Are center cities neighborhoods ?

6 comments

1. What is a center city?

2. Assuming you mean city centers, the answer is sometimes.

3. Sometimes.

   Other times city centers are either business districts or government districts and can be pretty dead on the weekends.

   Like Wall Street isn’t a particularly exciting area.

   Like that’s how downtown Buffalo was for the longest time with some entertainment districts thrown in. All the nice walkable neighborhoods with bars, restaurants and shops are outside of downtown proper.

4. In some cities yes, in others no. Some cities the downtown/CBD/city center is almost entirely commercial buildings and it empties out at night. In others it’s more a mixture of commercial and residential buildings so there’s more activity around the clock. Here in Philly “Center City” refers to a section that includes the downtown part with most of the skyscrapers but also some surrounding neighborhoods of various different styles. Some blocks aren’t really much more than office buildings and some businesses that cater mostly to the people working there, some blocks are all houses and apartments, some blocks are a mixture of homes, workplaces, and bars/restaurants and other businesses.

5. Seattle has a fairly small section which is all office towers and very little else in the middle of downtown. That area isn’t really a neighborhood and hardly anyone lives there.

   It’s surrounded by a bunch of “downtown adjacent” areas like Pioneer Square, First Hill, Capitol Hill, Belltown etc. that are much more like real neighborhood with actual residents.

6. Many center cities, also known as “downtowns,” were torn apart in the 1960s. People no longer wanted to live in them (crime, old buildings) but flocked to outer suburbs (shiny new housing, big yards!), and there was a lot of interest in building freeways to make it easier for people in the suburbs to come to work downtown and then go home. Freeways were plowed through many center cities. Older residential buildings were torn down to create parking lots with a general expectation that some day, maybe, they would be redeveloped. In many cities the redevelopment never came, or is only coming now and might be poorly executed.

   Downtown Detroit – once one of the most thriving cities in America – is now predominantly surface parking lots (plus a lot of garages.)
   https://usa.streetsblog.org/2018/12/03/who-benefits-from-downtown-parking-craters

   All that red and orange is either parking lots or parking garages.

   Neighborhoods like these are unappealing for most people to live or spend time in. Often “low income housing” is built close by because there is available land, which turns some people off even more.

   In my city, they built a mall *just* outside of downtown in the 60s, which basically killed downtown in terms of small businesses, shopping, etc. Similar things happened in other places too. For some cities where *both* things happened, it was a real double whammy.

   Many downtowns are being effectively redeveloped. My downtown still struggles but there is new dense housing being built and a relatively new library and a campus of the community college, good restaurants and local shops, a Whole Foods, a big new hotel…. but it is a slow process to un-do the last 60+ years of disinvestment in center cities.