Small Cities

The Two Americas

Joel Kotkin — Fri, 10 Oct 2025 20:28:38 -0400

The late Charlie Kirk may have been best known for his conservative politics, but those politics also resonated with traditional values, religious faith, and family life — one side of a critical divide in our society. Life and value choices, even more than ideology, increasingly define how people vote, what they believe, and where they live.

For years, the United States has been evolving into two different countries. One is dominated by often childless, urban renters, many of them college graduates or poor minorities. This America is concentrated in core cities and college towns.

The other America exists in an almost parallel universe—largely suburban, exurban, small town, and rural — but where family, faith, and children constitute the common threads of everyday life. This America was receptive to Kirk’s traditionalist message.

The first America has become a haven for a significant number of postmodernist progressives who largely reject the customary pillars of society such as religion, marriage, and family. Theirs is not a rebellion of peasants and laborers, as occurred from medieval times and on through the early progressive era, but instead an uprising mostly of the urban professional classes. Rather than the mundane concerns of traditional liberals or “sewer socialists,” the postmodernists focus more on environmental catastrophism, gender identity, and radical racial politics. AEI scholar Sam Abrams and I have been following this political trend for years, but new polling shows that it has intensified, particularly among younger single women.

Though economic pressures might eventually make the postmodernists’ cause a broader movement, today’s radical activists seem to respond more to their own inner cultural angst and troubled psychology. Modern progressivism sells best among people who reject traditional notions about families and gender. Today over 28 percent of all Gen Z women, notes Gallup, identify as LGBTQ — more than twice the rate for millennial women and almost three times that for Gen Z men. Over 5 percent of U.S. high school students struggle with gender identity, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Some have learned their gender politics at the feet of their teachers. As one USA Today correspondent wrote in 2017, “the number of women’s and gender studies degrees in the United States has increased by more than 300 percent since 1990, and in 2015, there were more than 2,000 degrees conferred.” Even certain nominally Catholic colleges reject the idea of the sex binary and encourage students to select their own pronouns.

Within this population, political anxiety can lead to violence, or at least acceptance of violence. Nearly 38 percent of respondents and over half of progressives would see the assassination of Donald Trump as “justified,” notes one study. It’s a mindset that predates the Kirk assassination. Many progressives — notably women — celebrated Luigi Mangione’s alleged premeditated murder of UnitedHealth CEO Brian Thompson. In California, a particularly strident center of such views, there’s even a pending proposition on health-care reform named after Mangione.

The postmodernists tend to be highly secular and are likely beneficiaries of America’s long-running “unchurching.” At least until recently, the country has witnessed a steady decline in Christian identification—most notably among mainstream Protestants. Only about 46 percent of Americans born in the 1990s currently identify as Christian. Younger Americans may still embrace of the notion of a spiritual power, but they are leaving religious institutions at a rate four times that of their counterparts three decades ago; almost 40 percent of people aged 18–29 have no religious affiliation.

Read the rest of this piece at: City Journal.

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

Photo: composite of images by RDNE Stock project and Jackson Howes.

Revival: Americans Heading Back to the Hinterlands

Joel Kotkin and Wendell Cox — Sun, 14 Sep 2025 20:28:32 -0400

The famous New Yorker magazine cover showing much of civilization ending at the Hudson River, save for Chicago, D.C., and then the West Coast, had more than a grain of truth for much of the 20^thcentury. The term “flyover country” was not just a snobbish put-down but a reality as a handful of core cities – New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco – exerted oversized influence over America’s culture, politics, and economy, with rural communities and smaller cities playing a relatively marginal role in the national drama.

The early decades of the 21^stcentury have altered America’s geographic reality. Moribund small cities have come back to life. Two decades ago, downtown Fargo, North Dakota, was dull and somewhat derelict. Now it boasts loft apartments, a fine boutique hotel, and a panoply of cultural attractions, including art studios and dance venues. Since 2010, about 14,000 Americans have moved to its metropolitan area. That total is small, but it reflects the experiences of many other once withering communities that are attracting people from larger urban centers. The Fargo metro area added nearly double the number of net domestic migrants as the nearest large metro area, Minneapolis-St. Paul, which is 15 times larger.

Some of this can be traced to considerably lower housing prices, which allows millennials to be on their own much earlier;only 5% of millennialsin the Great Plains states live at home, less than half the percentage in California, New York, and New Jersey. It’s also a result of a new wealth created by tech, manufacturing, and other industries seeking to reduce costs in less-regulated, less expensive areas where more people are willing to relocate.

Smaller Communities Rebound

Springfield, a metropolitan area of nearly 500,000 people in the southwest corner of Missouri, has blossomed in the past decade. Its economy, anchored by Southwest Missouri State University, is also home to several large firms, including Bass Pro Shops, O’Reilly Auto Parts, and accounting firm BKD. These businesses provide promising opportunities for millennials.

Between 2010 and 2023, a net 38,000 new residents moved into the area from elsewhere in the U.S. Rather than being rejected as outsiders by longtime residents, newcomers are welcome to join localboards and commissions.

