The ADRR

Downtown Multifunctionalism: An Old, Often Cited, Though Largely Ignored Concept[1]

Downtown multifunctionality is a topic that has been around at least since the mid 1970s when I started working on downtown revitalization projects, and first heard the term. Though oft used, and cited as being of significant importance, there has been surprisingly little related analytical thinking or research about it. The usual way to explain or illustrate the concept is to simply provide a list of functions/uses that can be found in a downtown such as retail shops, corporate offices, government offices, arts and entertainment venues, transportation hubs, health care facilities, educational institutions, etc. This essay will show that this concept is far more important than that, and integral to a proper understanding of how our downtowns can and should work. While this essay does not aspire to be either exhaustive or definitive on this subject, it hopefully it will spark further interest, consideration and use of this concept, and a fleshing out analytically of its action implications. That said, it also does aspire to provide some useful guidance for those making plans and  investment decisions about downtown housing.

Today’s Relevance

The current travails of many downtown office sectors have sparked calls to make these districts much more multifunctional and less dependent on office activities, especially by increasing the amount of housing. Many cities – e.g., Chicago, Washington, DC, and NYC — are consequently fashioning large new programs or updating inadequate old ones to convert now outmoded office buildings into housing.  A few, like downtown Austin, are even seeing new housing being built as a result of market forces. However, in a recent article I showed that the simple addition of new units does not guarantee that they will have significant positive impacts on nearby surrounding areas. [2]  Their locations, numbers, strength relative to other uses in the surrounding area, and the specific type of impact in question, can significantly shape the ability of new housing to have meaningful positive impacts. Consequently, while the conversion of outmoded office buildings may prevent property owners from having significant losses in asset values and revenues, and keep local governments from having significant reductions in property tax revenues, they may have little positive impact on the areas surrounding them in terms of increasing pedestrian traffic, making people feel safer, or increasing expenditures in local restaurants, retail and entertainment establishments.

Multifunctionality is the Foundation for Downtown Competitive Advantages

Perhaps nothing demonstrates the essential importance of multifunctionality more than the necessary foundation it provides for two of our downtowns most important competitive advantages: multi-purpose trips and dense agglomeration.

Multi-Purpose Trips. In successful downtowns, visitors tend to go to more than one “destination.” A shopper visiting a department store in a shopping mall, for instance, also is likely to shop at other stores located in the mall. But successful downtowns offer more than multiple shopping destinations. The downtown office employee not only can shop at various stores but also can go to a restaurant, attend a concert, visit a museum or doctor’s office, or even live nearby. Similarly, someone going downtown to file a legal document may also shop, dine, or visit the library, etc. Without their multifunctionality downtowns would lack the essential infrastructure needed for making such multipurpose trips possible.

The value of such trips and the multifunctionality upon which they rest is strongly demonstrated by the significant reconfigurations many of our strong retail malls have undergone in recent years as they have struggled for survival. They have decided to become even more like a downtown – indeed, some even call themselves “town centers.”  Facing a large disruptive dose of creative destruction in the retail industry, these shopping malls have sought to vastly improve their ability to generate multi-purpose trips by becoming much more multifunctional, adding such things as residential units, hotels, sports facilities, pamper niche operations, entertainment venues, etc. In doing so they potentially became  even more competitive with our downtowns, but their emulation provides strong validation of the importance of multi-purpose trips and their underlying multifunctional array of destinations that supports them.

Multi-Purpose Trips and Walk Sheds. These multi-purpose trips occur mostly on foot. While the newly multifunctional shopping malls provide a physically bounded walk shed for their visitors, the situations in our downtowns are less clear. The length of pedestrian trips in Manhattan’s midtown business district is about two times longer than in other downtowns, yet the median length of Manhattan shopping trips is only about 1,200 feet and 75 percent of all pedestrian trips are under 2,000 feet. [3] This suggests that the diameter of what, for want of a better term we will call here a Downtown Multifunctional Node (DMN), should usually be well under one-half mile in diameter or well within a 5-minute walk shed. In turn, that means that our downtowns can contain a number of such walk sheds, with the small ones being covered by one of them, but our larger ones, such as Midtown Manhattan might have about 11 or more DMNs.

The walkability of a downtown and the accessibility and service levels of local transit can influence how many destinations will be reached both within a DMN and across DMNs. However, the time available to the pedestrian will also be a factor. Downtown office workers these days, for example, may only have 30 to 45 minutes for their lunchtime trips, that translates into walking to destinations within about 1,000 feet. They are unlikely to walk out of the DMN their office is located in at lunchtime, unless it is close to the periphery , though they may do so for business related appointments throughout the day. Visiting tourists, on the other hand, are unlikely to have similar time constraints and consequently are more likely to visit several DMNs. This points to the fact that different downtown users are potentially impacted by a downtown’s multifunctionality in different ways, some at the geographic level of the mixed use building, others at that of the DMN, and others across several DMNs.

Dense, compact downtown development also generates higher rates of multi-purpose trips.

Multifunctionalism + Density = Agglomeration. If agglomeration is the key to the economic success of our large cities, it is likely to be strongest in their downtowns, and that is another very important competitive advantage for them. Multifunctionalism assures that businesses can have many of their clients, suppliers and supporting businesses nearby. The downtown is likely the most densely developed part of the city and that assures that lots of other related private and public organizations will be nearby. The downtown central social function venues such as restaurants, bars, coffeeshops, social clubs (e.g., Harvard, Yale, Cornell, Union, Metropolitan, Century clubs in Manhattan), and gyms facilitate high levels of related social interaction and exchanges of ideas and information.

Dominant and Supportive Functions

While large downtown office clusters recently have been hammered for being insufficiently multifunctional, they have been wrongly accused of being purely monofunctional. Every downtown office cluster I’ve visited has had supportive business services nearby, as well as the eateries, coffeeshops, drugstores, and banks to meet at least some of their workers’ needs. These firms may be present in varying numbers and attractiveness, but they are almost always there to some extent. In these large office clusters the office operations are the dominant function, and the venues of other functions are there to support them. This is important: the venues of the supporting functions are unlikely to be popular destinations drawing people and firms located outside of the area. Their viability in the area is dependent on their relationship to the dominant function.

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[1] Thanks to Mark Waterhouse, Paul Levy, and Richard Florida for their very helpful comments on earlier versions of this article. And again I must express my appreciation of the great editing Mark also did on it.

[2] N. David Milder. “How Many Residents Does it Take to Create New Functionally Diverse Downtowns – How to Think About Allocating Scarce Resources to Get There? The American Downtown Revitalization Review – The ADRR. February 2023. https://theadrr.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/MW-Edits-NDM-housing-and-office-multifucntionality.pdf

[3] See: Boris Pushkarev and Jeffrey Zupan, Urban Space for Pedestrians: A Report of the Regional Plan Association. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. 1975. Retrieved from: https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/rpa-org/pdfs/RPA-Urban-Space-for-Pedestrians.pdf