It's a shame we invented the perfect dense-but-not-too-dense urban form with the streetcar suburb -- just look how pricey and popular the extant ones are today! -- and then decided 'nah, we can do worse than that.'
I actually live in a streetcar suburb (in Philly), and I love it. It has a slightly less dense feel, with a fully walkable, very family-friendly neighborhood, but then I hop the trolley to the hospital for work or whenever we want to go downtown to the big museums or downtown events. It's a lovely way to live.
Broadly speaking that's my favorite type of neighborhood, too: urban core, but not *downtown* core: amenity rich, highly walkable, but just a bit more chill than the center of a major city. Boston's full of locations like that. I used to live in Coolidge Corner (Brookline). Wicked nice place to live.
Don't you live within city limits? I don't think I'd consider many neighborhoods within the city along our trolley lines to be streetcar suburban... the very end of the 10 (whatever the hell they renamed it to this time) in Overbrook mostly fits the bill, the Elmwood Park stretch of the 13, 11, and 36 isn't far off, but most of the length of those routes is just plain urban.
I think the 101 and 102 in DelCo are more classically "rail suburbs".
The story I heard is that west philly, especially the section east of 50th st was built up as a streetcar suburb, and then become part of the city as the city grew. That's why the row houses and lot sizes are bigger (and we have victorian twins instead of the tightly packed south philly rows) as the builders wanted to attract people interested in more space and avoiding the rif raf and hustle and bustle between the Schuylkill and Delaware. I'm not sure if neighborhoods like Walnut and Spruce Hill, Cedar Park and Kingsessing are still streetcar suburbs...They definitely fit into the class of "former street car suburbs" And they literally do have street cars, and they are almost entirely residential. But as things have grown around them and busses now exist, perhaps the distinction is less meaningful.
PS I say "we have" because I live in one of these neighborhoods too. JCW and I are probably practically neighbors!
The history is correct but calling much of it a streetcar suburb *now* is a stretch, I mean. Spruce Hill and Cedar Park to an extent still have the built form, but they're also smack in the middle of the city, such that they feel very urban due to the sheer amount of through travel, at least to me.
My neighborhood is on the other edge of W. Philly, three-odd miles to the north, and feels much more suburban in character even though its rows, and not twins, because it's just substantially more isolated from the heart of the city.
Street car suburbs were built between 1880 and 1920 as spurs from main urban areas. They tend to have row homes or densely packed single family homes that are not offset much from the road.
My guess would be it's more a problem with heat than with cold. Cold is easier to compensate for. Waiting outside in January in Chicago is fine if you have a good coat.
The existence of New Orleans and its streetcar system would seem to disprove that hypothesis.
Personally I live in a streetcar suburb of the area and while I bike to work normally, the streetcar is a much more attractive option by comparison once the heat index exceeds 95°.
I think the real scandal is the last paragraph where it says each bus shelter can cost $50k. Is there no economy of scale/bulk discount for a city the size of LA ordering mass quantities of them? Is the company that the city contracts with to manufacture them owned by an alderman’s cousin?
I assumed Matt was being tongue-in-cheek here, as this design has been mocked and parodied already for being incredibly inefficient and prototypically Californian.
Yeah, I figured that you weren’t serious about the Sombritas being a solution for anything - in fact it’s the height of insanity that that ever passed muster even for a pilot. But also $50k per bus shelter is crazy when you think about how many the city would presumably order if it were trying to put shelters at most bus stops. I mean LA’s bus system is massive!
Yeah, Memphis definitely used to have them, my grandmother used to tell stories about taking the kids on the streetcar to go shopping back before families had more than one car.
I mean, streetcars aren’t great where they have to share the road with modern car traffic, and Seattle can’t even build a line for less than billions despite the lack of grade separation. Best to have elevated lines or at the very least run them through medians
Streetcars don’t exist any more in most streetcar suburbs. And when you say “only” in cities without extreme climates, that is a bit of a limitation, but what you describe basically only happens in Houston, Dallas, Austin, San Antonio, El Paso, and Phoenix.
Pretty sure if you include all the metro areas with seriously hot climates during at least a good portion of the year, you've ruled out 90% of the areas that are growing today.
"Seriously hot" is pretty vague, though. There's a huge difference between Phoenix-hot and Atlanta-hot. (I don't think the kind of heat Kate described even applies to the Texas triangle, frankly.)
I can see that, but I've also seen in person bus services in even hotter cities like Delhi literally overflowing with people even though the level of service is often worse. That has as much to do with customer expectations and American car culture as it does with whether or not bus or trolley services are viable in hot places.
I’m not sure I buy the assertion that slower home price growth in urban areas is a sign of lower demand. Urban areas (particularly coastal ones) have higher prices to start with, so the lower percentage growth may still represent larger absolute dollar increases.
Here’s a hypothesis: more people are priced out of urban areas due to high mortgage interest rates and little to no new supply, so they have no choice but to decamp for the suburbs.
How have rents changed? I would have liked to see that in the analysis.
Was coming here to post the same comment! I don't see anything refuting "the rent is too damn high"... In the greater NYC market, I saw the jump in suburban prices, but it was more of a partial equalization with city prices. I would still rather live in NYC, but I have retreated to the suburbs because the total cost of having a family is much lower out here.
That data shows top 10% income folks are staying in cities, but young people and recent immigrants aren't - that smells like affordability to me. Or at least it's part of the story,
Also, the so called "exodus" from NYC to say suburban Florida consists entirely of "I am a mid-level Blue State public employee with a great pension and I'm retiring this year and the house I bought in Brooklyn for $250,000 back in 1992 is now worth $2.5 million."
Of course you would move to Florida! Even a good pension is still only a percentage of your earnings while you were working (making a tight budget in NYC). Plus contrary to the haters' opinion, Florida actually has nice upscale areas, perfect for 50/60's-ish aged retirees that are filled with Northeastern transplants.
Not sure what was in my comment to make you think that I thought that FL had a bad job market. I was referring to the tendency of people from NY to sell their expensive houses and buy bigger ones in FL.
Recent immigration is actually what is keeping the population of many cities up.
I live in a rural exurb that is very pretty and has many outdoor amenities, and we have been facing more growth than most existing residents would like. Seems many people like working remote and being able to keep a horse, hike, raft on the river, and so on. The houses being built are upscale, not inexpensive.
Yeah it depends on the industry. I work for a not-for-profit healthcare system, where breaking even on operations and not having to raid their investments is a win in their book. They’re all about cost so have no urge to move remote folks back on site, when they can use that vacant space to get some administrative functions off of hospital campuses and rented offices.
The number of people actually working remote is holding steady, and increasing if you include self employed. Advertising is not a particularly accurate way of measuring this.
Agreed. NYC rents just hit another high. If there was more supply, especially “affordable” housing, there is no question but that there would be a surge in people moving to the city, particularly younger people and empty nesters. The same is true of SF. Significant efforts to build more housing in both places are being made but will take some years to make an impact. Couples with young kids would also be more likely to stay as well.
It will be interesting to see what impact return to office policies and lower interest rates will have in general. I think there is a large number of my fellow boomers who have been holding onto their homes to accommodate their grown children and because high interest rates have encouraged them to hold onto their homes financed at lower rates. The unsettled markets may also lead some to sell before a correction and/or recession hits (while discouraging others).
None of that is unique to cities though. Demand per housing unit is bursting in nice suburbs just as much or more as it is in nice urban neighborhoods.
Of course you get more space for your money in suburbs but that's a constant throughout time across the globe.
Came here to say this. Urban neighborhoods are still more expensive in most cities, so looking at recent price change without that context is misleading.
People just fundementally cannot understand that price *levels* are a reflection of demand. People are paying $2.5 million dollars for 1,000 square foot three bedroom apartments in my (not even top twenty most expensive) NYC neighborhood and your conclusion is that demand is weak? Get out of here with that.
The conclusion of the article is about changes in relative demand, not absolute demand. Higher price growth outside of urban centers is indicative of that.
The conclusion is about consumer taste; if Rav4 sales are growing faster than G Wagon sales that doesn't necessarily mean that everyone decided that leather seats aren't cool anymore. Many people still want leather seats and we can see that because they are willing to pay a substantial premium for them!
Did he make a claim that people don’t want to live in cities? I thought he did a good job of making very clear that he was only talking about directions of change- urban living has not gotten relatively more popular in the past few years, even if it is still quite popular.
hmm, the last section of the article opens with "Slower demand, not just constrained supply, now holds back urban growth"... and in more detail: "The sluggishness of urban home prices since the pandemic began, combined with the slowdown in urban population growth relative to suburban and rural areas, suggest that a drop in demand for urban living, not just constrained supply, is holding back an urban recovery."
I think many of us read that as an absolute statement, not just a relative one.
