Urban Issues

Massive Shift from Urban Cores to Suburbs and Elsewhere

Wendell Cox — Tue, 09 Apr 2024 20:28:58 -0400

Moving Away from the Major Metros: The recent Census Bureau population estimates release revealed a massive shift of domestic migrants away from the major metropolitan areas (the 56 with more than 1,000,000 population) to the rest of the nation. In just three years (2021 through 2023), the major metros lost 1,920,000 net domestic migrants to other places .Relative to the 1.92 million gain outside the major metros, the major metro loss of 1.92 million was 3.84 million relative to the gain outside the major metros. This rising “net migration gap” is illustrated in Figure 1. By comparison in the first three years of the last decade (2011-2013), the major metros gained 352,000 net domestic migrants, indicating a drop of 2.27 million relative to 2021-3.

Moving from the Urban Cores to the Suburbs and Beyond: There has also been a significant change in net domestic migration from the major metro urban core counties within the major metros. The urban core counties include the city hall of the core municipality (Note), with the exception of New York, where all five of the city’s counties are considered urban core counties. People are migrating out of urban core counties at a considerably higher rate, while suburban counties are gaining net domestic migrants (overall).

Net domestic outmigration from the urban core counties was 2.6 million from 2021 to 2023. This is nearly equal to the 2.7 million for the entire 2011-2020 decade. Further, urban core net domestic migration was offset somewhat by major metro suburbs (75%) in the 2010s (Figure 2). But this phenomenon seems to have stalled. By 2021-2023 net domestic migration was only 27% to major metro suburbs (Figure 3)

Major Metropolitan Areas Summary: Designated based upon commuting data by the Office of Management and Budget, metropolitan areas are composed of complete counties. The latest delineation of counties within metropolitan areas was in July 2023.

Overall, the 56 major metropolitan areas accounted for 56.8% of the nation’s population in 2023, with 43.2% outside the major metropolitan areas. Detailed population and domestic migration data is in the Table, which includes all 56 metropolitan areas with at least 1,000,000 residents in the 2020 census.

Major Metropolitan Areas — Notable Recent Changes: Some counties were removed in July 2023 from major metropolitan areas, as working from home reduced the number of commuters crossing into interior counties from more remote counties. These areas are no longer suburbs or even exurbs of large metro areas.

Two of those metropolitan areas have fallen below 1,000,000 population since then, including Honolulu and New Orleans. The population reduction in New Orleans was principally the result of removing St. Tammany Parish (county) to become its own metropolitan area (Slidell, LA).

Further, Pike County, Pennsylvania was removed from the New York metropolitan area, reducing that metropolitan area to two states, New York, and New Jersey.

The Chicago metropolitan area lost Kenosha County, Wisconsin, the only part of Wisconsin that had been included in the Chicago metro.

The Top 15 Major Metropolitan Areas: 2021 to 2023: The largest net domestic migration loss over the past three years (2021-2023) was in the New York metropolitan area, which fell by 910,000. Most of this loss occurred within the urban core (the five boroughs of New York), with a net 689,000 moving away. While the suburbs lost 221,000.

Overall, the New York metro lost 492,000 residents, including net domestic migrants, natural increase (births minus deaths) and net international migration.
The Los Angeles metropolitan area lost 554,000 net domestic migrants, of which 457,000 left the urban core, while the suburban loss was 96,000. The overall population loss was 379,000.
The Chicago metropolitan area lost 290,000 net domestic migrants, of which 247,000 left the urban core. The suburban loss was 43,000. The overall population loss was 173,000.
The Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area gained 214,000 net domestic migrants, though the urban core lost 95,0000. The suburban gain was 309,000. The overall population gain was 434,000, which narrowed the gap with third ranked Chicago by 419,000. The Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area now trails Chicago by 1,150,000.
The Houston metropolitan area gained 103,000 net domestic migrants, though the urban core lost 83,000. The suburban gain was 186,000. Overall, the Houston metro gained 342,000 residents.
The Atlanta metropolitan area has become the sixth largest in the nation. Metro Atlanta gained 69,000 net domestic migrants, though the urban core lost 13,000. The suburban gain was 82,000. Overall, Atlanta gained 198,000 residents.
The Washington metropolitan area had a net domestic migration loss of 158,000 net domestic migrants, and the urban core lost 13,000. The suburban loss was 143,000. Overall, Washington gained 45,000 residents.
The Philadelphia metropolitan area had a net domestic migration loss of 52,000 and the urban core lost 78,000, while the suburbs gained 25,000. Overall, Philadelphia gained 4,000 residents.
The Miami metropolitan area had a net domestic migration loss of 147,000 and the urban core lost 127,000. The suburban counties lost 20,000. Overall, Miami gained 50,000 residents, due to a large net international migration.
The 10th ranked Phoenix metropolitan area had a net domestic gain of 129,000 and the urban core gained 78,000. The suburbs gained 51,000. Overall, Phoenix gained 195,000 residents. The urban core county, Maricopa, is largely suburban in form, giving it the capacity to attract domestic migrants by virtue of its large land supply.
The Boston metropolitan area had a net domestic migration loss of 128,000 and the urban core lost 60,000. The suburbs lost 68,000. Overall, Boston lost 15,000 residents.
The Riverside-San Bernardino metropolitan area had a net domestic migration gain of 49,000 and the urban core lost 17,000. The suburbs gained 67,000. Riverside-San Bernardino passed San Francisco during the 2010s to become California’s second largest metropolitan area. Overall, Riverside-San Bernardino gained 82,000 residents.
The San Francisco metropolitan area had a net domestic migration loss of 270,000 and the urban core lost 73,000. The suburbs lost 197,000. Overall, San Francisco metro lost 174,000 residents.
The Detroit metropolitan area had a net domestic migration loss of 270,000 and the urban core lost 73,000. The suburbs lost 18,000. Overall, Detroit lost 43,000 residents.
The Seattle metropolitan area had a net domestic migration loss of 87,000 . The urban core lost 74,000. The suburbs lost 12,000. Overall, Seattle gained 17,000 residents due to strong net international migration.

