Suburbs

The Ghost of Ancient Rome Haunts America

Joel Kotkin — Thu, 09 Mar 2023 20:28:58 -0500

The death of Ancient Rome wasn’t so much a collapse as a slow, interminable decay: between the second and sixth centuries AD, its population declined from a million people to just 30,000. Since then, 15 centuries have passed and thousands of cities have been built. And yet, as Rome’s greatest chronicler Edward Gibbon warned in 1776, a similar fate awaits our modern metropolises. This time, however, their decline will radically alter our perception of what “urbanism” really means.

London, New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles — these urban centres epitomised what Jean Gottman described in 1983 as “transactional cities”. Based on finance, high-end business and IT services, they were defined not by production and trade in physical goods, but by intangible products concocted in soaring office towers. For years, academic researchers, both on the Left and Right, envisioned a high-tech economic future dominated by dense urban areas. As The New York Times‘s Neil Irwin observed in 2018: “We’re living in a world where a small number of superstar companies choose to locate in a handful of superstar cities where they have the best chance of recruiting superstar employees.”

Yet even before the current downturn, the data defied the bravado. For decades, the ultra-tall towers that once symbolised urban greatness have been as anachronistic as the cathedrals of the Middle Ages. Office occupancy has been declining since the turn of the century, along with the construction of new space. In 2019, before the pandemic, construction was one-third the rate of 1985 and half that of 2000.

More serious still has been the movement of people. Migration to dense cities started to decline in 2015, when large metropolitan areas began to see an exodus to smaller locales. By 2022, rural areas were also gaining population at the expense of cities. The pandemic clearly accelerated this process, with a devastating rise in crime and lawlessness: notably in London, Paris, Washington, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Philadelphia and Chicago. In some parts of Chicago and Philadelphia, young men now have a greater chance of being killed by firearms than an American soldier serving during the Afghanistan or Iraq wars.

The fading allure of the big city — further undermined by the post-pandemic shift to remote work in many sectors — is also taking place against the backdrop of an urban economy that has increasingly rewarded the few. Of course, some districts, such as the north side of Chicago, have experienced impressive growth, but they are often surrounded by others suffering from severe deterioration. And for all of gentrification’s wonders, almost a fifth of residents in the 50 largest US cities live below the poverty line.

Contrast this with the historic role of cities as engines of upward mobility. Even the addition last year of a few thousand migrants forced New York Mayor Eric Adams to declare a state of emergency; in other words, New York, a city largely built on the labour of newcomers, now seems too weak to house and employ a substantial number of immigrants. Amid this failure, perhaps it’s unsurprising that migrants and minorities are heading to America’s suburbs, sprawled sunbelt cities and smaller towns.

So what is the urban future? The answer lies less in the central business districts than the suburbs and exurbs. And this presents a nightmare for the traditional urbanist. In contrast to central business districts, suburban offices have fared far better while sprawled areas such as Tampa, Fort Lauderdale, Austin and Nashville have become the nation’s hottest office markets. With the large majority of major metropolitan area residents already outside the urban cores, the most enticing economic opportunities may lie in modern-day versions of Ebenezer Howard’s “garden cities”, such as Cinco Ranch outside Houston or New Albany near Columbus.

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: Kelly via Pexels.

The Future of Cities: The Urban Future – The Great Dispersion

Wendell Cox — Fri, 27 Jan 2023 20:28:58 -0500

This chapter describes general urbanization trends in the United States and around the world, from 1950 to the present. Cities can be glamorous or exciting, but what matters most is how they facilitate higher incomes and standards of living.

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)

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 (new this week)

Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, a demographics and public pol-icy firm. He was appointed by Mayor Tom Bradley to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission, which was a predecessor agency to the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Speaker Newt Gingrich appointed him to the Amtrak Reform Council. He is a senior fellow at the Urban Reform Institute and the Frontier Centre for Public Policy and a member of the board of advisers at the Center for Demo-graphics and Policy at Chapman University. He served as a visiting professor of transport at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers in Paris.

Welcome to Austin

Pete Saunders — Fri, 13 Jan 2023 20:28:58 -0500

I'm going to make a little deviation from the bulk of the "Welcome to..." stories you see below, which mostly focus on South Side Chicago neighborhoods (the exceptions are Rosemont, in Chicago's northwest suburbs, and Park Forest, in the south suburbs).

Other entries in the occasional series observing Chicagoland places and spaces:

Welcome to Marquette Park
Welcome to Woodlawn
Welcome to Park Forest
Welcome to Ashburn (via WBEZ)
Welcome To South Chicago
Welcome To Mount Greenwood
Welcome To Rosemont
Welcome To The South Side, JRW Style

We're going to venture to the city's West Side. Today's entry, Austin, has an interesting origin story.

Austin sits on Chicago's far West Side, about seven miles directly west of the Loop. It borders the suburban communities of Oak Park and Cicero to its west and south, respectively, with Berwyn located just to the southwest. Really, Austin's story is intimately connected to the other three communities. Following the Civil War, all were united as unincorporated areas within the much larger Cicero Township.

The 1870's and 1880's saw Cicero Township grow immensely, just like the entire Chicago region. Commuter rail provided by the Chicago & Northwestern Railroad and the Lake Street Elevated provided easy access to newly developed "streetcar suburbs" for Loop workers. Austin became the largest community in Cicero Township and its residents dominated township politics. Austin had a plurality of the population in the township, but not a majority, and the residents of Cicero, Berwyn and Austin's neighbor Oak Park, seethed at Austin's leadership. They devised a plan.