I think you’re completely misinterpreting the author’s emphasis and not giving him credit for the fairly clear explanation he gave that he was focusing on relative changes in demand. First derivatives. I’m slightly disappointed to see that so many in this comment section have seemingly allowed that point to elide them.
I was wondering about that, too. A reasonably nice condition two bedroom apartment within walking distance to a transit line in Boston's urban core could easily set you back 4-5 grand a month. That's a lot more than you'll pay in Framingham. Mind you it wouldn't surprise me if rents have increased faster in the later over the last six or seven years; but couldn't that just be a function of the fact that, because so many people are priced out of the urban core, diminishing returns have begun to set in there in terms of a landlord's ability to raise rents? (Can't get blood from a stone: even in cities where there are a lot of very high wage jobs, the ability or willingness to absorb rent increases isn't infinite). Whereas in Framingham—starting from a much lower base—there has been more scope for rents to rise dramatically in recent years (while still leaving a very large gap between it and the urban core).
In other words, demand has been high in both places, but nonetheless higher in the urban core; but the higher starting price point (going back, to, say, 2018) in the urban core means the feasible ceiling of what kind of rent an owner can command was reached earlier than in the suburbs, and so price growth has been more subdued (until we have a correction/recession, and things reset).
To my knowledge, it's not really that much more, but in Framingham you'll get an entire house for that much -- though I'm not sure if Framingham has allowed any actual 2BD apartments to get built!
Sure, but that's not really a rejoinder to the core point.
Remote work has driven large relative increases in demand for rural living in specific sorts of scenic areas, but they're producing huge price increases not because they're huge in absolute terms, but because those regions are deeply constrained in the number of units which exist, which can be built rapidly, and for which infrastructure can be provided.
Meanwhile, does anyone really doubt that if you found some magical way to plunk 500,000 units of housing of various sizes and rent/sell mixes in New York, they'd sell/rent out rapidly? They'd absolutely push prices down in so doing, but they would basically fill up due to the latent demand.
This is less true of cities like Philadelphia or Chicago, though still somewhat true; Philly has conducted a natural experiment of sorts with a building boom of apartments in the neighborhoods immediately surrounding Center City, especially University City, Fairmount/Brewerytown, Fishtown, and Washington Ave. There're have probably been 30k rental units brought online between late 2022 and now. And the result is that they're all renting out very rapidly while overall keeping rents flat in nominal terms and declining in real ones.
A lot of the population dynamics we're seeing in places like Philadelphia are bog-standard displacement of larger, poorer households by smaller, wealthier ones as neighborhoods become more desirable. This doesn't produce a ton of growth in median house prices, and reads as a falling population, but causes once-cheap (because shitty) neighborhoods to compress upwards towards the median home values for the city.
I'm happy to hear this! I used to live in Philadelphia and one of my gripes was how most of the rental housing stock consisted of awkwardly-repurposed pieces of old buildings with no air conditioning. I would love to live there again, but life has taken me elsewhere...
The increases are in exurbs, small cities, and rural areas, not just rural, and the absolute numbers are very large. These regions are NOT deeply constrained in the number of units which can be built rapidly, as zoning and permitting is typically builder friendly, and infrastructure requirements are minimal for many exurban and rural areas, which are typically on private well and septic, not public water and sewer. Satellite Internet is now widely available, removing that constraint.
Adding a few tens of thousands of units in hundreds of exurbs and rural counties and college towns and small cities adds up.
The actual number of existing US residents in the urban centers of most large cities is decreasing. Any increase in urban centers, in most large cities, is solely due to new immigrants. And US immigration is currently being decreased significantly, so that source is less likely to offset the move.
It’s also expected to affect the House districting and thus the electoral college.
Glad to hear about the growth near Center City in Philadelphia. I’m originally from eastern PA, and once I’m approaching retirement, my wife and I are probably going to sell our home in OC (CA) and retire elsewhere.
We have our eye on parts of the UK and Italy, but Philadelphia is by far our favorite US city for walkability, transit options, and general vibes. (Plus, GO BIRDS) Something near Center City with at least one garaged parking spot (preferably two, I’m a car enthusiast, but I could rent some warehouse space instead) close to bars and restaurants is exactly what we want when we are older. We like to drive but don’t want to HAVE to do it on a daily basis. I can even stand the winter - just dress appropriately - but the humidity in the summer sucks. Hopefully we will adjust. Or just move to the UK (Yorkshire) or southern Italy.
I love Philly but if you're not relocating to somewhere where you have family and friends, then you might as well nail the climate and take a lower CoL, which Italy wins out on fairly decisively when you planned for retirement in dollars.
I do have some family in eastern PA, but I don’t really have any friends I care to see. Certainly they didn’t take up my offer to visit CA when I was offering them a place to stay while here.
I haven't managed to do that in almost 8 years back in the US, except a brief layover for dinner with the close friends who are in LA and to attend their wedding, haha.
I agree with this. I work in an upscale urban area and live in the suburbs, but this is entirely 100% because of cost. I bought a 5-bedroom house in the suburbs for about $500,000. The same house in the upscale urban area would be $2-5 million, depending on the street.
I love the upscale urban area where I work, but I'd literally need to be a millionaire to live here. Perhaps I could hypothetically get a small condo for just my wife and I when all my kids move out, but my guess is that prices will only grow higher in the interim.
I would like to continue living in my core city, but if I wanted to buy a home that would fit my family, it would cost north of $2M! Any analysis that doesn't include that isn't going to get very far.
With three kids that’s where I’ve been for the last couple of decades. Bigger houses for a lower price, yards, and better schools have kept us in the suburbs.
This captures what I was thinking reading this as well. While going off "vibes" is a bad idea for analysis, the vibes in NYC are that demand is as high as ever and that it's a supply/rent problem while wages generally stagnate. Under those conditions, new entrants would either have to be wealthy (or wealth-backed, like trust fund kinds) and my strong guess in those cases is that they would go through hoops to not pay local taxes such as lying about permanent residence OR it's people willing to live in more cramped conditions, which would more likely to be immigrants IMHO.
No research to specifically back this up so take it with a grain of sand, but those are my on the ground vibes in NYC.
Demand is as high as ever, yes. But it’s not *increasing* as significantly as it was a decade ago. But demand in the suburbs is increasing somewhat faster.
To an extent these are flip sides of the same coin. It doesn't matter what sort of latent demand exists in the first tier cities if prices and rents have reached the point where only the top percent or two of the population by income/wealth can afford to act on that demand.
Which means that the people who would like to live in the city but cannot meaningfully participate in that market will express their demand for housing by pushing up demand somewhere else.
The more interesting dynamics, to my mind, are occurring in our second-tier cities. I can't speak for places like Indianapolis but from what I see of Philly and know to be occurring in Chicago, we're consistently seeing lower income folks migrating to affordable New South suburbs as rents rise even in less desirable areas, driven by revitalization but without sufficient increases in units or floor area to avoid pricing older residents out altogether. Philadelphia's median price hasn't increased much at all, but the volume of units being sold near to it instead of far below it has gone up a good bit. The bottom of the spectrum is slowly disappearing.
Beautiful! I love Philly, it’s a great city. I took my mom and husband there for the first time last year and we had a great time. I thought it was a lot cleaner too, compared to the mid aughts when I dated a Temple grad student long distance and visited frequently.
The thing is though, incomes increase over time, so we would expect house prices in the city to also increase over time - *even if there is no change to which income percentiles can afford the housing*.
When prices stall out (outside of a recession), that suggests a drop in demand above and beyond simply people not being able to afford the housing. Fixed prices suggest the housing is starting to become accessible to people in lower percentiles, as their income increases. This happens when people who could afford it (when it was increasing) become less interested.
Of course, there is quite a bit of pent-up demand for housing in the city, just as before. Nobody is disputing that. Just less, compared to the suburbs, than before.
Hard to judge, not least because "prices" aren't the only major component of out-of-pocket costs, interest rates are another huge determinant.
The actual monthly payment for a house that today costs exactly what it did in nominal terms at this time in 2022 is now 45% higher in nominal terms, roughly 37% higher in real terms.
In reality, in the older urban cores, prices are roughly flat in real terms, not nominal ones, which means that affordability is more in line with the former number than the latter.
That's denting demand everywhere, but it's most impactful in the areas which were already least affordable relative to median incomes, which are almost all major urban cores, with a scattering of "desirable resort towns."
How many people out there are thinking “I thought I saved a nice down payment of $250k for this urban house that costs $1.25M, but the monthly payment just went up from $3,950 to $6,200 in a span of one year. Screw it, I’ll just bid up a new construction house in the exurbs to $500k (monthly payment ~$1500) and hope that I don’t get called back into the office more than once a week.”
If anything, it seems like a miracle that prices haven’t declined (much) in expensive urban areas.
