(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 462: Downtown or Not Downtown

This week on the Talking Headways podcast we’re at the 2023 Mpact transit + mobility conference closing plenary in Phoenix Arizona. Assistant Secretary of Transportation for Transportation Policy at USDOT Christopher Coes leads a panel discussing what’s happening in central cities and how to make them thrive again.

This panel features:  Karen Chapple, Ph.D., Director, School of Cities, University of  Toronto, Toronto, ON | Nichol Bordeaux, Chief Planning and Engagement Officer, Utah Transit Authority, Salt Lake City, UT | Dee Brewer, Executive Director, Downtown Alliance, Salt Lake City, UT | Emeke Moneme, President, Capitol Riverfront, Washington, DC | Ryan Johnson, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Culdesac, Tempe, AZ

Listen to this episode first at Streetsblog USA or the hosting archive.

Below is a full AI generated unedited transcript of the episode:

Christopher Coes (2m 18s):
It’s really great to be here with all of you. I want to take a moment of personal privilege before I bring up this amazing panel that we’re gonna have to discussion we’re gonna have today. And really just say thank you, thank you to Mpact formally known as Railvolution. Thank you to Mariia, Earl Blumenaur, Jackie Grimshaw. You’re still here as so many of you because in the years, for folks who don’t know, I was just you, just about a year and a two years, three years ago, actually now I can’t remember how long I’ve been in this administration three years ago, sitting in the same seats that you have been in. And it is here in rooms like this where we all together debated, we learned from each other, we innovated, and we connected around what it really means to create livable communities for everyone.

Christopher Coes (3m 9s):
And in this space, in this room, I remember all the times that we kept saying, you know, TOD is great, it, it’s amazing. But some of you joined, you know, organizations like Smart of America, reconnecting America on Capitol Hill, where we will actually hear that things like Liv Communities or TOD was kind of perceived as a four letter word. Remember those days right now, fast track, nearly 15, 20 years, how the world has changed, right? And how the fact that across the country, whether in rural communities or even our urban major cities, we are looking at local communities as the framework of how we are going to move this country forward. And that to me is really exciting.

Christopher Coes (3m 51s):
But of course, what is also exciting for me in this moment now as I look around the space and see how full it is. So thank you for staying for the lunch and hearing the panel. But more importantly, if you just take your memory back to 2020, we couldn’t have done this if we all remember, we couldn’t have extra predicted actually the impacts of COVID-19 on our, not just our communities by own individual lives. And I think if you all remember in those early days, we were hearing from our public health officials that we had to not allow our staff, our friends, our colleagues, to actually go into work In many cases, places like San Francisco, Seattle, New York, even started mandating that people work for home to protect ourselves.

Christopher Coes (4m 37s):
Those decisions, this pandemic, in addition to things that we were seeing already in terms of the racial disparities in our communities, the climate crisis that was involving, we were under siege. And unfortunately in two many places across the country, the result of now on this pandemic and the challenges that we’re seeing in economy, we saw so many businesses, coffee shops in our city centers that relied on that nine to five commuter workforce close. And they found it difficult to pay their employees and keep their doors open. We also saw that impact of covid, the economic challenges on our transit systems across the country, these systems that relied on fair box recovery to fund operations.

Christopher Coes (5m 21s):
Well even still today, we’re seeing many of those transit agencies still struggle to recruit that ridership. But these were challenges. But I have to say in those 10 to 15 years, I got to sit in this space with all of you in those sessions where we learned, debated, connected. When I came into the Biden administration on day one, on January 20th, 2021, I took all those lessons, all those workshops and your friendship and your words of wisdom with me on day one. And I can say with a level of certainty, the discussions and the leadership and the best practices that were discussed in this space were actually at the center of the Biden administration build back better plan.

Christopher Coes (6m 4s):
And that is why I can tell you that this administration saw an opportunity not only to how we can get outta the pandemic, but how do we do it in a way that makes sure every community feels and breathes the ethos that’s sitting in this room today, that we believe everyone should be able to live in a community that is thriving. And that is why at the Department of Transportation, we’ve been embracing the president’s call Secretary, Pete’s leadership around the bipartisan TAL law that really emphasized this idea of bottom up, middle out approach. And I have to say, I remember in this room someone used to say, we needed more money for transit, right? You remember those days? Well guess what? Through the bipartisan infrastructure law, we have the largest investment in public transportation ever in the history of this country.

Christopher Coes (6m 54s):
I remember someone talking in this room, how important that is us to create a national system that allows people to get around, particularly through passenger rail. Well, guess what? We got that done. We have the largest investment in put passenger rail ever in the history since the creation of Amtrak. Folks said, you know what? If we’re gonna make our cities livable, we had to prioritize people, not just cars. And turns out, even during c OOO VD, we saw over 40 to 2000 individuals die on our roadways in our cities.

Christopher Coes (7m 36s):
And disproportionately it was happening in communities of color as well as rural places. Well, you know what? Because of you, because of your advice, because of your leadership, we actually now have more funding dedicated to addressing the roadway fatalities through our safe streets for all program. And for the first time making complete streets a federal policy you guys did that you should give yourselves round applause about. But of course we talk all the time about how transportation can shape lives, the air we breathe, how we get around our communities. But we also know that sometimes infrastructure can be the thing that has been used in the past as a way to divide our communities.

Christopher Coes (8m 18s):
Those are conversations we have been having. I actually just attended a session yesterday about highway capping. It’s because of those discussions, we now have over $3 billion through our Reconnected communities and Neighborhood Access and equity program to do something about that where we can now connect more communities to neighborhoods with good jobs, with good healthcare and greater access. You guys did that and you should be thankful for that. Now I’m gonna close. A lot of talk has been around this administration, around the funding pieces. And as an assistant Secretary for transportation policy, trust me, I see all the applications that you’re submitting and so please don’t ask me.

Christopher Coes (8m 59s):
But it’s not just about the money, it’s also about the policy. It’s also recognizing that it’s not about the highway system in of itself. It’s also how do we build our communities. And I can sit here and say with level of certainty that we as a Department of Transportation are not just committed and making sure that we’re spending the money wisely in a way that’s coordinated with housing and transportation. But we’re making sure that our own staff are better suited to do that as well. We’re institutionalizing in the department, but we’re also working very closely with state dots and NPOs because of your work and your voices, we were actually able through the bipartisan interest law, now require housing to be part of the overall transportation planning process, which will allow us to get more liberal communities happen across the country.

