Big Cities Will Make a Strong Comeback From the Pandemic

Making predictions about the future is always challenging, but predicting how the pandemic will alter our world is an exceptional challenge. So far, those predictions have been wide ranging, but have included a resurgence of suburbs and more work-from-home office models, at lease in the near term. At the June 2020 Economic Outlook on residential real estate hosted by the UCLA Anderson Forecast and the UCLA Ziman Center for Real Estate, academic Richard Florida, however, predicted that cities would make a strong comeback following the pandemic with the potential for positive changes.

“I don’t think this is the end of cities. I think that cities will comeback strong,” he said in the virtual conversation. Florida, the director of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, global research professor at New York University, and the founder of the Creative Class Group, has a lofty history of making predictions about urban environments. He predicted the rise of urbanization in the early 2000s and the resurgence of the urban core after the 2008 financial crisis. He says that the pandemic will be no different.