the street – stores starting to do that, taking over sidewalks and taking over parking spaces, creating these “parklets.” There was enormous growth of that all over the country.

And the thing that really heartened me was this idea of all of us starting to see public space as public space again and not just space that is just for cars and people happen to be in. So we saw this huge shift into that. And in some ways, I think, a lot of that you still see out in the world. In some ways, a lot of that is here to stay. The idea that this actually creates this great vibrant street life in areas that may be in downtowns and sub-downtowns. We’re seeing that more in other areas as well, not only downtown.

So a lot of those things are still sticking around, and I think people are very excited about it. I don’t remember the exact numbers but in New York City, they had laws that let you do this type of thing before the pandemic. There’d been just a handful of permits given in the year before and then the year that COVID happened, they made it tons easier and there were in the hundreds of permits, immediately. You saw this huge growth of these types of things.

In terms of how much they’re going to stick around, on the one hand, we’re continuing to see them. But there are starting to be some questions about some of the problems that exist with these things. Even in the neighborhood I live in, there was a restaurant that spilled out over onto the sidewalk, wonderfully, during the pandemic. Then over time, it had built more and more on the sidewalk. So eventually it just felt like the restaurant had now taken over the sidewalk and this private space. And you couldn’t really even see inside there anymore.

Miller:  So it goes against your idea of the urbanism dream of public spaces for the public. But if it gets too big, then all of a sudden it’s a public space for a new private use. That’s what you’re talking about there?

Larco:  And not only too big but also too enclosed, we’ll say. So it no longer feels like a public space. I’m sure you’ve heard that in New York there were issues of people being upset about the amount of noise made later in the night or that it was attracting rodents and things like that. Also the design of these things – in the pandemic we were very gracious with anything that kind of worked being “good enough.” We just needed ways to move forward, all of us, together.

Now, there’s some concern over these starting to look a little dilapidated. Or maybe they’re not really put together that well or they’re not going to last for long, or they’re not going to look good over the long-term. So we’re getting a little bit of reining in and tightening up of some of those things, which probably is not a bad thing to have happen.

Miller:  But in the big picture, if, in the past, there was a question about whether or not parking spots might be removed for the kinds of things you’re talking about, I don’t think it would have been unusual for a lot of local business owners to say, “Wait, wait, wait, we need those parking spots for customers.” In the pandemic, the calculus it seems for many business owners was, “We need customers and if our only choice is to have them be outside with fewer parking spots, by all means, let us please have customers and we’ll give up a couple parking spots.” Is it your understanding that that maybe knee-jerk approach to losing parking spots, in particular, has changed?

Larco:  Yes, kind of. So that knee-jerk response, for which there are tons of studies that have shown that that is not the right response, shifting parking to all sorts of different uses, be it bike parking, for instance, or for outdoor spaces, tends to not have tremendous effects on the number of people who are visiting one store or another. And, in fact, oftentimes it has huge benefits.

But that isn’t convincing to people who own a store and have a parking spot directly in front of their building. Mind you, that parking spot is not owned by them. That parking spot is public property. It’s part of the public realm. So some of that knee-jerk reaction unfortunately still exists. But I think a lot of people saw the benefits and that’s why you see a lot of these things sticking around.

The pandemic waned and it’s not that people tore those things out and immediately went back to parking. They saw the benefits and saw how much people enjoyed it. It was really an attractive thing for people to come to your restaurant or to your store. So my sense is that unfortunately, we’re not completely done with that reaction. But there’s the opening now of this other reaction and seeing the benefits of these things.

Miller:  Let’s turn from outdoor dining and public rights of way or sidewalks to employment questions. Do you have a ballpark sense for the percentage of people who are now still working from home, at least part of the time these days, and how that compares to whether you’re looking at pre-pandemic or the height of work-from-home time?

Larco:  Pre-pandemic numbers were low, in the mid to low single digits. That is the percentage of people who worked from home remotely. At the peak of the pandemic, we were the highest, and it depends on who you look at and how they’re counting these things. But people who worked at least some time from home went up to something around 42%, which is a crazy high number.  Considering that there’s a bunch of studies that have shown that somewhere in the 50% range of the jobs that could even be done at home. So most of the people who could be doing jobs at home were doing jobs at home.

