New York

The Future of Cities: The Evolution of New York City Politics

Harry Siegel — Fri, 17 Mar 2023 20:28:58 -0400

It's always been a mug's fame to best against New York City, which was counted out only to quickly bounce back after 9/11 and again in 2008 after the financial system nearly collapsed and took the world economy with it. But too many New Yorkers, caught in a wave of optimism after getting through the worst of the pandemic, haven’t realized how challenging the years ahead will likely be, how far behind the national recovery the city already is, and how much deeper the problems go than those COVID-19 exposed and exacerbated.

This book is being published as a series, with permission of the American Enterprise Institute. Each week a new chapter will be published, with links to each chapter.

Click or tap a link below to read or download each chapter. (PDFs open in new tab or window)

The Evolution of New York City Politics – Harry Siegel (new this week)

Harry Siegel is a columnist for the New York Daily News and the creator and cohost of the FAQ NYC podcast.

Read the Series:

Introduction: Welcome to the Urban Future – Joel Kotkin

I. The Big Picture for Global Geography

American Aspiration is Metropolitan – Ryan Streeter

The Urban Future: The Great Dispersion – Wendell Cox

The Future of the Big American City is Not Bright – Samuel J. Abrams

II. The Variety of Urban Experiences

The Future of Chinese Cities – Li Sun

Africa's Urban Future – Hügo Krüger and Bheki Mahlobo

Recalibrating Expectations: Lessons from Youngstown, Ohio – Sherry Lee Linkon and John Russo

Indianapolis – Aaron M. Renn

The Texas Triangle: An Emerging Metropolitan Model in the Lone Star State – J. H. Cullum Clark

Los Angeles Densest Urban Area: Revision of Census Bureau Data

Wendell Cox — Mon, 20 Feb 2023 20:28:58 -0500

Los Angeles has been restored to the position of densest major urban area (over 1,000,000 population) in the nation, according to Census Bureau data (complete file). The original announcement of urban area population and densities has been revised for the San Francisco-Oakland urban area (San Francisco urban area), which had been listed as the densest major urban area, passing the Los Angeles urban area. Los Angeles had been the nation’s densest urban area in the 1990, 2000 and 2010 censuses and has now been recognized as densest in the 2020 Census.

The previous newgeography.com article summarizing the new data has been revised, with a new table listing the 83 urban areas with more than 500,000 population shown in both this article and the previous (Note 1).

The Revision

The revision places San Rafael-Novato in the San Francisco-Oakland urban area, as it had been in 2000 and 2010. The San Francisco-Oakland urban area had a revised population of 3,516,000, in a land area of 514 square miles, for a density of 6,843 per square mile (2,632 per square kilometer), an increase of 9.2% from the 6,266 reported for 2010, disregarding the changed urban area qualification criteria (Note 2). San Francisco’s 14th ranking in population is unchanged, and even with the additional population has been passed by the Seattle urban area, with 3,544,000 residents. Since 2010, the Seattle urban area grew by 15.8%, more than double the San Francisco gain of 7.2%. During the same period, the land area of the San Francisco urban area declined 1.9%.

There are six smaller urban areas denser than Los Angeles, the largest of which is Arvin, California, in Kern County, about 100 miles north of the Los Angeles central business district. The Arvin urban area had 19.385 residents in 2020.

The Los Angeles urban population density was 7.476 per square mile (2,876 per square kilometer), a 6.8% increase from the 2010 figure of 6,999. The population rose 0.7%, while the land area was reduced 5.7%, with the urban area criteria changes between the 2010 and 2020 censuses. The densest urban area was Mecca, California, located in Riverside County, east of Palm Springs and about 140 miles east of the Los Angeles central business district. Mecca had a density of 10,979.

Six of the 10 densest urban areas with more than 500,000 residents are in California (Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, Fresno and Bakersfield, as well as nearby Las Vegas (Figure 1)

The Census Bureau has published a new 2020 urban area map (zooming on the Census Bureau site makes it possible to visualize virtually major urban areas and more), which reflects the latest data (Figure 2).

The Densest Major Urban Areas

As noted above, Los Angeles begins its fourth decade as the nation’s densest major urban area. With significant changes to urban area criteria, the Los Angeles urban area reported density rose from 5,800 in 1990 to the present 7,476. The San Francisco urban area density rose over the same period from 4,009 to 6,843. The San Jose urban area, with only a tiny urban core surrounded by automobile oriented suburbs, ranked third densest among the majors, with 6,426. New York ranked fourth in 2020, with a density of 5,989 per square mile, up from the 1990 figure of 5,552.

The last four decade history of density among the top four (Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Jose and New York) is illustrated in Figure 3. Perhaps surprisingly, these four urban areas range from one of the most suburban (San Jose) to the least suburban (New York). The four corresponding metropolitan areas are illustrated (Figure 4) with the estimated 2018 share of their population (using the Demographia City Sector Model, described in Figure 5) located in the suburbs and exurbs (outside the urban core). San Jose, which is 99.7% suburban or exurban is a genuine anomaly, especially in comparison with New York having by far the densest urban core in the nation and likely denser than any major urban area in the high-income world with the exception of Hong Kong.

New York’s not being the nation’s densest major urban area seems perplexing to many. The key to the high Los Angeles UA density is its small single-family lot size (photograph above). The average detached house lot in Los Angeles is 0.15 acres, approximately one-half the major metropolitan area average, and nearly 20% smaller than the average New York metropolitan area detached house size.

These small lots are typical of virtually all California urban areas. California has 35 of the 43 densest urban areas of all sizes in the nation. Indeed, California has the highest urban density of any state.

Perhaps the ultimate irony is that Los Angeles, so long demeaned by some planners as the ultimate in “sprawl” is, in fact, the least sprawling major urban area in the United States in relation to its land area.

Notes:

1. Demographia World Urban Areas uses different criteria than the Census Bureau for delineating urban areas. Contiguous urbanization within a Combined Statistical Area is defined as an urban area. This means, for example, that the New York urban area is combined with the Bridgeport-Stamford and New Haven urban areas, that the San Francisco urban area is combined with the San Jose urban area and that the Los Angeles urban area is combined with the Riverside-San Bernardino urban area and the Mission Viejo urban area. Unlike the Census Bureau, Demographia World Urban Areas does not split urban areas within the same labor market (Combined Statistical Area).

2. Perhaps the most important urban area criteria revision in the last 40 years was for the 2000 census, which improved GIS and automation made it possible to define urban areas at the smallest census geography (blocks). The previous building block was municipalities. In some cases, such as Los Angeles and New Orleans, there was considerable land area inside core municipality boundaries. For example, the city limits of Los Angeles extend to the crest of the San Gabriel Mountains, at an elevation of more than 5,000 feet. Moreover, in the early years of urban areas (urbanized areas), there was considerable rural area in within the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles. It is possible that, under the present criteria, Los Angeles might have become the densest major urban area before 1990. Under the new 2000 criteria, the Los Angeles urban land area dropped 15% from 1990, or 298 square miles.

Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy firm located in the St. Louis metropolitan area. He is a founding senior fellow at the Urban Reform Institute, Houston, a Senior Fellow with 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 co-author of the annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey and author of Demographia World Urban Areas.

Mayor Tom Bradley appointed him to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission (1977-1985) and Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich appointed him to the Amtrak Reform Council, to complete the unexpired term of New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman (1999-2002). He is author of War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life and Toward More Prosperous Cities: A Framing Essay on Urban Areas, Transport, Planning and the Dimensions of Sustainability.

Photo: Los Angeles suburbs compared to New York suburbs at 35 miles from urban core (By author).

Table

How New York Can Survive

Joel Kotkin — Wed, 14 Dec 2022 20:28:58 -0500

In 1912, James Weldon Johnson wrote that New York City is “the most fatally fascinating place in America”. The city, he explained, “sits like a great witch at the gate of the country, showing her alluring white face and hiding her crooked hands and feet under the folds of her wide garments — constantly enticing thousands from far within, and tempting those who come from across the seas to go no farther.” But that was over a century ago. Today, New York appears to be less a “great witch” than an embattled crone, with many residents fleeing to lesser cities and towns.

When the great platform of urban supremacism, The New York Times, starts publishing articles about the “urban doom loop” facing American cities, it is clear the game is up. Yes, there has been much hand-wringing by the experts and brave words about the inevitable resurgence of cities, but the trends against dense urbanity are too powerful for even the most deluded to deny.

Only by embracing change can the city hope to recover something of its past glory. In the coming decades, New York, the country’s largest city since 1790, appears destined to decline, turning into what Terry Nichols Clark has described as the “city as entertainment machine”. This new role follows H.G. Wells’s vision of cities as largely childless “places of concourse and rendezvous”, ideal for the wealthy, necessary for their servants and a beacon to the young and the culturally aware.

The tired refrain that cities always recover ignores the spectre of long-term, permanent decline. History is replete with cities fading into obscurity and even non-existence, from ancient Carthage to Ctesiphon, capital of ancient Persia, Vijayanagar in India or Great Zimbabwe in Africa. Across the West, major industrial cities have been shrinking, from Liverpool and Manchester to Osaka and Adelaide, with little prospect of rapid recovery. For over a century, growth has shifted to the suburbs and exurbs — not only in the United States, but in the old cities of Europe too, including London and Paris.

These trends accelerated during the pandemic. Even as the virus has receded, the return to the office has been slower than some predicted. And of all the nation’s major cities, New York has suffered the slowest post-pandemic job recovery, with midtown offices still half-empty.

Yet this drift was taking shape even before the pandemic. Across the US, office occupancy has been declining since 2000, while construction of new space has fallen consistently for 25 years. In 2019, before the pandemic, construction was one-third the rate of 1985 and half that of 2000. Now faced with a recession or at least a slowdown, office absorption is likely to remain at historically low rates, with the potential loss of value in central-business-district offices reaching $500 billion in New York alone.

But even as New York’s office economy struggles, there are distinct signs of life, driven not by necessity but by people and industry. New York, for all its plight, remains dominant in those fields — media, culture, and tourism — where urban areas remain competitive with the hinterland. It also includes medical facilities, which need highly skilled workers and where agglomeration effects allow the city to export medical services. Less positive is its decision to bet its future on casino gambling and pot stores, not exactly a substitute for higher end activities. Yet overall, in this new urban order, New York is easily the best placed of America’s cities to thrive. It still attracts the global rich, boasts some of the world’s best museums and restaurants, as well as large arts communities.

Read the rest of this piece at UnHerd.

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 Executive Director for Urban Reform Institute. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

Photo: Street art by Nick Walker via Wikimedia under CC 4.0 License.

Beyond Crime and Punishment

Jerry Sullivan — Thu, 03 Nov 2022 11:56:18 -0400

Every politician, pundit and other apparatchik should have heard the elderly lady who didn’t even say a word about politics during my encounter with her on the streets of Manhattan.

They should have heard because she nonetheless gave me a crystal-clear insight on why the Democrats are sweating the midterm elections.

I didn’t get her name, and will likely never see her again, so I’ll report the exchange here and let all do as they might with the tale.

There is much to do, too, as Republicans smell weakness in their Democratic opposition. This has led to Republican candidates crafting exaggerations about crime in American cities in practiced tones intended to disturb the rhythms of life from socially solid city blocks to suburban centers of the safety-conscious.

We’ll see how that works out as Democrats remain tone-deaf. They too often offer retorts on crime right out of academia. Too many of them mistakenly question the fuss with a dismissiveness that relies on the alchemy of statistics to concoct whatever technically honest mistruths might be necessary for some casual campaign casuistry.

The old lady cut through all that when she stopped me on the street in Midtown, slightly stooped against a chill wind, cane in one hand and a piece of note paper flapping in the other. She tried me in Spanish, figured out that my skills with the language were subpar, and switched to her thickly accented English. She had a street address and some directions but was baffled—it turned out someone had told her the spot was between 1st Avenue and 2nd Avenue when it actually was between 2nd Avenue and 3rd Avenue.

I had some time, so I took a look at the address and figured out where she should be going. I was heading in that direction, so I asked her if she’d like me to accompany her to the address.

She said she’d appreciate it, and we chatted as we walked a block and a half or so. Where are you from? “Puerto Rico.” But where in New York? “The Westside—and I never come over here.”

She said she was looking for a medical facility of some sort, and I wished her well on whatever ailed her.

That’s when she told the story that Democrats should hear and understand. This lady had been sent as an emissary of her Roman Catholic parish on the Westside, a community of faith that had taken note that one among them had gone missing.

They checked their fellow parishioner’s apartment and links of friends and family. He apparently counted on the parish itself for the former and didn’t have much of the latter.
Someone finally tracked this fellow to a nursing home across town. That was the lead this lady was running down.

Then she mentioned one more thing that brought to light the insight on public safety: Word on the street back on the Westside said that this fellow had witnessed some crime, and the perpetrator knew. The fellow feared reprisal from the criminal and quit the neighborhood, checking into a nursing home to hide.

I suppose this lady could have made all this up, but I don’t think so. And I don’t know the specifics of the matter, but I have sufficient experience as a resident of inner-city neighborhoods and as a community journalist to make some deductions, draw some inferences—or assumptions—and offer some postulates that Democrats, Republicans, members of the media, ideologues, academics and anyone else truly interested in the lives and health of our cities might consider.

There’s a fair chance that the crime this fellow witnessed went unreported. That’s what happens when witnesses—AKA law-abiding community members—lose faith in public safety. An unreported crime plays back into the alchemy of statistics, by the way, uncaptured and therefore unanalyzed.

The decision not to report fouls the data analysis—it becomes a second-order effect of crime that isn’t sufficiently considered in the maelstrom of politics by the cable TV hosts, talk radio yakkers and social media mavens.