Before getting into the plan, let's look at Cicero Township circa 1895. All four communities were early suburbs that boasted tree-lined streets with plentiful single-family homes, with a mix of small apartment buildings thrown in. Each had residential densities that didn't match the intensity of what was seen in Chicago at the time, but clearly was much more intensely built than today's conventional suburban development. Commercial development occurred along streetcar or commuter rail corridors like Madison, Lake Street and Chicago Avenue. With a strong grid pattern and a mix of housing types, the area had broad appeal. All four of Cicero Township's communities prospered.

The biggest difference between them, however, was class. Cicero and Berwyn early on developed a strong manufacturing/working class character, and became a manufacturing center (Cicero) and manufacturing bedroom community (Berwyn). Austin became a solidly middle class community that was becoming a favored destination for new immigrants to the area, just like in Cicero and Berwyn. Oak Park was an upper-middle class enclave.

To the east, Chicago was on an annexation binge; it was trying to eclipse New York as the nation's largest city. Cicero, Berwyn and Oak Park wanted to maintain their independence, but were thwarted by the Austin residents' township leadership. The last straw was the proposed extension of the Lake Street Elevated line to Austin Boulevard, Oak Park's eastern border and Austin's western border, in 1898. Austin favored the extension; the rest of Cicero Township did not.

So Oak Park, Cicero and Berwyn leaders, led by Oak Park, petitioned to annex a portion of the township -- Austin -- to Chicago. Annexation had to be approved by a majority of voters within the township, and the Austin leadership was convinced there weren't enough votes to split them off from the rest of the township. A referendum was held in April 1899. Indeed, annexation was soundly defeated in Austin. However, it was overwhelmingly approved in the other three communities, surpassing the total "no" vote in Austin.

Oak Park, Cicero and Berwyn traded Austin to Chicago for their own independence.

For the next 50 years or so, that meant virtually nothing in terms of each community's development. Austin, Berwyn, Cicero and Oak Park continued on the paths already established by the late 19th century. Austin and Berwyn remained middle class bedroom suburban-ish communities, Cicero was a hub of manufacturing jobs and working-class neighborhoods, and Oak Park was still an upper-middle class enclave.

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

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: Austin Town Hall in Chicago's Austin neighborhood. Source: chicagoparkdistrict.org

Will Amtrak Benefit from Telecommuting?

Randal OToole — Mon, 28 Nov 2022 20:28:58 -0500

Airlines carried 94 percent as many passengers in September 2022 as they did in September 2019, according to passenger counts published by the Transportation Security Administration. That’s up from 91 percent in August and 88 percent in September.

According to United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby, the industry is thriving due to changes in leisure travel habits following the pandemic. People who work at home at least some days a week are taking more frequent short pleasure trips for long weekends.

“Hybrid work allows every weekend to be a holiday weekend,” says Kirby. Business travel may be down, both because of the impending recession and because of increased on-line meetings, but this is mostly offset by the increase in recreational travel. Apparently, he says, “It wasn’t money that constrained people from travel” before the pandemic, “it was time.”

This alludes to Marchetti’s constant, the notion that people have a fixed travel-time budget (usually estimated to be about an hour a day). If they spend less time commuting, they have more time in their budget for other kinds of travel.

The main reason why September air travel was 94 percent, instead of more than 100 percent, of pre-pandemic levels, Kirby observes, is the airlines’ limited ability to meet the demand due to supply-chain and labor problems. Air travel will greatly increase, he implies, as the airlines buy more aircraft and hire more employees, both of which United is doing as fast as it can.

Meanwhile, Amtrak is unusually late in publishing its monthly performance report for August. As of July, Amtrak was carrying 84 percent of pre-pandemic numbers, somewhat short of the airlines’ record.

If business travel were down and people were taking Amtrak as well as flying for short leisure trips, we might expect to see travel on long-distance trains (which mostly carry vacation travelers) up relative to travel in the Boston-Washington corridor (which mostly carries business travelers). But we don’t: in July, Northeast Corridor trains carried 87 percent of pre-pandemic numbers, while long-distance trains carried just 78 percent. State-supported trains (which carry a mix of business and vacation travelers) were even worse off at 75 percent.

Telecommuters who are using effectively long weekends for short jaunts are more likely to fly than take a train. A two-day train trip might be a nice part of a two-week vacation, but people are not going to spend most of their four-day weekends en route as doing so would exceed their travel-time budgets. Thus, Amtrak is not likely to benefit as much from the same boom in short vacation trips that the airlines are enjoying.

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: N509FZ via Wikimedia, under CC 4.0 License

A Better Future

Joel Kotkin — Wed, 16 Nov 2022 20:28:58 -0500

In earlier times, even with a soaring population, Americans knew how to accommodate housing demand. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries we built cities from scratch along the frontier. The existing major urban centers—Boston, New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia—all expanded rapidly, both by density and expansion into land on the periphery.

After the Second World War, mass suburbia and its expansion in homeownership ushered in a period of sustained prosperity that lasted until the 1970s. After 1940, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, U.S. homeownership rates grew rapidly, from 44 percent to 63 percent over the next three decades.

But now, in many places, it is exceedingly difficult, even impossible, to build the kind of family-friendly housing long sought by most Americans. Instead we are being left with two negative trends: increasingly low housing affordability for many, and the forced march of a whole new generation into the kind of small, crowded spaces they generally eschew, particularly after they enter their thirties.

