Cities on the fast track to doom

David Sherman

From our front porch, through the trees, comes the sound of “The Doom Loop,” our snippet of the vast migration of office stiffs from downtown cubicles across the continent.

Wifi-induced freedom is emptying office buildings and cities leaving shadows and empty restaurants and stores behind.

In our case, symptoms of the doom loop include never-ending traffic on the 364, a 50-year-old two-lane built to take people from the Laurentian autoroute, or The Quinze, starting line Montreal, and let them blow by our town -- what red lights? -- as they speed toward more northern villages like Seize Iles, Arundel, Val David and, eventually, Mont Tremblant.

Tremblant has an airport to handle the literal jet set, but most pilot SUVs the size of a single-engine Cessna.

If you could work at home in your pyjamas, why not invade the formerly pastoral landscape of those of us who have been living quietly in the mountains north of Montreal?

Or, head across one ocean or another and plug in anywhere rents are cheap, food is cheap and push the local population out of their no-longer-affordable homes into another postal code.

When we used to hear birds, we hear dump trucks and 18-wheelers grinding gears through the mountains. Not to mention joy-riding motorcycle pilots and their Harley’s roaring through the mountains to Lachute. The only pretty thing about Lachute is the road in and out of it, so you have to forgive those born to be wild.

They’re building over our heads, up the hill and across the street and through the fields. Apartment buildings are coming. As well, miniature humans, called children, attended to by people in their 20s and 30s have joined us fogies – 65 plus -- who are used to seeing shades of grey hair and conversations about joint replacements and the recently departed.

The invasion of city dwellers here and across the developed and even not-so-developed world has driven up house prices, crowded roads, sidewalks, restaurants, cut down forests to make room for more houses and brought the roar and beep of heavy machinery. It’s commerce at its shiniest, conquering new lands, and it’s noisy.

According to CNN, the loop after doom refers to the progressive erosion the exodus incites. Less desk jockeys means less restaurants and stores and whatever makes a city a city. It digs into a city’s tax base. Pot holes aren’t repaired, snow isn’t cleared, police and fire services are cut back which, in turn, makes the city even less appealing. The city then scavenges for new forms of revenue.

Montreal has become anti-car. A noble cause if you live there and can climb down into the metro or walk to work. Visiting, as we used to do, has become a perilous, expensive adventure, puzzling closed roads, one-way streets, boarded-up store fronts, detours, construction and no parking except ravenous parking meters requiring a physic degree to figure out. And, parking tickets keep climbing. Car-owners are cash cows.

At the same time, some of our favourite places have vapourized, victims of the plague and online shopping, food delivery and streaming.

And around and around it goes. Cities are becoming irrelevant, except for family and friends’ weddings, funerals and Akhavan, a great Middle Eastern grocer when you're desperate for real Greek feta and Iranian pistachios.

Most of my contemporaries have said to hell with it.

We stream movies or visit a laid-back multi-screen theatre in Saint Adele, about 20 minutes away. We visit local restaurants, if we can get a table because newcomers are now an occupying force.

We have musicians pass through here and our own theatre company. Beyoncé and Taylor Swift probably won’t be coming to the community centre here any time soon, but we all have to make sacrifices.

Around the world, this mass migration is dooming the once vaunted skyscrapers. The symbol of prosperity is now a monument to incipient bankruptcy, with cities perhaps not far behind.

Cities are desperate for low-cost and affordable housing but block-long office buildings that kiss the sky doth not low-cost housing make.

Conversion is expensive and impractical.

Windows are on one side, maybe half-a-block away from the elevator bank, necessitating long corridors or cutting through concrete flooring for more elevator shafts. The only light nine-to-fivers need is the glow of the computer screen. Humans at home tend to require more. Not everyone is comfortable living dozens of floors above the ground.

Residential spaces need more emergency exits.

And dropping kitchens and bathrooms into what was once a conference room or a cubicle cluster means tearing up floors, ripping out ceilings, exits and entrances. And throw in a whole lot of walls and front doors so you’re basically rebuilding the interior, the cost of which has to be bundled with whatever mortgage the building is carrying.

Only public money will cover the costs. Downtown office space rents in Manhattan, Toronto and Montreal between $30-$80 a square foot. Add on the costs of turning these abandoned offices into housing and taxpayers will hit the blood-pressure meds.

And if converted, as some have been, do you want to live in a canyon of empty buildings where cafés, stores and restaurants shuttered when clients stopped pouring out of subway stations to plug themselves into an office.

One way or another, we’ll all pay for the developers that can’t pay their mortgages on hundred-million-dollar buildings. The banks have a phobia about losing money so we’ll be hit with higher fees and those who hang on in the cities will be hit with higher taxes. This, of course, will have urban dwellers ask themselves, "who needs this?" and they too will leave. And the loop gets doomier.

Around the world, low-rent exotic cities have been invaded by this new exodus. Tourists have not only planted roots, they have taken up shop. Restaurateurs from around the world come in search of cheap rents, cheap labour and tourists with money to eat out. Computer nomads have moved and plugged. Local cuisine gets a “fusion” make over, lest the foreign country seem excessively foreign. 

Businesses thought the Pandemic-induced migration would save them a bundle on office space. Leases were not renewed. But productivity declined as did collective exchanging of ideas to solve problems or innovate. And worker bees not only don’t want to go back to the hive, it’s harder for bosses to look over their shoulder.

But, Big Brother found ways to hang in. Some ingenious employers lock their workers to the computer’s camera and measure keystrokes from afar.

Our home had now become an exurban home – the bucolic is being buried under construction. In cities, restaurants, theatres and stores are closing under the weight of streaming, online shopping, food delivery, screen addiction and shrinking populations.

They’re saying doom’s on the express lane. The question is, who’s going to turn out the lights?