Christopher Coes (9m 46s):
Now with that being said, with these resources and these new rules that we’re gonna be produced, we recognize that we can’t do it alone. And that’s why I’m just so excited for colleagues like Maria Zimmerman and Cherise Taylor and so many folks from the Build America Bureau because we are putting so much money, over $30 million just in the last several months to support our thriving communities work to help support more livable communities, more complete neighborhoods, more DOD projects, and even hopefully create more rural main streets that are linked up with our passenger rail system that we’re planning to build out. But again, this cannot be done by the federal government alone and there are still challenges that we have. And that is why I am just so excited to have this panel today.

Christopher Coes (10m 28s):
Because finally, with historic investments through the bipartisan infrastructure law as well as the Inflation Reduction Act, as well as the American Rescue Plan, we have an opportunity where the federal government can be a new partner, not just with ourselves at headquarters, but actually with cities and community organizations on the ground. And so today I’m thrilled to introduce our panel and so I’m gonna call them up individually, give ’em a quick bio so they come up one by one and then we’re gonna have a conversation. So first, let me invite Dr. Karen Chapple. Karen is actually currently the director of School of Cities at the University of Toronto. She also leads the Downtown Recovery Research Project, which is a collaboration between the School of Cities and the Institute of Governmental Studies at uc, Berkeley.

Christopher Coes (11m 11s):
Let’s give her a round of plan as she comes up. Next I would like to introduce a dear friend, CCA Moneme May, who’s, as you all know, a major strategic advisor. An executive leader not only on urban mobility and finance, but currently serves as Executive Director for the Capitol Riverfront in Washington DC, which I can say DOT is a current resident within that district. Next we have Nichol Burdo, yes, giving round of applause as well. Next up we have Nichol Burdo, who’s currently the Chief Planning and Engagement Officer at the Utah Transit Authority. She brings over 20 years of experience in communications and government relations. Please come on up, Nichol.

Christopher Coes (11m 55s):
Next we have Dee Brewer. He’s currently the Executive Director at the Salt Lake City Downtown Alliance, which is currently managing a number of things, great things actually, including the Downtown Farmer’s Market, which employs construction communication services across the district, as well as creating a great, safe, clean and courteous experience for all the Downtown residents. Let’s give him a round applause as well. Last but not least, we’re gonna have Ryan Johnson, joy Ryan. Johnson is currently the CEO and Co-founder of the Culdesac Incorporated, which bills and manages walkable neighborhoods. I’ll have to say, as someone who used to manage a, a national network of walkable real estate developers, Ryan, you speak to my heart.

Christopher Coes (12m 38s):
So let’s welcome Ryan as well. Guys, have a seat. So there’s two things we’re gonna do here. So before we engage with the panel, with a series of questions of conversations, I wanna invite Dr. Chap to actually give us a 10 minute presentation on some of the research she’s been doing around the intersectionality of downtowns and transit and what she’s seeing in terms of the marketplace. And then now we’ll frame the conversation moving forward. Karen,

Karen Chapple (13m 6s):
Terrific, thanks so much. Great to be back at impact. Great to be talking about downtowns and how they are actually coming back and transit is too. So this is research that I’ve done with my wonderful students in planning and engineering at Berkeley, plus a team at University of Toronto. Shout out to the Berkeley peeps who have really fueled the, the rail revolution in this country over the last 30 years. So, you know, downtowns fall and come back time after time, after disasters. And part of it is because transit is the backbone of cities and transit is what makes that density possible. Density of of residents, density of jobs, density of visitors, highways nearly destroyed cities, the cities that are doing best and coming back are the ones that have already taken down their highways.

Karen Chapple (13m 54s):
Europe, there’s a whole other story, but Europe actually spared its cities by, by playing the highways around instead of through them. So Downtown, beginning of the pandemic, we saw it empty out and people started proclaiming the death of Downtown. We said, well, we don’t think this is actually true and we think we can use mobile phone, cell phone trajectories to prove it. So we, we used safe graph and then spect US data, we 18 million cell phones across North America tracked cell phone activity and really looking at what was happening in the Downtown areas. This is what it looks like. This is the type of data we get, for instance, in Toronto. And this is the sort of impact you can see in the city using this type of data.

Karen Chapple (14m 36s):
Very powerful data. So this is Toronto, the downtowns in red, this is before the pandemic, this is when the pandemic hits, boom, the red goes way down. And then after the pandemic is easing up, you see that comeback. And what’s interesting here, lots of activity Downtown right before the pandemic pandemic hits and then post pandemic, you start to see Downtown coming back a little bit. But the areas all around in the neighborhoods, the more suburban areas, the suburban job centers coming back maybe even a little bit faster than Downtown. And this pattern we’re still dealing with today. So this is how we define Downtown. It’s based on job densities.

Karen Chapple (15m 16s):
We use what we call recovery rate, which actually compares activity today to activity in the same season before the pandemic. You can go to our website, Downtown recovery.com. I bought this for $3 at the outset of the pandemic. Nobody else cared about Downtown. It’s now worth $2,000. So invest in domains is really good. So, so this is our rankings. They’ve been covered in many, many different venues, but overall we’re finding that that downtown’s our back at about 74% on median. And it varies a lot across different regions with the southwest of the US really doing the best. And then some of the Pacific Coast and northeastern cities and Midwestern cities struggling.

Karen Chapple (15m 59s):
The Midwestern here are in the light blue. And right now in our rankings there at the very lowest Europe did very, very differently. So we compare this to downtowns in Europe, which are defined more by history and by culture than by office districts. And guess what, they came back at a much, much faster rate than any North American Downtown. So it’s, it’s a lesson for us for thinking about what do we want our downtowns to be now that the office district is probably obsolete, maybe we need to think about cultural and historical uses. Downtown. Now by the way, we can look building by building block by block. And this is really helpful as we work with cities to figure out how they wanna come back. So we ran a model to figure out what matters, what is driving the comeback of some cities and why are some coming back so much faster than others.

