Housing

Chicago Has A Dual Housing Market? What About Four Housing Markets?

Pete Saunders — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 19:18:28 -0500

You know, prior to the Covid pandemic, there was a lot more discussion in the urbanist sphere about economic inequality and a lack of economic mobility in cities, and their influence on the rising unaffordability of the American housing market. After the pandemic, that kind of discussion dissipated and morphed into something much broader – affordability, and later, abundance – that didn’t carry the same race and class associations typically given to inequality and mobility concerns.

That’s fine for people seeking to broaden support for policy action on affordability. However, it doesn’t touch on the entirety of the affordability problem.

Last week, Crains Chicago Business reporter Dennis Rodkin wrote about metro Chicago’s two-tiered real estate market – one that’s booming for the wealthiest Chicagoans, and one that’s flat for virtually everyone else. Here’s a quote from the paywalled article:

“In the uppermost echelon of home prices, sales took only until early November to pass the record number of homes sold in a full year. And one sale among them, a Winnetka estate that sold for $31.25 million, was the highest-priced sale of an existing home ever in the Chicago metro area (other homes have been built new for more). Meanwhile, in the market for homes at all prices, the number of sales is running only slightly higher than even with 2024, a year that ended with the fewest homes sold since 2011.”

In Rodkin’s interview with Jena Radnay, an agent with @properties Christie’s International Real Estate on Chicago’s North Shore, Radnay said, “(North Shore buyers may be) doing well with their business, sold their companies and cashed out, gotten massive promotions,” invested well or inherited wealth, she says, “and they’re happy to pay what it takes for real estate up here where they know it’s a good investment.”

Rodkin also spoke with Anthony Simpkins, president and CEO of Neighborhood Housing Services. The Chicago nonprofit focuses on financing homeownership in low- to moderate-income neighborhoods, but Simpkins’ perspective on the housing market takes in the middle class as well. Simpkins’ take? “It’s no secret that housing has gotten too expensive for almost everyone.”

Rodkin’s basis for Chicago’s dual housing market comes from his comparison of home price growth with median income growth in the Chicago metro area, between 2014 and 2024. Rodkin’s analysis compared home price growth and median income growth over two periods, 2014-19 and 2019-24. The map below shows areas where home price growth exceeds median income growth (shades of red), and areas where home price growth is surpassed by median income growth (shades of blue):

Rodkin sums up his position in this quote below:

For the past year and a half, Chicago-area home prices have been rising faster than the national average and faster than in nearly every major US city, accelerating the local affordability crunch right alongside interest rates that have remained relatively high.

Rising prices and mortgage interest rates that are twice what they were a few years ago take a one-two punch at affordability, and uncertainty about future financial well-being amid mass layoffs and the creeping hegemony of AI makes the hit feel even harder. “As the cost of housing has gone up dramatically,” Simpkins says, “people are feeling more challenged with being able to keep good-paying employment.”

Honestly, I think Rodkin is making a valid point with his framing of the Chicago housing market. From a pure residential real estate sense, there appears to be a clear worsening of housing affordability, with wealthy buyers getting what they want and others struggling.

Read the rest of this piece at The Corner Side Yard.

Pete Saunders is a writer and researcher whose work focuses on urbanism and public policy. Pete has been the editor/publisher of the Corner Side Yard, an urbanist blog, since 2012. Pete is also an urban affairs contributor to Forbes Magazine's online platform. Pete's writings have been published widely in traditional and internet media outlets, including the feature article in the December 2018 issue of Planning Magazine. Pete has more than twenty years' experience in planning, economic development, and community development, with stops in the public, private and non-profit sectors. He lives in Chicago.

Photo: Chicago housing for sale, courtesy The Corner Side Yard.

The Spectre of Communism Haunts the West — Mamdani is Only the Beginning

Joel Kotkin — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 19:18:28 -0500

The surprisingly easy election of the Marxist Zohran Mamdani represents a critical turning point, not only for my hometown of New York, but for all the West. Mamdani’s election as mayor represents the prospect of a rising socialist mindset, particularly among the young.

This shift is fairly universal, particularly in big cities. Virtually all the leading U.S. and European cities are ruled by progressives, in Europe, like New York, often as an odd alliance of Islamists, greens and leftists. Socialists, Islamists and Greens dominated such major European cities as Amsterdam, Paris, and Barcelona. Toronto, once ruled by moderate conservatives, has also turned to the progressive left.

Neither ethnicity nor class are the keys to this transition, but age. Mamdani’s election epitomizes these trends; he won an astounding 70 per cent of the vote among New Yorkers under 40, while losing badly among older folks and those who grew up, or lived long in Gotham.

Many on the reinvigorated left see Mamdani’s cost of living emphasis as a promising strategy for progressives often on the wrong side of many cultural issues. In the primary, Mamdani lost many predominately Black and Latino areas like the Bronx, Brownsville and Rosedale, all who favoured Andrew Cuomo, as did traditional ethnic working class areas in places like Canarsie in south Brooklyn.