Among the 15 largest metropolitan areas, only five gained net domestic migrants in the years from 2021 to 2023 (Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, Atlanta, Phoenix, and Riverside-San Bernardino). Only one of the 15 largest metropolitan areas had a core county net domestic migration increase (Phoenix). Finally, only six of the top 15 metropolitan areas gained suburban net domestic migration: Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Phoenix, and Riverside-San Bernardino. Philadelphia is particularly surprising, being the only among the top 15 outside the South and outside comparatively the Phoenix and Riverside-San Bernardino metros, which have gained substantially from the flood of outmigration from the Los Angeles metros.

(back to reference)

Note: The core municipality is the historical core municipality (https://www.newgeography.com/content/002401-suburbanized-core-cities) which the original metropolitan area was delineated. This is generally the largest municipality in the metropolitan area, except in Riverside-San Bernardino, where San Bernardino County is the urban core county and Virginia Beach-Norfolk, where the urban core county is the independent city of Norfolk.

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: aerial view of urban core of Phoenix, Arizona; the only one of top 15 metros with an urban core gain from 2020 to 2023. Via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

Table 1 (back to reference)

View/download spreadsheet

NYC Must Stop Destroying Its Institutions

Samuel J Abrams — Thu, 04 Apr 2024 20:28:58 -0400

Due to budget concerns, New York City Mayor Eric Adams proposed cuts to the New York City public library budgets, forcing the majority of public libraries to cut their hours and open only five days a week. Public libraries in the city, since November, have already been closed on Sundays to offset the surging cost of the local migrant crisis. These moves show how intent the mayor is on driving people away from important third spaces—and even away from the city itself.

I recently had the chance to chat with a handful of families who left New York and settled in the Yardley, Pennsylvania area over the past 18 months or so. Some still worked in New York and commuted occasionally, while others were remote or found jobs elsewhere. Although their professional tracks and life stages were all a bit different—some had young children, others had adult children, and some had no children—each family appeared extremely relieved to have left New York.

The former New Yorkers loved the city and never thought they would leave. Yet, life had become untenable since the pandemic. They cited their concerns about corruption and partisanship, as well as concerns with public safety, policing, and unending taxation and climbing charges. It was hard for me to argue with them; the city’s streets are dirty and in disrepair, the city feels unsafe and chaotic, violence and disruption have become commonplace, all the while, costs are skyrocketing, and congestion zones and failing public transit have made moving around the city even harder. The public school system is seeing a shortage in space, the city is not protecting property and ownership rights, and businesses are struggling because they cannot protect their goods from unending crime.

These new Pennsylvanians are not exceptions. Census data shows that in 2023, New York City lost almost 78,000 residents, shrinking its population to 8.26 million people. This is on top of the city losing more than 126,000 residents in 2022 after the pandemic ended. New survey data from the Citizen Budget Commission of 6,600 New Yorkers reveals that just 30 percent of New Yorkers think the quality of life in the city is good and only 50 percent plan on staying in the city in the next four years. Over the past six years, the Commission found that only 30 percent of New Yorkers rated the quality of life in the city as “excellent” or “good,” down from 50 percent in 2017. Just 49 percent of New Yorkers said that they felt safe riding the subway during the day, a stark drop from the 82 percent who reported feeling safe in 2017.

The reasons for leaving offered in the survey match my informal sample—New Yorkers feel notably more unsafe in the city in today than they did six years earlier. Residents are unsatisfied with many public services, public education, the cleanliness of their neighborhoods, and the traffic. Sadly, I have seen random assaults on the streets, know families who have had their homes invaded, and a teacher in my children’s school was randomly pushed onto the subway tracks resulting in multiple surgeries and missing half a year of work.