At the time, remember, the thinking and the conversation with people was that we were moving toward fully working at home forever. Even after the pandemic there was going to be everyone’s … five days a week, if you could, you’d be working from home. We saw a shift to, well, three or four days a week makes sense. Some places, some of the larger tech companies, had really made this huge push to work from home. Individuals seemed to like it and, at the same time, there’s a huge savings for the businesses in terms of not having to own this office space and all that.

What we’re seeing now is a real shift. So right now, we’re somewhere around 24-25%. Something like that is what we’re at with people who are working at least some part of their week at home. I think there’s been a large realization that five days a week, maybe for many businesses, is not really productive. Some days at home, actually can [result in] increased productivity. But there are larger long-term issues in terms of, specifically, younger workers.

So some creativity work that can happen is harder to do remotely. Definitely the development of office culture, the development of relationships, individuals being able to move ahead, which a lot is often based on relationships with people who they work with. But, especially for young people, it is really difficult not having a mentorship, not being able to be part of an office culture, to learn office culture, to learn the way offices work. [All that] has been really difficult.

So what you’re seeing now is the shift from that height of 42% in the pandemic to something lower. And my sense is the pendulum may be coming back down a little bit. So even of those 24%-25% of people who are working from home, many of them are still working three days a week in the office, two days a week at home. That might shift to one day a week at home. So definitely, the work from home is not going away. The genie’s out of the bottle. But I don’t think it’s going to be, and what’s proven to not be, the future of everything.

Miller:  But it does seem – and certainly downtown Portland is a prime example of this with all of its office space vacancy – that there is some percentage of buildings that used to have people working during the day that will not, going forward. There has been talk about taking some of this unused office space and turning it into housing. But then after that, there’s been a lot of talk about how financially challenging that is. Those kinds of retrofits may not pencil out in any big way. So what does that mean in terms of downtowns?

Larco:  There’s a huge reckoning still happening, so that part of the world, we have not landed yet from post-COVID. Office vacancy right now, overall in the country, is somewhere around 20%. And 5% is considered a normal and healthy market, and we’re at 20%. San Francisco, I looked recently, is at 28%; Portland’s at 22%. And a number of people think those offices will never be filled. We’re never going to go back to an occupancy rate and demand that’s going to be high enough to fill all those offices. So that is painful for central business districts, places where most of the activity is offices. They’re in a world of hurt right now. It has been very painful.

As you mentioned, we are definitely in need of more housing across the country. So the idea of shifting a lot of those offices into housing is a fantastic idea. The problem is that many of our office stock, the building stock for offices, is built in ways that make it really hard to convert to housing. They’ve got really large floor plates, which means that you can’t put bedrooms along windows in really large floor plate buildings. So these are buildings that have large areas per floor and not thin areas. Then also, a lot of them are built with concrete slabs with steel in them that helps with the reinforcement. And you can’t drill holes through that steel because then it compromises the slab. So it makes it really hard to convert some of these office spaces.

It’s possible that, as we continue to move forward with a 20% vacancy rate, prices for office buildings will continue to drop. And at some point, the prices will come down enough that it will make sense to buy and pay for the cost of refurbishing it into something else, so renovating it into something else, cutting large holes in the slabs if you can, or figuring out how we deal with structural reinforcement so that we can actually cut through some of the slabs.

Miller:  We just have a little under two minutes left. Given everything you’ve been talking about, positives and negatives, I’m curious how you’re feeling about Portland’s future, especially given recent talk about the possibility of the so-called doom loop?

Larco:  I’m an optimist by nature. And I’ll tell you, a couple of years ago I was not very optimistic at all. I’ll say two years ago we really hit bottom, probably about a year-and-a-half, two years ago in Portland. And I think people who are visiting downtown could see that. Things are tons better right now. I mean, tons better. The amount of activity that’s happening downtown is much better. The amount of homelessness that’s happening, tents that you see around downtown, is tons better. The amount of people who are downtown … I saw recently that Portland saw somewhere around a 14% increase in the amount of foot traffic that existed last year compared to 2022. So we are definitely improving and I think we’ve gotten out of the worst of it.

Are we on good footing yet? I would say probably not. There’s still much to be done. This new form of city government that we have, and some of the priorities of the city government, and hopefully some coordination with the county government could help us a ton in getting to that much better future.

Miller:  Nico, thanks very much.

Larco:  Thank you so much.

Miller:  Nico Larco is a professor of architecture and urban design, the director of the Urbanism Next Center at the University of Oregon and the author of “The Sustainable Urban Design Handbook.”

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