Karen Chapple (16m 47s):
So we looked at a variety of variables and I’ll, I’ll share some of the correlations with you. And then the overall model results. So biggest negative correlation, professional jobs. So those downtowns that really were over concentrated in professional jobs like management, consulting, lawyers, accountants, the folks that don’t need to be together to be productive, they’re not doing so well. Many of these actually were in the class B and C space that is really, really suffering in downtowns. So negative correlation with professional jobs, negative correlation also with financial insurance jobs. Positive correlation if you happen to have a lot of hotels and food services. Downtown, this is I think why the southwestern downtowns Phoenix, some other places have really thrived.

Karen Chapple (17m 29s):
Salt, Lake, City and others have have done really well. Population density sadly is negatively correlated with Downtown recovery. So people right now are avoiding density, they’re avoiding population density and they’re avoiding employment density. I think using our long view as urbanists, I think this is a temporary trend. I don’t think this will last, but we’ll see. See commuting by car now please don’t push me off the stage, But the cities that are recovering fastest are relying on car commuters. So again, let’s just hope by next year this correlation’s gone, I’ll come back and show it and you know, maybe we’ll have a better picture.

Karen Chapple (18m 11s):
But you know, at the beginning of the pandemic, people just didn’t wanna be around people. They wanna be in their cars. And this has really affected how quickly downtown’s come back, commute times, this is a major, major factor. The longer the commute time, the less likely your Downtown is to recover. So people just don’t like those long commutes anymore. And I think this one is here to stay. I don’t think we’re gonna see people doing the, the mega commutes anymore. So we ran a random forest regression model on this to figure out what mattered most. And just to zoom in here a little bit, you can see the top ones here have to do with economy. The economy, the economy. And Transit particularly long commutes, even more than than just reliance on Transit.

Karen Chapple (18m 53s):
It’s those mega commutes that are problematic. Okay, so we’re just starting to look at transit. And I just wanna give a shout out to Tracy had low and Brookings institution who already has a terrific paper on this and made many, many great points. And I just stole two of them, but I wanted to steal 10 of them. One of her great points is that, you know, we have off peak ridership that is recovering much quicker than peak hour ridership. And then second point is, is about bus services and that we see much quicker recovery in in bus service than we’re seeing in rail lines. And, and I would argue that has to do with essential workers and she makes some of that case in in her work as well. So we looked at this, we’d looked at the correlation between Downtown recovery and transit recovery and found that they are positively correlated.

Karen Chapple (19m 37s):
So they go hand in hand. You wanna have both cities that are downtowns are coming back. They’re also seeing a resurgence in their transit system. This differs across type of transit though. So positive correlation with bus ridership. Negative correlation with light rail. So light rails not that tightly connected to the fate of Downtown. It’s connected to the fate of other things, but not as closely connected as bus ridership or as metro subway ridership or as commuter rail. Unnaturally has the highest correlation with Downtown recovery. One last study I wanna mention. We just started doing a study of transit oriented neighborhoods and comparing them to those without transit. So in here this is Toronto, this is the red neighborhoods have access to a subway stop.

Karen Chapple (20m 22s):
The green are the controls that don’t. We do a little model, see which one’s doing better. So it turns out that recovery rates are higher in TOD neighborhoods. So TOD neighborhoods are more resilient than the ones without it controlling for a whole mess of factors. So we’ll be publishing that one soon. So policy implications, make sure we diversify our Downtown economies, our land uses. We’ve gotta think more about residential, but we’ve also also gotta think more about cultural uses. Arts and repopulating our space with pop-ups and startups make it easier to convert buildings, make sure that downtowns are, are of course affordable.

Karen Chapple (21m 4s):
I advocate lots of new student housing Downtown as a way of getting a lot of of activity there. But also, you know, more affordable housing Downtown. Since we’re losing that proximity to opportunities often in our cities, this is a great place to put affordability. And then finally investing strategically in transit and walkability. I think we need to double down on transit. It is coming back, but we can do even better. Downtown is for people who could say it better than Jane Jacobs. She wrote that 1957 guys, that was what, 66 years ago or something? So, and we still haven’t figured it out. We gotta make sure our downtowns are for people. So that’s our website and thank you very much.

Christopher Coes (21m 53s):
Thank you Karen for that. So we’re gonna have a conversation ’cause you gave us a lot of really important information, some of which may be counterintuitive in many cases where in a lot of communities we’re seeing trans supported communities actually not only have maintained value but actually in many cases have exceeded, particularly when it comes to housing costs. So one of the first questions, and I kind of taken this back to my remarks of where we were in the C and how cities responded. DI want to turn to you because you know, Salt, Lake, City for many, many cases has been like a poster child of what Louisville community supposed to look like and particularly in the Downtown. Can you just talk about how you and the Alliance are trying to dig out of the covid and where do you see, you know, the challenge as it relates to camera’s presentation?

Dee Brewer (22m 40s):
Thank you and thank you to the other panelists too. I’m glad to participate in this conversation. I have to acknowledge, first off, it really helps to have the tailwinds of a strong and diverse economy, which we do in the state of Utah. And that smooths out a lot of the bumps given that what we are seeing is an evolution in our Downtown economy. It tracks with the data we just saw and arts and entertainment is a big part of that. Our tracking on office i I believe the data shows us of about 82% on total visitation that tracks with what we see. Office is probably down around 70%, 68% in our market, but our nighttime economy is back and it’s back and forth.

Dee Brewer (23m 26s):
And that’s what we’re really leveraging. And let me, if I could talk about some data that we looked at, we looked at our top visitation days for last year. What really drove that and what could we correlate with those top days? 78% of those days had events at the Delta Center. That’s where the Utah jazz play, that’s where Bieber and Disney on Ice and Monster Truck shows and everything else comes 72% of those top visitation days. We had a major convention in town again in the convention district and that hospitality component is really material to the success that we’re seeing.

Dee Brewer (24m 8s):
Over half of those top visitation days had eight or more arts and culture events in Downtown on that night, on that day. So Symphony, opera, ballet, Broadway Theater, et cetera. And then shopping has been sort of a slow drip system, if you will, with some spikes around the holidays. And February 13th is another big shopping day

Christopher Coes (24m 35s):
From the private sector perspective. Ryan, you know, you are building literally car, car-free communities, right? What are you seeing in terms of the data? Why are you putting more time and investment in creating these communities?