But younger people, even those making decent incomes, catapulted a totally inexperienced, pro-Hamas, self-proclaimed Marxist to run the world capital of capitalism. Cost of living was the key, as New Yorkers pay the highest proportion of their income; it has by far the lowest percentage of homeowners in the country, half the national average.

Lack of affordable housing is now widely common in English speaking countries. Ireland which just elected a far-left Marxist as president, is among the worst. In the U.S., housing affordability stands at the lowest level ever recorded while one in three Americans now spend over 30 per cent of their income on mortgage payments or rent. In the U.S., homeownership for people under 35 has fallen fairly steadily for decades and is now half that of people over 45. A similar erosion in homeownership is clear in Britain and Australia.

Canada, home to two of the world’s most unaffordable cities, Toronto and Vancouver, is in a similar fix. According to a 2024 Scotiabank poll, home ownership declined for Canadians between the ages 18 and 34 to 26 per cent today from 47 per cent just a few years earlier, in 2021. Renters are also not well off as two in five renter households in Canada spend 30 per cent or more of income on rent and utilities.

Read the rest of this piece at: Yahoo News.

Authors

Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

Photo: Bingjiefu He via Wikimedia, under CC 4.0 License.

Mamdani Heralds the Radical American City

Joel Kotkin — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 19:18:28 -0500

The greatest threat to the United States is self-created and centered in urban areas. Having survived the pandemic and the 2020 “summer of love”, America’s cities — most critically, New York — are adopting politics that seem designed to make the much-feared “urban doom loop” a reality.

Instead of facing up to their fundamental challenges in liveability and economic viability, the Big Apple and other cities such as Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, and Chicago are falling for full-spectrum progressives. In Tuesday’s local elections, Zohran Mamdani, a socialist running as a Democrat, handily defeated former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who ran independently after failing to secure the Democratic nomination. Leftist have also scored recent victories in the smaller cities of Oakland, Cincinnati, Syracuse, Albany, and Buffalo.

It’s hard to see how politicians like Mamdani, following the Democratic Socialists’ platform, will abolish capitalism or implement the “social ownership” of all industry in a still profoundly capitalist country. People, at least outside the bluest cities, may not respond well to progressive ideas about taxing “white” areas, one of Mamdani’s proposals, or regarding the very existence of the NYPD as an obstacle to “queer liberation”.

His defenders insist Mamdani has disavowed such views since he aired them in the febrile Covid-and-BLM era. But his statements from back then, which wasn’t that long ago, give every impression of sincerity; Mamdani — unlike, say, his failed opponent Andrew Cuomo — comes across as an ideological true believer if ever there were one.

The bigger problem is that this abrupt Left turn comes as cities are losing their primacy. Today, core cities account for just 15% of the US population, down from a quarter in 1950. Meanwhile, the suburbs and exurbs have seen explosive growth — accounting for 86% of the metropolitan population, up from 13% at the outset of World War II. Suburban and, especially, exurban dominance of metropolitan growth has only accelerated in recent years.

More critical still, cities are losing their once-dominant economic role. In 2019, before the pandemic, office construction was a third of the rate of 1985 and half that of 2000. Even large multinational firms, historically anchored in cities like New York and Chicago, are rethinking their real-estate strategies. According to the Financial Times, many companies are planning to reduce their office footprints by 10% to 20%. A study from the University of Chicago found that as much as a third of the urban workforce could operate remotely.

It is precisely these conditions that have helped create a new urban demography favourable to far-Left city politicians like Mamdani. Between 1970 and 2000, notes the Brookings Institution, middle-income areas in core cities dropped 23%, down from nearly half, while the majority lived in low- or very-low-income areas. Job losses in manufacturing and middle management, notes MIT economist David Autor, were “overwhelmingly concentrated in urban labor markets”.

The Big Apple, for example, has lost some 76,000 middle-income jobs since 2020, while upper-income and low-income jobs have grown. This has paralleled the exodus of middle- and working-class ethnics — Italians, Irish, Jews, African Americans, Puerto Ricans — into the suburbs, particularly those with lower prices. Their departure is a blessing for the professional-class Left that backs Mamdani (while remaining middle- and working-class voters largely continued to back Cuomo to the bitter end).

Burdened with astronomical college debt, these high-education-but-low-wage voters constitute the vanguard of the far Left in many cities. They have largely adopted radical positions hostile to Israel and are seen as threatening to Jews, especially older ones, who once played a dominant role in the city politics.

Onetime rapper and Hollywood nepo baby Mamdani knows well how to appeal to this emergent class. His high-priced proposals for free childcare may seem family-friendly, but many of these voters are unliikely to have children (a majority of Manhattanites are single and have never been married). Socialist campaigners thrive in those places that have far fewer children — gentrified sectors of Queens and Brooklyn, Chicago’s near northside and trendy swaths of west LA. Those who march under the banner of LGBTQ also play an outsized role in these movements. Mamdani, despite his Muslim background and pro-Palestinian bona fides, romped in heavily gay-friendly parts of Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens

What disturbs the young professional class most appears to be high rents; Gotham takes the highest share of income for housing of any US big city. Mamdani’s programs — rent freezes, free buses, eviction restrictions, and the like — are designed to allow urbanites without the means to remain in the city, rather than join those moving to less costly cities to fulfill their dreams.