"There is no official government definition or categorization of suburbs: the government only defines urban and rural areas"
And it drives me nuts that there isn't more than two designations here. One of the greatest measures of political division today--maybe *the* greatest--is the urban/rural divide, with degrees of suburbanization in between. But the Census definitions are of little use when it says that the grand majority of the population, and almost every state, live in urban areas.
A lot of people like to pretend they live in more of a rural area than they really do. I know someone who claims they live in the country basically because their neighbor has horses, even though they're like 10 minutes away from a Crumbl Cookies and a Wegman's in a strip mall made up to look like a "town center", the classic marker of a bougie suburb.
I'm still blown away these cookie and cupcake franchisees are viable. I just don't know anyone that eats that many cookies. Part of me think it's just a play on excess immigrant franchisee demand and the house of cards will fall eventually.
They came from Utah and they’re super popular in the Mormon Corridor. Ditto with soda shops. The traditional vices are banned, so many Mormons have quite the sweet tooth.
That may work in older eastern cities, but most suburbs in the south/west aren't that walkable even if close to the urban center. Even some urban centers aren't that walkable.
Sorry if I’m being annoying, and bear in mind that I’m a foreign-born American, so I might not have standard American ideas of what is a city vs. a suburb.
With that said, to me, walkability is the sine qua non of cities. If it’s not walkable, it’s not a city. I don’t care how close it is to the city center. For this reason, I don’t call LA a city; I call it “fifty sprawling-ass suburbs in search of a city” ( not entirely fair, as there is a small sliver of Downtown LA that is nice and walkable. I love The Last Bookstore in Downtown LA!)
LA transit is improving quite a bit. When I visit my friend who lives in the sprawling valley I have to take transit to get around while she’s at work, and I’m pretty impressed with the bus service and the walkability (her condo complex is across from a grocery store and multiple bus stops). And they’re building a light rail in the next few years right by her complex. It may not necessarily be urban urban, but LA transit has been a pleasantly usable experience, at least.
Santa Monica, BH, and several of the beach neighborhoods are all very walkable and you could live in them without a car. Now Atlanta or Dallas on the other hand (yes arguably Emory or Highland Park but that’s pushing it)
You and I can make up our own definition of city, but if it excludes a majority of the large cities in the US, I'm not sure its that useful. That isn't to say there are strips or small sections that aren't walkable in these cities, but just that the vast majority of them are not that walkable.
Ok, I'm not going to be a pedant about this. Like I said, feel free to ignore me, because I'm a European-born American, and my definition of "city" is calibrated by Paris, London, Berlin, Krakow, Warsaw, etc. - true cities with a ton of walkability and mixed-use neighborhoods. (I've never been to Asia, but I imagine that Tokyo, Shanghai, Taipei, etc. also qualify).
By my definition, yes, America has few *true cities* and plenty of *central business districts surrounded by sprawling-ass suburbs.* But as you say, that's not helpful, and I don't want to get into a "but what *is* a woman?" debate.
You need someone other than me to come up with a useful American definition of "what is a city as opposed to a suburb?"
Perhaps a better term here would be “population center.” The US has a number of population centers, most of which are completely suburban. Some have a small downtown (convention center, sports facility, 1-3 bank office towers). Only a handful have a material urban area where people live and non-car transportation is relevant.
If you are a scientists/policy expert who wants to come up with specialized terms for specific purposes then sure. Just realize that it will be different language than what 99.9% of the population will use and mean.
Here in America, no. The stereotypical suburb is a bunch of single-family homes with front lawns and backyards, where you have to drive everywhere unless you’re walking your dog or borrowing a cup of sugar from your next-door neighbor.
In Europe of my childhood, we didn’t really *have* suburbs. We had: city, city, city, open green space, countryside.
In my opinion, floor area ratio is the best way to tell the difference between suburban/urban. The values are close to 100% so they're intuitive, and it does a good job of ignoring empty land like parks or bodies of water. I want someone to build a nationwide zoning database so we can map things like floor area ratio.
I found that part puzzling because the Census Bureau delineates the country into Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSA), Micropolitan Statistical Areas (μSA), and New England City and Town Areas (NECTA). The latter can be combined (CNECTA) or designated as Metropolitan or Micropolitan and either inside or outside CNECTAs.
I guess that’s all well and good, but the MSAs and μSAs are drawn inside city or county lines, and if you’re near those lines, you might reasonably consider yourself rural.
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.
It is sad. It is all downstream of increased housing costs in cities (and decreased marriage/relationship rates to a degree) and people keep insisting that "zoomers are relatively rich actually."
Frankly I also just didn’t see a lot of evidence for this claim. A 2pp drop over 5 years in the rate at which childless 25-34 year olds live in urban cores doesn’t seem super meaningful, especially since the change seems to have happened largely during the pandemic and levelled out since. And if you look back over 10 years the percentage is basically flat. I don’t really know how you can characterize that as “leaving”.
I don’t think he used the word “leaving” did he? “Increasingly choosing suburbs” seems correct. And 2% shift in 5 years actually is quite a bit! I’m not sure what percent of people move in any given five year period, but in order to result in a 2 percentage point shift, it has to be significantly imbalanced between the directions.
Yeah that’s fair I thought I read the word leaving somewhere but I did in fact misquote him. But I still don’t think these are big shifts over the arc of the past decade!
As a young college-educated adult without children, I currently live in a relatively dense urban area and I was surprised moving here at the proportion of families with school-age children.
Trump want to recreate the tariff policy of the late 19th and early 20th centuries to recreate that manufacturing juggernaut, but he's forgetting the crucial other leg of that policy -- open immigration. American cities reached their heyday in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as commercial centers that produced all manner of goods to meet demand, pulling in labor from, in effect, the hinterlands of the world because of the US's open immigration policy at that time. Perhaps analogous to how Chinese cities today have become great commercial centers, producing goods and pulling in labor from the hinterlands of China.
What would happen if the US adopted an urban and manufacturing renewal policy that reimposed some level of tariffs on imports, and at the same time designated major cities as relatively open immigration zones? (It's within Congress' power to make immigration conditional on maintaining residency in a specific area, until the immigrant becomes a citizen.)
Would that work to create Ross Perot's "giant sucking sound", but in a different direction - instead of pulling industry out of the country to where the work force is, pulling in both industry and workers in?
I go out on my deck in the morning and look over the city of Philadelphia, and sometimes imagine the bustle that was here a hundred years ago, compared to the acres and miles of old broken down buildings that are left today, and it makes me sad. What would it take to recreate that energy if one was really serious enough about results to cast aside any dogma and established thought patterns standing in the way? Is it worth trying?
Just because we can't easily see up close the living and working conditions of people who make cheap stuff for us, doesn't mean those conditions don't exist.
It's not just the people who make the shit, it's the people who build the roads and subway lines, drive the trains and buses, staff the hospitals and schools... building and operating infrastructure before wage compression hits is playing on easy mode.
We're singularly bad, among advanced economies with wage compression, at continuing to build it out, and in desperate need of reform, but to pretend that the newly industrialized city, whether Philadelphia in 1915 or Shenzhen in 2015, is a model we should seek to emulate once again seems... misguided at best.
I would gladly have my view obstructed by Shenzen-style highrises stretching north and west, if it meant Philadelphia would once again be the hive of activity, and major manufacturing, commercial and intellectual center of the Atlantic basin that it once was. And the people who came to live in those highrises would do so because they calculated it'll be a better life for them and their families than wherever they are now.
Not sure what neighborhood you're overlooking but the number of blocks with >20% dilapidated buildings is pretty low. St. Louis, we are not.
And the bubbles of restored housing and new-builds replacing empty lots seems to grow by a block or so a year even during and after COVID.
Even if we did go whole-hog on immigration and industrial policy, modern factories would be built in the exurbs, which would densify around them. The land for it doesn't exist in the city, and the built form of the older factories is ill-suited to anything modern.
Oh, no question the city is in better shape than when I first came to it over 25 years ago. But I see no force in sight that will bring it back to the thriving, optimistic city that built the monuments and statues that still dot it, many of them spiking the ball on defeating the Confederacy -- or even allow it to reach escape velocity from the overhang of old, past-their-useful-life buildings that the city is full of and that impede the new. I don't think most of industrial Philly was ever a beautiful city, but it was a city of energy looking to the future. Old Ed Rendell, mayor when i first arrived, is still cheerleading for it, and can't get agreement on whether the city even wants a new monument for the United States' quartermillennial. It's a sad fate for the birthplace of American democracy.
I've lived in places that "thrived" in the style of the Philadelphia which gave us all the monuments. They mostly suck for the people who live in them and do the scut work to make the gears turn.
