Late comment here but I'm just going to repeat a point I've made elsewhere here in political commentaries, which is that today's young adults are not the same people as those 10-15 years ago. They had different parents (Gen X vs Boomers), different opportunities and constraints, are digital natives, etc. There's way more than can be unpacked in a brief comment but we err greatly when we assume that Gen Z is just like millennials, only younger. In critically important experiences and influences, they're not.
I'm seeing some skepticism about what this means in the comment section and I hope the skeptics are right, but my gut feeling is not good.
I'd also like to see a version of this that looks at small to midsized cities specifically, because this data is breaking down the largest metros into urban/high-density suburb/low-density suburb while considering smaller cities as single units.
I live downtown in a growing ~500,000 person metro that has been trying to densify and breathe new life into its urban core in fits and starts, facing all the usual American urban development problems, and while I cheer every new building, it's hard to ignore how much of the population growth is getting soaked up by greenfield suburban developments in ever more far-flung parts of the region. The burning question in my head is how much of this is driven by unshakable market preference for fully detached homes with yards, a car-based lifestyle, etc. vs. thoughtless inertia (people have always lived this way and never considered alternatives) vs. negative cultural attitudes about renting vs. supply factors (families don't want the two-bedroom apartments that make up most new construction in the central city), because that's going to determine what's actually happening here and how much can be done about it.
For what it's worth I didn't specifically aim for this kind of environment; life and career connections brought me here, and I brought my lifestyle preferences with me from denser, higher-population places. When I look at comparable job listings in places like NYC, realize I'd make the same salary while having to pay twice as much rent for a studio apartment as I do for my two-bedroom unit here, and reflect on how the employer probably expects the hire to either cram in with roommates or commute from New Jersey, though, I tell myself I'd rather live downtown in a small city than in the suburbs of a large one. In a better country not suffering from 50 years of bad development decisions, I'd probably live in the biggest, densest city I could access, but weird circumstances have led to weird choices.
My thanks to Jed Kolko for another informative piece.
This makes me very sad. I love cities, but I recognize that's just my subjective preference. However, walkable cities are a lot better for the environment, because the average urban dweller uses significantly less energy/fossil fuels per capita than the average suburban dweller (partly due to not having to drive freaking everywhere). More of us should either live in dense, walkable cities or pay the true cost of a sprawling, car-centric lifestyle, aka internalize the externalities.
Of course, Lee Zeldin at the EPA just trashed pretty much all climate change regulations, because climate change is a hoax, don't you know, and who gives a shit about kids getting asthma? Let's repeal regulations on CO2, tailpipe emissions, smokestack emissions, everything! Drill, baby, drill! MAGA! And that shithead Hegseth said that the military should just ignore climate change "crap" (Lt. Gen. Hertling wrote an excellent piece on The Bulwark on why the military should, in fact, care about climate change: https://www.thebulwark.com/p/pete-hegseth-climate-change-crap-national-security-military-strategic)
My friends who live in other parts of Minneapolis/made different decisions over the past decade seem to be having a better time than me, so I recognize that some of it is on me, but I have not been having a great time trying to be a city person for a while now.
Two train rides on Monday had mentally ill people acting erratically, one enough that I had to move seats, which I don't do very often. Someone lives in a tent on the block kitty corner from mine and throws garbage and bags with human waste onto the boulevard. I moved across downtown a few years ago and rent out my old condo (which I can't sell for less than a $50,000 loss) for a $500/month loss. There are still some good bars, but you can't really get food past like 9:00 PM. Since we decided that people who went to college only have to work three days a week while simultaneously allowing a tremendous amount of antisocial behavior, downtown office buildings are empty and don't appear to be filling up quickly. One recently sold for 5% of what it went for pre-pandemic. We had a snowstorm last week and it was depressing to see that all the Chipotle workers had to show up to work and everyone making $150,000 got to take a snow day.
I moved downtown in 2011 and the core business district had four department stores, a movie theater, a transit mall with lots of fun outdoor seating, etc. Now we're down to a Target that closes at 8:00 PM.
Over the same time period, the north side of downtown, along the river, has added thousands of housing units and the North Loop actually feels like a real neighborhood if you squint at the right angle at the right time of day. Unfortunately, the upper middle class buys everything on Amazon and so it doesn't seem to be supporting as much practical retail as you'd hope to see. There is a new putt putt bar.