The Suburbs Are the Urban Cutting Edge

When academics and the media focus on urban innovation, they tend to look at cities. But the real action—and the best guides to the future—lie with the suburbs. Between 2010 and 2020 the suburbs and exurbs of the major metropolitan areas gained two million net domestic migrants, while the urban core counties lost 2.7 million. Americans have been heading to the suburbs for generations, growing from 13 percent of the metropolitan population in 1940 to 86 percent in 2017, a gradual increase of 2 percent annually.

Exurbs, the locale for most new innovative development, have grown in population at twice the national rate for over a decade. This is where we see the rise of new, privately designed and financed models for building better, more affordable, and even environmentally friendly communities. The technology for creating such communities extends back to the early visions of Frederick Law Olmsted and Britain’s Ebenezer Howard, who originated the idea of “garden cities,” essentially exurban communities where people could work, recreate, and live in the same environment.

These new cities consciously rejected the old suburban notion of serving the central city. Communities like Irvine, south of Los Angeles, function more as job and retail centers than adjuncts to an urban core. The 300,000 residents tend to work more at home, commute less, and have more access to open space than most metropolitan communities.

Irvine epitomizes a historical shift from the suburban “bedroom” model of the 1950s—in communities like Lakewood in the Los Angeles metro area and the Levittowns in Pennsylvania and on Long Island—that provided inexpensive housing for workers in nearby plants and downtowns. The new urban legacy owes much to visionaries like Irvine’s William Pereira, the Woodlands founder George Mitchell, and Columbia’s James Rouse. These communities, suggests Harvard’s Ann Forsyth, fulfilled most of today’s New Urbanists’ underlying aim, and they did so at a grand scale exhibiting “cutting-edge planning and design strategies.”

Read the rest of this piece at American Mind.

Photo: Ken Lund via Flickr CC 2.0 License.

Is America Entering a New Age of Democratic Capitalism?

Joel Kotkin — Fri, 04 Nov 2022 20:28:58 -0400

Most everyone outside the Biden administration knows that a recession is now more than likely. We could be entering what economist Noriel Roubini describes as the “Great Stagflation: an era of high inflation, low growth, high debt and the potential for severe recessions.” Certainly, weak growth numbers, declining rates of labor participation and productivity rates falling at the fastest rate in a half century are not harbingers of happy times.

But the coming downturn could prove a boon overall, if we make the choices that restore competition and bring production back to the United States and the West. The contours of a new post-pandemic economy are becoming clear, particularly in the Sun Belt and parts of the heartland. That revival could leave us with an economy that is stronger, more innovative and entrepreneurial.

This is not to say that a recession won’t be hard, particularly for groups like millennials, blue-collar workers and immigrants who have already suffered through the 2008 recession as well as the pandemic. They have been victims of very poor business and government practices that have created inflation and incentives either not to work or to invest in nonproductive activities. But if the 2008 recession ended with only tepid growth, this time around we may eventually see something different.

The best evidence for the prospect of better times lies in the post-pandemic increases in new business formations, in 2020 up to 4.4 million applications compared to roughly 3.5 million in 2019. In the first half of 2022, applications including those from non-employer businesses remained up by 44 percent from before the pandemic. In 2021, applications, including likely employer applications, totaled around 1.8 million by year’s end — almost half a million more than in 2019. According to the Economic Innovation Group, US new-business starts are on course to set a record this year.

The action today, unlike that of the previous decade, is not found so much among finance-backed IPOs, which are suffering their biggest decline in two decades. Instead, small grassroots businesses are seizing new niches, even in service industries, that could transform our economy. “Lots of good things happened during Covid,” suggests Shaheen Sadeghi, founder of California-based LAB Holdings, which builds “anti-malls” hosting local businesses. “The mediocrities went under, but the people who survived are doing better than ever before. They created new ways of doing business that fit the new realities.”

This grassroots growth is very different from what happened after the last serious recession in 2008. Once the financial engineers of the City and Wall Street finished demolishing the economy, governments moved to bless more consolidation.

The big banks recovered gloriously as inequality soared and incomes, particularly for minorities like African Americans, sank. As one conservative economist put it in 2018, “The economic legacy of the last decade is excessive corporate consolidation and a massive transfer of wealth to the top 1 percent from the middle class.” Fortunately, entrepreneurialism remains embedded in our national DNA. In more managed societies — like Germany, Japan or France — the leading companies tend to remain the same over time; even those historically connected to fascism, such as Mercedes, Krupp and Mitsubishi, survived their ignominy and remain dominant. But in the United States disruptive change has been the norm: only fifty-three of the current Fortune 500 companies were here in 1955.

This emerging new economy is also reshaping our economic geography. Sadeghi’s LAB (“Little American Business”) has developed nearly fifty projects for small, independent firms, predominantly in suburban settings, places not usually thought of as sources of cultural and business innovation. By contrast, the massive bailouts standard for the last three years have not slowed the movement of people and companies away from dense, often hyperprogressive urban locales, dispersing people and work to their periphery.

This is a marked change from the last recession. The great financial crisis of 2008, precipitated by the bursting of a housing bubble, led to much speculation that Sun Belt suburbia would become what the Atlantic predicted would be “the next slums,” and that city living would make a comeback. To be sure, the oligarchic nature of the recovery was somewhat less damaging to cities like New York, San Francisco and Boston, where financial and tech firms are concentrated and key managerial talent remained, despite its previous malfeasance.