“What Springfield attracts are people who are self-starters who want to fast-track their involvement in the community,” says millennial Matt Simpson, chief research and planning officer at Ozark Technical College, who was recently elected to the City Council. “People of my generation are motivated by the fact that you can have a say at an earlier age.”

Much of Springfield’s appeal lies not in culture or consumerism, where big cities are still hard to beat, but in the local habits and traditions found in numerous churches, charities, and civic groups.

Note: This is the second in a two-part series of the Great Dispersion of Americans across the country. Read part one here.

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

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

Photo: Diedrich via Wikimedia, under CC 4.0 License.

Exodus: Affordability Crisis Sends Americans Packing From Big Cities

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

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

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

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

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

Net Domestic Migration

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

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

The New Demographics

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

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

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

Photo: Carlos Oliva via Pexels.

Cities and Suburbs: Get it Together

Pete Saunders — Fri, 22 Aug 2025 20:28:38 -0400

I’ve written some versions of this topic many times over the years. Now it’s time for the latest installment.

Every so often, there are people who want to cast “cities” (here I’m defining them as the core or foundational municipality of a larger metropolitan region) against “suburbs” (the non-core, usually smaller jurisdictions, that have an economic, social and cultural connection to a core city). Every so often, people want to use various metrics to demonstrate that either cities or the collective suburban areas are doing better or worse than the other.

Researchers of all types on either side of the city/suburb divide will cherry-pick data to prove a point about cities or suburbs. I could bore you with a long historical explanation of this divide, but the tl;dr version is that as cities were beset with economic and social issues in the mid-20^th century, and as “suburbs” had grown to a point where they had their own constituency and political representation at the same time, the line between the two was drawn. In the early 21^st century, many cities recovered and saw revitalization. However, those committed to suburbs were quick to suggest that not all is well with cities.

The Covid pandemic period had plenty of examples of this pushed forward by suburban advocates. Two examples stand out. When researchers saw a surge in city out-migration in 2021 and 2022, many were saying the pandemic was causing people to flee cities in favor of more spacious and pleasant suburbs, exurbs and rural areas. Suburbs offered more comfort and protection than the more-crowded cities. When downtown office buildings effectively shuttered because of the pandemic shutdown, and office workers finally took advantage of meaningful ways to work from home, many people were saying that office-centered downtowns that were reliant on office worker traffic were doomed; if a worker could work principally at home, one could live anywhere, potentially threatening the very existence of cities.

Of course, there were city advocates (I include myself) who pushed back on those narratives. For one, I maintained that cities had an “experiential advantage” over suburbs that would survive the pandemic. There are amenities and attractions that cities have that still bring people to cities, and there are people who will still choose to live in an amenity-rich environment.

On the other hand, there are city advocates who are priced out of expensive cities, and getting behind the YIMBY and/or abundance movements to increase the supply of housing in cities and suburbs. Many YIMBY activists have become deeply involved in zoning reform in large cities, promoting the elimination of exclusive single-family zoning districts and increased housing density in transit-accessible areas. To address the same issues in suburbia, many YIMBYs have taken to proposing statewide legislation at state legislatures, encouraging states to take a more direct role in shaping local land use and zoning policy.

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

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

Photo: Renee Silverman via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

Building the Future: Fixing the Global Housing Crisis

Joel Kotkin and Wendell Cox — Sat, 31 May 2025 20:28:38 -0400

This is the second of a two-part series on the global housing crisis. Read the first part here.

The affordable housing crisis in America and many other advanced countries keeps getting worse because it is largely dominated by the wrong voices talking about the wrong places.

For years the YIMBYs and NIMBYs have debated development in urban centers: While “Yes in My Back Yard” advocates seek to “build, build, build” ever more density in urban centers for environmental reasons, the “Not In My Back Yard” forces want to limit development often to preserve property values and the existing character of neighborhoods.

Meanwhile, housing prices have continued to rise to often unsustainable levels from San Francisco to Seoul, putting the dream of home ownership out of reach for many who are forced to pay much of their salaries in rent. Both YIMBYs and NIMBYs rely on heavy-handed regulation and other policies that discourage and complicate home ownership. Their effects have been particularly severe in California, Canada, Australia, Britain, and other places where policies aimed at funneling more people into dense urban areas by making it expensive to build in the suburbs and exurbs are negatively distorting the market.

There is now a growing pushback to this approach. Even some long-time advocates of forced densification and urban growth boundaries are recognizingthat “sprawl” is not only here to stay, but that it offers a cohesive and market-friendly way to spur greater construction and lower prices. Given enough freedom, the market can do much to address the housing problem.

In the future, the shift from urban centers to suburban and exurban growth will likely be accelerated through the rise of remote work and new transport systems such as autonomous vehicles. A recent study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City noted that demographic conditions, the rise of online work, and migration to less expensive regions create conditions for a family-friendly housing boom. The issue is how to meet this burgeoning demand and build a society where the opportunity for home ownership becomes ever greater.

Market-Based Solutions

Trying to force people to live in dense urban areas against their wishes contributes to the continued outflow of people to suburbs and exurbs, and from highly regulated to less regulated states. It is not enough to simply call for building more houses as a solution to the crisis when regulation-heavy “urban containment” policies have increased land-related costs and made housing affordability impossible in many regions.

