John Cochrane has a very good post explaining why the cities that are prospering the most haven’t grown in population:
Lots of people in a democracy vote their interest, despite their professed ideology. There is plenty of hypocrisy on all sides. People of achingly progressive sensibilities vote for housing policies that keep the unwashed out, drive up long commutes, carbon emissions, and inequality. My neighborhood is full of these charming signs:
(the sign, in graphic form, reads “No matter where you are from, we’re glad you’re our neighbor.”)
If I were not polite, I would add a sticker that says, “as long as you have the $3 million bucks it takes to live here. If not, get out.” (Many of the same houses also have signs protesting a local school expansion, which might, well, attract people.)
This is in stark contrast with the boomtowns of the 19th century. When the economy was booming, the cities grew, too.
The converse, however, is not true. Cities that aren’t prospering are shrinking.
Today the cities that are growing are not those where wages are rising rapidly. They are those that allow growth.
There’s a problem with their analysis – it uses 2000, the peak of the dot-com boom – as the basis. Plus we already know that wages have not grown much since 2000 across the country.
Query- I was offered a job in Texas that I almost took many years ago. The real estate people there showed us a lot of fairly expensive homes. They were all in areas with other expensive homes. Is there any place in the country where they are building new expensive homes right next to new cheap housing? Cochrane goes after progressives for doing this, so apparently everyone else must be building their McMansions right next to trailer parks. I was unaware that they were doing this. Awfully altruistic of them.
Back on topic, small towns in the NE and Midwest also did not see growth (they got smaller). I seriously doubt that is due to zoning issues. Maybe if the US had a large demographic group that wanted to move someplace warm when they retire, we could explain a lot of this.
https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2017/cb17-81-population-estimates-subcounty.html
Steve