Yet the ongoing exodus from big urban centers started before Covid, with over 90 percent of all metropolitan growth between 2010 and 2020 in the suburbs and exurbs. The 2020 census notes that four of the five US counties gaining at least 300,000 people were in Texas, Arizona or Nevada. Houston and Dallas added far more people than New York, Chicago, Los Angeles or the Bay Area.

The pandemic, and the rise of online work, seem likely to accelerate this movement. The big blue coastal cities have all experienced meager growth and, since 2020, serious population losses. In the last year, the biggest migration losses took place in three key states: New York, New Jersey and Illinois. In the post-pandemic economy where some 30 percent of the employed expect to work mostly remotely, this turns even small towns into new centers of economic dynamism.

Overall, notes demographer Wendell Cox, offices on the fringe have recovered far faster than those in the largest urban cores. According to Jay Gardner, president of Site Selectors Guild, leading companies are looking increasingly at opportunities in smaller cities and even rural locations. The biggest upsurge in new business formation took place in the Deep South, Texas and the southwest while New York and the West Coast lagged. This year, Zen Business found that the best places for small businesses — in terms of taxes, survivability and regulation — were overwhelmingly in the south, parts of the Great Plains, Utah and the Midwest.

One surprising aspect of the emerging economy reflects tentative steps by corporations to return production to the United States. The “reshoring” movement has been building over the last several years, helped by the boom in shale oil and gas, which makes US manufacturing more efficient. But the return became imperative when China blocked healthcare exports during the worst days of the pandemic. Our painful dependence — even for military goods — on our primary global adversary is starting to concentrate minds.

Read the rest of this piece at Spectator World.

Photo: Local businesses in Carterville, Illinois by Brian Stansberry via Wikimedia under CC 4.0 License.

Pandemic Increases Homeownership

Randal OToole — Tue, 11 Oct 2022 20:28:58 -0400

The nation’s number of occupied homes grew by 3.9 percent between 2019 and 2021, representing 4.7 million units of new homes, according to table B25032 of the American Community Survey. More than 98.5 percent of those new units were owner occupied, while rental housing grew by just 0.2 percent or less than 1.5 percent of total new homes.

More than three-fourths of new homes were single-family detached homes, reflecting the preferences of most (about 80 percent) Americans for such homes. Another 16 percent were single-family attached (row houses), while only 12 percent were multifamily.

Overall, homeownership grew from 64.2 percent of 64.1 percent of occupied homes to 65.4 percent. This seems like a large leap considering that the nation was in a recession for much of the period, but it shows that the pandemic persuaded many people to give up rental and multifamily housing for owned, single-family housing. Or, more likely, the increase in telecommuting that resulted from the pandemic allowed more people to give up rental and multifamily housing in favor of owned, single-family housing.

This is the opposite, of course, of what many cities have been trying to get people to do. For largely irrational reasons, many regions have tried to encourage more people to live in multifamily housing, which usually means more people renting.

The pandemic hasn’t helped those who have this goal. California recently passed a law encouraging developers to tear down single-family homes and replace them with multifamily. Yet in San Francisco, which has some of the most expensive and densest housing in the country, single-family detached homes grew by 1,214; single-family attached homes (row houses) grew by 4,566, and multifamily homes declined by 20,536. (This reflects occupied numbers; the actual number of multifamily housing units may not have declined.)

Similar trends can be seen in Los Angeles and San Jose, as well as in the San Francisco and San Jose urban areas as a whole: growth in both kinds of single-family, shrinkage in multifamily. (The Los Angeles urban area saw a growth in all kinds of housing.) Even Newport Beach and Palo Alto, the two cities in the country where the Census Bureau reports the median home price is more than $2 million, occupied single-family housing grew while occupied multifamily housing declined.

Overall, the state of California gained 293,000 units of single-family homes and lost 7,000 units of multifamily homes. Oregon also saw a growth in single-family and a decline in multifamily despite efforts by many cities in the state to promote multifamily housing. Washington managed to gain 5,000 units of multifamily (against almost 97,000 single-family), but the Seattle urban area, which has been the most aggressive promoter of multifamily in the state, lost 5,400 units of multifamily while gaining more than 38,000 single-family homes.

Since most multifamily is rented and most single-family is owned, it isn’t surprising that occupied rental units also declined in most places that saw a decline in multifamily housing.

Read the rest of this piece at The Antiplanner.

Photo: courtesy The AntiPlanner

U.S. Auto Commuting Dips to Half Century Low

Wendell Cox — Mon, 26 Sep 2022 20:28:58 -0400

The share of workers commuting to work by auto fell to 75.6%, according to the 2021 American Community Survey (ACS), the lowest level since before the 1970 census, which reported that 77.7% of commuting was by auto (Figure 1). At the beginning of the previous decade, in 1960, autos accounted for 64.0% of commuting.

The new data provides the first comprehensive look at how work access (commuting) was revolutionized between the last pre-pandemic year (2019) and 2021 (Figure 2). The most important factor in reducing commuting by auto was the pandemic, with its severe lockdowns, and the related business closures.

The share of commuters working from home increased by more than 200%, while transit’s share dropped about 50%. While working at home was increasing by 18.6 million from 2019 to 2021 (Figure 2), car commuting dropped 14.5 million, transit commuting declined 4.0 million, and the total number of commuters dropped 2.6 million.

Auto Commuting

Despite the recent decline, auto commuting remained the dominant commuting mode nationally, as it has since the first Census Bureau report in 1960. Separate drive alone figures were first reported in the 1980 census, and have dominated the market since then. In 2021, the drive alone market share was 67.8%, 16.8% under the 2019 figure (75.1%). The 2021 market shares are in Figure 3.

