According to the World Health Organization, the pandemic officially ended on May 5.

And in a way, the pandemic is just a bad memory. Crowds have returned to professional sporting events in Detroit. They clog the city’s Corktown and theater districts. They line up at popular restaurants in the evenings and fill the seats at school events.

But downtown revitalization is uneven in Michigan and across the country. Office rents are falling as employers are still reluctant to require their employees to work on-site. In some areas, restaurants, particularly those associated with the office lunch trade, remain closed, while others function largely as take-away restaurants. Some downtown businesses are permanently closed. San Francisco was in the spotlight as a downtown area, especially during the crisis.

The hangover of the pandemic has urban planners and executives holding their breath. In downtown Detroit, restaurants that have survived the pandemic can get crowded on typical weekdays, though many office towers remain largely empty. The brain drain from Detroit has spread to more daytime business for suburban restaurants, city planners said in some cities including Royal Oak, where a week of public meetings to plan the city’s future begins Monday.

In Pontiac, a mayor ending his first year in office says people always want to gather in groups, whether for work or play. This aligns with many scientists who have said that a century-old trend will continue to see rural areas shrink in population while cities around the world continue to grow. On Friday, Pontiac broke ground on a skate park, replacing an aging skateboard park nearby. It’s part of a citywide plan to improve youth facilities, delivering on a campaign promise made by Mayor Tim Greimel. “The kids will get together, so let’s provide them with good activities,” Greimel said.

“There will always be an interest in face-to-face interactions, both in our downtown area and in our parks,” Greimel said after lifting a clod of earth for the groundbreaking ceremony. Across from the park, Pontiac plans to convert a 1920s elementary school into a youth activity center, he said.

“I think some doomsayers are premature to announce the deathblow in inner cities. People going out to be with other people is still the future,” Greimel said. Indeed, it took extensive networking, sometimes face-to-face, to elicit support for the skate park from Pontiac City Council, the Oakland County Board of Commissioners, the Ralph C. Wilson Jr. Foundation, and a group of small but important individuals and organizations attract corporate donors. The new skate park is slated to open in late summer in Pontiac’s historic Oakland Park, which is surrounded by homes built by GM in the 1920’s to house workers who built GM’s then newest and hugely popular model – the Pontiac .

A week full of charrettes begins for Royal Oak on Monday. That’s the fancy word for group meetings aimed at gathering public and expert opinion on how a city should see its future in a new master plan. The process is required by state law every five years and will also take place in Birmingham this spring. Downtown Royal Oak is well positioned to benefit if many of its residents choose to continue working from home rather than commute to downtown Detroit, city planner Joe Murphy said.

As the weather warms, remote workers will find comfortable spots to land their laptops in Royal Oak’s new downtown park, Murphy said. This puts coffee and bagel shops, upscale restaurants or takeaways, and even the library’s squeaky-clean restrooms within easy walking distance with a keyboard punch.

“I think we’re still a small, traditional inner-city community, and I think we’re going to hear people love that,” Murphy said.

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“But will our downtown area be as busy as it used to be?” he said, referring to recent concerns that “downtown San Francisco is becoming emptier.” He added, “While we don’t want to admit it, we are in competition with other communities.” (See www.planroyaloak.com for the schedule of Royal Oak’s master plan meetings.)

Retail experts say malls were dying decades before the pandemic. The question now is whether, despite the simplicity of online shopping, it will be possible to lure shoppers back to brick-and-mortar retail in the city centre. No one can be sure, but one staunch optimist is Cristina Sheppard-Decius, former head of Dearborn’s Downtown Merchants Group and now chief executive of the Birmingham Shopping District, which includes promoting the city’s restaurants and services.

A business with the right mix of merchandise backed by friendly staff and a slick website can thrive in the right location, said Sheppard-Decius, chairman of the Michigan Downtown Association. Sheppard-Decius said downtown commerce in the Detroit suburbs is returning to normal, albeit with some changes.

Alfresco dining has become a staple ahead of many restaurants, she said. As for working from home, she said she knows a lot of people who are “longing to go back to the office.” Still, countless Michigan residents seem happy to work from home, especially if they can avoid paying a city income tax like those incurred when working in Detroit, Pontiac, or any of the two dozen or so Michigan cities that levy income taxes, which is a shift could promote, “she could.” “Stay with us for a long time,” she said.

Despite this chilling incentive, both psychologists and economists say there are reasons why, despite pandemic-related disruptions, people of all kinds either want or should be around others to look their best. This can even include copying each other’s skateboarding moves while modeling purple hair and fake tattoos like those sported by Marijayne Renny of the Pontiac Skateboard Project — dubbed by her mayor as the key networker and fundraiser behind Pontiac’s under-construction skateboard park .

As Renny told the groundbreaking crowd of about 50 people, including a group of young people with skateboards, “People will be watching this project across the country to see how hard everyone has worked to make this happen.”

Contact Bill Laytner: blaitner@freepress.com

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In his 2002 book “Rise of the Creative Class,” Mr. Florida found that companies like Yelp were springing up in cities rich in design and engineering workers, rather than aiming for lower taxes and operating costs or locating near suburban ones Establishing enclaves with good schools Companies had to grow. He built the book’s success into a consultancy, Creative Class Group, which advises cities on strategies for attracting young workers.

The advice — find an educated workforce, create dense, fun neighborhoods, and embrace social liberalism — could effectively be pared down to “become more like San Francisco.”

One irony of San Francisco’s burgeoning status as an economic pioneer was that the city had made no particular effort to attract tech companies until the Great Recession, when a collapse in tax revenues prompted local government to seek ways to stimulate growth . However, in the wake of the downturn, the city changed its tax code to be more welcoming to startups, while office owners began offering shorter leases that startups want and open floorplans that allow businesses to bring more people together.