Thanks to market forces, peripheral development has long been the way cities have grown virtually everywhere in the world. Contrary to the claim that density represents social and economic progress, wealthier countries are producing ever more decentralized cities. Even in places like Tokyo, London, Paris, and New York, the vast majority of population growth takes place in the periphery. As one report put it, “human settlement has always tended to sprawl out from key urban centres.”

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

Photo: Deane Bayas via Pexels.

A Look at Satellite Cities

Pete Saunders — Thu, 29 May 2025 15:29:38 -0400

Have you ever given much thought to satellite cities? Cities located close to major metropolitan areas that aren’t the primary city, yet have a strong identity and history of their own? Cities miles away from the central city core but with many strong urbanism elements and with outstanding cost of living affordability? Satellite cities are located near many large metros, but they’re rarely considered as places that people will consider as an affordable urbanism alternative.

I first noticed satellite cities when I moved to one, Muncie, IN, while in high school. Once we moved to Muncie, I saw that there were many other similarly sized communities in central Indiana, anywhere from 30 miles to 60 miles or so away from Indianapolis – Kokomo, Anderson, Muncie, Bloomington, Lafayette – that had long histories of their own, but had relationships with the Indiana’s capital and largest city. Each of these cities started out as agricultural trading centers for surrounding farmers and then became mid-tier industrial hubs in the 20^th century. Each also suffered from deep deindustrialization that set in during the 1980s. Recovery for them has been spotty; Bloomington (home of Indiana University) and Lafayette/West Lafayette (home of Purdue University) haven’t suffered the same decline as the others, thanks to the pull of flagship universities. Ball State has helped Muncie, but it hasn’t gotten the boost that Bloomington and Lafayette did.

Later, I started to notice similar relationships surrounding other large Midwestern metro areas. When our family moved to Chicago, I saw some similarly positioned cities surrounding Chicago – Waukegan, Elgin, Aurora and Joliet – in the same light. However, they were all doing somewhat better than their central Indiana cohorts. I saw the same surrounding other major Midwestern metros, all in various stages of decline or revitalization.

(Note: I find this to be almost exclusively a Midwestern phenomenon, with a few exceptions. Similar satellite cities exist in California, whose settlement owes a lot to the Midwest. California’s versions also seem to be further from the core cities. The East Coast may have once had satellite cities like the Midwest, but a case could be made that metro amalgamation began occurring there even before industrialization really took off, so the region’s cities began evolving into the more familiar Megalopolis. No similar cities appear to exist in the South.)

These are what I’ve called satellite cities. They are midsized cities that experienced a period of growth during an independent phase of development but soon found themselves being pulled toward the gravitational pull of the larger nearby metro area. Some have been fully captured by the larger metro’s pull, others haven’t fully made the transition.

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

Photo: Muncie, Indiana downtown, source: downtownmuncie.org.

Why Cities Have Lost Their Appeal

Joel Kotkin — Fri, 16 May 2025 20:28:38 -0400

Over the past half century, media and academic sources repeatedly suggested that increasingly dense cities would dominate the future. Places such as London, San Francisco and Chicago would dominate an economy.

Today, this assessment seems grossly dated. Even in the pages of the urbanista New York Times there are widespread fears of an “urban doom loop.” But this, too, is a stretch. Great core cities will not go the way of post-imperial Rome, but their role is being recast as the urban frontier shifts increasingly to the periphery.

What we are seeing mirrors H.G. Wells’s vision. He predicted that most economic life, and most families, would shift to the suburbs and exurbs. The urban core would be reinvented: no longer the uncontested center of political and economic life but a vast theater of “concourse and rendezvous,” ideal for the childless wealthy, necessary for their servants and a beacon to the young and the culturally aware.

This would surely represent a major shift away from the idea of the dominant “transactional city,” filled with workers packed in ever-higher buildings, drawn from the vast array of bedroom satellites across a huge geographic area. Office occupancy has been declining since the turn of the century. Covid accelerated that trend.

Although they are no longer the epicenters of economic life, London, New York, Paris, Tokyo and Miami retain an irresistible allure to educated young people, globe-trotting elites and cultural creators. In New York, while the population has declined, the ranks of the ultra-rich have continued to increase. These favored cities have become less economic capitals and more stage props for luxury-brand groups.

Now, the bulk of new urban development takes place outside the core of the city, largely in the suburban and exurban periphery. In 1950, those living in city cores accounted for nearly 24 percent of the US population; today that share is less than 15 percent.

Suburban, and particularly exurban, metropolitan growth has accelerated in recent years. From 2010 to 2017, 91 percent of employment growth among major metropolitan areas was outside central business districts. The 50 highest-growth counties in the US, almost all suburban or exurban, had an employment increase of more than 2.5 times that of the others in 2019.

These changes are generally greeted with horror by our cultural, academic and media elites. But if some analysts still predict a return to urban growth and greater office occupancy, even devoted friends of urban density admit that the urban future will be increasingly shaped by sprawl.