Compared to ten years ago, some neighborhoods in other parts of the city are doing better, others just fine, others considerably worse. We did build quite a bit of new rental housing for about a decade, but it's dropped off a cliff in the past year or two.
I think it would help if people started getting in trouble for breaking the law again.
I'm an urban planner and agree with you 100%. I'm sorry that this has been your experience.
Re you side point about practical retail, I also find this unfortunate and try to buy things in person as much as possible. Just sitting in your house looking at screens all day, for work or entertainment, and ordering food and consumer goods to be delivered, seems to me to be a sterile, even dystopian, kind of existence. But a lot of people seem to be fine with it.
I think it's all related. I don't use Amazon and like going to the grocery store. People don't leave the house and then say that things aren't that bad--well, yeah, you do your email job in your apartment and order Doordash and get groceries delivered, and then every four months you take a full train to a soccer game, so things probably do not seem that bleak.
One thing not explicitly stated here but implied by the immigration effects, is that a lot of urban density is de facto driven by willingness of low income folks to cram into overcrowded apartments, NOT by the young, mostly childless, folks moving into the city.
I learned this during some public school advocacy in relatively suburban Pasadena, CA. We were seeing steady decline in our school population, and it was being driven by slow turnover of 1-3 bedroom apartments from housing 1-2 families with at least a couple kids each, on average, to a single middle class couple with 0-1 children. Such families with 2 or more were generally buying homes, again converting run down homes in lower income neighborhoods, pushing such families further out of central pasadena.
Yeah, I think a lot of people who focus on housing units and construction miss that average household size dropping or increasing by .2 is a lot of people in a city of 800,000. It would be nice if the schools were run better.
Just adding that our suburban revival experience has been even more dramatic. When we moved to the suburbs in 2017 the average house had been sitting on the market for a year and amazing houses were selling as-is for land value. Our town only has one school and there were just two kindergarten classrooms. Post-COVID, there's been nearly zero inventory for four years and our school now has eight kindergarten classrooms. Out of ~ 20 young families we knew in the city pre-COVID, only two are left. Somehow I feel like the urban family outflow is even more stark than the data here indicates.
RE-EDIT: Yes. The entire suburb is now filled with young families that were previously living in the city. Something like 50% of the houses have turned over post-COVID. For the three years we were here pre-COVID, it was a ghost town. You'd rarely ever see a stroller now the parks are filled everyday after school.
Random question - I know that O’Hare is pretty far from downtown but it’s still in the City of Chicago. When you’re talking about the city do you mean the loop? Or what most people would think of as the suburbs but by quirk of 19th century fate are “the city.”
Somewhere in between. Probably the ring around the loop, so Lakeview to the north and like Logan Square / West Town to the west and then the South Loop.
As more folks get called back to the office I’m surprised by how….I’m not sure right term…people can be. Some are up in arms that they were told they can work remotely “going forward.” Or they were hired into a fully remote role and now have to move. It was always “going forward” until we change our mind. Same with fully remote. Employers could have said, at any time, we need to transfer you to the Dubai office - take it or find another job.
What in their experience in corporate America made them think the situation was anything but temporary.
Okay but a not particularly high level employee being transferred across the country is rare, let alone transferred to Dubai. Very few employees will ever experience that kind of transfer, and often it’s financially incentivised because the company knows it’s a big deal. Transferring offices or stores within the same general geographic area maybe, but many employers aren’t big enough to do that either. Layoffs are different and much more common, but people generally don’t expect the location of their employment at the same employer to change with little notice for compensation, because that really is rare. Also, many remote workers were *hired* remote and never lived near the office.
Everybody understands that at some level all employment in the US is contingent. I think previously corporate behavior regarding where you worked was at least perceived as predictable, or predictable within a range, and not a function of managerial capriciousness.
Part of why anyone accepted a job was based on where they were going to work. Even if that changed it rarely changed dramatically. Maybe your operation expanded/contracted and moved a few miles to a bigger/smaller office but you could usually see that coming. Yes, sometimes companies closed an office and moved the operation to a different city --- and people were pissed, as they are today when remote work ends. Whether they stayed or went, companies understood that closing an office would result in bad morale, and priced that into deciding if it was a good idea..