That is to say, some of what you outline is just the problems that come with wage compression; it might prove to be unsustainable, trying to maintain everything, keep up services, and hold it all together when every worker is paid well and retires comfortably, and we'll watch wages decompress over the next fifty years to begin the cycle anew... but if so it's going to suck for a lot of people. Hopefully cutting vast swathes of red tape will suffice to make the problems of building, maintaining, and using the full potential of our infrastructure manageable even with pleasant blue-collar pay scales.
In any case, I agree that we get in our own way far more than should be the case, but I will be reasonably content with the city becoming a better place to live for the majority of its residents, which has marched forward with pretty steady regularity since Rendell, even with Street's questionable ethics and Kenney's sheer lethargy. I can't say I give much of a fuck whether it builds monuments, though I understand our failure to muster basically anything for next year to stem from the same fundamental issues that make it difficult to build, well... anything.
I would look to city models in Asia to see what conditions need to be present for revitalization to happen. My guess as someone who isn't an urban planner, is that there have to be major changes in zoning and regulation, programs to discourage vacancies (auctioning off lots to wrest them away from disinterested owners?), and a ton of money pouring in around transit, affordable housing, and city services.
Please don't plow anymore money into affordable housing. PHA is a terrible owner and maintainer of infrastructure and our housing projects are distilleries for every ill that concentrated poverty brings.
Section 8 is bureaucratic and cumbersome but infinitely better than Section 9.
Part of the ability to do that was tolerance for crowded, dangerous, and unsanitary living conditions; and grim circumstances for the children born into it. You were relatively free to immigrate, but you were on your own once you arrived.
Of course, the flip side of urban stagnation is that maybe I'll actually get to retire in the same city I'm spending my prime adult working years in. Which doesn't make slowing/actually-declining home prices a good thing! Much better to actually build meaningful new housing, work the YIMBY magic, free up rental units so more people can get the kind of killer steal I'm living in. But it's important to always look on the bright side of life, as Brian says. Macroeconomic trends, historical clout, and weather will mean there's gonna be people wanting to live in SF for awhile yet, even if they're poorer overall than in the past.
But I'll always wonder how things woulda been different if I'd started my career a bit earlier. Company used to have an extremely generous transfer policy, where you kept your local wage when moving to a different store...even one with lower CoL. Lots of people ran a "get hired in SF, move to Texas, own a ranch despite bagging groceries for a living"-type plan. High wages don't mean much if CoL eats up so much of the premium...and ironically, improved transit makes it increasingly feasible to enjoy city agglomeration amenities even if one doesn't live directly in the city. So much value being left on the table by self-own urban outmigration. If even the immigrants are heading for the suburbs now, that tells you a lot...
"Lots of people ran a "get hired in SF, move to Texas, own a ranch despite bagging groceries for a living"-type plan."
Feels a small example of what often goes so wrong in this country--people take a perk or service or amenity, figure out how to run a grift on it, and then abuse it until it's gone for everyone. In many ways, we have the perfect president for this philosophy.
Then they complain about how 'the oligarchs' took muh perks away because of greed. Zero ability to look in the mirror. Same people who shop for airline tickets by price, then complain about the lack of legroom.
I doubt the "lots" is actually any more than "some" or "a few". Not that many people move, not that many people move keeping the same job, not that many people would move, keep the same job, and never leave that job because the pay differential acted like silver handcuffs to the job.
ETA, it's not a grift given that there was nothing hidden or deceptive about any of it. And assuming the folks running the company weren't idiots, the possibility to do what the poster suggests was undoubtedly part of their recruiting strategy for getting a good workforce. Whatever risk the company was running in paying somewhat higher wages in Texas for the people who used the perk, they presumably made up for by having a higher quality workforce in SF and a more stable workforce in both TX and SF.
Fair enough (and OP would know more than me) but I think we can generalize the idea of people approaching perks/community benefits from a value extraction perspective and in turn ruining them. Compare this to a culture like Japan, where the focus is on the group vs. the individual, where people would be pariahs for doing such a thing (though there are plenty of things wrong with Japanese society too).
One of my most eye-rolling experiences of the last few years was seeing my extremely progressive friend return from Japan, raving about how clean and awesome everything is there, then watching her face fall when I pointed out that those conditions are achieved by the very political choices and social shaming she opposes at every turn.
Yeah, it's an interesting comparison to the US, both in regards to prioritizing the group and just where it's conservative vs. progressive. I lived there for a while, have been back many times, and while I love it for many reasons, things like expectations in the workplace, gender inequality, and conformity as a value enforced in schools are not lost on me one bit.
I do wish the US would take some lessons away though: Investment in train transit in densely populated sprawls (East Coast, West Coast, etc), mixed-use zoning (the "shop downstairs, bar upstairs, family home in back" model makes for some vibrant neighborhoods), and encouraging integrated families to allow for elder care (and in turn providing child care).
This is exactly what did it for me. When we needed a third bedroom, we had to leave downtown Miami despite being in the top 5% of incomes. Where we live now still reads as "urban" to my suburbanite coworkers but it's a detached house with a yard and a need to drive for most trips so it's quite a bit more suburban than I'd ever choose for reasons other than price.
I believe it! Brickell is a great place to live but like the rest of urban America family size units are few and you're competing with groups of roommates for them.
I live in Baltimore and am leaving in part due to new commuting requirements. If we lived away from the city my wife’s commute would be the same (my god Pratt St.), taxes lower, less crime, and better schools.
The food is good but housing stock and infrastructure is old.
Schools are such a huge factor in where to live once you have kids. It's one thing to pay more in rent to live downtown when it's just you and maybe a partner being cool kids in the city - very different ten years later when you're buying, looking at paying a higher purchase price, higher property tax, you need at least one car for the kids anyway, *and* you're either sending your kids to a very bad public school system or paying out the nose for private schools where your kid's going to be filling out college-style applications when they're 13. Suburban living starts to look really, really attractive by comparison at that point.
We have three kids. All that has been what’s kept us in the burbs despite not enjoying the soulless nature of suburban living. Four more years until the youngest might be grown and flown, then we will move somewhere we like.
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.
"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.
It's a shame we invented the perfect dense-but-not-too-dense urban form with the streetcar suburb -- just look how pricey and popular the extant ones are today! -- and then decided 'nah, we can do worse than that.'
I actually live in a streetcar suburb (in Philly), and I love it. It has a slightly less dense feel, with a fully walkable, very family-friendly neighborhood, but then I hop the trolley to the hospital for work or whenever we want to go downtown to the big museums or downtown events. It's a lovely way to live.
Broadly speaking that's my favorite type of neighborhood, too: urban core, but not *downtown* core: amenity rich, highly walkable, but just a bit more chill than the center of a major city. Boston's full of locations like that. I used to live in Coolidge Corner (Brookline). Wicked nice place to live.
Don't you live within city limits? I don't think I'd consider many neighborhoods within the city along our trolley lines to be streetcar suburban... the very end of the 10 (whatever the hell they renamed it to this time) in Overbrook mostly fits the bill, the Elmwood Park stretch of the 13, 11, and 36 isn't far off, but most of the length of those routes is just plain urban.
I think the 101 and 102 in DelCo are more classically "rail suburbs".
The story I heard is that west philly, especially the section east of 50th st was built up as a streetcar suburb, and then become part of the city as the city grew. That's why the row houses and lot sizes are bigger (and we have victorian twins instead of the tightly packed south philly rows) as the builders wanted to attract people interested in more space and avoiding the rif raf and hustle and bustle between the Schuylkill and Delaware. I'm not sure if neighborhoods like Walnut and Spruce Hill, Cedar Park and Kingsessing are still streetcar suburbs...They definitely fit into the class of "former street car suburbs" And they literally do have street cars, and they are almost entirely residential. But as things have grown around them and busses now exist, perhaps the distinction is less meaningful.
PS I say "we have" because I live in one of these neighborhoods too. JCW and I are probably practically neighbors!
The history is correct but calling much of it a streetcar suburb *now* is a stretch, I mean. Spruce Hill and Cedar Park to an extent still have the built form, but they're also smack in the middle of the city, such that they feel very urban due to the sheer amount of through travel, at least to me.
My neighborhood is on the other edge of W. Philly, three-odd miles to the north, and feels much more suburban in character even though its rows, and not twins, because it's just substantially more isolated from the heart of the city.
That's my DC neigborhood
H Street sucks... And it's definitely not a suburb. So not sure what you mean
Somewhere on H St may have been a streetcar suburb, but I’m talking about Ward 3.
I lived Ward 3 and now I'm even more confused. What streetcar?
And yes it's pretty residential but still obviously in the city, there are just $4mil houses
Almost all streetcar suburbs lost their streetcar sometime between 1925 and 1965.
Was the street car on Connecticut Ave?
Street car suburbs were built between 1880 and 1920 as spurs from main urban areas. They tend to have row homes or densely packed single family homes that are not offset much from the road.