Some Leftist pundits see this class-based approach as the path to power, and even as the better substitute for the identity-based politics that dominated progressivism beginning a decade ago. High prices mean that coastal metropolises now suffer the lowest adjusted incomes, even as incomes in the less costly middle of the country remain above the national average. The thinking goes that, by running on “affordability” for this educated precariat, Democrats can regain their electoral footing after the thrashing they received in 2024.

Other economic pressures are radicalising the hipsters. They face a job market that is getting tougher — barely half of workers under 30 have full time jobs — even for those with expensive advanced degrees. Their jobs are increasingly threatened by the rise of artificial intelligence, including in finance, business services, and even “creative” professions that historically have clustered in cities.

Cities, of course, can fight back against these trends by developing policies that encourage urban economic growth, something barely mentioned in the DSA and other Leftist forums. Through reasonable taxation, less regulation, and the nurturing of local high-wage industries, from light manufacturing to video production, an early generation of practically minded urbanists helped restore order and growth. Mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg in New York, Bob Lanier and Bill White in Houston, Richard Riordan in Los Angeles, Ed Rendell in Philadelphia and Steve Goldsmith in Indianapolis showed how cities can come back.

“High-education-but-low-wage voters constitute the vanguard of the far Left in many cities.”

Today’s urban politics, at least for now, make such a revival unlikely. Chicago’s Brandon Johnson, in office since 2023, was elected by a very Mamdani-like coalition of poor minorities, public employees, and hipster whites. Under Johnson’s steady misrule, schools deteriorate even as he pushes through big raises for teachers and other public employees, leaving the city with an extremely high pension debt.

Even where reformers have triumphed this decade, as in San Francisco and Seattle, radical forces appear to be once again ascendant. Long a favoured destination for college-educated migrants, Seattle during the 2020 riots shut down for weeks and even spawned something of a mini-Havana near its downtown. The city suffers from stubbornly high office-vacancy rates, large numbers of empty stores, and business flight. Crime is down, but hardly back to its pre-2020 levels. The George Floyd Plaza, meant to be some sort of public shrine, remains largely desolate and threatening.

In Portland, another city still reeling from the effects of 2020, socialists are also ascendant, having displaced Republicans as the city’s essential second party, and one with all the momentum. As in Seattle, the local progressives seemed reluctant to police even violence-prone groups like antifa.

Just recently, New York Times veteran Nicholas Kristoff blithely dismissed Trumpian assertions about Portland as a crime-cursed dystopia, suggesting that “hell does not serve Pinot Noir this good”. Of course, not everyone in these cities loves the helmeted kids in black, notably those who have suffered their attacks, including the Seattle police union.

Much the same process appears to be taking place in Minneapolis, which suffered massive disorder during the “summer of love”. There, Mayor Jacob Frey, after eight years, is deeply unpopular and could lose out to his socialist challenger, Omar Fateh. The race was too close to call as of this writing.

Radical realignment is also unfolding in San Francisco, where since 2020, the city had tacked to the center. Once united in opposition to the progressives, the moderates are now increasingly divided. Now the city’s Board of Supervisors may have a DSA majority within a year or two.

President Trump deserves some blame for the socialist tide. He may well have saved the career of Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, who impressed few during last year’s fires and continues to disappoint, as the city’s performance in rebuilding has been abysmal at best. Its economy may be largely moribund, losing companies at a rapid clip. But Bass’s fervent attacks on ICE agents have helped her galvanize progressive support.

Is this the denouement of great cities? Even under socialist rule, big cities like New York will continue to attract young professionals, globe-trotting elites, and cultural creators, as well as some immigrants. In New York, while the overall population has declined, ultra-wealthy residents, boosted by the stock market, continue to spend lavishly at the city’s often absurdly expensive restaurants. Similarly, tourists continue to flood in, gawking at the bright lights, street characters, and remarkable cultural assets built by earlier generations.

Yet over time, socialist rule may make it impossible for big cities to finance their current costs, much less elaborate schemes for redistribution. Trump and the congressional GOP are unlikely to give much help with mass transit or to fund new city services. And there remain definite limits to what the rich — notably, those who earn and not just inherit their wealth — will absorb in terms of taxes and public humiliation.

It’s hard to see how cities like New York can expand spending without keeping these people. Between 2011 and 2021, New Yorkers with more than $1 million in adjusted gross income averaged 0.7% of all tax filers, but paid 42.4% of municipal personal Income Tax. Between 2018 and 2022, the city lost some $10 billion in revenues just to south Florida. Even Andrew Cuomo vowed to head to the Sunshine State in case he lost, which, he did.

On the other hand, socialist wins could prove a boon for places like Palm Beach, Fla., which have become beacons for people leaving places like New York and Chicago. Dallas is developing a stock exchange to rival Wall Street and is eyeing a Mamdani mayoralty as an ideal marketing device.