Transfers, although sometimes mandatory and lateral, were more likely promotions, or at least compensated for in some way like a promise of career growth.
But all those things were generally driven by some explicable business/economic circumstance. Ending remote work feels more personal and more capricious, a choice not a need and driven more by management whim. Nobody got transferred to Dubai because their manager was there and wanted to see them in a cubicle right outside their office rather than the cubicle they were already in. Companies didn't change office buildings because they didn't trust you to work on the second floor when the boss was on the first if your performance was just fine being on different floors or even different offices.
If you're hired into remote working, or told you can do it going forward, there is at least an implication that the contingency there is that if you're performing satisfactorily there wouldn't be a reason for change. "You can't work remotely" carries a strong sense of "we can't trust you." No one is going to like that idea.
" I think previously corporate behavior regarding where you worked was at least perceived as predictable, or predictable within a range, and not a function of managerial capriciousness."
“ Ending remote work feels more personal and more capricious, a choice not a need and driven more by management whim.”
From my perspective I would think that anyone given the opportunity to work remotely would do everything they could to not take advantage of the situation. But in reality people are constantly and egregiously taking advantage of the situation. As in, for example, posting from the beach forgetting that you’re friends with your boss on Facebook.
Was the boss mad because he was in a beach town, or mad because he was posting literally from the beach during a work day. One of those is much more justified than the other.
A few days before Hurricane Irma made landfall, it was forecast to have a high probability of hitting Miami as a Category 4 or 5 storm. The company I work for told everyone to evacuate, which by the time that decision was made flights to other parts of the US were totally booked. A Peruvian lady who worked for me at the time was unable to get a flight to another city where we had an office (NYC, Chicago, Houston, and a few others) and ended up flying to Lima for the duration. They have internet.
Because buying a house out of easy commuting distance is a BFD and so the assurance by employers that WFH would not be reversed was a signficant and material consideration that workers made large life changes in reliance on, and because the employers knew or should have known that this would be the case because it’s obvious to all parties? This is why promissory estoppel is a thing.
At-will employment complicates this a bit but I don’t think it’s conceptually hard to understand why workers would consider the employers to be aware of the significance of making those kind of representations and why they resent them being reneged on after making major life changes in reliance on them any more than they would feel similarly aggrieved if they switched from employer A to employer B on the basis of the promise of a higher salary only for employer B to give them a salary cut a few weeks into the job.
“ Because buying a house out of easy commuting distance is a BFD and so the assurance by employers that WFH would not be reversed was a signficant and material consideration that workers made large life changes in reliance on”
To me that sounds like when employers announce layoffs and then promises there won’t be any more layoffs. What kind of fool believes that?
I don’t think there were any guarantees or no more guarantees than for ones continued employees - anyone without an employment can be fired at any time for any reason or no reason at all. Can you buy a new house based on your recent raise and fabulous performances review only to be laid off the next week? Sure. Happens every day.
As we drift into recession I expect more and more employers to follow the leaders (Amazon, JP Morgan, etc.) in calling all employees back to the office 5 days a week. That would tend to reverse the trend noted.
A better indicator of local supply versus local demand would be the change in price levels for different neighborhoods vs the change in median wages for the area over the same time period.
Comparing percentage changes on numbers with very different bases can be misleading. If you have a town of 100k people and a nearby village of 2k people, then 20k people move to the town and 1k people move to the village, the town grew by 20% and the village grew by 50% — but 20x more people chose the town.
But more fundamentally, since people cannot actually just move wherever they want, but in fact have to pay the local cost of housing to move there, we learn less from growth rates than we do from price levels. If housing cost relative to AMI is increasing, that means demand exceeds supply such that only a smaller and smaller fraction of the market can afford to live there.
New development on the edge is inherently cheaper than new development in the center, but 20-30 years ago those areas tended to have pretty stable prices. Now their prices are going up too. That indicates a domino effect of people being pushed out. And that makes it impossible to untangle how much suburban growth is because people prefer to move there, and how much is because it’s all they can afford.