It goes on, too, when you consider the cost to this would-be witness, who uproots himself from a settled community. And the cost to both his community of faith—which loses a member, perhaps a volunteer, and a likely financial supporter—and the larger neighborhood. After all, it’s a safe bet that any person who inspires the sort of search the old lady undertook is someone who brings an overall positive effect to society.

Also consider the costs of keeping this fellow in a nursing home versus his living on his own. Perhaps the guy is a billionaire—but let’s be real and figure that whatever he did to gain refuge in the facility is likely leading to greater costs to taxpayers through Medicare or other publicly subsidized program.

Finally, and most intangibly, consider the cost to society when we concede that some folks who have obviously put in the sort of work it takes to become a valued part of a community are suddenly chased from their lives because of a crime that will likely never enter the official record or the consciousness of the political manipulators who claim to care.

Here's my advice to all when it comes to understanding crime, punishment and public safety: Go where the crime happens and listen to all the people it hurts.

Jerry Sullivan is National Managing Editor at The Real Deal. You can follow him @SullivanSaysSC

The Importance of Fare Enforcement

Randal OToole — Mon, 15 Aug 2022 20:28:59 -0400

According to the New York City police department, subway crime is up 53 percent so far in 2022 compared with 2021. Since ridership grew by 64 percent in that time period, that means that crime rates per rider have actually fallen, but that doesn’t reassure many people.

Nationwide, Federal Transit Administration data show that, through the end of March 2022, transit crime (not counting suicide) is 44.4 percent more than the same period in 2021. This is almost exactly the same as the increase in ridership, which was 44.9 percent. Former riders who are reluctant to return to transit may be justified in not doing so.

Many crimes are directed at transit workers. Assaults on New York City transit operators happen an average of once per day. More than three out of four transit workers say they are afraid to come to work. Transit unions recently sent a letter to Pete Buttigieg and FTA administrator Nuria Fernandez asking them to take more actions to increase transit security, though the real actions must be taken by transit agencies.

BART rider Darrell Owens has a proposal to reduce crime: Decriminalize fare enforcement. BART, he says, spends $2.6 million a year on fare enforcement that results in the collection of less than $30,000 in fares. Sounds like a pretty poor benefit-cost ratio.

The purpose of fare enforcement, however, is not to collect more fares than the cost of enforcement. It is to send a message to potential criminals that they are likely to get caught. If they can’t get away with minor crimes such as evading fares, they will be less likely to try to get away with major crimes such as assaults, robberies, and attempted murder.

This is known as the broken windows theory (which name comes from the notion that a building with broken windows is more likely to be broken into than one that is well maintained). While the theory is controversial, there is clear evidence that lack of fare enforcement is correlated with transit crime. As I demonstrated in March, the highest rates of transit crime are associated with light rail, which has the least fare enforcement of any transit mode. The only other mode of transit that comes close is trolley buses, and that is solely due to high crime rates on San Francisco trolley buses — which, like light rail, has minimal fare enforcement. Unlike most other buses, the drivers of San Francisco trolley buses don’t check for fare payments as people board.

Owens worries that fare enforcement can quickly turn into police brutality. But police actions aren’t necessarily the best way to enforce fares. Instead, turnstiles in subway stations should be replace with gates that can’t be crossed without paying a fare. Fences and gates should also be placed around light-rail stations and stops. Once people pass through these gates, they should feel as safe as they do at home or anywhere else. Fare enforcement on buses should be done by the drivers, as has been done for decades except recently in San Francisco and a few other cities.

People should also be protected from falling or being pushed onto tracks by screens between the platforms and the tracks. Doors in the barriers would open only when a train is in the station. This is the way most airport rail systems work as well as many rail systems in other countries.

Such barriers and screens will cost money. Despite the infrastructure bill, rail transit still has a huge backlog of maintenance and repair projects, many of which won’t be fixed with money in that bill. All of which raises the question: is rail transit worth it? Outside of New York City, the answer is mostly no. Even in New York City, the value of rail transit is becoming questionable as more people work at home and the job density of Manhattan seems to have permanently declined.

This piece first appeared at The Antiplanner.

Randal O'Toole, the Antiplanner, is a policy analyst with nearly 50 years of experience reviewing transportation and land-use plans and the author of The Best-Laid Plans: How Government Planning Harms Your Quality of Life, Your Pocketbook, and Your Future.

Photo: MassDOT, via Flickr under Public Domain. In 2009, MBTA could say that crime had reached a 30-year low. Yet FTA data show that, by 2021, the MBTA suffered almost 19 times as many “security events” as in 2009: 94 vs. 5.

N.Y. Company Schools Flyover Peers on Recruiting Workers

Dale Buss — Thu, 02 Jun 2022 20:28:58 -0400

When people ask me, “Exactly what do you consider Flyover Country?” I generally point to the logo of The Flyover Coalition and say: “There!” Because our logo nearly perfectly circumscribes the part of the country that basically is linked economically and psychographically, including Florida, Georgia, West Virginia — even Colorado and Montana.

But now and again, we are bound to stretch our definition of Flyover Country to include western and upstate New York, where the reigning economies of metal manufacturing and dairy cows make those areas much more akin to Wisconsin and Missouri than they are to Manhattan.

And that’s where Jay Baker comes in: The CEO of Jamestown Plastics — named for Jamestown, New York, also known as the birthplace of Lucille Ball — runs one of the most dynamic mid-market manufacturing operations I know of. When Baker isn’t rolling out new products, adding new customers and expanding his injection-molding business, he’s tending to the future supply of workers for his operations in Brocton, New York, and Brownsville, Texas.

And more than that, the CEO is providing a model that is effectively addressing a common plaint among his peers in American manufacturing: How do we get kids interested in careers in our factories? There’s much to learn from his successful approach.

Different Kind of Lunch Club

Baker started a STEM- and manufacturing-focused “lunch club” at the Chautauqua Lake Central School in western New York for high-school students who wanted to become “makers” and now, a few years later, the program has been integrated into the local curriculum for junior-high and high-school students.

The kids are getting real-world experience in taking a concept and creating a physical product using CAD-CAM equipment and computer numerical controls (CNCs). Because of the intensity of their learning, they can earn up to 30 credit hours at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) in nearby Rochester, New York, one of the best research universities in the country.

“We’ve got three individuals who went through that program and now are our employees and doing a fantastic job,” Baker told me. “They’re going to [college] at the same time. One kid is working full-time and carrying 20 to 25 credit hours in manufacturing at the local community college, building on his skill set. We’re getting the cream of the crop at Jamestown Plastics while these kids continue their education at the same time.”

Baker is inspiring other New York manufacturers to follow suit and would like to see the lunch-club model sweep manufacturing across the country. His “aha moment” came about five years ago when he thought, “We have boys’ and girls’ clubs using our school facilities. Why not start a manufacturing club?’’ Baker, a former member of the local school board, worked with another nearby manufacturer, Randy Stuart, CEO of Stuart Tool & Die, and presented the idea to the school.

Read the rest of this piece at Flyover Coalition.