The drivers here are demographic shifts and technological improvements. With the development of instantaneous communication, notes a report from Brown University, neither the size nor density of a city makes it more productive. Indeed, almost all the leading tech centers in the country are primarily suburban in nature.

In New York, while the population has declined, the ranks of the ultra-rich have continued to increase.

The rise of remote or hybrid work is accelerating this shift. According to a study by the University of Chicago, in high-end business services and technology, a third of the workforce can function remotely – as can employees in roughly 50 percent of jobs generated by Silicon Valley.

Demographics provide the most compelling evidence of peripheral ascendancy, which can be seen in the movement of educated young people, particularly as they hit their thirties, away from places such as New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Even before the pandemic, two-thirds of millennials favored the suburbs. The same thing is happening in other countries. Rather than signaling decay, the growth of suburban and exurban communities represents the cutting edge of 21st-century urbanism. These areas are becoming cities of a new sort, serving as domiciles but also places of employment, shopping and the arts.

This process is in its infancy. New exurban areas are being planned, notably by Elon Musk in Texas and Bill Gates in Arizona. Rather than an abandonment of the city, this is a continuing reinvention of it.

The rise of suburban and exurban living reflects a desire for safer, cleaner and less congested environments, and core cities will only be revitalized if they address the quality of life they provide. Donald Trump’s return has been greeted by many urban leaders with about as much enthusiasm as a reprise of the bubonic plague. But a second Trump presidency could also force mostly Democratic municipal leaders to address challenges on their own.

The right’s drive to close off America’s international borders may slow the movement of populations to urban centers. But it could also reduce threats to public order and social cohesiveness. In New York, warns its former governor and mayoral aspirant Andrew Cuomo, the “migrant crisis” has become “the tipping point” of “the urban death spiral.” The challenge for older cities lies not in notions about diversity but in making the streets safe and creating opportunities for business and culture.

A promising sign lies in the election of new, pro-business moderates in cities where crime has been a key issue. In Houston, more than 80 percent of voters listed it as their primary concern. In 2023 the public elected as mayor, by almost two to one, veteran state senator John Whitmire over left-wing firebrand Sheila Jackson Lee.

If traditional cities seek to find their future niche, they will need to enact a political revolution. It will not alter the fundamental dispersion of urban life – but even the old cities can find a comfortable place in the new metropolis if they can find ways to make urban life work.

This piece first appeared at: The Spectator.

Photo: Trey Ratcliff, via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

Canadians Moving to Smaller Cities and Rural Areas

Wendell Cox — Wed, 30 Oct 2024 20:28:08 -0400

For the last two centuries, one of the most important demographic trends has been the movement of people from rural areas to the cities. It has been estimated that in 1800, the world was only 3% urban, meaning that it was 97% rural.In 1800, there was only one urban area in the world with more than 1,000,000 population — Beijing — and it subsequently fell below that level. As late as 1900, there were only 16 urban areas in the world with more than 1,000,000 population. Now there are more than 530. The world urban population share is approaching 60%.

Yet urbanization in Canada appears to be slowing substantially, likely due to the impossibly unaffordable markets, especially Vancouver and Toronto. This article discusses net internal migration within Canada (excludes international migration), which has suddenly turned against the largest cities (metropolitan areas, which is the generic economic definition of a city).

This article supplements my recent commentary in The Financial Post, entitled “Opinion: “Want to help solve Canada's housing crisis? Move: The latest StatCan data reveal Canadians are leaving the priciest cities and moving to rural areas, reversing the traditional trend. ”The principal message of the piece is that there has been no housing affordability progress, despite a number of proposals. However, the net migration numbers (described below) show that people are taking matters into their own hands, moving to areas that more affordable.

Moving to Smaller Cities and Rural Areas

Over the past five years, the largest cities in Canada — the census metropolitan areas (CMAs, which have populations of more than 100,000)have been losing net internal migrants (people who move from one part of the nation to another) to cities with smaller populations (census agglomerations or CAs, which have urban cores of more than 10,000 but are not large enough to be CMAs) and to areas that are neither CMAs or CAs.

Between 2018 and 2023, according to Statistics Canada (the principal federal government statistics organization), the CMAs lost a net 274,000 internal migrants to the CAs and the areas outside the CMAs and CAs. The smaller CAs, gained 108,000 net internal migrants, while the areas outside the CMAs and CAs gained 166,000. Not only are the largest cities losing net internal migrants to smaller areas, but the areas with the smallest populations, those outside the CMAs and CAs, gained the most, with 61% of the total net internal migration (Figure 1).

The net internal migration loss among the highly urban CMAs was stunning. In the previous five years (2014-2018), the CMAs lost less than 1,000 net internal migrants. This loss was multiplied by more than 350 times, to the loss of 274,000 in 2019-2023. Among the CAs, there was a tripling from 34,000 in 2014-2018 to the current 108,000. Meanwhile, the areas outside the CMAs and CAs, which has much of Canada’s rural population went from a loss of 34,000 to a gain of 166,000, an overall gain of 200,000 (Figure 2).