Some conservatives might celebrate the radicalisation of cities and salivate at the prospect of hard-Left control of the Democratic Party. But they ignore the underlying forces boosting socialism, notably the cost of living and diminished employment prospects for the young, which could also spread beyond the radical cities. Rather than a boon to conservatives, the rise of the radical city constitutes a loss for the country, and can be reversed only by a rebirth of pragmatic reason.

This piece first appeared at: UnHerd.

Photo: Marco Verch via, Flickr, under CC 2.0 License.

If "Business as Usual" is So Utterly Broken, Why Do We Still Keep Doing It?

Ross Elliott — Mon, 27 Oct 2025 13:29:26 -0400

“Business as usual is broken” I’ll say to someone. Their head nods in furious agreement. Whether that head belongs to a property industry professional, a government minister, a senior bureaucrat or a tradie doesn’t seem to matter. The realisation that business as usual is broken is now universally accepted by all except the most ardent lovers of regulatory overreach.

The question then becomes, if it is so broken, why do we keep applying business as usual techniques to solve the problem? Why don’t we discard the things we know are not working, especially the things that are working against us, and adopt a different strategy?

The signs of a broken system are everywhere. Our housing market is the most widely reported failing: median prices in capital cities are now 10 times median household incomes – and still rising. That places us as among the most expensive housing markets in the developed world. Sydney – at 14 times incomes – is second place in the world. Not a prize you want. Even Adelaide – yes Adelaide – at 10.9 times incomes, is in the top 10 least affordable cities in the world, relative to incomes. Most Australian capitals are in the top 10 or 15 globally – ahead of cities like greater metro London, Singapore or a host of US cities with bigger economies and populations.

Bringing new supply into a market at a speed which is remotely close to meeting demand is now a task that is beyond us, using business as usual techniques. Our performance could only be described as miserable and – with the exception of national politicians who keep talking targets as if they will somehow magically be delivered – no well informed person seems remotely hopeful that our supply side mechanisms are up to the task. To use the fad phrase, they are “not fit for purpose.”

One proposed ‘solution’ has been a call for more planners to
cope with the increasing complexity of land use regulation and development
assessment. But so far, the rate of growth in complexity is outpacing the
growth of planners. Jonathan O'Brien of Inflection Points wrote an interesting piece relating the number of planners to the delivery of housing stock.

Read the rest of this piece at The Pulse.

Ross Elliott is a leading industry practitioner with over 35 years' experience in property and urban development across a number of industry sectors. He has held senior roles with the Property Council of Australia as Executive Director, National Chief Operating Officer, and National Executive Director of the Residential Development Council. Ross has been a frequent writer and guest speaker on urban development themes both in Australia and the US. In 2018 he published a piece on Australia in a global study of suburban development by the MIT Center for Advanced Urbanism (Cambridge, Mass.) Ross is also founding director of suburban issues think tank Suburban Futures.

Chart: courtesy The Pulse, data source is Australian Bureau of Statistics.

Housing Reforms are Needed to Stop Stockholm from Stagnation

Peter Zonabend - Per Arwidsson - Nima Sanandaji — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 19:28:38 -0400

New companies face obstacles growing in Stockholm, in part this stagnation is due to the combination of a regulated rental market and too high prices for new housing development. Growing companies find it difficult to expand in urban regions with lack of housing, this adds to Sweden already being at a disadvantage due to relatively high taxes.

A study written by Tobias Lundberg, senior partner at McKinsey warns that Sweden is stagnating in growth and prosperity, with 70 percent of the total value of startup companies ending up in other countries.

This is not only because Sweden has high taxes on business and labor, but also because new companies have a hard time expanding in a city that has insufficient housing growth. The need for construction is 20,000 homes per year, in the capital city of Stockholm, but the households of the region can only afford 13,600.

Stockholm can be compared with the Irish capital region of Dublin and the Swiss capital region of Zurich. In Zurich, 13.9 percent of the residents are engineers and researchers, in Dublin the level is clearly lower, 9.2 percent. Stockholm has the second highest level in Europe; 13.1 percent of adults are engineers and researchers.

At the same time, Dublin and Zurich now have just over 50 percent higher prosperity per inhabitant compared to Stockholm, illustrating the need for growth reforms. This is shown by a report about conditions for a growing Stockholm, commissioned by Arwidsro real estate company and produced by ECEPR. In Stockholm, GDP per capita, expressed in the equivalent March 2025 krona exchange rate, is 787,100 kronor. That is how much value creation takes place in the economy per adult inhabitant. The level can be compared with 1,269,050 kronor per capita in Dublin and 1,199,350 in Zurich.