Ryan Johnson (24m 49s):
Yeah, so we started cul-de-sac five years ago. I was at Opendoor before that and I think Opendoor has the best data in real estate. And what I saw so clearly, both in the data and hearing from so many customers was that people want to live in walkable neighborhoods. And there’s this recent NAR study that says every generation would pay a premium to live in a walkable neighborhood including 92% of Gen Z. And the challenge is that we largely stopped building them with the advent of cars. But there’s been a lot of innovation in transportation and that lets us build walkable neighborhoods again. And so we have something called cul-de-sac Tempe with a thousand residents. It’s open today, I live there. It’s a thriving community and I know some people came to the tours there and would love to show you more there.

Ryan Johnson (25m 32s):
But the reason why it’s possible is that our residents, instead of a private vehicle, they use a portfolio of transportation options. And we’re right on the light rail. My uncle actually worked for Valley Metro and he’s retired now, but I showed him cul-de-sac one day and he said this is why we built this.

Christopher Coes (25m 49s):
Oh that’s great Ryan. And you know, we keep having this conversation. And Cameron, you talked about transit and how communities in your research that actually embrace transit were coming outta recovery quicker. And so I would love for Nichol if you could talk about, you know, we just heard for Dee how he’s seeing the market, but what is your transit agency doing to recover?

Nichol Bordeaux (26m 8s):
Well thank you and thank you all to the panelists and I kind of geek out on this, it’s really exciting for us to talk about Salt, Lake, City and UTA. So during the pandemic we really looked at as every transit agency did, where we could reduce service because people weren’t using it. It was kind of a clean slate for us, which really allowed UTA to look at how we recover, right? So it wasn’t based on the old economy or how people were traveling back and forth. We really started to look at number one, our bus network. We saw people during the pandemic and continue, it was rising. Our numbers are above pandemic numbers on some of our rides because of the essential workers.

Nichol Bordeaux (26m 52s):
And we also started to see transit ridership flatten out. So it wasn’t these big spikes on commuter, it was big spikes on events, Downtown entertainment, Garth Brooks, and I know if anybody’s had to do Garth Brooks, you’re gonna have a little or Taylor Swift. Yeah, or Taylor Swift, you know you have a little post-traumatic stress syndrome transit agency. But we saw those big recoveries and what’s exciting for us is concentrating on how to build that going forward. But now we understand it’s really gonna be about arts, culture, entertainment and it isn’t a eight to five economy anymore.

Nichol Bordeaux (27m 32s):
It, we really have to look at late nights, which we work with our partner in Salt, Lake, City to do more and Saturdays, which every mode is up on Saturdays and buses up almost 18% on Sundays. So it’s those weekend travelers, it’s the entertainment that we’re seeing.

Christopher Coes (27m 48s):
Lemme just follow up. For those transit agencies who are here, what advice would you give them to be more adaptable to this change?

Nichol Bordeaux (27m 56s):
Well I think it’s important to look at when people are writing and looking for other opportunities to get that ridership. So during the day, making partnerships with events, which we do as ticket is fair. Making sure people can get down and get into the system when they want to. But also, I know we’re here and it used to be rail, but really looking at your connections to your bus system and how that can help you and be flexible and work with you or your ridership and connectivity. And especially Downtown where trips are small, they’re not long and people want, they want to get where they can go walk, but then if there’s a little bit longer they can hop on a bus or you’re trained.

Nichol Bordeaux (28m 36s):
So I would look at that system about really looking at the walkability of your community and how you can access that.

Christopher Coes (28m 42s):
Thank you. And Mecca, we’ve heard a lot now, not only from the panelists but also from the research that entertainment is a huge driver, right? For bringing people back to the core and at the Capitol Riverfront, for those who don’t know as aware, we have the Nat Stadium, the was Nats Go Braves, we also, but we also have a number of entertainment but also you have a lot of office tenants including Department of Transportation. So can you just talk about the role of like maybe your anchor institutions holding in the community together and bringing the Downtown Pac

Emeke Moneme (29m 12s):
Lo? First of all, thank you for allowing me to be on the panel. Really pleased to be on the stage with folks and thank you for the the quick commercial for the Capitol Riverfront bid. We are a 500 acre neighborhood on the banks of the Anacostia River, five blocks from the US Capitol complex. And we do host in addition to the USDOT, the nationals, Washington Nationals, DC United. And we’re able to use those assets that the city thought really strategically about 15 years ago to place them there in a neighborhood that didn’t really exist 15 years ago, less than a thousand people lived in the neighborhood. Today we have, we’re home to 20,000 residents that live there. We have a metro rail stop that was built at the same time that we built the baseball stadium.

Emeke Moneme (29m 52s):
Again, thinking ahead about what do we want the mix of transportation options to be in this community. And then we’ve really invested a lot of money in making sure that we’ve taken advantage of our Riverfront location to build pedestrian trails, access to the water amenities to bring people down there. Not just on the a hundred to 120 days a year where there is some sort of a game or an event going on in our neighborhood. But to come down for the quality of life. I thought the slide that really grabbed my attention was the comparison of the European cities to US cities and just that distinction between quality of life as being the driver for community recovery. Those cities have something special, unique that draws people there. Regardless if they’re going to go check in at the office to go to work, they’re coming down there to enjoy the city, to experience the city.

Emeke Moneme (30m 37s):
And that’s really what we try to cultivate in the neighborhood is that experience.

Christopher Coes (30m 41s):
Let me follow up with that because again, I’m hearing entertainment, quality of life being the driver, being a livable community, right? Why didn’t I hear is more office space. Yeah,

Emeke Moneme (30m 52s):
So we’ve got 58% of the land use in the neighborhood is residential. Only about 28% is office. And I think there’s been an intentionality to kind of get that balance right. I’m sure many of my development property owners want more office in the neighborhood, they always want more office. But I think we’re now rethinking what that right mix is. I think Downtown, DC, 90% of the land use is office and it’s the one that’s still trying to figure out how it moves forward through this position. I think we’ve kind of got the balance right at 60, maybe a little bit more office, but it’s a different type of office. And we were just talking earlier about with WeWork filing for bankruptcy. I think the entire market’s kind of thinking about well what’s the right format, location and quantity of office you need to kind of make that 15 minute neighborhood piece work.

Emeke Moneme (31m 38s):
You have to have some presence there. But getting the balance right is what we’ve been focused on.