That only works in cities without extreme climates. Many people can't wait at a streetcar stop when e.g. it is 105 degrees F at 7 AM.
Chicagoland has many thriving streetcar suburbs and our January ain't child's play.
Neither are your Aprils
My guess would be it's more a problem with heat than with cold. Cold is easier to compensate for. Waiting outside in January in Chicago is fine if you have a good coat.
The existence of New Orleans and its streetcar system would seem to disprove that hypothesis.
Personally I live in a streetcar suburb of the area and while I bike to work normally, the streetcar is a much more attractive option by comparison once the heat index exceeds 95°.
We can fix it with technology
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/25/us/la-sombrita-bus-los-angeles.html
I think the real scandal is the last paragraph where it says each bus shelter can cost $50k. Is there no economy of scale/bulk discount for a city the size of LA ordering mass quantities of them? Is the company that the city contracts with to manufacture them owned by an alderman’s cousin?
I assumed Matt was being tongue-in-cheek here, as this design has been mocked and parodied already for being incredibly inefficient and prototypically Californian.
Yeah, I figured that you weren’t serious about the Sombritas being a solution for anything - in fact it’s the height of insanity that that ever passed muster even for a pilot. But also $50k per bus shelter is crazy when you think about how many the city would presumably order if it were trying to put shelters at most bus stops. I mean LA’s bus system is massive!
Phoenix, Tempe, Prescott, and Tuscon all had street car networks.
Albuquerque and Las Vegas had street car networks.
Austin, El Paso, Galveston, and San Antonio had street car networks.
Tampa, Miami, and Jacksonville all had street car networks.
Atlanta had street car networks.
Mississippi and Missouri both had multiple street car networks.
Please tell us this alleged place in America where street cars "don't work". They've even built one in Saudi Arabia!
Yeah, Memphis definitely used to have them, my grandmother used to tell stories about taking the kids on the streetcar to go shopping back before families had more than one car.
I mean, streetcars aren’t great where they have to share the road with modern car traffic, and Seattle can’t even build a line for less than billions despite the lack of grade separation. Best to have elevated lines or at the very least run them through medians
Streetcars don’t exist any more in most streetcar suburbs. And when you say “only” in cities without extreme climates, that is a bit of a limitation, but what you describe basically only happens in Houston, Dallas, Austin, San Antonio, El Paso, and Phoenix.
Vegas has entered the chat.
Vegas had a street car system for 50 years until 1928.
Pretty sure if you include all the metro areas with seriously hot climates during at least a good portion of the year, you've ruled out 90% of the areas that are growing today.
"Seriously hot" is pretty vague, though. There's a huge difference between Phoenix-hot and Atlanta-hot. (I don't think the kind of heat Kate described even applies to the Texas triangle, frankly.)
Buses exist in just about every city though.
Yeah, but after Rosa Parks, most bus systems have been really neglected and become a self-fulfilling doom spiral
I agree, but the usage is limited by climate in some cities (as well as the condition of the service).
I can see that, but I've also seen in person bus services in even hotter cities like Delhi literally overflowing with people even though the level of service is often worse. That has as much to do with customer expectations and American car culture as it does with whether or not bus or trolley services are viable in hot places.
Well, yes, of course Phoenix and Las Vegas are worse than living in habitable locations...
"extreme climates" isn't the issue, it's heat. Cold cities with thriving public transit are too numerous to mention.
I’m not sure I buy the assertion that slower home price growth in urban areas is a sign of lower demand. Urban areas (particularly coastal ones) have higher prices to start with, so the lower percentage growth may still represent larger absolute dollar increases.
Here’s a hypothesis: more people are priced out of urban areas due to high mortgage interest rates and little to no new supply, so they have no choice but to decamp for the suburbs.
How have rents changed? I would have liked to see that in the analysis.
Was coming here to post the same comment! I don't see anything refuting "the rent is too damn high"... In the greater NYC market, I saw the jump in suburban prices, but it was more of a partial equalization with city prices. I would still rather live in NYC, but I have retreated to the suburbs because the total cost of having a family is much lower out here.
That data shows top 10% income folks are staying in cities, but young people and recent immigrants aren't - that smells like affordability to me. Or at least it's part of the story,
Also, the so called "exodus" from NYC to say suburban Florida consists entirely of "I am a mid-level Blue State public employee with a great pension and I'm retiring this year and the house I bought in Brooklyn for $250,000 back in 1992 is now worth $2.5 million."
Of course you would move to Florida! Even a good pension is still only a percentage of your earnings while you were working (making a tight budget in NYC). Plus contrary to the haters' opinion, Florida actually has nice upscale areas, perfect for 50/60's-ish aged retirees that are filled with Northeastern transplants.
When I saw the “metros folks were moving to” chart it seemed like it was just a chart of top retirement destinations
You don’t know what you’re talking about. Job growth in Florida has been pretty impressive for many years.
Not sure what was in my comment to make you think that I thought that FL had a bad job market. I was referring to the tendency of people from NY to sell their expensive houses and buy bigger ones in FL.
Recent immigration is actually what is keeping the population of many cities up.
I live in a rural exurb that is very pretty and has many outdoor amenities, and we have been facing more growth than most existing residents would like. Seems many people like working remote and being able to keep a horse, hike, raft on the river, and so on. The houses being built are upscale, not inexpensive.
“ Seems many people like working remote”
But their bosses don’t so that party is ending.
No, remote work isn’t going away. Some companies are returning to office, some are not, and many are using remote work to hire better staff.
It is also very popular with small businesses.
Yeah it depends on the industry. I work for a not-for-profit healthcare system, where breaking even on operations and not having to raid their investments is a win in their book. They’re all about cost so have no urge to move remote folks back on site, when they can use that vacant space to get some administrative functions off of hospital campuses and rented offices.
PS - I’ve been remote for 5 years this month and there is no push from management to go back. It’s saved us millions per year.
The number of jobs advertised as fully remote has collapsed. Remote Friday? Sure. But that doesn’t let you move to Boise.
The number of people actually working remote is holding steady, and increasing if you include self employed. Advertising is not a particularly accurate way of measuring this.
Agreed. NYC rents just hit another high. If there was more supply, especially “affordable” housing, there is no question but that there would be a surge in people moving to the city, particularly younger people and empty nesters. The same is true of SF. Significant efforts to build more housing in both places are being made but will take some years to make an impact. Couples with young kids would also be more likely to stay as well.
It will be interesting to see what impact return to office policies and lower interest rates will have in general. I think there is a large number of my fellow boomers who have been holding onto their homes to accommodate their grown children and because high interest rates have encouraged them to hold onto their homes financed at lower rates. The unsettled markets may also lead some to sell before a correction and/or recession hits (while discouraging others).
None of that is unique to cities though. Demand per housing unit is bursting in nice suburbs just as much or more as it is in nice urban neighborhoods.
Of course you get more space for your money in suburbs but that's a constant throughout time across the globe.
Came here to say this. Urban neighborhoods are still more expensive in most cities, so looking at recent price change without that context is misleading.
People just fundementally cannot understand that price *levels* are a reflection of demand. People are paying $2.5 million dollars for 1,000 square foot three bedroom apartments in my (not even top twenty most expensive) NYC neighborhood and your conclusion is that demand is weak? Get out of here with that.
The conclusion of the article is about changes in relative demand, not absolute demand. Higher price growth outside of urban centers is indicative of that.
The conclusion is about consumer taste; if Rav4 sales are growing faster than G Wagon sales that doesn't necessarily mean that everyone decided that leather seats aren't cool anymore. Many people still want leather seats and we can see that because they are willing to pay a substantial premium for them!
Did he make a claim that people don’t want to live in cities? I thought he did a good job of making very clear that he was only talking about directions of change- urban living has not gotten relatively more popular in the past few years, even if it is still quite popular.
hmm, the last section of the article opens with "Slower demand, not just constrained supply, now holds back urban growth"... and in more detail: "The sluggishness of urban home prices since the pandemic began, combined with the slowdown in urban population growth relative to suburban and rural areas, suggest that a drop in demand for urban living, not just constrained supply, is holding back an urban recovery."
I think many of us read that as an absolute statement, not just a relative one.
I think you’re completely misinterpreting the author’s emphasis and not giving him credit for the fairly clear explanation he gave that he was focusing on relative changes in demand. First derivatives. I’m slightly disappointed to see that so many in this comment section have seemingly allowed that point to elide them.
I was wondering about that, too. A reasonably nice condition two bedroom apartment within walking distance to a transit line in Boston's urban core could easily set you back 4-5 grand a month. That's a lot more than you'll pay in Framingham. Mind you it wouldn't surprise me if rents have increased faster in the later over the last six or seven years; but couldn't that just be a function of the fact that, because so many people are priced out of the urban core, diminishing returns have begun to set in there in terms of a landlord's ability to raise rents? (Can't get blood from a stone: even in cities where there are a lot of very high wage jobs, the ability or willingness to absorb rent increases isn't infinite). Whereas in Framingham—starting from a much lower base—there has been more scope for rents to rise dramatically in recent years (while still leaving a very large gap between it and the urban core).