Dale Buss is founder and executive director of The Flyover Coalition, a not-for-profit organization aimed at helping revitalize and promote the economy, companies and people of the region between the Appalachians and Rockies, the Gulf Coast and the Great Lakes. He is a long-time author, journalist, and magazine and newspaper editor, and contributor to Chief Executive, Forbes, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and many other publications. Buss is a Wisconsin native who lives in Michigan and has also lived in Texas, Pennsylvania and Florida.

Photo: courtesy Flyover Coalition.

Hudson County: New York's Sixth Borough

Wendell Cox — Thu, 19 May 2022 20:28:58 -0400

In some ways, Hudson County, New Jersey shares characteristics of a New York City borough. This is evident in various urban and transportation indicators and their similarities in urban form.

Hudson County lies on the west bank of the Hudson River, opposite three of New York City’s boroughs. The county seat is Jersey City, which is also the second largest municipality in New Jersey (after Newark). Hudson County stretches from just north of the borough of Staten Island and across the river from Lower and Mid-Town Manhattan to about as far north as 79th Street, at a latitude equal to the southern third of Central Park. Hudson County is also directly across Upper New York Bay from the borough of Brooklyn.

From time to time, writers and analysts have referred to Hudson County or parts of it — such as Jersey City and Hoboken as the sixth borough of New York City: such as here, here and here.

This article describes ways in which Hudson County functions like a borough of New York and provides charts.

Population, Density and Trends

New York City is the densest incorporated municipality in the United States with more than 70,000 residents, and ranks sixth densest (as calculated by the author) regardless of population according to data from the 2020 US Census (29,000 per square mile). Four of the five municipalities in the US denser than New York are in Hudson County, including, Guttenberg (61,000 per square mile), West New York (59,000), Union City (54,000) and Hoboken (47,000). Among the “six boroughs” (the name used for the sake of convenience in this article) however, the highest neighborhood density is to be found on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, at 287,000 per square mile.

During the last decade, Jersey City reached a population of 292,000 and with a density of 19,800 overtook San Francisco (18,600) as the second densest municipality with more than 250,000 residents between 2010 and 2020. Even so, Jersey City remains below its 1930 population of 317,000.

Hudson County’s density (Figure 1) would rank fifth among the six boroughs (15,200), at halfway between Staten Island (8,500) and Queens (21,500), but well below that of Manhattan (69,100), which (as New York County) is, by far, the nation’s densest. Hudson County’s land area would be the fourth largest among the six boroughs, behind Queens, Brooklyn and Staten island (Figure 2).

Hudson County would have the fifth largest population, half that of The Bronx and more than 40% above Staten Island (Figure 3).

All of the “six boroughs” have faced challenging times during the pandemic, with Hudson County losing 20,000 residents (Figure 4) in the last year (2020 to 2021). The smallest loss among the six was in Staten Island (2,000) and the largest was in Manhattan (111,000).

The losses are largely the result of net outmigration, apparently much of it related to the rise of remote work related during the pandemic and lingering fears of contagion associated with mass transit and density. Hudson County lost 22,400 net domestic migrants, while the New York boroughs ranged from a loss of 2,300 in Staten Island to a drop of 117,400 in Manhattan (Figure 5). As a percentage of 2020 population, Hudson County placed in the middle near The Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens (Figure 6), losing 3.6% of its 2020 residents to net domestic migration. Staten Island had the lowest percentage loss (0.5%), while Manhattan had the highest percentage loss (6.7%).

Employment and Commuting

Hudson County contains 277,000 jobs, well ahead of Staten Island (Figure 7), but trails Manhattan by more than 2 million jobs.

But Hudson County is very much an urban job center. On a jobs per resident employee basis it has more employment per resident than all boroughs but Manhattan, with its 2.81 jobs relative to workers (Figure 8). The huge excess of jobs over resident workers in Manhattan means that other areas (in this case the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens and Brooklyn) have large excesses of resident workers compared to local jobs.

Yet the County’s strong job position does not alter the fact it functions within a large labor market. Hudson County sends 26% of its commuters to Manhattan. This is more than Staten Island (24%). At the same time, with so many jobs available worker in Manhattan, it is surprising that 16% apparently could found their jobs of choice outside the borough (Figure 9).

Hudson County has a high transit commuting share, similar to that of the New York City boroughs. Hudson County’s 42.7% is 20% to 40% below that of the four densest boroughs, and it is about 40% greater than that of Staten Island. Hudson County’s transit share is about 12 times that of the nation outside the “six boroughs” (Figure 10).

Hudson County also has a strong walking share, at 7.2%, ahead of both Staten Island and Queens but well below that of nation leading Manhattan (21.8%). Hudson County’s walking share is three times that of the nation outside the “six boroughs” (Figure 11).

Hudson County has less than half the share of commuters driving alone to work than the nation outside the “six boroughs.” Fewer commuters from Hudson County drive alone than in Staten Island, and only four percentage points more of its commuters drive alone than in Queens. However, more than six times as many Hudson County commuters drive than those living in Manhattan (Figure 12).

Hudson County has a smaller working at home share (3.9%) than Manhattan (7.6%) and Brooklyn (4.8%), and trails the nation outside the “six boroughs” (5.7%), though more than the Bronx, Queens and Staten Island (Figure 13).

Connecting the Six Boroughs

Hudson County is well connected to Manhattan, with its by far the largest central business district (by employment) in the nation.

Hudson County’s Exchange Place has emerged as a new central business district (photo above) on the Hudson riverfront. Exchange Place is a virtual extension of lower Manhattan’s financial district and is a rapid transit commuting destination in its own right (Port Authority Trans-Hudson County or “PATH”). The line continues in a tunnel to the World Trade Center station in Manhattan, and also serves downtown Newark.

Another PATH rapid transit tunnel provides services from Jersey City and Hoboken to lower Manhattan, Penn Station in Mid-town and downtown Newark. By virtue of PATH, Hudson County, like the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens is connected by rapid transit to Manhattan. Staten Island is not, though it has the fabled Staten Island Ferry to Manhattan. There is also ferry service from Hudson County to Manhattan, much of it from the historic ferry terminal in Hoboken (photo above).

Hudson County residents can also access Penn Station in Manhattan by New Jersey Transit commuter rail services, as well as points in New Jersey via Hudson County’s Secaucus Junction station.

Connections can be made in Manhattan to the New York City subway, as well as the Long Island and Metro-North commuter rail services.

The Holland and Lincoln Tunnels provide road access to lower Manhattan and Midtown. The Bayonne Bridge provides road access to Staten Island.

The Uniqueness of New York and Hudson County

The uniqueness of New York is well known. No other urban core in the United States can match its population, its density, its urban transport system, its central business district. At the same time, Hudson County shares this uniqueness by virtue of the fact that on most indicators it ranks within the range of New York City’s five boroughs. Indeed, Hudson County exhibits the urban core characteristics of New York, but under its own control and that of its 12 local general purpose governments. It is a power that Brooklyn and Kings County forfeited with the 1898 consolidation that established the present city of New York.