Europe's second most knowledge-intensive capital region has a stagnant housing market, which leads to stagnant growth. The new study calculates the economic value that would be created if reforms lowered the cost of construction, so that a thousand more households could afford to establish themselves in the housing market. In that case, individuals could contribute an additional SEK 2.2 billion ($230 million) in value added to the total gross domestic product in Sweden over the course of their careers. Discounted because future gains are worth less today, the social gain is converted to a present value of SEK 1.2 billion ($130 million). This is the productivity gain created by more housing on the margin in the capital region, on top of which there is also extensive value created through capital formation. If the reforms that are implemented are long-term, there will be a similar growth effect every year.

Three reforms that are needed include lowering of the VAT on housing construction, to the lowest level of 6% that is allowed in Sweden. It is problematic that VAT is even charged at all on the construction of private housing, as renting out property is generally exempt from VAT. Balance targets in the planning process are needed, so that social benefit is also weighed up, not just formalities. Planning processes are currently treated so that they are analyzed for what could be considered reasons to stop the plans, without considering the opportunity cost of not building housing.

The Swedish Real Estate Association has pointed out in an analysis that overall Sweden has the highest moving taxes in the EU, and that reforms such as a phased-down capital gains tax where those who have owned the same home for a long time are eventually exempted from the tax. By lowering the thresholds for mobility, moving chains can make more homes available.

Stockholm needs to be a city where more affordable housing is built, allowing more individuals to join the more productive capital region economy, and more of the growing companies of the region to keep growing at home rather than relocating due to growth obstacles.

Authors
Peter Zonabend is CEO of Arwidsro Fastighets AB.
Per Arwidsson is President of Arwidsro Fastighets AB.
Nima Sanandaji is Director of ECEPR (European Centre for Entrepreneurship and Policy Reform).

Photo: Stockholm, by Jonatan Svensson Glad via Wikimedia, under CC-BY-SA 4.0 License. Chart: Comparison of real wealth per inhabitant of Stockholm vs. other European capital regions since 2014; courtesy the authors.

How Blackstone Killed the Homeowner

Joel Kotkin — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 16:29:44 -0400

Zombie foreclosures. They sound like the dullest disaster movie ever — but, in fact, represent the grim reality for a rising number of Americans. The theory is simple. First, giant real estate funds buy up properties, deliberately allowing them to deteriorate. That takes homes off the market, and drives up prices, especially when demand is so high and supply so persistently low.

The upshot? A bonanza for investors, with firms like Blackstone betting literally billions of dollars on buying up American homes, before renting them out to desperate tenants. And if 28% of US single family homes were sold to investors in Q1 2022, an 8% jump on the previous year, the trend is increasingly popular on the far side of the Atlantic too. Not content with dolling out mortgages, Lloyds Bank apparently has plans to become Britain’s biggest landlord.

Yet as large corporations gobble up a diminishing supply of houses, they pose an enormous threat to would-be homeowners, particularly those Millennials too young to have cashed in the boom of earlier decades. Combined with frequent complaints that these mega-landlords don’t maintain their new purchases — and signs that they’re keen to scoop up even more real estate — much of the Western world edges closer to genuine disaster territory, even if the antagonists are more feudal vampires than undead shamblers.

Housing now dominates political discourse right across the developed world. Among Americans, it now ranks second only to inflation as a leading economic worry. In my native California, almost 70% of residents are concerned about housing costs; in Britain, housing has risen to become one of the top issues for voters — well ahead of defence, security, poverty and crime. That’s hardly surprising: especially under the country’s inflexible NIMBY regime, projections suggest that nearly five million UK households will live in unaffordable accommodation by 2030.

And if the Anglosphere is especially bad in this respect, it’s hardly unique. Studies have found similar problems stalk the European and East Asian markets too, as prices rise far faster than household incomes or inflation. And if the OECD warns that living standards are bound to “stagnate or decline” in consequence, this is far more than a series of individual catastrophes for the families involved. Rather, the West’s housing crisis, so exacerbated by outfits like Blackstone, has terrifying implications for the maintenance of middle-class democracy.

Small landowners have been the bulwark of democracy for millennia. This was true in the early origins of Athens and Rome, and in the rise of the Dutch Republic during the 17th century, perhaps the first genuinely middle-class society in history. If, however, the rise of property ownership undermined the aristocracy and hastened the end of feudalism, the most dramatic changes came after the Second World War.

Servicemen returning home wanted something better than the dank Victorian apartments they’d inhabited before. Their dreams were embraced, and indeed realised, by a series of progressive governments, often on the Left but sometimes Christian Democratic. There are plenty of examples here: Harry Truman’s GI Bill and Clement Attlee’s welfare state are probably the two most famous, but Australia and Canada pursued similar policies too.

And if President Roosevelt was surely right when he proclaimed that a “nation of homeowners” is unconquerable, the postwar embrace of quality, affordable houses for all provided “the secret sauce” that made liberal capitalism palatable to working people. Throughout the Fifties and Sixties, that was self-evident for those thousands of working-class families that fled the slums of Brooklyn or Wapping, embracing instead a front lawn and back garden in Long Island or its Essex equivalent. “Was there ever such a stealthy social revolution as the rise of this semi-detached suburbia?” wondered the filmmaker John Boorman, recalling his childhood in a South London suburb.

Read the rest of this piece at: UnHerd.