It’s impossible to untangle these things, sure. But if both population level and price level are growing faster in one area and slower in another, that is a clear sign that the demand for the first area is growing faster than the demand for the second area (regardless of which one has more total demand, which we may not be able to identify).
"Population changes by themselves can’t tell us where people want to live. A shift in population from cities to suburbs could mean demand for suburban living is growing faster than demand for urban living, or the supply of suburban housing is growing faster than supply of urban housing, or some mix of both."
It is possible that you are actually measuring people's tolerance for homeless encampments and panhandling, which tends to be higher in many city centers than in many suburbs. Perhaps some people would rather live in an urban area, but that has been (deliberately) rendered intolerable.
“ that has been (deliberately) rendered intolerable”
What do you mean by this? Do you think there are people who actively dislike the fact that cities are popular places to live, and thus are actively trying to make them worse by being more friendly to homeless people?
I interpreted it as an allusion to defund the police / non-enforcement activism and policy in blue cities. The intolerability (to the cohort under discussion) is a predictable effect of a deliberate (in the sense of willfully enacted) set of policies by those with higher disorder-tolerance and a stated preference for non-enforcement. But the effects on the stated lower-tolerance cohort are simply ignored or not part of the calculus rather than the result of a specific animus.
Any relation to totally incompetent and corrupt progressive governance of all major cities?
Late comment here but I'm just going to repeat a point I've made elsewhere here in political commentaries, which is that today's young adults are not the same people as those 10-15 years ago. They had different parents (Gen X vs Boomers), different opportunities and constraints, are digital natives, etc. There's way more than can be unpacked in a brief comment but we err greatly when we assume that Gen Z is just like millennials, only younger. In critically important experiences and influences, they're not.
This kind of piece is Slow Boring at its best. More, please!
Suburbs forever. Every city has turned into SoDoSoPa with surrounding homeless encampments. Once I hit 30 I had seen enough of the urbanite cosplay.
I'm seeing some skepticism about what this means in the comment section and I hope the skeptics are right, but my gut feeling is not good.
I'd also like to see a version of this that looks at small to midsized cities specifically, because this data is breaking down the largest metros into urban/high-density suburb/low-density suburb while considering smaller cities as single units.
I live downtown in a growing ~500,000 person metro that has been trying to densify and breathe new life into its urban core in fits and starts, facing all the usual American urban development problems, and while I cheer every new building, it's hard to ignore how much of the population growth is getting soaked up by greenfield suburban developments in ever more far-flung parts of the region. The burning question in my head is how much of this is driven by unshakable market preference for fully detached homes with yards, a car-based lifestyle, etc. vs. thoughtless inertia (people have always lived this way and never considered alternatives) vs. negative cultural attitudes about renting vs. supply factors (families don't want the two-bedroom apartments that make up most new construction in the central city), because that's going to determine what's actually happening here and how much can be done about it.
For what it's worth I didn't specifically aim for this kind of environment; life and career connections brought me here, and I brought my lifestyle preferences with me from denser, higher-population places. When I look at comparable job listings in places like NYC, realize I'd make the same salary while having to pay twice as much rent for a studio apartment as I do for my two-bedroom unit here, and reflect on how the employer probably expects the hire to either cram in with roommates or commute from New Jersey, though, I tell myself I'd rather live downtown in a small city than in the suburbs of a large one. In a better country not suffering from 50 years of bad development decisions, I'd probably live in the biggest, densest city I could access, but weird circumstances have led to weird choices.
I’m glad we now have a bona fide urbanist President who’s doing everything in his power to drive up car prices!
My thanks to Jed Kolko for another informative piece.
This makes me very sad. I love cities, but I recognize that's just my subjective preference. However, walkable cities are a lot better for the environment, because the average urban dweller uses significantly less energy/fossil fuels per capita than the average suburban dweller (partly due to not having to drive freaking everywhere). More of us should either live in dense, walkable cities or pay the true cost of a sprawling, car-centric lifestyle, aka internalize the externalities.