Christopher Coes (31m 43s):
Ryan, do you wanna touch on that? What are you seeing in terms of the market? Like what are the challenges of the fact that we have so much office space now in Downtown, so I need to get converted. What do you see the opportunity or the barrier for addressing that?

Ryan Johnson (31m 54s):
So what we’re seeing is there’s a lot of remote workers that creates geographic flexibility. We also have co-working on site that helps people that are working remote and also smaller scale entrepreneurship. And we’re also seeing a flight to quality. I think the challenges are bigger in B and C office space and that’s one of the reasons why Tempe is doing disproportionately well. It has the highest price office space along Tempe Town Lake and so you know those will always be filled eventually. I think it’s the things that are farther out in the burbs where people don’t really want to be there as much as they do in a walkable, thriving area.

Christopher Coes (32m 27s):
So let’s take a step back, Karen, you talked about some policy ideas, I love policy. From your perspective, what is the main policy issue that the federal government should be focusing on today?

Karen Chapple (32m 39s):
Today? Well I do like that the federal government is looking at office conversion and as an RFP out on research on that. You know, I think we kind of have to look carefully at the tax structures and right now, you know, a lot of our cities are all set up to give big tax abatements to commercial office development. And so, you know, we need to probably rethink our tax structure. I mean I always go back to 1986 and Reagan and the multifamily apartments and how we lost that type. I mean that’s the sort of structural reform we kind of need in order to get land uses kind of mixed up Downtown also, cities have been really slow to act and this has been striking and depressing for me that cities have been waiting kind of for the commercial landlords to figure out what’s going on and what they wanna do.

Karen Chapple (33m 30s):
And the thing is that those landlords are sitting on space ’cause it’s easier for them to keep it empty and wait it out. Right? And that’s a disaster from a public good and a public, you know, space and civic infrastructure perspective. We can’t have that, we can’t afford that. And so we need to force those commercial landlords to take some action. I don’t know what exactly what that is, but maybe you can ask some of your buddies.

Christopher Coes (33m 54s):
Okay. I imagine that if you had a policy magic wand, you may have an approach, what would it be?

Emeke Moneme (33m 59s):
Well, let me, let me, I want to double down on the, the tax structure piece. An interesting piece of data for us. So 2019 before the pandemic property taxes were the main driver for value in our communities. Property tax, sales tax and income tax. What we saw over the five to six years transition through COVI is that income tax was the chief generator of tax benefit out of our neighborhood. Neighborhood adjacent to us and the other business improvement district, NOMA north of Massachusetts Avenue, they’re growing. It’s the people moving in high earners spending money sales tax remaining to number two, property tax dropped to number three. So I think this, this data is telling us that structurally our economies successful growing economies are more dependent upon again that quality of life that drives people to choose to live there, maybe even work in the neighborhood at some coworking space, spend their money go out to eat in that neighborhood.

Emeke Moneme (34m 49s):
That’s what’s generating that flywheel for the economy for Downtown as it relates to policy. Where do we begin? I’ll share a vignette. So 23 years ago when I first moved to DC as a bright, eager less gray haired young man, I came to do real estate development. I thought that that’s, that’s why I’m in DC. I wanna go build things. I worked for mayor then Mayor Williams in DC and ended up doing an internship where they put me in the Transportation department. I spent a month complaining why would you send me the transportation department? And I came here to do real estate development and then within six months I completely understood that I was doing real estate and economic development by working transportation. So I think anything that we can do to further tie that link between land use decision making, transportation investment decision making closer and closer together, including EV investment, right?

Emeke Moneme (35m 39s):
Because that’s a piece of the action. Those are the big levers. That’s the piece that’s gonna move private capital to take action once it sees the federal government move.

Christopher Coes (35m 47s):
So pivoting, obviously federal government doesn’t have all the answers. A lot of solutions we were finding are happening at the state and local level. And you know, what better to have this conversation, what’s happening in Salt, Lake, City. So Dee, we would love to hear how you guys are navigating this challenge that all of these downtowns are facing right now.

Dee Brewer (36m 3s):
Well, a couple things happening. Our residential population is growing. We feel good about that actually doubling in the next 24 to 30 months just with the occupancy of what is currently under construction now we have a small Downtown residential population, about 5,000, but we’re gonna crest 10,000 when we fill up what is under construction right now. When I think about the office situation, I mean what do we do? We program, right? We try to make Downtown an amenity that is attractive and a lot of my real estate friends talk about we’re not in the real estate business, we’re in the human capital business, we are attracting human capital.

Dee Brewer (36m 46s):
And I see what we do as an instrument of that. So like many cities, we produced open streets programming during the pandemic and even as late as just a couple of weeks ago where we closed our main street to traffic to automobiles, made it a pedestrian corridor, programmed entertainment every night. Again, it’s about driving traffic Downtown on those specific nights, but it’s also about creating a destination for the region. It’s about creating habits for coming Downtown for those arts culture and entertainment amenities.

Christopher Coes (37m 22s):
So we’re gonna pivot just a little bit because one of the conversations that we are having at the federal level is not only how do we build back better and we have clearly this investment America agenda that does that, but we’re also recognizing that we are in the middle of a climate crisis. And one of the things that I always loved about coming to this convening is the fact that the solutions are in this room, right? And one of the things that I have and you know am mecca with navy yard, you know I see all the scooters, I see all the different micro mobility, but the fact that I have a private sector developer here who is literally designing car free neighborhoods. I’m curious from your perspective, what is the mode of transportation for the future besides walking?

Ryan Johnson (38m 3s):
It’s a full portfolio and the most popular of the options of our residents is the Valley Metro light rail. But there’s also, yeah, thank you everybody.

Christopher Coes (38m 13s):
That was a softball if you haven’t noticed. Yeah,

Ryan Johnson (38m 16s):
Electric bikes, which really hockey stick and the number one electric bike companies here in Phoenix started by somebody who’s only 27 now, it’s called electric. Every resident of cul-de-sac gets a free electric bike. We’re leasing if anybody’s interested, gotta plug that. And then electric scooters and also ride share. We’re partnering with Lyft, our residents get 15% off and then AV ride hail including Waymo has really come outta nowhere. And you know, that might be a four letter word in this audience, but it paired with the other transportation modes is going to really make a big difference. And it’s popular with our residents now. And I think in particular the combination of the AV ride hail and bikes, when you’re on a bike and you see a Waymo that actually respects even a painted bike lane, that’s when it starts to click.