Note: Hudson County has 12 general purpose local government units to serve its 700,000 residents, as opposed to the city of New York, with its six such governments serving about 8.5 million residents, according to the American Factfinder.

Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy firm located in the St. Louis metropolitan area. He is a founding senior fellow at the Urban Reform Institute, Houston, a Senior Fellow with 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 co-author of the annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey and author of Demographia World Urban Areas.

Mayor Tom Bradley appointed him to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission (1977-1985) and Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich appointed him to the Amtrak Reform Council, to complete the unexpired term of New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman (1999-2002). He is author of War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life and Toward More Prosperous Cities: A Framing Essay on Urban Areas, Transport, Planning and the Dimensions of Sustainability.

Photo: Hoboken Terminal, with Exchange Plaza (Jersey City) in the background, by "King of Hearts", via Wikimedia, under CC 4.0 License.

Comparing Urban Densities: Winnipeg and New York

Wendell Cox — Thu, 21 Apr 2022 20:28:38 -0400

Following a recent New Geography column “Toronto Solidifies Highest Density Ranking in North America,” I received comments of disbelief, at the fact that the urban density of the Winnipeg urban area is above that of the New York City urban area. This is based on the latest available data from Statistics Canada and the United States Census Bureau (Figure 1).

Summary of the Data: According to the 2021 Census, the Winnipeg PC had a density of 2,125 residents per square kilometer. By contrast, the latest data, from the US 2010 census, shows that the New York UA had a density of 2,054 per square, about three percent below that of Winnipeg. The data for Winnipeg and New York is in Figure 2, as well as Toronto and Los Angeles, the densest PCs/UAs in Canada and the United States. Additional information on Toronto, Los Angeles and New York is in Note 3.

PCs/UAs are composed of the smallest census geographies, and do not conform to any political boundaries. They are developed irrespective of state, provincial, city, regional municipality or other local or regional government boundaries. PCs/UAs are the highest geographical level at which urban density can be reasonably calculated, because any larger area would include rural areas. In both nations, all land outside PCs/UAs is rural. Additional PC/UA background is in Note 2.

Misunderstanding Urban Densities: The media and sometimes even academics can profoundly mischaracterize urban densities. Much of the difficulty arises from confusion about geographical terms. Reports and articles sometimes compare population densities of “cities” (municipalities) with metropolitan areas, metropolitan areas with urban areas, etc. These are very different geographies and can no more be validly compared than apples and oranges.

Urban Areas (Population Centres): Urban areas are continuously developed urbanization. In Canada, they are called “population centres” (PC) and in the US “urban areas” (UA). A PC/UA is generally outlined by the lights one would see from a high flying airplane on a clear night. This is illustrated in Figure 3 (map source Google Earth), which shows urban areas in the Lower Mainland area of British Columbia. By far the largest is the Vancouver urban area, which includes such municipalities as Vancouver, Richmond, Burnaby, Surrey, New Westminster, etc. Metropolitan areas (called Census Metropolitan Areas or CMAs in Canada) are organized around their largest PCs/UAs.

Cities (Municipalities): Cities (municipalities) are local government jurisdictions, such as the city of Vancouver, Winnipeg, Toronto or New York. Generally, municipalities are within an urban area and a metropolitan area. But there is little statistical relationship between the population of large municipalities and the urban areas or metropolitan areas that share their names. For example:

The city of Vancouver comprises 27% of the Vancouver PC population and 25% of the Vancouver CMA population.

The city of Calgary has slightly more than 100% of the Calgary PC population and 89% of the Calgary CMA.

The city of Winnipeg comprises 99% of the Winnipeg PC population and 90% of the Winnipeg CMA population.

The city of Toronto has 49% of the Toronto PC population and 45% of the Toronto CMA population.

In the United States, the city of Atlanta comprises only less than 10% of the Atlanta urban area and metropolitan area population.

In perhaps the most extreme case, the city of Melbourne (Australia) comprises only 3% of either the urban area or metropolitan area population.

Metropolitan Areas (CMAs): Metropolitan areas are organized around PCs/UAs, and include the largest PC/UA, along with the rural and smaller PCs/UAs from which significant number of employee commute into the largest PC/UA. It is possible to calculate metropolitan area densities, but this is of no use for analyzing urban issue, because metropolitan areas are both urban and rural. Their physical expanse is routinely much larger than the urban areas around which they are organized. For example:

The Toronto PC covers 31% of the Toronto CMA land area.

The Winnipeg PC covers 7% of the Winnipeg CMA land area. Figure 4 from Statistics Canada, illustrates the Winnipeg CMA, which stretches all the way to Lake Winnipeg, while the general outlines of the Winnipeg PC can be identified from the dense street pattern in the center of the map..

The Los Angeles UA covers 37% of the Los Angeles metropolitan area.

The New York UA covers 51% of the New York metropolitan area.

Perhaps the extreme example is the Riverside-San Bernardino (California) UA, which with nearly 2,000,000 residents in 2010, covered only 2% of the metropolitan area’s land area.

Metropolitan area densities should never be used as a proxy for urban densities, because they are not urban, but rather urban and rural.

Inside Winnipeg and New York: The population densities within the Winnipeg PC and the New York UA are compared in Figure 5. While the New York urban core has far higher urban density than that of Winnipeg, Winnipeg’s far higher densities outside the urban core more than make up the difference, leaving the Winnipeg PC slightly denser than the New York UA.

The core city of the New York UA is used as the urban core of the New York UA. In the Winnipeg PC the Winnipeg-Centre Federal Electoral District is used as the urban core.

In the New York UA, the urban core has a population density of 10,500 per square kilometer. This is about 3.5 times the density of the Winnipeg PC.

In the New York UA, the population density outside the urban core is only about 1,247 per square kilometer, nearly 40% below the Winnipeg density outside the urban core (2,041). Thus, despite having the largest and densest urban core in Canada or the United States, the far lower density of its expansive suburbs reduces the New York UA density to lower than that of the Winnipeg PC.

Closer comparisons will be possible when the US Census Bureau releases the 2020 Census urban area data, so that the gap between the two data sets will be only one year.

Note 1: Cautions: The Canadian and US data is from the most recent census data, but the years of the data are different in the two nations. The Canadian data is from the 2021 census. The US data is from the 2010, because the urban area data has not yet been released from the 2020 census. Census schedules make comparison of the same years impossible. Canada conducts a census every five years, while the US census is every 10 years. Once the 2020 US Census data for urban areas is available, the results can be compared to the 2021 Canada census data. Interim data is not published, because PC/UA land areas are only delineated in the censuses.

Note 2: Background on Population Centres/Urban Areas: Population centres/urban areas are “built up” from the smallest census enumeration districts. In Canada, these are the 498,786 “dissemination blocks,” which in 2021 had an average population of 74. The United States uses 11,078,297 “census blocks,” which in 2010 had an average population of 27. In both nations, these census areas are far smaller than political jurisdictions, such as cities, smaller than postal cost or ZIP code areas and smaller than census tracts. All areas outside population centres/urban areas are rural.

