Author Richard Florida cites an interesting statistic.
While many, if not most, large cities grew faster than their suburbs between 2000 and 2015, in the last two years the suburbs outgrew cities in two-thirds of America’s large metropolitan areas, according to a detailed analysis of the latest census data by the demographer William Frey of the Brookings Institution.In other words, as soon as the economy turned up, people started heading for the 'burbs and beyond. To what does Florida attribute the change?
Several factors have come together to potentially stymie the urban revival. Foremost is a recent uptick in violent crime. There would have been no urban revival without the sharp declines in violent crime in the 1990s brought on by demographic shifts, more effective policing and other factors.SJWs moaned about "broken window" and "stop and frisk" policing being discriminatory but those behaviors contributed to sharply lower crime rates. When they got the practices banned, murderous crime exploded, especially in places like Chicago and Baltimore.
And, of course, the most desirable cities have become incredibly expensive places to live. In the Bay Area and Los Angeles, the average home costs more than 10 times the average income; in New York, Washington, Seattle, Denver, Miami and Portland, Ore., it’s more than five times. The median cost to rent an apartment in parts of the Bay Area and Los Angeles is as much as $10,000 a month; in many areas of Lower Manhattan, the median rent per 1,000 square feet exceeds $5,000 a month.But here's the real bottom-line answer, which to his credit Florida includes, although it gives him no joy:
Two-thirds of people born since 1997, including those who live in cities, want to live in single-family suburban homes, according to a 2015 survey, but the costs make this aspiration prohibitively expensive in most urban centers.Translation: two-thirds of Americans prefer low density, which isn't available in urban areas. I'm with them.