Photo: Nick Bastian, via Flickr, CC 4.0 License.

Exodus: Affordability Crisis Sends Americans Packing From Big Cities

Joel Kotkin and Wendell Cox — Fri, 12 Sep 2025 20:28:32 -0400

For much of the past century, in both the United States and elsewhere, the inexorable trend has been for people to move from rural areas and towns to ever larger cities, particularly those with vibrant downtown cores such as New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle, and dozens of other iconic American cities. Most visions of the future still view urban cores as the uncontested centers of production, consumption, and culture, with rural areas, small cities, and suburbs relegated to the backwaters of modernity.

A RealClearInvestigations analysis has found that we may be on the cusp of a new era. Urban cores have started to shrink, losing first to the suburbs, then to ever further exurbs, and now to small towns and even rural areas. For the first time since the 19th century, America’s growth pattern favors smaller metros – Fargo, North Dakota, as opposed to Portland, Oregon – many of which once seemed out of favor.

This transformation can be hard to detect because demographers often discuss metropolitan regions, which put city centers at their cores. But this method of classification masks the trend that much of the growth is at the edges of these areas. In virtually all the fastest-growing metros, it has been the further-out exurbs, themselves until recently rural areas, that have experienced most of the expansion. While Raleigh, North Carolina – a sleepy state capital for much of its history – continues to draw migrants from across the country, the most explosive growth is not occurring in the city center but the surrounding “countrypolitan” towns of Apex, Fuquay-Varina, and Zebulon that offer land and a relaxed rural environment along with access to modern amenities.

Between 2010 and 2020, the suburbs and exurbs of the major metropolitan areas gained 2 million net domestic migrants, while the urban core counties lost 2.7 million. The pandemic, which normalized remote work and encouraged people to keep their distance, turbocharged this movement to smaller, less crowded, less expensive housing markets. Through the first four years of this decade, the urban core counties of the major metropolitan areas (over 1,000,000 population) lost 3,259,000 net domestic migrants, three times the rate of loss in the last decade. In contrast, 2.3 million net domestic migrants moved outside the major metros.

Net Domestic Migration

This is a shift the media has underplayed or pinned almost entirely on the pandemic, leaving the impression that small towns and rural areas have little to offer other than a safe haven from illness and crime. In a pre-pandemic 2018 article asking “Can rural America be saved?” The New York Times reported that small cities and towns, particularly in the middle of the country, were “getting old” and facing “relentless economic decline.”

The data suggest the opposite: that Americans are heading back to the land. The steep costs of urban housing and an Amazon economy that allows anybody, anywhere to get almost anything, is rekindling our deep-seated desire for privacy, space, and home ownership.

The New Demographics

The first phase of geographic reinvention began to take shape by 2000, as workers followed both U.S.- and foreign-based companies, which were increasingly expanding into lower-cost states in the Sun Belt and Midwest. Since then, the two most urbanized big states, California and New York, have each lost more than 4 million net domestic migrants. Two other trends – a drop in immigration and fertility rates, especially among people living in big cities – are making it hard for these states to restock their urban populations.

Note: This is the first in a two-part series of the Great Dispersion of Americans across the country.

Read the rest of this piece at: Real Clear Investigations.

Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy firm located in the St. Louis metropolitan area. He is a Senior Fellow with Unleash Prosperity in Washington and the Frontier Centre for Public Policy in Winnipeg and a member of the Advisory Board of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University in Orange, California. He has served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers in Paris. His principal interests are economics, poverty alleviation, demographics, urban policy and transport. He is author of the annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey and author of Demographia World Urban Areas.

Photo: Carlos Oliva via Pexels.

The Young Would Be Less Screwed If They Started Making Better Choices

Joel Kotkin — Wed, 13 Aug 2025 20:28:38 -0400

It’s been over a decade since I wrote the original “screwed generation” piece for Newsweek. In the subsequent years, the idea that younger people face a difficult future has become commonplace in public debate.

In the United States, the basics have been evident for some time – low rates of marriage and property ownership, and diminishing demand even for educated workers. Overall, notes the Financial Times, under-40s are less conscientious, more neurotic and less agreeable than previous generations. The political ramifications can already be seen, from the swelling numbers of socialist hipsters in New York’s “commie belt” to the angry, alienated incels living in parental basements, mostly in suburban and exurban areas.

We should sympathise with this “screwed” generation but also suggest ways that they can improve their prospects. After all, every generation faces some sort of existential challenge, like those who lived through the Depression and the World Wars or Vietnam, the Civil Rights era, de-industrialisation, and the sexual revolution.

If millennials and their successors, the so-called Gen-Zs, want to get ahead, maybe it’s time to stop complaining and start changing. In my mind, there are several things that could provide a roadmap to a successful adulthood – moving to places of opportunity, getting married and starting a family, and finally seeking out jobs that actually are in demand.

The first step is to move. People have been gravitating away from expensive, elite-controlled areas throughout history; the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand are all products of this kind of aspirational movement. Indeed, America’s great national myth, Manifest Destiny, was shaped by people who left the East Coast for the opportunities west of the Appalachians.