The two nations use similar population density thresholds for inclusion of enumeration districts in an urban area. Generally, enumeration districts require a density of 400 per square kilometer in Canada (1,036 per square mile). In the US, enumeration districts require a density of 386 per square kilometer (1,000 per square mile). Most nations that delineate PCs/UAs principally rely on the 400 per square kilometer population density threshold.

Canada conducts a census every five years, with the latest in 2021, from which data has been released for population centres. US censuses are conducted every 10 years, however the latest urban area data released is from the 2010 census.

Urban areas are called various other names in other countries, such as Built Up Urban Areas in the United Kingdom Unites Urbaines in France and Urban Centres in Australia. The generic international English term is urban areas.

Note 3: Elaboration on Los Angeles, New York and Toronto: For decades, planners and others have demeaned Los Angeles for urban sprawl. However, Los Angeles sprawls the least among the larger UAs in the United States, in having the smallest amount of land per resident (highest urban density). The Los Angeles UA covers about 50% less land area than the New York UA, but about a third less population. However, with its higher density than Los Angeles, the Toronto PC is the least sprawling large PC/UA in Canada or the US — no larger PC/UA covers less land per resident..

The conception that New York is denser betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of census geography. True, parts of the New York urban area contain the highest densities in the United States. But New York’s urbanization is overwhelmed by its vast lower density expanse of suburbanization, which are 91% of the land area. The suburbs cover about 8,150 square kilometers, having an urban density of approximately 1,250 per square kilometer. By contrast, the suburbs of Los Angeles cover 3,400 square kilometers and have a population density of nearly 2,450 per square kilometer. None of the largest urban areas in the United States is as dense as the suburbs of Los Angeles.

No urban area sprawls like New York. As defined by the US Census Bureau, the New York UA is larger than the states of Delaware and Rhode Island combined. It is also more than one-half larger than the province of Prince Edward Island.

This piece first appeared at Frontier Centre for Public Policy.

Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy firm located in the St. Louis metropolitan area. He is a founding senior fellow at the Urban Reform Institute, Houston, a Senior Fellow with 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 co-author of the annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey and author of Demographia World Urban Areas.

Mayor Tom Bradley appointed him to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission (1977-1985) and Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich appointed him to the Amtrak Reform Council, to complete the unexpired term of New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman (1999-2002). He is author of War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life and Toward More Prosperous Cities: A Framing Essay on Urban Areas, Transport, Planning and the Dimensions of Sustainability.

Downtown Winnipeg, via Wikmedia. under under CC 4.0 License.

Huge Spike in Domestic Migration from Urban Cores

Wendell Cox — Wed, 06 Apr 2022 20:28:58 -0400

Net domestic migration losses spiked perhaps as never before in the pandemic year of 2021 among urban core counties --- the counties that contain the urban cores (Note 1). This article reviews net domestic migration trend in the major metropolitan areas (over 1,000,000 residents) based on US Census Bureau data for 2021 and going back to 2010. The analysis is limited to 51 of the 56 major metropolitan areas that have more than one county. Since the Census Bureau does not estimate domestic migration below the county level, urban core versus outlying (or suburban) can only be calculated for metros with more than one county (Note 2). As a result, there are no results for Fresno, Honolulu, Las Vegas, San Diego, and Tucson.

Urban Core Counties

Among these urban core counties there was a net loss of 1,122,000 net domestic migrants in 2021. (see Table) This is a 140% increase from the minus 466,000 in 2020 and nearly 10 times the average net domestic migration loss of 115,000 in the first five years of the decade (2010 to 2015). The peak net domestic migration for these metropolitan areas was in 2012, when there was a loss of about 2,000.

In the second half of the decade (2016 to 2020), the average urban core county net domestic migration loss was 425,000, as there was a pronounced shift of net domestic migration away from the larger metropolitan areas to other areas of the country. This was before the spike in net domestic migration that occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Of course, it’s likely that the out-migration will slow as the pandemic wanes. But still, central business districts are particularly vulnerable as many of its long-time workforce labor in “laptop economy jobs” to the shift to on-line work.

Outlying (Suburban) Counties

At the same time, the outer (suburban) counties of the major metropolitan areas experienced a net domestic migration gain of 395,000, their largest gain since 2011. Even as urban core domestic migration was plummeting, the outlying counties experienced a more than 50% increase from their 2016 to 2020 average (231,000), and an even stronger gain relative to earlier in the decade (2011 to 2015), when the average gain was 177,000.

Over the decade the suburban counties added net domestic migrants in every year. The outlying counties gained a minimum of 119,000 more net domestic migrants than the urban core counties (2012), which rose to an average of 656,000 in the last half of the decade. In 2021, the outlying counties gained 1,481,000 more net domestic migrants than the urban core counties. The 2021 results are consistent with research indicating substantial movement away from urban cores, to the periphery of metropolitan areas and even beyond.

Metropolitan Area Highlights

The largest net domestic migration loss occurred in the New York metropolitan area at 385,000. The city of New York accounted for 342,000 of this loss, with a much smaller net out migration of 43,000 from the suburbs.

Metro Los Angeles had the second largest net migration loss at 205,000, with a 180,000 loss in core Los Angeles County.

The San Francisco metropolitan area lost 129,000 net domestic migrants, 56,000 of which were from core San Francisco County and 73,000 from the other four counties (Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, and San Mateo counties).

Chicago continued its long-lasting string of net domestic migration losses at a minus 107,000 in the metropolitan area. Most of the loss (98,000) was from core Cook County. The outer counties had a relatively modest loss of 9000 net domestic migrants.

The Washington DC-VA-MD-WV metropolitan area lost 67,000 net domestic migrants. The net domestic migration loss in the core city (county equivalent) of Washington, stood at 23.000, while the outlying counties lost a larger 44,000 (only in San Francisco and Washington was the suburban loss greater than the urban core county loss).

Some metropolitan areas that have had strong net domestic migration fell on much harder times in 2021. Seattle had a net domestic migration loss of 31,000 in 2021, after having gained 147.000 between 2010 and 2020. The 2021 loss was concentrated in core King County which lost 33,000 net domestic migrants, while the other two counties had a net domestic migration gain of more than 1,000.

Portland Oregon lost more than 7,000 net domestic migrants, with a 13,000 loss in core Multnomah County, and a suburban gain of 6,000 net domestic migrants. This is after a 129,000 net domestic migration gain in the 2010s.

Denver had a 2021 net domestic migration loss of 7,000, with a 9,000 loss in the city of Denver (county equivalent) and a small gain in the outlying counties. This is after a 204,000 net domestic migration gain between 2010 and 2020.

In Seattle, Portland and Denver, the strong net domestic migration was strongest early in the decade and fell as the decade was closing.

So, if these stellar performers of the last decade lost migrants, which metros gained?