Working from Home Employment Access

As expected, working from home expanded significantly, spurred by business lockdowns. The share of working at home in the United States, grew from 5.7% in 2019 to 17.9% in 2021. In 2021, 27.6 million workers worked from home, compared to 9.0 million in 2019. This made working from home the second largest method of work access, displacing car pools.

There was a substantial range in working from home among the 56 major metropolitan areas (over 1,000,000 population), from little over 10% to 35%. The intensity of the working from home revolution is illustrated by the fact that the lowest 2021 rates are higher than the top 2019 rates. The highest rate in 2019 was 10.3%, in Austin, while the lowest 2021 rate was Honolulu‘s 10.9%.

The highest 2021 work from home share was in San Francisco, at 35.1%, more than four times the 2019 figure of 6.9%. San Jose nearly equaled San Francisco, at 34.8%, more than eight times 2019 (4.2%). Washington, DC-VA-MD-WV, Austin, Raleigh and Seattle also had work from home shares exceeding 30%. Denver, Portland, Boston, Minneapolis-St. Paul and Charlotte exceeded 25% (Figure 4). The metros with the largest working from home shares are overwhelmingly tech and finance hubs.

The lowest 2021 work from home share was in Honolulu, at 10.9%, nearly three times its 2019 share. Fresno, Memphis, New Orleans, Oklahoma City and Tulsa had working at home shares of under 12.5% (Figure 5).

In each of the 56 cases, the working at home market share at least doubled over the past year, with the smallest gain in Riverside-San Bernardino. San Jose had the largest increase, at over 700%. In all 56 metros, the working from home share was greater than the car pool share in 2021 (Table 1).

Transit Employment Access

At the same time there were unprecedented declines in transit commuting from 2019 to 2021. The largest losses were in San Jose (minus 80%), San Francisco, Seattle, Tulsa and Washington (69.2%), shown in Table 2.

The highest transit market share was in New York, at 19.0%, down 40% from 31.7% in 2019. Boston was a distant second, at 5.6%, down 57% from 2019. San Francisco, which had been the second strongest transit market in 2019, dropped 73% from 18.1% in 2019 to 4.9% in 2021. The other three metros with transit legacy cities ranked in the top seven, including Chicago, Philadelphia and Washington, followed by Seattle. Honolulu, one of the three major metros that has recently passed one million population, ranked sixth highest (Figure 6).

Los Angeles achieved its highest ranking in transit share ever reported in Census the data, ranking 9th, with a market share of 2.8%, even with a 41% decline in the last two years. In 2019, Los Angeles ranked 12th, and has since passed Portland, Baltimore and Pittsburgh. Baltimore and Buffalo exceeded 2.5%. Portland, often touted for its light rail system, fell four places from 9th to 13th between 2019 and 2021 and had a 2.3% transit share.

Only in New York and Boston was the transit share above that of car pools. By contrast transit led car pools in the six metros with legacy cities (New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Boston and Washington) as well as Seattle in 2019. These seven metros have the largest estimated central business district (CBD or downtown) employment, each with more than 200,000 jobs and a transit market share of more than 40% (Table 2).

The 10 major metros with the smallest 2021 transit market shares have less than a 0.7% share (Figure 7).

The New Normal: Still Developing

Within just two years (2019-2021), those working at home rose to 3.5 times the highest transit commuting ever reported by the Census Bureau (7.8 million in 1960). In 2021, working from home accounted for more than seven times transit commuting.

Later research indicates that the high working from home share is continuing. Jose Maria Barrero of Instituto Tecnologico Autonomo de México, Stanford’s Nicholas Bloom, and Steven J. Davis of the University of Chicago estimated that from April to August of 2022, 30% of work days were from home. Professor Bloom told The Wall Street Journal that this figure has “held steady — despite recent campaigns by many employers to get staff to work from the office more often.”

At the same time, while transit ridership is rising, it is still well below 2019 levels. There are expectations that it will take some time for transit to recover its 2019 ridership levels. This is illustrated in projections for New York and San Francisco, the two strongest transit markets as of 2019.

We may not yet be at the “new normal,” but the future seems likely to involve less physical commuting and more virtual work access as technology continues to advance.

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: San Francisco Bay Area rail system map. This area includes the San Francisco and San Jose metropolitan areas, which in 2021 had the strongest major metro work from home share in the nation. Source: Wikimedia under CC 2.0 License.

Table 1 (back to reference)