Total Net Internal Migration Moves: 2004-2023

The change has occurred over a very short period of time and is very substantial. This is illustrated by the total “moves” represented in the net internal migration data. The 273,800 moves during the last five years (2019-2023) are 7.9 times that of the previous five years (2014-2018). This is an increase of 6,900% from the three previous five-year average (2004-2008, 2009-2013 and 2014-2018) total internal migration between the three categories (Figure 3).

Net Internal Migration at the Area Level

The big news is the exodus from metro Toronto. Between 2019 and 2023, Toronto lost 403,000 net internal migrants. Montréal was a distant second at 163,000, while Vancouver lost 50,000. Winnipeg lost 26,000 net internal migrants. (Figure 4).

The biggest gainers were areas outside the Ontario CMAs/CAs at 78,000. Quebec almost equaled this, with a non-CMA/CA gain of 76,000. Calgary gained 43,000, the largest gain among the CMAs. Ottawa-Gatineau, the national capital, which straddles the Ontario-Quebec border gained 37,000. Oshawa, bordering Toronto on the East, gained 35,000, while Edmonton, capital of Alberta, gained 29,000. Victoria, capital of British Columbia, gained 25,000, while St. Catharines-Niagara gained 21,000 (Figure 5).

Halifax led a new trend of net internal migration to the Maritime provinces (Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island), gaining 20,000 net internal migrants (Figure 5). Moncton (now the largest city in New Brunswick), Saint John and Fredericton are also welcoming net internal migration, as well as Charlottetown in Prince Edward Island.

Cost of Living: Driving the Demographics

What is behind this? Certainly, the differing cost of living between all of these areas is a major factor. Moreover, as University of Toronto Professor Richard Florida notes, differences in the cost of living are driven by the cost of housing.

Toronto has seen its income adjusted cost of housing more than double since 2005, under the Places to Grow urban containment policy. There may, however, be good news. A just enacted Ontario law that liberalizes the process for cities to expand their settlement boundaries could, at least to some degree, address the shortage of land for ground-oriented dwellings (detached and town house) and help lower the cost of land. Toronto’s net internal migration has been heavily toward other areas of the province, such as London, Kitchener-Waterloo, Guelph, the Kawartha Lakes, Peterborough, St. Catharines-Niagara, and as noted above, to Ontario areas completely outside of the existing cities. The problem is, however, that these markets did not have enough approved land for development, and house prices have escalated (Figure 6). It is not surprising that people are beginning to move to the Maritimes.

The largest share of the Montréal outmigration has been to the Quebec areas outside CMAs and CAs, two-province CMA of Ottawa-Gatineau Trois-Rivières, Drummondville, Granby, Saguenay, Sainte-Agathe-des-Montsand Sherbrooke.

A similar dynamic is occurring in Vancouver, where the outmigration has been dominated by moves to the Fraser Valley, Kelowna and Kamloops as well as to the Vancouver Island markets of Victoria, Nanaimo and Courtenay . As in Ontario, these markets have been subject to the provincial urban containment policy, and seen substantial losses in housing affordability (Figure 7).

Net Internal Migration at the Provincial Level

During the last five years, the largest net internal migration gains have been in Alberta and British Columbia. Further, all of the Atlantic provinces have had gains (Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland and Labrador. The Yukon also had positive net internal migration.

The largest provincial loss was in Ontario, followed by Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Quebec, Northwest Territories and Nunavut (Figure 8).

Canada: The Need for Making Affordable Land Available

Canadians are fortunate to have desirable places to move where housing is relatively affordable. Regrettably, the destinations of the largest movements of net internal migration — in Ontario outside Toronto and British Columbia outside Vancouver — remain under the provincial land use regulations that have virtually destroyed the competitive market for land. I expect that net internal migration will increasingly be toward the Atlantic and Prairie provinces, as well to principally rural areas across the nation. Without assuring there is a sufficient supply of land, these newer destinations could suffer a similar fate, as Vancouver and Toronto style cost of living crises spread nearly everywhere.

Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy firm located in the St. Louis metropolitan area. He is 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: Moncton (Largest CMA in New Brunswick) via Wikimedia under CC 3.0 License.

Moving Away from Density to Less Dense Detached Housing Areas

Wendell Cox — Wed, 16 Oct 2024 20:28:08 -0400

Further evidence of the continued dispersion of the US population is revealed by an examination of net domestic migration data and types of residences according to the American Community Survey, compared to the annual Census Bureau population estimates from 2020 through 2023.

Despite efforts of urban planners to outlaw single family zoning (detached houses) in some areas and pack families into cramped apartments, demographic date suggests people who move head to counties with more detached housing, not less.

The counties gaining net domestic in-migration had a population weighted average detached housing rate of 69.2%. The counties that had net domestic out-migration had an average detached housing rate of 45.6%. The counties to which people moved had an average detached housing rate 52.6% higher than the counties from which people moved (Figure 1). This is yet another general indication of the increasing suburbanization and exurbanization of the nation. Suburban, exurban and rural areas tend to have higher percentages of detached housing, while urban core locations tend to have large multifamily, especially apartment shares.