The hipster socialists backing Zohran Mamdani in New York or the various Left-wingers on the Pacific Coast may demand that landlords and taxpayers underwrite their preferred lifestyle as largely childless, and unmarried, permanent renters. But many others are taking the plunge and moving to smaller towns and less expensive metropolitan areas. In fact, after dominating migration among people between the ages of 25 to 44 for much of the past half century, the share of that age group moving to big metro areas has fallen since 2010, while smaller cities, and particularly areas with under 250,000 people, have surged in appeal.

More young people should look at migrating to places that can accommodate their aspirations. As the Brookings Institution’s Mark Muro has noted, salaries across the central states, adjusted for the cost of living, are above the national average. A recent study by Jed Kolko, formerly economist for Indeed Hiring Lab, found this true of smaller metros; in 2019, of the 10 areas with the highest adjusted incomes, eight were in the Heartland. In contrast, those with the lowest adjusted incomes were entirely on the ocean coasts.

Home ownership remains the key driver for this shift. Despite media accounts about how young people do not want to start families or own homes, most surveys show that the vast majority want to replicate the essentials of the middle-class lifestyle, including starting a family and buying a house.

As numerous studies have found, both homeownership and marriage are key elements for success in life, leading to higher incomes, less child poverty and probably higher fertility rates. Even Warren Buffett, at the 2009 Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting, said that to “marry the right person … will make more difference in your life. It will change your aspirations, all kinds of things”.

The next shift lies with career choices. For the past few decades, parents have tended to encourage their offspring to “follow their passion”, taking degrees in such things as gender and race studies, and environmental engineering. But there is little market – outside government and the nonprofit world – for such “skills”. These young people face a job market getting tougher for college graduates.

For years, young people have been told that a university degree is essential for a good career, but many increasingly don’t buy this line. Between 2020 and 2023, new enrolment at trade schools grew by 10 per cent.

Trade schools are far less expensive, and can leave their enrollees with more opportunity without the huge debt. In contrast to many traditional university-enabled professions, there is an ever growing shortage of industrial and craft workers. Such jobs should offer hope for the rising number of young people disengaged from the labour force; the rate of prime age men not in the labour force is three times what it was a few decades ago while that of young men under 25 is twice that of baby boomers at the same age. Europe has, if anything, a larger cohort of the young and disengaged. In some countries, almost 20 per cent of the population under 30 is neither in school nor a job; in Britain, parents worry about “generation jobless”.

Taking these steps may not be as appealing as living by the beach, indulging in singular fantasies, accessing pornography, or working in a protected job in government or a non-profit. But if attitudes don’t adjust to reality, the next generation will be forced to depend on the generosity of our increasingly parlous state for their sustenance. Then they really will be permanently screwed.

This piece first appeared at: Telegraph.

Photo: Kindel Media via Pexels.

Elite liberal Yimbys are Killing off the Family Home

Joel Kotkin — Thu, 07 Aug 2025 20:28:38 -0400

Housing is now as hot an issue in politics as the shape of Sydney Sweeney’s jeans (or genes). The socialist Zohran Mamdani’s stunning primary win in New York came largely off the back of concerns about housing affordability. California has recently passed legislation to reform environmental regulations that have hindered home-building. The power of the so-called Yimby (“Yes in my backyard”) movement seems only to have been reinforced. Yet the great irony is that where the Yimby agenda has advanced furthest – notably my home state of California – housing affordability has remained consistently the worst.

Yimbys have got something right – the central problem behind the housing affordability crisis is the failure to build enough homes. Homebuilders built hundreds of thousands fewer homes (including rental units) in 2024 than in 1972 when there were 130 million fewer Americans. One estimate has put the US housing market short by approximately 4.5 million homes.

But if Yimbys have correctly diagnosed the problem, their solutions – oriented towards building more high density urban apartments – have tended to make matters worse. High density development, often seen as the alternative to “sprawl”, does not necessarily lower prices, as is sometimes suggested, because of higher urban land costs and higher construction fees. In fact, US data suggests a positive correlation between greater density and higher housing costs.

Housing, of course, is not just a New York issue. Mainstream Yimbys, so obligingly financed by tech oligarchs and urban real estate interests, see the solution not in socialist housing but for the private sector to construct their dreamscape of high density homes and apartment buildings. They are not interested so much in people buying their own properties, and seem to care little that investors already own one in four single family homes.

Yimbys repeatedly blame poor housing affordability on so-called Nimbys (“Not in my backyard”) groups, including those who want to preserve the lower density neighbourhoods, filled with detached family homes, that they bought into. Getting rid of zoning that prevents the construction of taller buildings is a critical Yimby priority, which they have pushed not only in California but in the Pacific Northwest and the Northeast.

Yet the positive impact on home-building via these policies has been negligible, with the mixed exception of strong growth in so-called Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs) – self-contained units that often remain part of a primary property, most of which are kept for relatives, or used as a spare guest house, an office, or as a high-end rental.