Of course, Lee Zeldin at the EPA just trashed pretty much all climate change regulations, because climate change is a hoax, don't you know, and who gives a shit about kids getting asthma? Let's repeal regulations on CO2, tailpipe emissions, smokestack emissions, everything! Drill, baby, drill! MAGA! And that shithead Hegseth said that the military should just ignore climate change "crap" (Lt. Gen. Hertling wrote an excellent piece on The Bulwark on why the military should, in fact, care about climate change: https://www.thebulwark.com/p/pete-hegseth-climate-change-crap-national-security-military-strategic)
It's all very depressing.
Zeldin has an editorial in the WSJ today. It doesn’t mention climate change at all.
My friends who live in other parts of Minneapolis/made different decisions over the past decade seem to be having a better time than me, so I recognize that some of it is on me, but I have not been having a great time trying to be a city person for a while now.
Two train rides on Monday had mentally ill people acting erratically, one enough that I had to move seats, which I don't do very often. Someone lives in a tent on the block kitty corner from mine and throws garbage and bags with human waste onto the boulevard. I moved across downtown a few years ago and rent out my old condo (which I can't sell for less than a $50,000 loss) for a $500/month loss. There are still some good bars, but you can't really get food past like 9:00 PM. Since we decided that people who went to college only have to work three days a week while simultaneously allowing a tremendous amount of antisocial behavior, downtown office buildings are empty and don't appear to be filling up quickly. One recently sold for 5% of what it went for pre-pandemic. We had a snowstorm last week and it was depressing to see that all the Chipotle workers had to show up to work and everyone making $150,000 got to take a snow day.
I moved downtown in 2011 and the core business district had four department stores, a movie theater, a transit mall with lots of fun outdoor seating, etc. Now we're down to a Target that closes at 8:00 PM.
Over the same time period, the north side of downtown, along the river, has added thousands of housing units and the North Loop actually feels like a real neighborhood if you squint at the right angle at the right time of day. Unfortunately, the upper middle class buys everything on Amazon and so it doesn't seem to be supporting as much practical retail as you'd hope to see. There is a new putt putt bar.
Compared to ten years ago, some neighborhoods in other parts of the city are doing better, others just fine, others considerably worse. We did build quite a bit of new rental housing for about a decade, but it's dropped off a cliff in the past year or two.
I think it would help if people started getting in trouble for breaking the law again.
I'm an urban planner and agree with you 100%. I'm sorry that this has been your experience.
Re you side point about practical retail, I also find this unfortunate and try to buy things in person as much as possible. Just sitting in your house looking at screens all day, for work or entertainment, and ordering food and consumer goods to be delivered, seems to me to be a sterile, even dystopian, kind of existence. But a lot of people seem to be fine with it.
I think it's all related. I don't use Amazon and like going to the grocery store. People don't leave the house and then say that things aren't that bad--well, yeah, you do your email job in your apartment and order Doordash and get groceries delivered, and then every four months you take a full train to a soccer game, so things probably do not seem that bleak.
One thing not explicitly stated here but implied by the immigration effects, is that a lot of urban density is de facto driven by willingness of low income folks to cram into overcrowded apartments, NOT by the young, mostly childless, folks moving into the city.
I learned this during some public school advocacy in relatively suburban Pasadena, CA. We were seeing steady decline in our school population, and it was being driven by slow turnover of 1-3 bedroom apartments from housing 1-2 families with at least a couple kids each, on average, to a single middle class couple with 0-1 children. Such families with 2 or more were generally buying homes, again converting run down homes in lower income neighborhoods, pushing such families further out of central pasadena.
Yeah, I think a lot of people who focus on housing units and construction miss that average household size dropping or increasing by .2 is a lot of people in a city of 800,000. It would be nice if the schools were run better.
Just adding that our suburban revival experience has been even more dramatic. When we moved to the suburbs in 2017 the average house had been sitting on the market for a year and amazing houses were selling as-is for land value. Our town only has one school and there were just two kindergarten classrooms. Post-COVID, there's been nearly zero inventory for four years and our school now has eight kindergarten classrooms. Out of ~ 20 young families we knew in the city pre-COVID, only two are left. Somehow I feel like the urban family outflow is even more stark than the data here indicates.
That doesn’t make any sense given the collapse in the birth rate.
What doesn't make any sense?
There aren’t that many kids now, there weren’t that many kids then to drive what you’re seeing statistically.
Edit - or maybe I’m misunderstanding. Are you saying these kids would have all been in CPS pre-pandemic?
