Like I said Many times ! The city is the last place you wanna be when the poop hits the fan , especially during a time of civil unrest
The great metro shrinkage is part of a larger demographic story. Last year, the U.S. growth rate fell to a record low. The major drivers of population—migration and births—declined, while deaths soared in the pandemic. But America’s largest cities are getting the worst of this national trend. In the past three years, the net number of moves out of Manhattan has increased tenfold. In every urban county within the metros of New York City, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, immigration declined by at least 50 percent from 2018 to 2021. In downtown Detroit and Long Island, deaths actually exceeded births last year.
The great metro shrinkage also appears to be part of a broader cultural story: The rise of remote work has snipped the tether between home and office, allowing many white-collar workers to move out of high-cost cities. Nearly 5 million Americans have moved since 2020 because of remote-work opportunities, according to Adam Ozimek, the chief economist for the Economic Innovation Group, a think tank in Washington, D.C.
Historically, shrinking cities and towns have major economic and cultural problems. But something pretty strange is happening in America’s biggest metros: Their housing markets aren’t suffering the way you’d expect. In fact, rents and housing prices are going up in almost all of these metros. In the past year, rents rose 33 percent in New York City, 16 percent in Los Angeles, and 12 percent in Chicago. Since the pandemic, rents are up in every city on the above list, except for San Francisco.
Pop quiz: What do the metros of New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami, Boston, Seattle, San Francisco, San Diego, Minneapolis–St. Paul, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., have in common?
They are all among the 20 largest metropolitan areas in the country. All of their populations were growing in 2011. And then, in 2021, they all shrank by a combined 900,000 people, according to an analysis of census data by the Brookings scholar William Frey. That’s an urban exodus nearly the size of two Wyomings.
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The great metro shrinkage is part of a larger demographic story. Last year, the U.S. growth rate fell to a record low. The major drivers of population—migration and births—declined, while deaths soared in the pandemic. But America’s largest cities are getting the worst of this national trend. In the past three years, the net number of moves out of Manhattan has increased tenfold. In every urban county within the metros of New York City, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, immigration declined by at least 50 percent from 2018 to 2021. In downtown Detroit and Long Island, deaths actually exceeded births last year.
The great metro shrinkage also appears to be part of a broader cultural story: The rise of remote work has snipped the tether between home and office, allowing many white-collar workers to move out of high-cost cities. Nearly 5 million Americans have moved since 2020 because of remote-work opportunities, according to Adam Ozimek, the chief economist for the Economic Innovation Group, a think tank in Washington, D.C.
Historically, shrinking cities and towns have major economic and cultural problems. But something pretty strange is happening in America’s biggest metros: Their housing markets aren’t suffering the way you’d expect. In fact, rents and housing prices are going up in almost all of these metros. In the past year, rents rose 33 percent in New York City, 16 percent in Los Angeles, and 12 percent in Chicago. Since the pandemic, rents are up in every city on the above list, except for San Francisco.
So what we have here is a bit of an urban mystery. If America’s biggest metros are shrinking, why are their housing markets on fire? And if rents are rising in almost all of these cities, how can they possibly be shrinking?
There are a few possible answers. One is that the census data are just wrong. For example, the government may have failed to count families that have been moving around during COVID waves, taking extended breaks from their city apartments without actually abandoning them. Or maybe the census took an accurate snapshot of city-population levels in 2021 but hasn’t yet caught up to people surging back into America’s biggest cities in the past few months, creating yet another great urban renewal. In these scenarios, many places that looked imperiled during the data-collection process are actually