Table 1
Work from Home Employment Access by Major Metropolitan Area
2019-2021 (Usual Method of Work Access)
Major Metropolitan Area	2021	Rank	2019	Rank	Change	Rank
Atlanta, GA	24.2%	12	8.7%	4	176.6%	49
Austin, TX	32.2%	4	10.3%	1	213.2%	34
Baltimore, MD	22.2%	20	5.5%	29	300.6%	14
Birmingham, AL	13.7%	48	3.9%	53	246.8%	24
Boston, MA-NH	26.9%	9	5.3%	33	411.6%	3
Buffalo, NY	14.3%	45	3.5%	56	313.2%	9
Charlotte, NC-SC	25.3%	11	7.9%	9	220.6%	28
Chicago, IL-IN-WI	21.5%	22	5.7%	27	278.6%	17
Cincinnati, OH-KY-IN	17.1%	37	5.4%	31	217.1%	33
Cleveland, OH	16.5%	38	4.6%	43	260.2%	20
Columbus, OH	23.0%	17	5.3%	34	337.4%	8
Dallas-Fort Worth, TX	20.7%	26	6.5%	17	218.7%	31
Denver, CO	27.5%	7	9.2%	3	199.9%	40
Detroit, MI	19.8%	30	4.4%	49	348.7%	7
Fresno, CA	11.2%	55	5.3%	32	112.3%	55
Grand Rapids, MI	13.9%	46	4.6%	44	203.7%	37
Hartford, CT	20.3%	28	5.0%	37	303.5%	11
Honolulu, HI	10.9%	56	3.9%	54	181.3%	47
Houston, TX	15.5%	42	5.1%	36	202.2%	38
Indianapolis. IN	17.7%	36	5.5%	30	220.1%	29
Jacksonville, FL	17.9%	33	7.5%	10	139.7%	53
Kansas City, MO-KS	20.0%	29	6.3%	21	219.0%	30
Las Vegas, NV	13.3%	50	4.7%	42	183.4%	45
Los Angeles, CA	21.2%	24	6.1%	23	249.5%	22
Louisville, KY-IN	15.4%	43	4.8%	40	217.2%	32
Memphis, TN-MS-AR	11.7%	54	3.5%	55	233.9%	26
Miami, FL	16.1%	39	6.3%	20	156.5%	51
Milwaukee,WI	17.9%	35	4.4%	48	302.1%	13
Minneapolis-St. Paul, MN-WI	26.0%	10	6.4%	18	308.1%	10
Nashville, TN	20.6%	27	7.4%	11	176.9%	48
New Orleans. LA	12.2%	53	5.2%	35	133.9%	54
New York, NY-NJ-PA	22.8%	19	4.7%	41	384.3%	5
Oklahoma City, OK	12.3%	52	4.4%	51	182.5%	46
Orlando, FL	19.0%	31	6.6%	16	187.3%	43
Philadelphia, PA-NJ-DE-MD	23.6%	13	6.0%	24	295.7%	15
Phoenix, AZ	23.4%	14	7.9%	6	194.2%	42
Pittsburgh, PA	21.1%	25	5.7%	28	271.9%	19
Portland, OR-WA	27.5%	8	7.9%	7	247.6%	23
Providence, RI-MA	15.8%	41	4.5%	47	252.3%	21
Raleigh, NC	31.0%	5	10.2%	2	204.7%	36
Richmond, VA	23.0%	16	5.7%	26	302.9%	12
Riverside-San Bernardino, CA	13.6%	49	6.7%	15	103.7%	56
Rochester, NY	15.3%	44	4.5%	46	237.6%	25
Sacramento, CA	23.3%	15	7.9%	8	195.8%	41
St. Louis,, MO-IL	18.7%	32	5.0%	38	272.9%	18
Salt Lake City, UT	22.9%	18	5.9%	25	291.8%	16
San Antonio, TX	15.8%	40	4.9%	39	225.7%	27
San Diego, CA	22.1%	21	7.4%	12	200.7%	39
San Francisco, CA	35.1%	1	6.9%	13	409.2%	4
San Jose, CA	34.8%	2	4.2%	52	727.0%	1
Seattle, WA	30.6%	6	6.3%	19	384.2%	6
Tampa-St. Petersburg, FL	21.2%	23	8.6%	5	145.8%	52
Tucson, AZ	17.9%	34	6.9%	14	160.8%	50
Tulsa, OK	12.5%	51	4.4%	50	185.8%	44
Virginia Beach-Norfolk, VA-NC	13.8%	47	4.5%	45	205.3%	35
Washington, DC-VA-MD-WV	33.1%	3	6.1%	22	442.1%	2
Derived from American Community Survey, 2019.& 2021

Table 2 (back to reference)