Overall, even with ADUs, California housing construction is at among the lowest rates in America. Only one California metropolitan area was among the top 20 for housing growth last year; Texas had four areas on that list, Florida three. In Los Angeles, the state’s dominant metropolitan area, just 1,325 new homes were approved citywide in the first quarter of 2025.

The Yimbys believe that the only real solution is to roll back regulations further and introduce new housing laws designed to increase urban density. Much of this is based on often exaggerated climate concerns about “sprawl”. Remarkably they have gained the support of the libertarian Right. One might think such people would embrace the notion of promoting a class of small property owners, but it seems that juicing the profits of large corporations is a higher priority. The problem here, for Yimbys on the Right and Left, lies in the small matter of market preferences: most people don’t want to live in the inner-city high rise apartments beloved by planners and Yimbys, but in a house with a garden of their own.

Indeed, generally high-end dense housing has a relatively small market. Condos and apartments may thrill Yimby imaginations – the public, not so much. Surveys, such as one in 2019 by political scientist Jessica Trounstine, have found that the preference for lower-density, safe areas with good schools is “ubiquitous”. Three out of four Californians, according to a poll by former Obama campaign pollster David Binder, opposed legislation that banned zoning which only permitted single family homes.

This mismatch between what is being built and what most people want can be seen in the huge oversupply of apartments, not just in the US but in Canada’s big cities too, causing prices for such properties to drop over the past two years. Yet despite all the evidence, Yimbys show little or no interest in the predominant dreams of their own citizens.

Worse, their ideas are helping to inform the agenda of the so-called “Abundance Democrats”, a fashionable new movement which seeks to make peace between the Left, prosperity and growth, inspired by a book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. Even the Yimbys’ more moderate ideas as laid out in the book – also called Abundance – largely ignore the suburbs and exurbs, where most Americans live, and stay clear of ownership.

As attorney Jennifer Hernandez suggests, there is an “ugly elitist underbelly” to Abundance, reflecting the values of hipster professionals while eschewing “even a passing wave to those who choose not to live in city centres, who want to be able to buy a detached, single family home, and who don’t want to share a wall, sound, ride or odours with their neighbours…”

The obvious and likely failure of Yimby policies might well empower far more radical approaches to housing, which seem more interested in turning cities into a souped up version of greater Moscow. The Mamdani approach of public housing and rent control may come to be seen by progressives as the best alternative – however disastrous public housing has been in cities across the United States.

Given the utter failure of mainstream Yimbyism, the progressive embrace of a more socialist approach seems inevitable. Well-heeled Yimbys, and their corporate backers, are unlikely to enjoy the results.

This piece first appeared at: Telegraph.

Photo: Brett VA via Flickr under under CC 2.0 License.

Young Americans Want Homes and Connection

Samuel J Abrams — Sun, 27 Jul 2025 20:28:38 -0400

For years, urbanists and pundits have insisted that young Americans are rejecting the suburbs. Supposedly, Millennials and Gen Z crave walkable cities, apartment living, and dense cores filled with transit options and 24-hour vibrancy. The story goes: the white picket fence is passé, the cul-de-sac is dead, and no one under 40 dreams of mowing a lawn.

But the data—like much conventional wisdom these days—tells a different story.

According to a new report from the Institute for Family Studies, a clear majority of young adults still aspire to own single-family homes. When asked about their ideal living arrangement, nearly 60 percent of 18–34-year-olds chose detached homes with yards over apartments or townhouses. To younger Americans, space is so critical for families that they are willing to increase commute times and sacrifice neighborhood amenities for bedrooms.

It is time, therefore, for a recalibration of our thinking about young Americans and housing policy for there is a powerful reality present: Americans, even young ones, want space, stability, and the chance to put down roots.

Critics might scoff: Doesn’t suburban life lead to isolation? Isn’t urban density the precondition for civic engagement, social capital, and belonging?

Not quite.

In fact, recent research from the American Survey Center shows that social life in the suburbs is not only alive and well—it’s thriving. Contrary to stereotypes, suburban Americans are just as socially connected, civically active, and community-minded as their urban peers. In some key areas—like knowing neighbors, volunteering, or attending neighborhood events—they outperform their city-dwelling counterparts.

Privacy, it turns out, is not the enemy of connection. The suburbs offer both: the opportunity to retreat and the opportunity to engage. There’s a reason why religious congregations, PTAs, youth sports leagues, and neighborhood associations remain strongest in precisely these communities. The suburban model gives people the bandwidth—and the incentive—to invest in local life.

Part of the appeal is developmental. As people age out of the transient lifestyles of early adulthood, their priorities shift. Safety, affordability, good schools, and green space begin to matter more than nightlife and density. It’s not a sign of regression—it’s a sign of responsibility. Many Millennials who once rented in Brooklyn or Silver Lake are now seeking the same kind of stability their parents once prized. The only difference is that today, they’re often priced out.

Read the rest of this piece at AEI.

Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

Photo: New homes by Curtis Adams, via Pexels.