In other words, demand has been high in both places, but nonetheless higher in the urban core; but the higher starting price point (going back, to, say, 2018) in the urban core means the feasible ceiling of what kind of rent an owner can command was reached earlier than in the suburbs, and so price growth has been more subdued (until we have a correction/recession, and things reset).
“Diminishing returns in raising rents” mean that demand isn’t increasing as quickly as it used to.
>That's a lot more than you'll pay in Framingham.
To my knowledge, it's not really that much more, but in Framingham you'll get an entire house for that much -- though I'm not sure if Framingham has allowed any actual 2BD apartments to get built!
Prices in many cities are actually dropping, while prices in exurbs and desirable rural areas are increasing rapidly.
Nice discussion of the dynamics at play at https://www.coopercenter.org/research/remote-work-persists-migration-continues-rural-america
Sure, but that's not really a rejoinder to the core point.
Remote work has driven large relative increases in demand for rural living in specific sorts of scenic areas, but they're producing huge price increases not because they're huge in absolute terms, but because those regions are deeply constrained in the number of units which exist, which can be built rapidly, and for which infrastructure can be provided.
Meanwhile, does anyone really doubt that if you found some magical way to plunk 500,000 units of housing of various sizes and rent/sell mixes in New York, they'd sell/rent out rapidly? They'd absolutely push prices down in so doing, but they would basically fill up due to the latent demand.
This is less true of cities like Philadelphia or Chicago, though still somewhat true; Philly has conducted a natural experiment of sorts with a building boom of apartments in the neighborhoods immediately surrounding Center City, especially University City, Fairmount/Brewerytown, Fishtown, and Washington Ave. There're have probably been 30k rental units brought online between late 2022 and now. And the result is that they're all renting out very rapidly while overall keeping rents flat in nominal terms and declining in real ones.
A lot of the population dynamics we're seeing in places like Philadelphia are bog-standard displacement of larger, poorer households by smaller, wealthier ones as neighborhoods become more desirable. This doesn't produce a ton of growth in median house prices, and reads as a falling population, but causes once-cheap (because shitty) neighborhoods to compress upwards towards the median home values for the city.
I'm happy to hear this! I used to live in Philadelphia and one of my gripes was how most of the rental housing stock consisted of awkwardly-repurposed pieces of old buildings with no air conditioning. I would love to live there again, but life has taken me elsewhere...
It actually is a rejoinder to the core point.
The increases are in exurbs, small cities, and rural areas, not just rural, and the absolute numbers are very large. These regions are NOT deeply constrained in the number of units which can be built rapidly, as zoning and permitting is typically builder friendly, and infrastructure requirements are minimal for many exurban and rural areas, which are typically on private well and septic, not public water and sewer. Satellite Internet is now widely available, removing that constraint.
Adding a few tens of thousands of units in hundreds of exurbs and rural counties and college towns and small cities adds up.
The actual number of existing US residents in the urban centers of most large cities is decreasing. Any increase in urban centers, in most large cities, is solely due to new immigrants. And US immigration is currently being decreased significantly, so that source is less likely to offset the move.
It’s also expected to affect the House districting and thus the electoral college.
Glad to hear about the growth near Center City in Philadelphia. I’m originally from eastern PA, and once I’m approaching retirement, my wife and I are probably going to sell our home in OC (CA) and retire elsewhere.
We have our eye on parts of the UK and Italy, but Philadelphia is by far our favorite US city for walkability, transit options, and general vibes. (Plus, GO BIRDS) Something near Center City with at least one garaged parking spot (preferably two, I’m a car enthusiast, but I could rent some warehouse space instead) close to bars and restaurants is exactly what we want when we are older. We like to drive but don’t want to HAVE to do it on a daily basis. I can even stand the winter - just dress appropriately - but the humidity in the summer sucks. Hopefully we will adjust. Or just move to the UK (Yorkshire) or southern Italy.
I love Philly but if you're not relocating to somewhere where you have family and friends, then you might as well nail the climate and take a lower CoL, which Italy wins out on fairly decisively when you planned for retirement in dollars.
I do have some family in eastern PA, but I don’t really have any friends I care to see. Certainly they didn’t take up my offer to visit CA when I was offering them a place to stay while here.
I haven't managed to do that in almost 8 years back in the US, except a brief layover for dinner with the close friends who are in LA and to attend their wedding, haha.
Maybe one of these years.
I agree with this. I work in an upscale urban area and live in the suburbs, but this is entirely 100% because of cost. I bought a 5-bedroom house in the suburbs for about $500,000. The same house in the upscale urban area would be $2-5 million, depending on the street.
I love the upscale urban area where I work, but I'd literally need to be a millionaire to live here. Perhaps I could hypothetically get a small condo for just my wife and I when all my kids move out, but my guess is that prices will only grow higher in the interim.
I would like to continue living in my core city, but if I wanted to buy a home that would fit my family, it would cost north of $2M! Any analysis that doesn't include that isn't going to get very far.
With three kids that’s where I’ve been for the last couple of decades. Bigger houses for a lower price, yards, and better schools have kept us in the suburbs.
This captures what I was thinking reading this as well. While going off "vibes" is a bad idea for analysis, the vibes in NYC are that demand is as high as ever and that it's a supply/rent problem while wages generally stagnate. Under those conditions, new entrants would either have to be wealthy (or wealth-backed, like trust fund kinds) and my strong guess in those cases is that they would go through hoops to not pay local taxes such as lying about permanent residence OR it's people willing to live in more cramped conditions, which would more likely to be immigrants IMHO.
No research to specifically back this up so take it with a grain of sand, but those are my on the ground vibes in NYC.
Demand is as high as ever, yes. But it’s not *increasing* as significantly as it was a decade ago. But demand in the suburbs is increasing somewhat faster.
To an extent these are flip sides of the same coin. It doesn't matter what sort of latent demand exists in the first tier cities if prices and rents have reached the point where only the top percent or two of the population by income/wealth can afford to act on that demand.
Which means that the people who would like to live in the city but cannot meaningfully participate in that market will express their demand for housing by pushing up demand somewhere else.
The more interesting dynamics, to my mind, are occurring in our second-tier cities. I can't speak for places like Indianapolis but from what I see of Philly and know to be occurring in Chicago, we're consistently seeing lower income folks migrating to affordable New South suburbs as rents rise even in less desirable areas, driven by revitalization but without sufficient increases in units or floor area to avoid pricing older residents out altogether. Philadelphia's median price hasn't increased much at all, but the volume of units being sold near to it instead of far below it has gone up a good bit. The bottom of the spectrum is slowly disappearing.
Is crime down? (In Philly)
Vastly, and more importantly *palpably.*
Ways to go yet, but in most places and across most dimensions, the city feels vastly more orderly than it did 18 months ago.
Beautiful! I love Philly, it’s a great city. I took my mom and husband there for the first time last year and we had a great time. I thought it was a lot cleaner too, compared to the mid aughts when I dated a Temple grad student long distance and visited frequently.
Indy and its subarbs prices have gone up alot. Starting point was really low though
The thing is though, incomes increase over time, so we would expect house prices in the city to also increase over time - *even if there is no change to which income percentiles can afford the housing*.
When prices stall out (outside of a recession), that suggests a drop in demand above and beyond simply people not being able to afford the housing. Fixed prices suggest the housing is starting to become accessible to people in lower percentiles, as their income increases. This happens when people who could afford it (when it was increasing) become less interested.
Of course, there is quite a bit of pent-up demand for housing in the city, just as before. Nobody is disputing that. Just less, compared to the suburbs, than before.
Hard to judge, not least because "prices" aren't the only major component of out-of-pocket costs, interest rates are another huge determinant.
The actual monthly payment for a house that today costs exactly what it did in nominal terms at this time in 2022 is now 45% higher in nominal terms, roughly 37% higher in real terms.
In reality, in the older urban cores, prices are roughly flat in real terms, not nominal ones, which means that affordability is more in line with the former number than the latter.
That's denting demand everywhere, but it's most impactful in the areas which were already least affordable relative to median incomes, which are almost all major urban cores, with a scattering of "desirable resort towns."
Great points!
How many people out there are thinking “I thought I saved a nice down payment of $250k for this urban house that costs $1.25M, but the monthly payment just went up from $3,950 to $6,200 in a span of one year. Screw it, I’ll just bid up a new construction house in the exurbs to $500k (monthly payment ~$1500) and hope that I don’t get called back into the office more than once a week.”