RE-EDIT: Yes. The entire suburb is now filled with young families that were previously living in the city. Something like 50% of the houses have turned over post-COVID. For the three years we were here pre-COVID, it was a ghost town. You'd rarely ever see a stroller now the parks are filled everyday after school.
Why do you think this is?
(1) schools are way better
(2) quality of life is way better
Random question - I know that O’Hare is pretty far from downtown but it’s still in the City of Chicago. When you’re talking about the city do you mean the loop? Or what most people would think of as the suburbs but by quirk of 19th century fate are “the city.”
Somewhere in between. Probably the ring around the loop, so Lakeview to the north and like Logan Square / West Town to the west and then the South Loop.
As more folks get called back to the office I’m surprised by how….I’m not sure right term…people can be. Some are up in arms that they were told they can work remotely “going forward.” Or they were hired into a fully remote role and now have to move. It was always “going forward” until we change our mind. Same with fully remote. Employers could have said, at any time, we need to transfer you to the Dubai office - take it or find another job.
What in their experience in corporate America made them think the situation was anything but temporary.
Okay but a not particularly high level employee being transferred across the country is rare, let alone transferred to Dubai. Very few employees will ever experience that kind of transfer, and often it’s financially incentivised because the company knows it’s a big deal. Transferring offices or stores within the same general geographic area maybe, but many employers aren’t big enough to do that either. Layoffs are different and much more common, but people generally don’t expect the location of their employment at the same employer to change with little notice for compensation, because that really is rare. Also, many remote workers were *hired* remote and never lived near the office.
Everybody understands that at some level all employment in the US is contingent. I think previously corporate behavior regarding where you worked was at least perceived as predictable, or predictable within a range, and not a function of managerial capriciousness.
Part of why anyone accepted a job was based on where they were going to work. Even if that changed it rarely changed dramatically. Maybe your operation expanded/contracted and moved a few miles to a bigger/smaller office but you could usually see that coming. Yes, sometimes companies closed an office and moved the operation to a different city --- and people were pissed, as they are today when remote work ends. Whether they stayed or went, companies understood that closing an office would result in bad morale, and priced that into deciding if it was a good idea..
Transfers, although sometimes mandatory and lateral, were more likely promotions, or at least compensated for in some way like a promise of career growth.
But all those things were generally driven by some explicable business/economic circumstance. Ending remote work feels more personal and more capricious, a choice not a need and driven more by management whim. Nobody got transferred to Dubai because their manager was there and wanted to see them in a cubicle right outside their office rather than the cubicle they were already in. Companies didn't change office buildings because they didn't trust you to work on the second floor when the boss was on the first if your performance was just fine being on different floors or even different offices.
If you're hired into remote working, or told you can do it going forward, there is at least an implication that the contingency there is that if you're performing satisfactorily there wouldn't be a reason for change. "You can't work remotely" carries a strong sense of "we can't trust you." No one is going to like that idea.
" I think previously corporate behavior regarding where you worked was at least perceived as predictable, or predictable within a range, and not a function of managerial capriciousness."
HAahahahahahha you're kidding, right?
“ Ending remote work feels more personal and more capricious, a choice not a need and driven more by management whim.”
From my perspective I would think that anyone given the opportunity to work remotely would do everything they could to not take advantage of the situation. But in reality people are constantly and egregiously taking advantage of the situation. As in, for example, posting from the beach forgetting that you’re friends with your boss on Facebook.
Was the boss mad because he was in a beach town, or mad because he was posting literally from the beach during a work day. One of those is much more justified than the other.
Literally on the beach under and umbrella with White Claw in hand.
Some people need to be fired for being dumb, independent of whatever particular dumbness they display.
Or, for instance, someone, after being specifically informed of a clarified policy forbidding work from another country, pings the VPN from Peru.
Whoops!
Peru is not the most lawless country on earth, but that could be a questionable decision even if it wasn't forbidden.
Work computers and logging in from overseas needs to be carefully considered anywhere outside US.
I knew some people who were being sent to China who were issued laptops specific to traveling there, along with strict instructions about their use.
No, it’s not really an issue.