The Census Bureau net domestic migration data, indicates that 4.9 million people moved across county borders over the past three years. This means that as a result, the population of the counties with net domestic migration gains increased 9.8 million relative to the counties that lost net domestic migrants. (Figure 2)

Background

In the United States, net domestic migration is reported at the county level each year. A single net figure (“ins” minus “outs”) is provided for each of the more than 3,100 counties. This article compares the single-family (detached) occupied housing share in the counties with positive net domestic migration to the counties that lost net domestic migrants.

Detached housing accounts for 61.4% of residences (per the American Community Survey 2018-2023), and are most common in suburban, exurban and rural areas where population densities are below those of high-density urban cores.

There were 15 states in which the in-migration county detached housing share exceeds that of outmigration counties by the largest margin (Figure 3). This is notable even in highly urbanized, blue states.,Moving New Yorkers are attracted to counties that have an average 256% higher share of detached housing. Movers from Pennsylvania, Idaho and New Jersey were destined to states with a100% or more detached housing share, Movers from Massachusetts, Virginia, Hawaii, Illinois, Rhode Island, Wisconsin, Maryland and Florida have been destined to areas with 50% to 100% greater detached housing share as. Alaska, California and Vermont rounded out the top 15, each above a 40% gain in detached housing share.

There were three states in which the opposite trend was shown, where movers new counties had a lower share of detached housing than where they moved from (Figure 4). These included North Dakota, South Dakota and Iowa. Even so, South Dakota and Iowa had a detached share of housing higher than the national average (61.4%), but below the former residence counties. North Dakota, however, had a lower detached housing share than the national rate. The overall trend remains: people are more likely to move to areas where single family homes predominate.

The table below provides data for the major metropolitan areas.

Similar Research

Other recently released research indicates that internal migration favors counties with lower urban population densities.

Americans Accelerate Move Away From Density showed that among all of the nation’s more than 3,100 counties and county equivalents, those that received net domestic migration between 2020 and 2023, urban densities were 82% lower (1,776 per square mile) than the counties from which there was a net domestic migration loss (9,920 per square mile).

More on the Flight from Density: Within Major Metropolitan Areas found a similar trend between 2020 and 2023 within major metropolitan areas. Counties within major metropolitan areas that gaining net domestic migrants had an average urban density 81% below (2,147 per square mile) that of major metro counties with net domestic migration losses (11,486 per square mile).

What This Means

At the fundamental level, this simply indicates that the trend toward suburbanization has only deepened. The United States has been suburbanizing for a century or more, with significant acceleration occurring following World War II. As the data above indicates, further acceleration has occurred over the last three years.

Photo: The Villages, Florida in the fastest growing CBSA (metropolitan and micropolitan areas) in the nation out of more than 900, between 2020 and 2023 (over 16%). Source: Wikimedia under CC 4.0 License.

Table 1 (Back to reference)

Net Domestic Migration: Gaining & Losing Counties 2023
State/DC	In	Out	Ins Divided by Outs	Rank
Alabama	69.7%	67.8%	2.8%	42
Alaska	82.7%	57.2%	44.7%	13
Arizona	66.7%	61.0%	9.3%	34
Arkansas	71.8%	69.9%	2.7%	44
California	73.0%	51.0%	43.1%	14
Colorado	72.9%	53.1%	37.4%	17
Connecticut	65.2%	56.2%	16.0%	30
Delaware	64.4%
District of Columbia		11.5%
Florida	62.7%	41.5%	50.9%	12
Georgia	76.8%	58.8%	30.6%	18
Hawaii	77.3%	46.5%	66.5%	7
Idaho	75.7%	36.7%	106.1%	3
Illinois	76.4%	47.9%	59.3%	8
Indiana	77.9%	62.9%	23.8%	22
Iowa	70.9%	72.5%	-2.1%	45
Kansas	79.0%	66.1%	19.6%	25
Kentucky	71.8%	62.9%	14.1%	32
Louisiana	72.3%	63.0%	14.8%	31
Maine	70.7%
Maryland	66.1%	43.6%	51.7%	11
Massachusetts	65.9%	35.6%	85.1%	5
Michigan	79.4%	67.6%	17.5%	28
Minnesota	76.8%	55.4%	38.6%	16
Mississippi	73.6%	67.4%	9.3%	35
Missouri	74.0%	60.5%	22.3%	23
Montana	71.7%	69.4%	3.4%	40
Nebraska	79.0%	69.8%	13.2%	33
Nevada	60.6%	58.0%	4.5%	38
New Hampshire	67.0%
New Jersey	71.5%	35.1%	103.4%	4
New Mexico	69.5%	67.0%	3.7%	39
New York	64.4%	18.1%	255.9%	1
North Carolina	69.4%	64.6%	7.5%	36
North Dakota	46.0%	54.5%	-15.6%	47
Ohio	76.0%	60.1%	26.6%	20
Oklahoma	76.7%	73.2%	4.9%	37
Oregon	70.0%	55.8%	25.6%	21
Pennsylvania	65.4%	27.8%	135.6%	2
Rhode Island	71.4%	46.6%	53.2%	9
South Carolina	64.2%	62.4%	2.8%	43
South Dakota	64.5%	70.7%	-8.7%	46
Tennessee	72.0%	60.3%	19.4%	26
Texas	71.3%	59.1%	20.6%	24
Utah	71.9%	61.4%	17.1%	29
Vermont	73.1%	51.2%	42.7%	15
Virginia	78.0%	44.9%	73.8%	6
Washington	69.7%	54.8%	27.0%	19
West Virginia	72.0%	69.8%	3.2%	41
Wisconsin	75.7%	49.8%	52.0%	10
Wyoming	72.5%	61.1%	18.8%	27
All Counties	69.6%	45.6%	52.6%
Derived from ACS data.