If anything, it seems like a miracle that prices haven’t declined (much) in expensive urban areas.
"There is no official government definition or categorization of suburbs: the government only defines urban and rural areas"
And it drives me nuts that there isn't more than two designations here. One of the greatest measures of political division today--maybe *the* greatest--is the urban/rural divide, with degrees of suburbanization in between. But the Census definitions are of little use when it says that the grand majority of the population, and almost every state, live in urban areas.
A lot of people like to pretend they live in more of a rural area than they really do. I know someone who claims they live in the country basically because their neighbor has horses, even though they're like 10 minutes away from a Crumbl Cookies and a Wegman's in a strip mall made up to look like a "town center", the classic marker of a bougie suburb.
I'm still blown away these cookie and cupcake franchisees are viable. I just don't know anyone that eats that many cookies. Part of me think it's just a play on excess immigrant franchisee demand and the house of cards will fall eventually.
They came from Utah and they’re super popular in the Mormon Corridor. Ditto with soda shops. The traditional vices are banned, so many Mormons have quite the sweet tooth.
On the other end of things, I live in an ostensible city that to me feels like a bunch of suburbs in a trench-coat.
Maybe walkability scores would be useful here? Above xyz walkability score within an urban area = city; below it = suburb.
That may work in older eastern cities, but most suburbs in the south/west aren't that walkable even if close to the urban center. Even some urban centers aren't that walkable.
Sorry if I’m being annoying, and bear in mind that I’m a foreign-born American, so I might not have standard American ideas of what is a city vs. a suburb.
With that said, to me, walkability is the sine qua non of cities. If it’s not walkable, it’s not a city. I don’t care how close it is to the city center. For this reason, I don’t call LA a city; I call it “fifty sprawling-ass suburbs in search of a city” ( not entirely fair, as there is a small sliver of Downtown LA that is nice and walkable. I love The Last Bookstore in Downtown LA!)
LA transit is improving quite a bit. When I visit my friend who lives in the sprawling valley I have to take transit to get around while she’s at work, and I’m pretty impressed with the bus service and the walkability (her condo complex is across from a grocery store and multiple bus stops). And they’re building a light rail in the next few years right by her complex. It may not necessarily be urban urban, but LA transit has been a pleasantly usable experience, at least.
Santa Monica, BH, and several of the beach neighborhoods are all very walkable and you could live in them without a car. Now Atlanta or Dallas on the other hand (yes arguably Emory or Highland Park but that’s pushing it)
You and I can make up our own definition of city, but if it excludes a majority of the large cities in the US, I'm not sure its that useful. That isn't to say there are strips or small sections that aren't walkable in these cities, but just that the vast majority of them are not that walkable.
Ok, I'm not going to be a pedant about this. Like I said, feel free to ignore me, because I'm a European-born American, and my definition of "city" is calibrated by Paris, London, Berlin, Krakow, Warsaw, etc. - true cities with a ton of walkability and mixed-use neighborhoods. (I've never been to Asia, but I imagine that Tokyo, Shanghai, Taipei, etc. also qualify).
By my definition, yes, America has few *true cities* and plenty of *central business districts surrounded by sprawling-ass suburbs.* But as you say, that's not helpful, and I don't want to get into a "but what *is* a woman?" debate.
You need someone other than me to come up with a useful American definition of "what is a city as opposed to a suburb?"
Perhaps a better term here would be “population center.” The US has a number of population centers, most of which are completely suburban. Some have a small downtown (convention center, sports facility, 1-3 bank office towers). Only a handful have a material urban area where people live and non-car transportation is relevant.
If you are a scientists/policy expert who wants to come up with specialized terms for specific purposes then sure. Just realize that it will be different language than what 99.9% of the population will use and mean.
That's a very good way of putting it.
Aren’t suburbs in (wherever you happen to be from) walkable? Does this mess with your categorization?
Which suburbs?
Here in America, no. The stereotypical suburb is a bunch of single-family homes with front lawns and backyards, where you have to drive everywhere unless you’re walking your dog or borrowing a cup of sugar from your next-door neighbor.
In Europe of my childhood, we didn’t really *have* suburbs. We had: city, city, city, open green space, countryside.
In my opinion, floor area ratio is the best way to tell the difference between suburban/urban. The values are close to 100% so they're intuitive, and it does a good job of ignoring empty land like parks or bodies of water. I want someone to build a nationwide zoning database so we can map things like floor area ratio.
We need lots of nationwide databases. Here’s where I’ll bitch again at how we don’t do the full American Community Survey annually on every American!
I found that part puzzling because the Census Bureau delineates the country into Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSA), Micropolitan Statistical Areas (μSA), and New England City and Town Areas (NECTA). The latter can be combined (CNECTA) or designated as Metropolitan or Micropolitan and either inside or outside CNECTAs.
If you’re outside any of those areas, depicted as unshaded in Census maps, you’re definitely rural. E.g., https://www2.census.gov/geo/maps/metroarea/us_wall/Mar2020/NECTA_WallMap_Mar2020.pdf
I guess that’s all well and good, but the MSAs and μSAs are drawn inside city or county lines, and if you’re near those lines, you might reasonably consider yourself rural.
I'd be remiss not to share this recommendation on this topic (assuming you haven't read it already): https://www.amazon.com/Space-between-Us-Geography-Politics/dp/1108430716
Makes me depressed to think about how many of these data sources are going to be destroyed before the next update to this article.
Great guest post as always!
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.
"college-educated young adults without school-age kids — are increasingly choosing suburbs."
At the risk of severe urban snobbery, God this sounds sad.
It is sad. It is all downstream of increased housing costs in cities (and decreased marriage/relationship rates to a degree) and people keep insisting that "zoomers are relatively rich actually."
Frankly I also just didn’t see a lot of evidence for this claim. A 2pp drop over 5 years in the rate at which childless 25-34 year olds live in urban cores doesn’t seem super meaningful, especially since the change seems to have happened largely during the pandemic and levelled out since. And if you look back over 10 years the percentage is basically flat. I don’t really know how you can characterize that as “leaving”.
I don’t think he used the word “leaving” did he? “Increasingly choosing suburbs” seems correct. And 2% shift in 5 years actually is quite a bit! I’m not sure what percent of people move in any given five year period, but in order to result in a 2 percentage point shift, it has to be significantly imbalanced between the directions.
Yeah that’s fair I thought I read the word leaving somewhere but I did in fact misquote him. But I still don’t think these are big shifts over the arc of the past decade!
As a young college-educated adult without children, I currently live in a relatively dense urban area and I was surprised moving here at the proportion of families with school-age children.
Thanks, that was informative.
Trump want to recreate the tariff policy of the late 19th and early 20th centuries to recreate that manufacturing juggernaut, but he's forgetting the crucial other leg of that policy -- open immigration. American cities reached their heyday in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as commercial centers that produced all manner of goods to meet demand, pulling in labor from, in effect, the hinterlands of the world because of the US's open immigration policy at that time. Perhaps analogous to how Chinese cities today have become great commercial centers, producing goods and pulling in labor from the hinterlands of China.
What would happen if the US adopted an urban and manufacturing renewal policy that reimposed some level of tariffs on imports, and at the same time designated major cities as relatively open immigration zones? (It's within Congress' power to make immigration conditional on maintaining residency in a specific area, until the immigrant becomes a citizen.)
Would that work to create Ross Perot's "giant sucking sound", but in a different direction - instead of pulling industry out of the country to where the work force is, pulling in both industry and workers in?
I go out on my deck in the morning and look over the city of Philadelphia, and sometimes imagine the bustle that was here a hundred years ago, compared to the acres and miles of old broken down buildings that are left today, and it makes me sad. What would it take to recreate that energy if one was really serious enough about results to cast aside any dogma and established thought patterns standing in the way? Is it worth trying?
"What would it take to recreate that energy?"
Desperate poverty and a bunch of inner-city heavy industry, mostly.
Just because we can't easily see up close the living and working conditions of people who make cheap stuff for us, doesn't mean those conditions don't exist.
It's not just the people who make the shit, it's the people who build the roads and subway lines, drive the trains and buses, staff the hospitals and schools... building and operating infrastructure before wage compression hits is playing on easy mode.
We're singularly bad, among advanced economies with wage compression, at continuing to build it out, and in desperate need of reform, but to pretend that the newly industrialized city, whether Philadelphia in 1915 or Shenzhen in 2015, is a model we should seek to emulate once again seems... misguided at best.
I would gladly have my view obstructed by Shenzen-style highrises stretching north and west, if it meant Philadelphia would once again be the hive of activity, and major manufacturing, commercial and intellectual center of the Atlantic basin that it once was. And the people who came to live in those highrises would do so because they calculated it'll be a better life for them and their families than wherever they are now.
Not sure what neighborhood you're overlooking but the number of blocks with >20% dilapidated buildings is pretty low. St. Louis, we are not.