A few days before Hurricane Irma made landfall, it was forecast to have a high probability of hitting Miami as a Category 4 or 5 storm. The company I work for told everyone to evacuate, which by the time that decision was made flights to other parts of the US were totally booked. A Peruvian lady who worked for me at the time was unable to get a flight to another city where we had an office (NYC, Chicago, Houston, and a few others) and ended up flying to Lima for the duration. They have internet.
What happened to her? That sounds like extenuating circumstances!
A really hot job market?
Yeh but why would anyone think that is anything but temporary?
Because they aren't Millennials and don't assume labor markets will inevitably loosen again.
Because buying a house out of easy commuting distance is a BFD and so the assurance by employers that WFH would not be reversed was a signficant and material consideration that workers made large life changes in reliance on, and because the employers knew or should have known that this would be the case because it’s obvious to all parties? This is why promissory estoppel is a thing.
At-will employment complicates this a bit but I don’t think it’s conceptually hard to understand why workers would consider the employers to be aware of the significance of making those kind of representations and why they resent them being reneged on after making major life changes in reliance on them any more than they would feel similarly aggrieved if they switched from employer A to employer B on the basis of the promise of a higher salary only for employer B to give them a salary cut a few weeks into the job.
“ Because buying a house out of easy commuting distance is a BFD and so the assurance by employers that WFH would not be reversed was a signficant and material consideration that workers made large life changes in reliance on”
To me that sounds like when employers announce layoffs and then promises there won’t be any more layoffs. What kind of fool believes that?
No one forced the employers to make prospective WFH guarantees at gun point rather than remain silent or even say “until the end of the pandemic.”
I don’t think there were any guarantees or no more guarantees than for ones continued employees - anyone without an employment can be fired at any time for any reason or no reason at all. Can you buy a new house based on your recent raise and fabulous performances review only to be laid off the next week? Sure. Happens every day.
Oh it’s that guy again..
Who are you and what have you done with Matt Yglesias!
As we drift into recession I expect more and more employers to follow the leaders (Amazon, JP Morgan, etc.) in calling all employees back to the office 5 days a week. That would tend to reverse the trend noted.
A better indicator of local supply versus local demand would be the change in price levels for different neighborhoods vs the change in median wages for the area over the same time period.
Comparing percentage changes on numbers with very different bases can be misleading. If you have a town of 100k people and a nearby village of 2k people, then 20k people move to the town and 1k people move to the village, the town grew by 20% and the village grew by 50% — but 20x more people chose the town.
But more fundamentally, since people cannot actually just move wherever they want, but in fact have to pay the local cost of housing to move there, we learn less from growth rates than we do from price levels. If housing cost relative to AMI is increasing, that means demand exceeds supply such that only a smaller and smaller fraction of the market can afford to live there.
New development on the edge is inherently cheaper than new development in the center, but 20-30 years ago those areas tended to have pretty stable prices. Now their prices are going up too. That indicates a domino effect of people being pushed out. And that makes it impossible to untangle how much suburban growth is because people prefer to move there, and how much is because it’s all they can afford.
It’s impossible to untangle these things, sure. But if both population level and price level are growing faster in one area and slower in another, that is a clear sign that the demand for the first area is growing faster than the demand for the second area (regardless of which one has more total demand, which we may not be able to identify).
"Population changes by themselves can’t tell us where people want to live. A shift in population from cities to suburbs could mean demand for suburban living is growing faster than demand for urban living, or the supply of suburban housing is growing faster than supply of urban housing, or some mix of both."
It is possible that you are actually measuring people's tolerance for homeless encampments and panhandling, which tends to be higher in many city centers than in many suburbs. Perhaps some people would rather live in an urban area, but that has been (deliberately) rendered intolerable.
“ that has been (deliberately) rendered intolerable”
What do you mean by this? Do you think there are people who actively dislike the fact that cities are popular places to live, and thus are actively trying to make them worse by being more friendly to homeless people?
I interpreted it as an allusion to defund the police / non-enforcement activism and policy in blue cities. The intolerability (to the cohort under discussion) is a predictable effect of a deliberate (in the sense of willfully enacted) set of policies by those with higher disorder-tolerance and a stated preference for non-enforcement. But the effects on the stated lower-tolerance cohort are simply ignored or not part of the calculus rather than the result of a specific animus.