Table 2
Transit Employment Access by Major Metropolitan Area
2019-2021 (Usual Method of Work Access)
Major Metropolitan Area	2021	Rank	2019	Rank	Change	Rank
Atlanta, GA	1.0%	32	2.7%	23	-63.5%	50
Austin, TX	0.7%	43	1.9%	30	-62.9%	49
Baltimore, MD	2.6%	10	4.6%	14	-43.5%	32
Birmingham, AL	0.2%	53	0.4%	55	-40.7%	26
Boston, MA-NH	5.6%	2	13.1%	4	-57.2%	41
Buffalo, NY	2.5%	11	2.9%	17	-11.4%	3
Charlotte, NC-SC	0.7%	47	1.6%	39	-58.9%	42
Chicago, IL-IN-WI	4.8%	4	12.3%	5	-61.0%	45
Cincinnati, OH-KY-IN	0.9%	34	1.5%	40	-38.0%	19
Cleveland, OH	1.4%	24	2.8%	22	-49.5%	37
Columbus, OH	0.9%	35	1.6%	37	-43.2%	31
Dallas-Fort Worth, TX	0.6%	49	1.2%	44	-52.8%	40
Denver, CO	1.7%	20	4.6%	13	-62.8%	48
Detroit, MI	0.9%	36	1.4%	41	-34.4%	14
Fresno, CA	0.8%	39	1.1%	47	-23.6%	6
Grand Rapids, MI	0.8%	41	1.3%	43	-38.4%	20
Hartford, CT	1.9%	16	2.2%	24	-12.7%	4
Honolulu, HI	4.1%	6	7.1%	8	-41.6%	30
Houston, TX	1.3%	26	1.9%	28	-32.4%	13
Indianapolis. IN	0.6%	48	0.7%	51	-6.2%	1
Jacksonville, FL	0.7%	44	1.2%	45	-41.2%	29
Kansas City, MO-KS	0.5%	51	0.8%	49	-38.6%	21
Las Vegas, NV	1.8%	17	2.8%	21	-35.0%	15
Los Angeles, CA	2.8%	9	4.7%	12	-41.2%	28
Louisville, KY-IN	0.7%	42	1.9%	29	-62.6%	47
Memphis, TN-MS-AR	0.2%	55	0.3%	56	-29.4%	9
Miami, FL	2.0%	14	2.9%	19	-30.8%	11
Milwaukee,WI	1.7%	18	2.9%	18	-39.3%	22
Minneapolis-St. Paul, MN-WI	1.7%	21	4.4%	15	-62.1%	46
Nashville, TN	0.6%	50	1.0%	48	-43.7%	33
New Orleans. LA	1.4%	23	2.1%	26	-32.3%	12
New York, NY-NJ-PA	19.0%	1	31.7%	1	-40.0%	24
Oklahoma City, OK	0.2%	54	0.5%	53	-49.8%	39
Orlando, FL	0.8%	40	1.4%	42	-40.2%	25
Philadelphia, PA-NJ-DE-MD	4.7%	5	9.3%	7	-48.9%	36
Phoenix, AZ	0.9%	33	1.8%	32	-49.6%	38
Pittsburgh, PA	2.4%	12	6.0%	10	-59.0%	43
Portland, OR-WA	2.3%	13	6.6%	9	-65.4%	51
Providence, RI-MA	1.2%	28	1.7%	34	-29.7%	10
Raleigh, NC	0.4%	52	0.7%	52	-37.4%	17
Richmond, VA	0.9%	37	1.6%	35	-45.9%	34
Riverside-San Bernardino, CA	0.7%	45	0.8%	50	-9.9%	2
Rochester, NY	1.4%	22	1.9%	31	-23.9%	7
Sacramento, CA	0.9%	38	2.2%	25	-60.8%	44
St. Louis,, MO-IL	1.2%	27	1.7%	33	-29.4%	8
Salt Lake City, UT	2.0%	15	3.8%	16	-48.0%	35
San Antonio, TX	1.1%	29	1.9%	27	-41.0%	27
San Diego, CA	1.7%	19	2.9%	20	-39.3%	23
San Francisco, CA	4.9%	3	18.1%	2	-72.9%	55
San Jose, CA	1.1%	30	5.8%	11	-80.2%	56
Seattle, WA	3.0%	8	10.9%	6	-72.2%	54
Tampa-St. Petersburg, FL	0.7%	46	1.1%	46	-37.9%	18
Tucson, AZ	1.4%	25	1.6%	36	-16.6%	5
Tulsa, OK	0.1%	56	0.5%	54	-72.0%	53
Virginia Beach-Norfolk, VA-NC	1.0%	31	1.6%	38	-35.8%	16
Washington, DC-VA-MD-WV	4.1%	7	13.2%	3	-69.0%	52
Derived from American Community Survey, 2019 & 2021

Class Homicide

Joel Kotkin — Sun, 11 Sep 2022 20:28:58 -0400

There’s much talk today, from left and right, about threats to democracy, yet little focus on the social dynamic critical to its survival. In this respect, we may see the current, and troubling, escalation of violent political rhetoric, and even political violence, not so much as the cause of polarization but the result of changing class dynamics, most notably the increasingly perilous state of the yeoman middle class.

The United States, and much of the high-income world, is going through a revision of class relations resonant with gilded age, or even feudal models. A recent British parliamentary study projects that by 2030, the top one percent will expand their share to two thirds of the world’s wealth, with the biggest gains overwhelmingly concentrated at the top one percent of the top one percent—the top 0.01 percent. Similarly, in this country, since the mid-1980s, the share of national wealth held by those below the top 10 percent has fallen by 12 percentage points, the same proportion that the top 0.1 percent gained.As one conservative economist put it succinctly in 2018, “The economic legacy of the last decade is excessive corporate consolidation, a massive transfer of wealth to the top 1 percent from the middle class.”

Hierarchy triumphs over merit and even luck

In the process, the aspirational character long essential to American society is being transformed. According to one study, the chances of middle-class earners moving up to the top rungs of the income ladder has declined by approximately 20 percent since the early 1980s. Data from the Census Bureau show that the share of national income going to the middle 60 percent of households has fallen to a record low.

In the economy, hierarchy is rapidly replacing opportunity. Banking and finance, treated amiably by Washington during the Financial Crisis, have become increasingly concentrated while many smaller regional institutions have either been acquired or driven out of business. Growing corporate concentration has now seeped into the once dynamic tech economy in both the U.S. and Europe. In Silicon Valley now, the renowned garage culture has morphed into a Gargantua of giant firms with market power unprecedented in modern times, controlling in some cases 80 to 90 percent of key tech markets.

Similarly, property ownership has become more concentrated; we see declining homeownership, particularly among the young, notably in the United States, Canada, and Australia. One analyst predicted that soon most middle class people will be “priced out” of ownership in a “rentership society” where Wall Street firms profit by renting homes, furniture, and other necessities.

Own nothing and eat it

Increasingly, property ownership now increasingly depends on inheritance; the offspring of property-owning parents are far better situated to own a house eventually (often with parental help) and enter what one writer calls “the funnel of privilege.” In America, millennials are three times as likely as boomers to count on inheritance for their retirement. Among the youngest cohort, those ages 18 to 22, over 60 percent see inheritance as their primary source of sustenance as they age.