Less than a decade later, a city that was never more than a satellite of Silicon Valley was the epicenter of a new boom, with companies like Twitter, Lyft, Uber, Dropbox, Reddit, and Airbnb all set up within city limits. And the employees who worked there needed lunch.

Ms. Cerros-Mercado, who grew up in the city, observed this while building her career at Specialty’s, a local coffee shop and sandwich chain known for its giant cookies. She began working there for about $10 an hour, viewing it as a way station to support her children through their colleges with hopes that she would later attend nursing school.

But she took a liking to it, rising from a cashier to a kitchen manager and then to a manager earning $80,000 off off work, along with dental and health benefits. She worked mostly downtown, next to a mixt restaurant where lines stretched out onto the street.

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For the optimized office worker looking for the trifecta of fast, healthy and filling, few meals are more efficient than a pile of veggies and some dressing swirled with tofu or grilled chicken. Unfortunately, the aspirations of a salad are often dashed by the difficulty of making one that is actually good. The ingredients come from every corner of the supermarket, and if they aren’t combined in the right proportions, or if they are made too far in advance, every bite is a drag.

Ms. Silverglide, 42, the chief executive of Mixt, tried to solve this problem with a setup in which customers proceeded down a counter and called out ingredients like grilled chicken and roasted brussels sprouts while stipulating exactly how much dressing they wanted. She said the naysayers of the time told her that there weren’t enough salad eaters to sustain her company, or that only women would eat there.

Instead, lines extended down the block, and Yelp’s users gave the business three and a half stars. People like Mike Ghaffary discovered a healthier kind of lunch in a restaurant where customization was encouraged.

Mr. Ghaffary is a former Yelp executive and serial optimizer who went to Mixt in search of a vegan meal that was high in protein and low in sugar. The salad he came up with paired lentils, chickpeas and quinoa with greens and a cilantro jalapeño vinaigrette.

Over the next several years, as Yelp grew and went public, Mixt thrived alongside it, adding a dozen locations through downtown and other city neighborhoods. Mr. Ghaffary became something of a Mixt evangelist (“He was very proud of the beany salad he came up with,” Mr. Stoppelman said) and ordered his vegetable concoction so frequently that the salad was added to the permanent menu and still sits on the board under the name “Be Well.”

In the city, however, well-being was taking a hit.

The tech companies that San Francisco had tried so hard to attract were now the target of regular protests, including some by demonstrators who at the end of 2013 began blocking commuter buses from Google and other companies to show their rage at rents that now sit at a median of $3,600. This was an opening gesture in what would become an ongoing debate about gentrification and the effect of tech companies on the city — a debate that played out in arguments over homeless camps, votes to stop development and countless more protests.

All of this was rooted in the cost of housing, which had been expensive for decades but had morphed into a disaster. A local government that had all but begged tech companies to set up shop there was now pushing a raft of new taxes to deal with its spiraling affordable housing and homelessness problems. In 2017, the year the Salesforce Tower eclipsed the Transamerica Pyramid as the city’s tallest skyscraper, Mr. Florida published another book. It was called “The New Urban Crisis.”

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From Dr. Stephen Gamboa

I was having my picnic at church in Golden Gate Park in April 2019 when I heard someone yell for help. As an ambulance, I’m always ready to respond to major or minor disasters, so I ran to see if I could help. A young woman was riding a bike on John F. Kennedy Drive when she was hit by a U-Haul truck that used the park as a shortcut. She was conscious but hurt; likely a broken arm and a concussion. I helped stabilize her and called emergency services. As she was loaded into the ambulance, I noticed how annoying it was that someone trying to enjoy a nice day wasn’t safe to ride a bike in a city park.

After that worrying incident, I began to pay attention to the daily flow of pedestrians, runners and cyclists injured by cars in my emergency room. Prior to the pandemic, JFK Drive in Golden Gate Park was a predictably dangerous place for people walking or cycling. I took care of many park visitors who were seriously injured there. In fact, The City’s JFK Drive is classified as a high-injury corridor, meaning it is one of the most dangerous streets in The City for pedestrians.

This is no longer the case. After JFK Drive was closed to motor vehicle traffic in April 2020 to allow for more social distancing, something strange and wonderful struck me: I didn’t see a single patient in my emergency room due to a traffic accident on JFK. By staying safe and car-free for children, JFK Drive prevented many serious injuries. Data supports my observations: in 2019, nine people reported injuries to JFK, some of which were quite serious (in particular, most injuries, including many I see in the emergency room, are never officially reported). No serious injuries have been reported since the road was closed to cars.

I tell almost everyone I see in my emergency room that the most dangerous thing they will do in San Francisco is crossing the street, and the statistics back it up. This is especially true of children: Motor vehicle accidents are the leading killer of young people aged 1 to 29 in California. As a father of two young children, this is especially true when you’re near home. This is a public health crisis. We have to do better for our children.

Franciscans should be very proud of the leadership our city has shown in its pandemic response. I’ve seen on the front lines in the emergency room and as part of the Department of Health’s COVID response how strong and proactive leadership can save many lives. Now is the time for our San Francisco city guides to demonstrate the same proactive, proven and proven approach to road safety in our city.

As an emergency doctor and a father, I will always advocate approaches that save lives. If we have the opportunity to make our city safer for children and other vulnerable people by maintaining car-free spaces and slow streets, we must take advantage of them. Conversely, when JFK Drive reopens to motor vehicles, we must live with the knowledge that any injury or God forbidden death we suffer is within our power to prevent, and we have chosen not to to do. San Franciscans, especially children, deserve a consistently child-safe, car-free JFK.

Dr. Stephen Gamboa is a father of two, a resident of the Richmond District and an ambulance doctor at Kaiser Medical Center in San Francisco.

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