New York is letting its institutions—which not only promote law and order, but stability and investment—disintegrate, and we are seeing the consequences. What must be understood here is that this decline is a matter of bad public policies, poor governance, and incorrect choices, not a pandemic. The city must pause and strategically think about how to shore up its institutions and stop destroying them or its numbers will continue to drop.

Read the rest of this piece at AEI.

Samuel J. Abrams is a profesor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

Photo: Ajay Suresh, via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

CSY Opinion Piece In Crain's Chicago Business

Pete Saunders — Tue, 02 Apr 2024 20:28:58 -0400

(Note: Last week I was fortunate enough to have an opinion piece written by Ed Zotti and myself published in Crain's Chicago Business. It's on the continuing loss of Chicago's Black middle class, at least as defined by its ability to attract Black college graduates. The article is behind a paywall, but as a co-author I took the liberty of posting it here. It's a theme I've written extensively about, and Chicago's not the only city or metro to experience this. However, I think Chicago's (and other Rust Belt cities) particular brand of segregation is an under-recognized feature that holds them back. Please take a look. -Pete)

Opinion: Chicago needs to attract more Black talent. Right now, we're not even trying.

Crain's Chicago Business, March 21, 2024

The past few years have seen much handwringing about the supposedly dire state of Black America, with one local business leader warning that "without significant intervention, Black people will become a permanent underclass."

We beg to differ. We're well aware of the challenges Black Americans face. But the alarmist talk ignores the substantial progress that has been made and perpetuates the myth that Black people are doomed victims incapable of helping themselves.

That's nonsense. Our analysis of the latest Census Bureau data for the 10 U.S. metropolitan areas with the largest Black populations clearly shows that, in many regions, Black Americans have built strong middle-class communities that collectively are home to millions of people.

Granted, we found wide variation. Pessimism in the Midwest surely stems from the fact that Chicago and Detroit — where one of us, Pete Saunders, grew up — are at the bottom of the list on important metrics such as Black income growth, education, geographical mobility and integration. That's because huge numbers of middle-class Black Chicagoans have bailed for other parts of the country and we're not attracting enough ambitious newcomers to replace them.

Why not? Other cities have become magnets for the Black middle class and are booming as a result. Chicago has had no difficulty attracting people of other ethnicities. Setting aside fluctuations due to the pandemic, if the number of Black residents was increasing at the same rate as the rest of the city, the overall population would be growing rather than flat, and the Black community would get a much-needed boost.

That's not happening now, but we don't see that as cause for despair. On the contrary, the fact that other cities are far ahead of us shows the problems of Black Chicago can be solved — but only if we understand why we're so far behind and decide to do something about it.

Some important findings from our research:

More Black people have left the Chicago region than any other U.S. metro except New York. For decades, Black people have been moving back to the South from elsewhere in the U.S., a phenomenon demographers have termed the New Great Migration. Many of these people have come from Chicago. Our calculations suggest the area experienced net out-migration of 857,000 Black people between 1980 and 2022, more than any other metropolitan area except New York, which lost just over a million, and New York is a much larger place.

The majority of those departing were, or went on to become, middle class. We calculate that, had no Black migration occurred, the number of Black people living in middle-income communities in metro Chicago would have grown to 1.2 million by now. Instead, the number has fallen to 746,000. Chicago is one of only two of the top 10 metros to have experienced a decline in middle-income Black residents since 1980. The other is Los Angeles.

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: Justin Brown, via Flickr under CC 2.0 License

Europe More "Auto-Dependent" Than U.S.

Randal OToole — Sun, 31 Mar 2024 20:28:58 -0400

Before the pandemic, Europeans relied on automobiles for 70 percent of their travel, compared with 77 percent for U.S. residents. But after the pandemic, in 2021, the European share of passenger travel that used automobiles climbed to 80 percent, while the U.S. share increased only to 78 percent (and dropped to 74 percent in 2022), according to a recently released report from the European Union. That means that Europe is more auto-dependent than the U.S.

Although the report is labeled “2023,” it actually was released in late January 2024 and includes data through 2021. The title of the report is “key figures,” which is literally true: it consists almost solely of figures as in charts, with little or no actual data. However, the charts are clear and can be read to the nearest percent or so. Meanwhile, National Transportation Statistics table 1-40 shows the share of passenger travel in the United States that relies on autos, airplanes, rail, and other modes.

Mode Shares by Country

I added lines corresponding to 80, 85, 90, and 95 percent to help estimate mode shares. See the second page of the report for the counties that correspond to the two-letter codes shown on this chart.