The assault on middle class mobility strikes at the heart of democratic governance. Throughout history, democracy, the definition of which clearly changes over the millennia, has rested on a broad base of small property owners—merchants, artisans, skilled laborers, small farmers, and professionals. The earliest democracies in Athens and Rome rested on an assertive property-owning middle class. Aristotle also warned about the dangers of an oligarchy that would control both the economy and the state; in fact, an ever-greater consolidation of wealth played a role in undermining Greek democracy. Much the same process took place in the once citizen-led Roman Republic. By the end of the Republic, over 75 percent of all property was owned by roughly 3& percent of the population, while over four-fifths owned no property.

Read the rest of this piece at American Mind.

Photo: Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

Migratory Millennials - Marching from the Metropolis

Rob Burgess — Wed, 10 Aug 2022 20:28:59 -0400

As stories of new migration patterns and movement across Australia’s cities and regions abound, updated population data shows that what initially appeared to be a pandemic-induced blip is instead the beginning of a reversal of a long-term trend. Emergent patterns of internal migration, together with the rise, and living preferences of the Millennial cohort, now present a genuine opportunity to address the seemingly unsolvable housing dilemma that has burdened the nation for two decades.

By 2019, the concentration of people in Sydney and Melbourne reached a level never seen in the nation’s history. With 40% of all Australians living in one of our two largest cities, the effects of this unique phenomenon were many, including, of course, the impact on house prices, with both cities consistently appearing near the top of the world’s most expensive housing surveys. The onset of the pandemic, however, saw the established patterns of population growth that shaped Australian cities in recent years, especially Sydney and Melbourne, come to a grinding halt.

Confronted with ongoing uncertainty regarding overseas migration and the expectation that it will continue to lose more people interstate than what it will gain, Melbourne remains in the throes of a demand shock, as it grapples with a downward shift in the dynamics that underpinned its rapid rate of growth over the last 15 years.

Nonetheless, new patterns of population continue to emerge.

Though a direct challenge to the beneficiaries of recent growth patterns, emerging population trends have the potential to deliver significant social and economic gains, if managed proactively. Understanding the characteristics of those who are moving, how old they are, where they are going, and the type of dwellings they are seeking is the basis for ensuring these gains are delivered.

Having already accounted for the variety of covid-inspired population shifts of the last two years, just released population estimates have again been revised upwards for each of Melbourne’s Growth Areas, its peri-urban locations (excluding the Shire of Macedon Ranges), and the State’s regions. Add to this the unprecedented number of approvals for detached dwellings in Victoria in 2021 (48,000), despite significant population loss, the living preferences of a growing number of people suddenly look vastly different from those of the recent past.

Conversely, population estimates in all metropolitan local government areas have again, been adjusted downwards, dispelling the assumption of continued, consistent growth otherwise applied to justify housing policy frameworks, service planning, and infrastructure investment.

Combined with the take up of technology, including online retail, telehealth, and remote work, this new reality has been foisted upon the agencies responsible for planning for and providing the necessary social and physical infrastructure for our communities. At the very least, the growth assumptions relied upon by these agencies should be reviewed as a matter of priority.

Recent covid-inspired relocations aside, emergent population trends signal the arrival of a new chapter in the nation’s ongoing demographic story, with the headline being the staggering growth in the number of 35-44-year-olds.
As the age group in which family formation is greatest, and with a strong preference for detached dwellings, it is the 35-44-year-old cohort that will generate the greatest demand for housing in coming years.

Comprising the Millennial generation, where, how, and in what, the 35-44-year-old cohort will choose to live, is a defining question for contemporary Australian society. Few, if any social surveys will reveal as much about the direction of the nation, as the collective choices of the Millennial cohort in deciding whether to remain propertyless, lifelong renters, or pursue the great Australian dream, increasingly, somewhere in the regions. Representing the highest proportion of regional movers in the 12 months to March, for many Millennials, the dream remains well and truly alive.

In an already highly concentrated nation, the vast majority of Victoria’s population – heading towards 80% - resides within the boundary of metropolitan Melbourne. Whatever benefits this unique spatial phenomenon is deemed to deliver, improving deteriorating affordability, has not been one of them.

Multiple parliamentary inquiries, various Federal and state government incentives, monetary policy, and strategic planning frameworks have all failed to solve the affordability problem. An accident of the pandemic, together with a structural-demographic shift has however presented a genuine opportunity in which practical improvement to the housing quandary can be achieved.

The continued convergence of health, demographic and economic factors will see non-metropolitan locations become increasingly attractive places to live, particularly for the family-forming Millennial cohort. A coherent, tailored policy response that closely monitors key demand drivers with the express purpose to ensure the delivery of the requisite supply of housing in the many, increasingly popular sub-markets across the state, is crucial to enabling this.

Criticised for their prolonged adolescence, breakfast selections, and all-around lifestyle choices, younger Australians maintain an overriding aspiration for home ownership. If in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, the new reality presents a genuine opportunity to practically address the calamitous state of housing affordability, then surely, we are obliged to facilitate it.

Rob Burgess is a town planner with over 25 years of experience, having worked in both the public and private sectors. Applying evidence-based insights, Rob’s expertise lies at the intersection of population dynamics, town planning, and property markets. He is regularly engaged to undertake market research, provide strategic advice to clients, and sharing his thoughts on current and future trends. Rob is a Principal with Quantify Strategic Insights.