Americans Accelerate Move Away from Density

Wendell Cox — Mon, 15 Jul 2024 20:28:38 -0400

For more than 75 years America has been dispersing away from dense urban cores, with nearly all population growth in neighborhoods with a suburban form, whether inside urban core cities (Note 1) or within. This trend could well be accelerating and is now extending into counties that the Census Bureau determined had no urbanization at all in 2020. The trend toward suburbanization has long been opposed by urban planning orthodoxy, and increasingly state governments in California, Oregon, Massachusetts, and the city of Minneapolis. Public officials and key political figures such as California’s last two Governors, Jerry Brown and Gavin Newsom have endorsed policies to increase urban density. The dispersion occurring represents a rejection of that agenda.

In just the first three years of the decade, nearly five million US residents have migrated across county borders, according to US Census Bureau population estimates from July 1, 2020 to July 1, 2023. Each year, the Census Bureau estimates net domestic migration (migrating in minus migrating out), which is measured at the lowest level between counties. Only total net domestic migration is estimated by the Census Bureau, not other characteristics, such as income or race. Further, there are no data for areas within counties, such as cities (except where cities and counties have the same geographic boundaries, such as in Baltimore, Washington, Philadelphia, St. Louis and, of course New York, which consists of five complete counties).

The United States has become an overwhelmingly urban nation, with 80% of the population in urban areas and only 20% in the rural areas (which are all areas outside urban areas). The urban land area covers only 2.9% of the total US land area. At the 2020 Census, 265 million of the 331 million residents were in urban areas, which had a population density is 2,553 per square mile. The rural area population density is a much smaller at 19 per square mile. The 2020 Census was the third that classifies urbanization by the smallest unit of enumeration (census blocks) and as a result, urban areas are independent from all state, county and municipal borders. For example, the Philadelphia urban area is not only in Pennsylvania, but also New Jersey, Delaware and Maryland, while the Cincinnati metropolitan areas is not only in Ohio, but also Kentucky and Indiana. Urban areas are also different than metropolitan areas, with which they all are too frequently confused in academic literature.

Urban Areas

The Census Bureau defines urban areas after each census. Urban density is calculated by dividing the total urban population by the urban land area. In 2020, the average US overall population density was 94 per square mile (including both urban and rural areas). Among counties, the highest urban density is 74,800 in New York County (Manhattan). Of the nation’s about 3,100 counties and county equivalents, more than 1,000 had no urbanization in 2020. Urban density is a useful measure of urban influence at the county level.

It is notable that this net domestic migration has been overwhelmingly away from more intense urbanization — that is from counties with larger urban densities to counties with lower urban densities. Counties with higher urban population densities are often in or near the urban cores of the largest metropolitan areas.

Urban Density Weighted Net Domestic Migration

The relationship between net domestic migration and urban influence is illustrated by a population weighted analysis, which follows (Table).

The counties losing net domestic migrants had a weighted urban population density of 9,920 per square mile, almost four times the national urban density and only 12% below that of the US capital, Washington, all of which is urban (Figure 1).

Among the counties gaining net domestic migrants over the last three years, the population weighted urban density was 1,776 residents per square mile. This is 82% below the weighted urban population density of origin counties and approximately 30% below the national average urban density. This includes 224 counties that had no urbanization in 2020, which have gained 211,000.

The largest non-urban county gains were within generally within hybrid work commuting distance to larger metropolitan areas. For example, the largest gain was more than 5,000 net domestic migrants in Van Zandt County, which is to the southeast of Dallas-Fort Worth (photo above). Levy County, Florida gained more than 4,000 net domestic migrants and is located within hybrid commuting distance of Tampa-St. Petersburg and Orlando. Union County, Georgia gained more than 3,000 net domestic migrants and is within 2.5 hours of Atlanta, Chattanooga, TN and Greenville, SC, all of which could be comfortably reached for a remote worked needed in the office only a day or two per month.

Among the 46 states that had both gaining and losing counties, 37 had lower density net domestic destinations. In nine states, migrants from counties moved to higher urban densities, though only three moved to counties with higher than average urban densities (Nevada, 48% above, Arizona, 10% above and North Dakota 3% above).

New York out migrants had by far the greatest decline in urban densities, moving from an urban density of 33,900 moving to counties of just 1,800. This is indicative of the massive recent New York City outmigration. New York net domestic migration destinations had 95% lower urban densities than origins (Figure 2).