And the bubbles of restored housing and new-builds replacing empty lots seems to grow by a block or so a year even during and after COVID.
Even if we did go whole-hog on immigration and industrial policy, modern factories would be built in the exurbs, which would densify around them. The land for it doesn't exist in the city, and the built form of the older factories is ill-suited to anything modern.
Oh, no question the city is in better shape than when I first came to it over 25 years ago. But I see no force in sight that will bring it back to the thriving, optimistic city that built the monuments and statues that still dot it, many of them spiking the ball on defeating the Confederacy -- or even allow it to reach escape velocity from the overhang of old, past-their-useful-life buildings that the city is full of and that impede the new. I don't think most of industrial Philly was ever a beautiful city, but it was a city of energy looking to the future. Old Ed Rendell, mayor when i first arrived, is still cheerleading for it, and can't get agreement on whether the city even wants a new monument for the United States' quartermillennial. It's a sad fate for the birthplace of American democracy.
I've lived in places that "thrived" in the style of the Philadelphia which gave us all the monuments. They mostly suck for the people who live in them and do the scut work to make the gears turn.
That is to say, some of what you outline is just the problems that come with wage compression; it might prove to be unsustainable, trying to maintain everything, keep up services, and hold it all together when every worker is paid well and retires comfortably, and we'll watch wages decompress over the next fifty years to begin the cycle anew... but if so it's going to suck for a lot of people. Hopefully cutting vast swathes of red tape will suffice to make the problems of building, maintaining, and using the full potential of our infrastructure manageable even with pleasant blue-collar pay scales.
In any case, I agree that we get in our own way far more than should be the case, but I will be reasonably content with the city becoming a better place to live for the majority of its residents, which has marched forward with pretty steady regularity since Rendell, even with Street's questionable ethics and Kenney's sheer lethargy. I can't say I give much of a fuck whether it builds monuments, though I understand our failure to muster basically anything for next year to stem from the same fundamental issues that make it difficult to build, well... anything.
I would look to city models in Asia to see what conditions need to be present for revitalization to happen. My guess as someone who isn't an urban planner, is that there have to be major changes in zoning and regulation, programs to discourage vacancies (auctioning off lots to wrest them away from disinterested owners?), and a ton of money pouring in around transit, affordable housing, and city services.
Please don't plow anymore money into affordable housing. PHA is a terrible owner and maintainer of infrastructure and our housing projects are distilleries for every ill that concentrated poverty brings.
Section 8 is bureaucratic and cumbersome but infinitely better than Section 9.
Part of the ability to do that was tolerance for crowded, dangerous, and unsanitary living conditions; and grim circumstances for the children born into it. You were relatively free to immigrate, but you were on your own once you arrived.
Of course, the flip side of urban stagnation is that maybe I'll actually get to retire in the same city I'm spending my prime adult working years in. Which doesn't make slowing/actually-declining home prices a good thing! Much better to actually build meaningful new housing, work the YIMBY magic, free up rental units so more people can get the kind of killer steal I'm living in. But it's important to always look on the bright side of life, as Brian says. Macroeconomic trends, historical clout, and weather will mean there's gonna be people wanting to live in SF for awhile yet, even if they're poorer overall than in the past.
But I'll always wonder how things woulda been different if I'd started my career a bit earlier. Company used to have an extremely generous transfer policy, where you kept your local wage when moving to a different store...even one with lower CoL. Lots of people ran a "get hired in SF, move to Texas, own a ranch despite bagging groceries for a living"-type plan. High wages don't mean much if CoL eats up so much of the premium...and ironically, improved transit makes it increasingly feasible to enjoy city agglomeration amenities even if one doesn't live directly in the city. So much value being left on the table by self-own urban outmigration. If even the immigrants are heading for the suburbs now, that tells you a lot...
"Lots of people ran a "get hired in SF, move to Texas, own a ranch despite bagging groceries for a living"-type plan."
Feels a small example of what often goes so wrong in this country--people take a perk or service or amenity, figure out how to run a grift on it, and then abuse it until it's gone for everyone. In many ways, we have the perfect president for this philosophy.
Then they complain about how 'the oligarchs' took muh perks away because of greed. Zero ability to look in the mirror. Same people who shop for airline tickets by price, then complain about the lack of legroom.
I doubt the "lots" is actually any more than "some" or "a few". Not that many people move, not that many people move keeping the same job, not that many people would move, keep the same job, and never leave that job because the pay differential acted like silver handcuffs to the job.
ETA, it's not a grift given that there was nothing hidden or deceptive about any of it. And assuming the folks running the company weren't idiots, the possibility to do what the poster suggests was undoubtedly part of their recruiting strategy for getting a good workforce. Whatever risk the company was running in paying somewhat higher wages in Texas for the people who used the perk, they presumably made up for by having a higher quality workforce in SF and a more stable workforce in both TX and SF.
Fair enough (and OP would know more than me) but I think we can generalize the idea of people approaching perks/community benefits from a value extraction perspective and in turn ruining them. Compare this to a culture like Japan, where the focus is on the group vs. the individual, where people would be pariahs for doing such a thing (though there are plenty of things wrong with Japanese society too).
One of my most eye-rolling experiences of the last few years was seeing my extremely progressive friend return from Japan, raving about how clean and awesome everything is there, then watching her face fall when I pointed out that those conditions are achieved by the very political choices and social shaming she opposes at every turn.
Yeah, it's an interesting comparison to the US, both in regards to prioritizing the group and just where it's conservative vs. progressive. I lived there for a while, have been back many times, and while I love it for many reasons, things like expectations in the workplace, gender inequality, and conformity as a value enforced in schools are not lost on me one bit.
I do wish the US would take some lessons away though: Investment in train transit in densely populated sprawls (East Coast, West Coast, etc), mixed-use zoning (the "shop downstairs, bar upstairs, family home in back" model makes for some vibrant neighborhoods), and encouraging integrated families to allow for elder care (and in turn providing child care).
I want to retire on an urban waterfront and to be able to see the ducks in the morning.
https://images.fineartamerica.com/images/artworkimages/mediumlarge/3/matt-foley-quote-living-in-van-down-by-the-river-vintage-saturday-night-liv-ladislas-crepin.jpg
Are vans down by the river cheaper than vans in the Walmart parking lot?
What am I, a realtor?
[Checks to see if I can afford a third bedroom in my Brooklyn neighborhood with a top 2% household income yet.]
...
Nah.
Checks to see if any leading mayoral candidate has a real plan to solve this issue.
...
Nah.
This is exactly what did it for me. When we needed a third bedroom, we had to leave downtown Miami despite being in the top 5% of incomes. Where we live now still reads as "urban" to my suburbanite coworkers but it's a detached house with a yard and a need to drive for most trips so it's quite a bit more suburban than I'd ever choose for reasons other than price.
I knew a coupe families in Brickell who made that same move in the last few years.
I believe it! Brickell is a great place to live but like the rest of urban America family size units are few and you're competing with groups of roommates for them.
Policy implications: More of the same
Reform land use and building code regulations to de-constrain supply.
Reform Blue city/state governance to stop outmigration - 13 House/Electoral college voters going to to Red states in 2030
Reform Democratic Party to appeal to growth-with-equity voters ubiquitously.
-- Reform immigration law and practice to attract legally entering immigrants to offset fall in illegally/irregularly entering immigrants.
-- Reform taxes to reduce the deficit to no more than public investment
-- Reform trade regulations toward freer trade with everyone but China-Russia axis
I’m glad we now have a bona fide urbanist President who’s doing everything in his power to drive up car prices!
I live in Baltimore and am leaving in part due to new commuting requirements. If we lived away from the city my wife’s commute would be the same (my god Pratt St.), taxes lower, less crime, and better schools.
The food is good but housing stock and infrastructure is old.
Schools are such a huge factor in where to live once you have kids. It's one thing to pay more in rent to live downtown when it's just you and maybe a partner being cool kids in the city - very different ten years later when you're buying, looking at paying a higher purchase price, higher property tax, you need at least one car for the kids anyway, *and* you're either sending your kids to a very bad public school system or paying out the nose for private schools where your kid's going to be filling out college-style applications when they're 13. Suburban living starts to look really, really attractive by comparison at that point.
We have three kids. All that has been what’s kept us in the burbs despite not enjoying the soulless nature of suburban living. Four more years until the youngest might be grown and flown, then we will move somewhere we like.
Where are you moving to?
Southern Howard County if we play our cards right. Praying I don’t get RIFfed.
I want to be able to hit the Penn line within 15 min but I might just drive and pay to park at GreenBelt and avoid the bike nonsense.
Best wishes to you during this stressful time...
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.
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.
Why do you think this is?
(1) schools are way better
(2) quality of life is way better
"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.