Ryan Johnson (38m 59s):
And you say that, you know, even though having more cars is not the outcome in and of itself, having road safety enables a lot of things. And when we don’t need parking spaces for vehicles, we can build things closer together. And so it starts a reverse feedback loop, which is the opposite of the sprawl loop.

Christopher Coes (39m 14s):
Well that just brings me to Nichol then in the sense that obviously Transit is definitely a solution, right? To meet the climate crisis and if we build more transit, right, we can meet our greenhouse goals. But it’s also this moment of like we still have this micro mobility and there’s some transit issues that are embracing it full hand and there’s some that are still asking questions. We’ll love to hear how you guys are addressing and trying to bring it into your system.

Nichol Bordeaux (39m 39s):
So I would say Salt, Lake, City and especially UTA, we are embracing it wholly. Part of my portfolio is innovative mobility solutions. We have an on-demand sector, we also are looking at AV as well. So Waymo, we’re looking at something like that for some of our areas as well as working with our TNCs to help us pick up trips where we miss them. So we look at it as a transportation portfolio and we were always looking for solutions. UTA is a broad service area from very rural to our capital city. And so we have to look at solutions that meet all those needs and they’re very different.

Nichol Bordeaux (40m 22s):
So I welcome you all to come try it out. But we have done a great job, I believe, and we’ll continue to look at these micro mobility options for our people and actually what new technologies can help in the transit world.

Christopher Coes (40m 35s):
I’m gonna stick with you for a second because one of the things that fascinates me in a era of a moment of disruption, whether it’s the pandemic or economic disruption, is that our workforce is so critical, right? To not only the transition of bringing our downtowns back, but also our own agencies, our own teams, whether you’re in a development space. So I would love to hear about how you guys are approaching your workforce because we all saw it like we had to now and protect them. But also we need more workforce to deliver some of the capital goals that a lot of our agencies are trying to produce.

Nichol Bordeaux (41m 7s):
Yeah, this is, you know, this is what weighs on us at UTA every day and all those transit agencies out there, it’s labor and we are really taking a step back at how we organize our work, right? The working conditions, the flexibility, what people are looking for, which goes back to kind of that sustainable life to put out there. And so we actually have a system set up right now talking about getting the service on the road and it starts from our planning team to our people team to our operations and how we’re going to move the service that we know is needed. We know we have ridership out there, we can’t really pull it in until we get that labor taken care of.

Nichol Bordeaux (41m 50s):
So it’s really kind of an overhaul at UTA right now of how we are gonna approach labor hiring and sustaining the service and hopefully increasing it as we need to.

Christopher Coes (42m 1s):
Alright, so we’re gonna pivot a little bit in this conversation. I promised them that I’ll give them enough softballs to hopefully get, you know, will spinning, but I also wanna get you some questions I haven’t like tested them on yet. And so be prepared. This is what I would like to call the things that we don’t say out loud. Alright? The things we don’t say out loud, but we should. So I’m gonna give you a minute, Mecca, you first?

Emeke Moneme (42m 27s):
No, this one I’m, I’m actually happy to call this spade a spade. So the neighborhood that I oversee is really exciting. If you’ve been to DC, you know that the energy is there, it’s, it’s shiny, it’s literally a new neighborhood, 15 years old. The critique that I have of my neighborhood is that we’d have not preserved the soul of that neighborhood again. So let me take us back. DC is a very diverse community. That neighborhood does not fully represent the diversity of that neighborhood. And so what can we do as we grow and we want it to continue to grow? How do we ensure that that DNA, that authenticity, that part of DC not represented shows there. And it’s through mobility investments, it’s through culture, it’s through lifting up history and things that happened or ceased to happen in the past.

Emeke Moneme (43m 12s):
I’m talking about urban renewal. We are urban renewal neighborhoods. So part of our history is we basically made some neighborhoods disappear and the vestiges of that are still something I think we struggle with. And so yeah, that’s the quiet part.

Christopher Coes (43m 25s):
I’m gonna let that sit for a second. That is one of the major issues that we are trying to address at the federal level. And the reality is there are thousands of capital riverfronts across the country that are struggling with this big towns, small towns. And one of the things that we are constantly emphasizing is centering community in that conversation. Inviting those who have not been a part of the table. Not just to hear them but actually bring them into the solution. So I’m appreciative you saying that part out loud. So Nichol, you are next up, what’s the thing that should be said?

Nichol Bordeaux (44m 4s):
Well I think I’m the wrong one for this question, but I think what’s important, especially in a transit agency and one of the things we are trying to balance is this idea of bus being sexy, right? You know, we’re at a conference that changed its name but for the last few years it was rail, rail, rail, rail, rail. And now we’re seeing as rail is necessary and we need it. But we also need to continue to invest in bus and invest in the people that need bus and, and and support that connection as a whole. None of the modes are bad, the modes are all needed for the community and how we serve them.

Nichol Bordeaux (44m 44s):
What we need to do is make sure that we’re looking at that balancing act.

Christopher Coes (44m 48s):
Thank you D

Dee Brewer (44m 51s):
That’s a really hard question. I’m glad I at least got two, two to go first. The thing I’m thinking about is the livability of our Downtown. As that increases as we double that our Downtown is not livable enough yet. And what I mean by that specifically is green space. We’ve got the entertainment components but we are at a deficit for green space and all of the transit is important on some level, but if the real estate itself, if the area of Downtown doesn’t breathe in some way, we need to make some progress there. And some of our city partners are evaluating the permanent closure of Main Street.

Dee Brewer (45m 31s):
I think I said that a minute ago. We also have some quasi public spaces that could be brought into the city park inventory that would make such a difference for those 5,000 residents that are already on their way to Downtown.

Christopher Coes (45m 49s):
Thank you for that. Ryan.

Ryan Johnson (45m 51s):
So I think buses are sexy at cul-de-sac. We name our conference rooms after the most influential urbanists. So the biggest and best conference room is Jane Jacobs. We also have the Donald Chub conference room, but we also have the Jaime Larner conference room and bus Rapid Transit can make a big difference. And I think that actually ride sharing and AV ride hail with the right policies in place can be the sort of second coming of bus rapid transit.