Significantly, migrants from states with strong densification programs (urban containment, compact city policy and infill requirements) generally moved to counties with lower urban densities, such as Colorado (45%) Washington (50%), Oregon and California (53%), Hawaii (69%) and New Jersey (73%).

US Urbanization: Preferences Rule

An economist colleague of mine often suggests that “preferences trump policies.” There is probably no better example than the historic rejection by people of higher densities, and the migration to lower densities, with their lower costs, greater space (inside and out) and comfort. Of course, some people prefer higher densities, but their numbers fall far short of a majority, essentially constituting a relatively small niche.

But as our City Sector Model has shown, even before the pandemic, 85.8% of US major metropolitan area residents lived in areas that are suburban in form (regardless of whether they are in core municipalities) rather than urban core in form. This is by no means limited to the United States. For example, in Canada (75.9%) and Australia (77.6%), the suburban share of major metropolitan areas population is reported to be only slightly below that of the United States (Figure 3) This is despite the fact that in both countries, anti-suburban policies have been far more comprehensive than in the United States. Additionally, our sample of 18 major world urban areas, both in the more developed and less developed, more than 95% of urban growth was in suburban areas between the 1950s and 2020s.

Meanwhile, the preference for suburban, and even rural living has become even stronger in the United States, and it seems that planning policies have been unable to stem the tide.

Photo: 2010 Larry D. Moore, via Wikimedia under CC BY 4.0 license.

Notes: (back to reference)

Note 1: Many urban core cities have broad expanses of post World War II suburbanization, such as Phoenix, Austin, Dallas, Houston, Memphis, Nashville, Columbus, Indianapolis, Kansas City, Los Angeles, San Diego, Sacramento, San Jose, Las Vegas, Charlotte, Raleigh, Jacksonville and Orlando.

Note 2: Connecticut is not included in this analysis. There is no data because of its post-2020 geographical county reconfiguration.

Table (back to reference)

Urban Population Density: Domestic Migration 2020-2023
County Gains or Losses by State/DC
Population per Square Mile
State/DC	Net Domestic Migration: Gain	Net Domestic Migration: Loss	Difference	Percentage Difference
Alabama	1,210	1,382	(172)	-12.5%
Alaska	868	1,587	(719)	-45.3%
Arizona	2,812	1,726	1,087	63.0%
Arkansas	1,372	1,192	180	15.1%
California	3,188	6,726	(3,538)	-52.6%
Colorado	2,365	4,278	(1,912)	-44.7%
Connecticut
Delaware	1,306
District of Columbia		11,281
Florida	1,803	5,994	(4,191)	-69.9%
Georgia	1,102	2,307	(1,206)	-52.3%
Hawaii	1,602	5,191	(3,589)	-69.1%
Idaho	2,225	4,355	(2,129)	-48.9%
Illinois	1,979	4,883	(2,903)	-59.5%
Indiana	1,770	2,436	(666)	-27.3%
Iowa	2,043	1,842	201	10.9%
Kansas	1,536	1,810	(274)	-15.1%
Kentucky	1,217	2,505	(1,288)	-51.4%
Louisiana	1,245	2,589	(1,344)	-51.9%
Maine	1,072
Maryland	1,916	4,045	(2,130)	-52.6%
Massachusetts	1,409	7,080	(5,671)	-80.1%
Michigan	982	2,810	(1,828)	-65.1%
Minnesota	1,482	3,275	(1,793)	-54.7%
Mississippi	1,133	1,260	(127)	-10.0%
Missouri	1,412	3,346	(1,934)	-57.8%
Montana	1,484	451	1,034	229.3%
Nebraska	2,003	2,562	(559)	-21.8%
Nevada	3,784	1,172	2,612	222.8%
New Hampshire	1,125
New Jersey	2,162	8,026	(5,864)	-73.1%
New Mexico	1,855	2,289	(434)	-19.0%
New York	1,789	33,674	(31,885)	-94.7%
North Carolina	1,256	1,532	(277)	-18.0%
North Dakota	2,634	1,413	1,221	86.5%
Ohio	1,800	2,879	(1,079)	-37.5%
Oklahoma	1,507	1,852	(346)	-18.7%
Oregon	2,255	4,814	(2,559)	-53.2%
Pennsylvania	1,823	8,458	(6,636)	-78.5%
Rhode Island	1,851	3,454	(1,603)	-46.4%
South Carolina	1,399	829	569	68.7%
South Dakota	1,950	806	1,144	142.0%
Tennessee	1,215	2,301	(1,085)	-47.2%
Texas	2,161	3,202	(1,041)	-32.5%
Utah	2,619	3,830	(1,211)	-31.6%
Vermont	1,027	1,842	(816)	-44.3%
Virginia	1,237	4,576	(3,340)	-73.0%
Washington	1,982	3,952	(1,970)	-49.9%
West Virginia	1,094	952	142	14.9%
Wisconsin	1,167	3,767	(2,599)	-69.0%
Wyoming	1,176	2,314	(1,137)	-49.2%
UNITED STATES	1,776	9,920	(8,144)	-82.1%
Connecticut excluded due to reconfiguration of counties (see text).
Derived from US Census Bureau data