The largest net domestic migration gainer was Phoenix, with 67,000 net domestic migrants. This included a gain of 47,000 in core Maricopa County and 20,000 gained in the other core county. The Maricopa County gain was the largest of any urban core county.

Dallas Fort Worth gained 54,000 net domestic migrants for the second strongest gain. However, core Dallas County had a loss of 45,000, while the outlying counties gained 99,000 net domestic migrants.

Tampa-St. Petersburg had net domestic migration of 42,000, 10,000 to core Hillsborough County, with 32,000 to outlying counties.

Austin had the fourth largest net domestic migration in 2021. However, the core county, Travis, had a small net domestic migration loss (200), with suburban counties accounting for a 41,000 gain.

The situation was similar in Houston where core Harris County lost 44,000 net domestic migrants while the outer counties gained 64,000 for an overall gain of 19,000.

There is increasing evidence that the increased metropolitan core migration losses could continue given the less than robust return to the jobs in the nation’s largest central business districts (downtowns). In San Francisco, it has been projected that ridership on the regional rail system, BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) may not reach pre-pandemic levels for a decade. The hybrid work and remote work arrangements, that have made the five day work week a thing of the past and facilitated the decentralization are being embraced not only by employees but also by corporate leadership.

Note 1: The urban core counties contain the city hall of the historic core municipality in metropolitan areas. In all but one case the historical core municipality is the largest in the metropolitan area (the exception is the city of Norfolk (county equivalent) in Virginia Beach. In the case of New York, there are five urban core counties, all of which comprise the city of New York.

Note 2: The use of counties for analyzing decentralization in metropolitan areas is not ideal, since there is such great variation among the urban core counties. Some urban core counties contain vast swaths of suburban development, such as Maricopa (Phoenix), with a 2010 urban density of 3,100 per square mile, King (Seattle), at 3,500, Multnomah (Portland) at 4,400 or Bexar (San Antonio (at 3,100) or Fulton (Atlanta) at 2,200. At the same time other urban core counties have little or no suburban development, such as the five New York City counties at 27,000, San Francisco, at 17,000, and Suffolk (Boston), at 12,600. In some cases, the much higher urban densities extend into adjacent counties, especially in Boston and New York. This lack of more local data on domestic migration limits the precision of the analysis. Factors other than net domestic migration can be assessed using census tract or zip code data (such as our City Sector Model).

Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy firm located in the St. Louis metropolitan area. He is a founding senior fellow at the Urban Reform Institute, Houston, a Senior Fellow with 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 co-author of the annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey and author of Demographia World Urban Areas.

Mayor Tom Bradley appointed him to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission (1977-1985) and Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich appointed him to the Amtrak Reform Council, to complete the unexpired term of New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman (1999-2002). He is author of War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life and Toward More Prosperous Cities: A Framing Essay on Urban Areas, Transport, Planning and the Dimensions of Sustainability.

Photo: Phoenix, AZ — Strongest major metropolitan area net domestic migration 2021

Table 1 (back to reference)

Net Domestic Migration: Urban Core and Outlying Counties: 2021

Total Urban Core Counties Suburban (Outlying) Counties Suburban Migration Compared to Urban Core

Atlanta, GA 19,358 (7,786) 27,144 34,930

Austin, TX 40,264 (172) 40,436 40,608

Baltimore, MD (5,561) (6,678) 1,117 7,795

Birmingham, AL (2) (5,283) 5,281 10,564

Boston, MA-NH (48,040) (28,850) (19,190) 9,660

Buffalo, NY (924) (1,121) 197 1,318

Charlotte, NC-SC 23,970 (4,293) 28,263 32,556

Chicago, IL-IN-WI (106,897) (98,205) (8,692) 89,513

Cincinnati, OH-KY-IN (213) (5,268) 5,055 10,323

Cleveland, OH (6,089) (10,359) 4,270 14,629

Columbus, OH 2,487 (9,799) 12,286 22,085

Dallas-Fort Worth, TX 54,319 (44,650) 98,969 143,619

Denver, CO (6,507) (9,115) 2,608 11,723

Detroit, MI (18,841) (15,857) (2,984) 12,873

Grand Rapids, MI 310 (2,472) 2,782 5,254

Hartford, CT 832 (1,161) 1,993 3,154

Houston, TX 19,426 (44,409) 63,835 108,244

Indianapolis, IN 6,732 (10,836) 17,568 28,404

Jacksonville, FL 24,815 646 24,169 23,523

Kansas City, MO-KS 748 (1,732) 2,480 4,212

Los Angeles, CA (204,776) (179,757) (25,019) 154,738

Louisville, KY-IN (358) (4,458) 4,100 8,558

Memphis, TN-MS-AR (3,041) (6,132) 3,091 9,223

Miami, FL (55,305) (44,787) (10,518) 34,269

Milwaukee,WI (8,780) (12,764) 3,984 16,748

Minneapolis-St. Paul, MN-WI (15,462) (18,903) 3,441 22,344

Nashville, TN 12,328 (14,770) 27,098 41,868

New Orleans, LA (9,824) (6,699) (3,125) 3,574

New York, NY-NJ-PA (385,455) (342,449) (43,006) 299,443

Oklahoma City, OK 10,224 (1,277) 11,501 12,778

Orlando, FL 4,019 (16,184) 20,203 36,387

Philadelphia, PA-NJ-DE-MD (14,763) (28,226) 13,463 41,689

Phoenix, AZ 66,850 46,866 19,984 (26,882)

Pittsburgh, PA (3,993) (7,635) 3,642 11,277

Portland, OR-WA (7,441) (12,983) 5,542 18,525

Providence, RI-MA 2,427 (2,427) 4,854 7,281

Raleigh, NC 21,743 10,518 11,225 707

Richmond, VA 6,788 (887) 7,675 8,562

Riverside-San Bernardino, CA 34,859 3,608 31,251 27,643

Rochester, NY (2,938) (3,381) 443 3,824

Sacramento, CA 6,963 (2,639) 9,602 12,241

St. Louis,, MO-IL (7,277) (7,577) 300 7,877

Salt Lake City, UT (4,629) (7,447) 2,818 10,265

San Antonio, TX 25,660 4,687 20,973 16,286

San Francisco, CA (128,870) (55,631) (73,239) (17,608)

San Jose, CA (52,932) (54,801) 1,869 56,670

Seattle, WA (31,489) (32,802) 1,313 34,115

Tampa-St. Petersburg, FL 42,089 9,600 32,489 22,889

Tulsa, OK 6,757 965 5,792 4,827

Virginia Beach-Norfolk, VA-NC (321) (3,540) 3,219 6,759

Washington, DC-VA-MD-WV (66,811) (23,030) (43,781) (20,751)

TOTAL (763,571) (1,122,342) 358,771 1,481,113

Derived from US Census Bureau data

Excludes metropolitan areas with only one county (Fresno, Honolulu, Las Vegas, San Diego & Tucson)

Americans Do Not Want to Return to Urban Living

Samuel J Abrams — Sun, 03 Apr 2022 20:28:58 -0400

The Census Bureau recently released data on domestic migration that took place during the COVID-19 pandemic, and their findings were heavily covered in the press with headlines such as “Cities Lost Population in 2021” and “The pandemic city exodus revealed: New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Chicago lost the most residents.” While deaths from the virus itself was absolutely a factor in the decline, the fact of the matter is that tens of thousands of residents moved away from some of the nation’s biggest, most densely populated, and costly metropolitan areas. Metropolitan Los Angeles, for instance, lost almost 176,000 residents. The San Francisco region saw a loss of more than 116,000 residents. Greater Chicago lost more than 91,000 people from 2020 to 2021, and the San Jose, Boston, Miami, and Washington metro regions each lost tens of thousands of residents, primarily from people moving away as well. So the question is, then, whether or not these cities will reclaim residents as the nation returns to some sense of pre-pandemic normalcy.