Christopher Coes (46m 13s):
Now I’m gonna go back to what’s the thing that’s not said that should be said

Ryan Johnson (46m 17s):
When people are talking about housing affordability, they should be talking about housing and transportation affordability together.

Christopher Coes (46m 23s):
You must have read my recent FAQs at the department. Karen close it.

Karen Chapple (46m 28s):
Yeah, I, I have a two part one. So first of all, so high income folks are willing to pay a premium for transportation choice. And that means that when we think about TOD and when we think about Downtown which has the best transportation choice of anywhere in the region, we are at risk of losing our diversity and not being inclusive. And so we need to find a way to leverage the willingness of high income folks to pay that premium. And relatedly, this is the part that people don’t say out loud. So there’s all kinds of accessibility and if you wanna have inclusion, you may not need to put low income folks right next to the transit station or even within a quarter mile or a half mile.

Karen Chapple (47m 11s):
You could have great accessibility within a mile and you can get a lot lower land prices and you can get a lot more affordable units if you are willing to go a little bit more out. So that’s what I would advise.

Christopher Coes (47m 24s):
Okay. Does the panel agree?

Dee Brewer (47m 27s):
I agree.

Christopher Coes (47m 28s):
Yeah. Okay. Everyone’s in agreement. That was easy. Thank you for, for sharing your perspective of the thing. So I think in many cases what has always been great about Impact, formerly known as Revolution is that we can have the hard conversation and I really appreciate you guys pushing that envelope a little bit. But Ryan, you said something that obviously resonated with me when I was a young pop coming to these conferences, you know, listening to Scott Bernstein and talk about how h and t, h and t housing and train station costs and everyone had to go and like look up their zip code and put their address in and kinda like, oh crap, my home in Thomasville, Georgia, you know, our h and t was definitely over 60%. But now in my little walkable neighborhood in union market in Washington, DC is roughly 44%.

Christopher Coes (48m 13s):
And so you, you find that in a place like McAllen, Texas, they have one of the highest h and t in the country, close to 82%. Think about that. And when you go to McAllen and you talk to the workers and you listen how long they have to commute to come into Downtown McAllen and you hear that story not only in McAllen, you can hear that in Houston, you can hear that in Tampa when you talk to military families who are literally traveling two hours one way to get to Downtown Tampa because housing affordability is a huge challenge. That is something that this administration has made front and center in a lot of our policy. So if you looked at all of our discretionary grants, we are asking not just Transportation options ’cause we all know transit, but we also wanna know how is it related and connected to your housing policy.

Christopher Coes (48m 59s):
And increasingly we’re finding applicants are embracing and producing projects that bring those two things together. But one of the things I think we still struggle with is how do we address this housing affordability now, but also over the next 10 to 15 to 20 years. Because we also are seeing that the homes that we have built, particularly in our more suburban markets, are actually in climate vulnerable places. So as we were trying to address the housing affordability for people who have housing in downtowns or in our liveable areas of transit supported communities, we also had to think about, and I really appreciate you Karen calling out my colleague Dr. Tracy Lewis. When I was at Brookings, we did this report together where we identified close to 40 million Americans are living in homes that will not exist in the next 10 to 15 years due to flooding fires and climate disasters.

Christopher Coes (49m 49s):
Where do they go? So that’s my question to first to Ryan as the real estate developer, I feel like for you this is a market news of like, okay, I gotta keep building. But what do you see as the barrier for you producing more affordable car century? Because that is the desire of the market, but we’re not producing it fast enough.

Ryan Johnson (50m 6s):
There’s demand for walkable neighborhoods all over the country. And so if you think about where it works for us, you build new housing when there’s job growth, you go to places that are welcoming of growth and obviously the profitability matters. So being able to get the right parcels and when those things are in place, we can build more walkable neighborhoods. And I think that one thing that policy makers can do is you can lower housing costs and increase profitability simply by having less bureaucracy, right? I used to work for the New York MTA and was sort of part of it, so I know how hard it is to change it within, but we’re talking, we can get 10% plus housing cost decreases just through streamlining bureaucracy.

Christopher Coes (50m 44s):
Nichol, I’m gonna come to you next because a lot of transit agencies are here and the planners will say, transit agencies, we don’t do housing. But so many of you now are looking at your existing assets, your land, hons, your parking lots and asking ourselves, we have to be in this conversation. And for folks who haven’t noticed, a week ago, the Department of Transit Station announced a change and how we do disposition of land and for transit agents who have land, you can now without ever coming to ask us, you can now transfer it to local governments or nonprofits for affordable housing. So I’m curious, how is the Transit agency trying to lean in on housing affordability in Salt, Lake City?

Nichol Bordeaux (51m 22s):
Well, this is something we’ve been doing for a few years at UTA. We’ve had a TOD and now called Transit Orient Communities Department now looking at our surplus land and working with developers along there to gain ridership as well as build affordable housing. Salt, Lake. City specifically has very limited affordable housing. And what we’re seeing is it’s more sprawled and pushed out across the city. So this is something we continue to do. We do look at affordability and I’m hoping that we continue to look at how far down we can go, that affordability piece and looking at non-profits. We don’t have a lot of nonprofit developers in Utah, but it would be great to expand that now that the administration allows for that.

Christopher Coes (52m 8s):
So with that Ika, we had a conversation earlier and you said something that I thought was quite profound between you and D. You guys are a place managers, right? Your job is to bring the quality of life to life, but you are also, you have a board, you have a strategic plan. And one of the challenges that you’re seeing, even Capitol Riverfront right now is a house affordability. But you said something to me, which was something I think we all struggle with, which is that I do not want Capitol Riverfront become a bedroom community. Talk about that tension.

Emeke Moneme (52m 38s):
Yeah, so I, I think I mentioned before again, 58% of our land use is residential, which is great. It explains the reason why we’re resilient from a financial standpoint. But there’s more to it. The energy that makes that place a place is the people that visit it, whether it’s for work, for entertainment, for recreation, those people coming in, pumping in and pumping outta the neighborhood is what makes it a place and not just a place where people go to to lay their heads down. And actually, I want to weave back to your policy recommendation as we were kind of talking about public space Downtown, I’m gonna use Robert Moses as an example, which I know is dangerous, but I’m still gonna do it. So one of the things that Robert Moses did, and he used it for for nefarious purposes, was he used park construction to build his roads right, his roads, freeways.