While demographers like William Frey believe that population decreases in the biggest metro areas will be temporary and that “we will go back to normal” in metros like New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago as offices re-open, most reporting on these census data have overlooked a key fact about American life in the COVID era: Americans are no longer interested in living in big, dense cities.

Survey data collected by the Survey Center on American Life throughout the COVID-19 pandemic reveal that those big cities — despite the values of propinquity, density, and scale — are simply not where most Americans want to reside. Even younger generations of Americans — those who traditionally flocked to big cities for careers, social lives, and cultural amenities — actually show greater interest in suburban living than dense city living.

Indeed, after being homebound for many months due to the pandemic, more Americans now express a desire for personal space than ever before. The majority of Americans today are willing to sacrifice easy access to amenities to have more space to themselves and distance from their neighbors, and city life is simply not where those desires are realized. Perhaps driven by idealized visions of rural life — small, tight-knit communities that move at a more leisurely pace — many Americans express a preference for small-town life. Roughly four in 10 Americans say they would prefer living in a town (15 percent) or rural area (27 percent). In contrast, only 9 percent say they would prefer to live in a large city. More Americans now state that they would prefer living in a small city (16 percent), while one in three Americans prefer the suburbs (33 percent).

Unsurprisingly, the cities that have recovered fastest from COVID-19 — Denver, Charlotte, Nashville, and Dallas — are themselves overwhelmingly suburban. And these realities fit well with the data from a Los Angeles Times/Reality Check Insights national poll, which was taken after the November 2020 election in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. The Los Angeles Times poll found that when residents of big cities were asked about the ideal setting of their next home, a majority of big city dwellers said something other than their current situation. Just 44 percent would pick a big city once again, with significant numbers preferring a small city (9 percent), rural areas and towns (17 percent), or the suburbs (25 percent). Small cities did not fare much better either; only 38 percent of small city dwellers claim that their ideal location is another small city.

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: Wally Gobetz via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

Net Domestic Migration: Urban Core and Outlying Counties: 2021
	Total	Urban Core Counties	Suburban (Outlying) Counties	Suburban Migration Compared to Urban Core
Atlanta, GA	19,358	(7,786)	27,144	34,930
Austin, TX	40,264	(172)	40,436	40,608
Baltimore, MD	(5,561)	(6,678)	1,117	7,795
Birmingham, AL	(2)	(5,283)	5,281	10,564
Boston, MA-NH	(48,040)	(28,850)	(19,190)	9,660
Buffalo, NY	(924)	(1,121)	197	1,318
Charlotte, NC-SC	23,970	(4,293)	28,263	32,556
Chicago, IL-IN-WI	(106,897)	(98,205)	(8,692)	89,513
Cincinnati, OH-KY-IN	(213)	(5,268)	5,055	10,323
Cleveland, OH	(6,089)	(10,359)	4,270	14,629
Columbus, OH	2,487	(9,799)	12,286	22,085
Dallas-Fort Worth, TX	54,319	(44,650)	98,969	143,619
Denver, CO	(6,507)	(9,115)	2,608	11,723
Detroit, MI	(18,841)	(15,857)	(2,984)	12,873
Grand Rapids, MI	310	(2,472)	2,782	5,254
Hartford, CT	832	(1,161)	1,993	3,154
Houston, TX	19,426	(44,409)	63,835	108,244
Indianapolis, IN	6,732	(10,836)	17,568	28,404
Jacksonville, FL	24,815	646	24,169	23,523
Kansas City, MO-KS	748	(1,732)	2,480	4,212
Los Angeles, CA	(204,776)	(179,757)	(25,019)	154,738
Louisville, KY-IN	(358)	(4,458)	4,100	8,558
Memphis, TN-MS-AR	(3,041)	(6,132)	3,091	9,223
Miami, FL	(55,305)	(44,787)	(10,518)	34,269
Milwaukee,WI	(8,780)	(12,764)	3,984	16,748
Minneapolis-St. Paul, MN-WI	(15,462)	(18,903)	3,441	22,344
Nashville, TN	12,328	(14,770)	27,098	41,868
New Orleans, LA	(9,824)	(6,699)	(3,125)	3,574
New York, NY-NJ-PA	(385,455)	(342,449)	(43,006)	299,443
Oklahoma City, OK	10,224	(1,277)	11,501	12,778
Orlando, FL	4,019	(16,184)	20,203	36,387
Philadelphia, PA-NJ-DE-MD	(14,763)	(28,226)	13,463	41,689
Phoenix, AZ	66,850	46,866	19,984	(26,882)
Pittsburgh, PA	(3,993)	(7,635)	3,642	11,277
Portland, OR-WA	(7,441)	(12,983)	5,542	18,525
Providence, RI-MA	2,427	(2,427)	4,854	7,281
Raleigh, NC	21,743	10,518	11,225	707
Richmond, VA	6,788	(887)	7,675	8,562
Riverside-San Bernardino, CA	34,859	3,608	31,251	27,643
Rochester, NY	(2,938)	(3,381)	443	3,824
Sacramento, CA	6,963	(2,639)	9,602	12,241
St. Louis,, MO-IL	(7,277)	(7,577)	300	7,877
Salt Lake City, UT	(4,629)	(7,447)	2,818	10,265
San Antonio, TX	25,660	4,687	20,973	16,286
San Francisco, CA	(128,870)	(55,631)	(73,239)	(17,608)
San Jose, CA	(52,932)	(54,801)	1,869	56,670
Seattle, WA	(31,489)	(32,802)	1,313	34,115
Tampa-St. Petersburg, FL	42,089	9,600	32,489	22,889
Tulsa, OK	6,757	965	5,792	4,827
Virginia Beach-Norfolk, VA-NC	(321)	(3,540)	3,219	6,759
Washington, DC-VA-MD-WV	(66,811)	(23,030)	(43,781)	(20,751)

TOTAL	(763,571)	(1,122,342)	358,771	1,481,113
Derived from US Census Bureau data
Excludes metropolitan areas with only one county (Fresno, Honolulu, Las Vegas, San Diego & Tucson)