Emeke Moneme (53m 25s):
He basically said, I’m gonna use a park to divide a neighborhood and I’m gonna build the road that I want. One of the benefits of that is that the Federal Highway Administration, you’re allowed to use some of the funds. And this is backed by DDOT days to build public parks. And we’ve done that in the city, the Federal Transit Administration does not allow for that. Right? And that, I think is a, an opportunity miss, is if you could allow some of those resources for a transit project to be used for public parks. A tremendous way to make place. 3% of the land area in the Capitol Riverfront bid are public parks. We manage 10 acres of public parks, splash parks, we do movies, we do all kinds of events there. And that’s what makes part of that connective tissue work. And so that’s a, there’s your policy idea.

Christopher Coes (54m 6s):
Thank you. That was a really good one. Okay, so we have a few more minutes left. And so I’m gonna try to ask a couple of questions and then I’ll give you your immediate softball question at the end. So Chapple, let me ask you this. From your research, what do you see coming over the horizon that we’re not paying attention to?

Karen Chapple (54m 27s):
Actually, from a personal perspective, we’re losing our phone data. And actually this affects transportation agencies too. A lot of us have been relying on phone data and Apple changed its opt-in procedure. And yeah, so, and, and that data’s gonna disappear for a lot of us. That’s gonna affect a, a lot of transportation agencies. But I’m very worried about the commercial office sector and the potential collapse of it. And then that impact on regional banks and kind of the domino effect on downtown’s. I’m not a believer in the urban doom loop. You know, maybe one or two cities are, have that. But I do think we need to think a lot about those vacancies and that 15, 25, 30% vacancy in San Francisco.

Karen Chapple (55m 12s):
You know, that’s huge. I mean, I guess we knew that was coming, but I think we’re not worrying about it enough.

Christopher Coes (55m 17s):
Okay. And Mecca, what do you see either for Capitol Riverfront, but from, I mean, again, you’re bringing over 20 plus years of experience in this. What do you see around the horizon that we should be paying attention to?

Emeke Moneme (55m 29s):
There’s no way, I couldn’t bring up the cap, the commercial real estate issue. I, I do think that that’s a big unknown. And I think that the good news is that there’s models. I mean, DC’s a perfect example of a city that was on its back and pivoted and took it and and leveraged all of its assets to kind of create amazing city in my view. But I think that it should be, should be a higher priority. It’s one of those things we don’t, we don’t talk a lot about. And I think our biggest issue in DC in particular is that our transit system is teeing around the brink of insolvency. And we don’t talk about it in mixed company. It’s like things that people whisper in back rooms and then we don’t even talk about it. We even have the regional CFOs not even really putting it in forward. So it’s always solved itself.

Emeke Moneme (56m 10s):
And I think we just think that things will happen as they happen in the past. So those are the two things.

Christopher Coes (56m 16s):
I’m so glad you said. That was actually gonna be my follow up question. I was like, the thing I haven’t heard from anyone is the viability of transit and the funding gaps that we’re seeing. So Nichol, I assume that might be one, but there may be others. Would you want to piggyback off of that?

Nichol Bordeaux (56m 29s):
Yeah, I’ll piggyback Salt, Lake, City and UTA and our system is a little different because we’re not funded by Fairbox Recovery as a dominant source. Like the major areas we’re funded by sales tax. And so as the economy is really, well, funding in that sense isn’t a big problem for UTA, but labor is. But looking forward, how do we fund huge expansions of rail in our system is something that we do worry about. As we talked about, public transit is no longer eight to five, and that’s how these systems have been built. And how do we move forward and help with these spikes in entertainment and spikes in huge mega events we’re talking about.

Nichol Bordeaux (57m 11s):
And the money and the infrastructure to support that is gonna be difficult over the few years. And that’s something we really gotta watch out for.

Christopher Coes (57m 19s):
I would say that is one of those moments where say there are transit agencies, your mobility service providers, right? If you start thinking of that framework, it changes the whole dichotomy. So thank you for bringing that Dee. Looking through your crystal ball, looking through the horizon, what do you see

Dee Brewer (57m 35s):
In the short term? It’s the crisis in office and the things that derive from that. The impact on commercial and retail, which affects vitality. Downtown as well on the long front, and maybe this isn’t on point for this transportation conference, but I want to see greater regional accountability for the homelessness issues in our community. Downtown bears, the brunt of that homelessness increased 10% in Utah last year, but I guarantee you most zip codes did not feel the impact of that. Like the two zip codes that are in Downtown, Salt, Lake, City, where the services are, and the community continues to look to the city mayor to solve this, which feels completely displaced.

Dee Brewer (58m 22s):
We are going to solve this on a regional level with regional resources and with housing solutions beyond what we’re getting to in any meaningful way on a city level, right?

Ryan Johnson (58m 33s):
Well, we’re not building enough walkable housing and the playing field isn’t level. We’re giving enormous subsidies to all things car dependency, right? There’s free use of the roads, but public transit agencies are struggling for funding. And I think that electric vehicles are gonna potentially make this worse. Partly ’cause of the gas tax question, but also electric vehicles are much heavier and that’s gonna actually increase the particulates in the air from tires, which is a huge problem for health. And meanwhile, we’re subsidizing them $7,500 and there’s no e-bike subsidy when people love e-bikes. And we can get many people living car free.

Christopher Coes (59m 10s):
So here’s your softball. What’s your favorite form of transportation? Karen. We’ll start with you.

Karen Chapple (59m 16s):
I walk everywhere. Love it. Love it.

Dee Brewer (59m 20s):
Scooters ’cause they’re fun

Christopher Coes (59m 21s):
Scooters.

Nichol Bordeaux (59m 24s):
Airplanes. No, I’m sticking with airplanes.

Dee Brewer (59m 30s):
My bike. I love my bike. I have for decades.

Ryan Johnson (59m 35s):
Same. It’s my electric XPE bike that I got for free when I signed my lease at cul-de-sac Tempe.

Christopher Coes (59m 43s):
Well ladies and gentlemen, give a round applause to this amazing panel. It’s amazing conversation. Thank you. Thank you. Impact for a wonderful, wonderful session. So with that, I’ll turn it back over to Tamar.