Page 13 of the European report breaks down transport shares for each member of the European Union. Although they are not members, Norway and Switzerland (CH) are also included, but the United Kingdom has been spitefully deleted. In any case, about half the members of the EU rely on autos for a greater share of passenger travel than the U.S. These include Germany, Belgium, Poland, Finland, and non-member Norway. The only countries that are significantly less dependent on autos than the U.S. are Austria, Croatia, and Hungary.

Of course, I prefer to use the term “auto liberated” rather than auto dependent as liberation better reflects the actual benefits of auto ownership. Autos give people better access to jobs, quality housing, lower-cost consumer goods, and other economic and social benefits than any other form of urban travel.

Despite many European countries spending billions on high-speed rail, rail’s share of travel declined from about 8 percent before the pandemic to about 6 percent in 2021. In the U.S., counting both urban and intercity rail, it went from 0.6 percent in 2019 to 0.25 percent in 2021, recovering to 0.4 percent in 2022. While rail’s share is insignificant in the U.S., it is not very important in Europe either.

Switzerland hasn’t built any high-speed rail yet it relies on rail for more of its passenger travel than any other European country, about 13 percent. Spain has built more high-speed rail than any European country, yet rail’s share there is less than 5 percent. Austria is 8 percent. France, with the second-most high-speed rail, is around 7 percent as is the Netherlands. Every other country appears to be less than 7 percent. (Keep in mind these shares include both intercity and urban rail.)

Read the rest of this piece 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: Screenshot of report cover.

Is There an Urban Future?

Joel Kotkin — Fri, 22 Mar 2024 20:28:58 -0400

Talk of the future of (some) cities these days can bring out the pessimists, who warn of an “urban doom loop.” Yet just as the urbanistas overestimated the “back to the city” movement, they also may be underestimating the possibilities for an urban resurgence.

Cities can achieve a rebirth, but only if they make two critical realizations. One, they have to see their primary challenge as making themselves attractive to middle-class families, upwardly mobile immigrants, and entrepreneurs. Second, they have to redirect their efforts away from the giant steel-and-glass downtown towers that have much less to justify themselves than in the past and instead turn their attention to cultivating the richness of urban neighborhoods.

At the very least, this requires expunging the myth that big cities, particularly their dense cores, possessed an unchallengeable hold on the future. In 2018, Neil Irwin of the New York Times argued that where “a small number of superstar companies choose to locate” would dominate the economic future, leaving the spaces between them as desolate flyover zones thinly populated by society’s losers.

The Office Disaster

If that was ever the case, it is not now. Virtually every major downtown in America, including San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, Los Angeles, and New York, is suffering from record levels of vacancy, with downtown street traffic in some cities down by 30 to 40 percent since 2019. In San Francisco, some 100 downtown businesses have closed, and nearby Union Square has lost roughly half its tenants.

Some hope that the fanciest class-A buildings will recover, but the overall picture is dismal indeed, as evidenced by Blackstone’s decision to sell a prestigious Broadway tower at half price. If we face another financial crisis, downtown real estate — bad commercial real-estate loans are now larger than loss reserves of the largest U.S. banks — will likely stand at the core of it. Faced with a credit crunch worse than during the financial crisis, the vast majority of real-estate investors, notes Bloomberg, believe the office market is destined for a steep crash.

Read the rest of this piece at National Review.

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. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

Photo: Marco Verch via, Flickr, under CC 2.0 License.

Rethinking the Housing Affordability Crisis, Part 3

Pete Saunders — Tue, 19 Mar 2024 20:28:58 -0400

Back in 2018, I attended and participated in an event called “Tools Toward Market Restoration”, hosted by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. The event was held in Detroit. At the event I got a chance to meet Richard Rothstein, author of The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, a fantastic book about government-sponsored segregation in America. The book garnered quite a bit of attention at the time for reintroducing the phrase “redlining” to the public, but truly explored all of the segregation tactics (racial covenants, public housing policy, urban renewal, Interstate highway development, white flight, blockbusting, and mob violence, among others) utilized in this country. It’s a wonderful book that blows up the myth of any distinction between de jure and de facto segregation – each type feeds the other.

Following Rothstein’s presentation I remember asking him if he thought cities that were deeply segregated like Detroit had suffered most acutely from segregationist policies and actions. When he said no, the nation’s been impacted equally, I disagreed. My thinking was that certainly places that were on the front line of divisive policies, such as mid-century manufacturing centers like Detroit, bore the brunt. Intuitively, I reasoned that segregation was an exercise in property depreciation for some, but property appreciation for others.

Turns out that we were both right. Cities like Detroit did suffer far more from deep segregation as the nationwide decline in manufacturing took hold in the 1970’s and beyond. But all cities suffered because all levels of government, the real estate industry and homebuyers and renters all employed the same practices to maximize value. And all of us are paying for it as a result.

In the last entry into this series, I wrote about Yonah Freemark’s study of upzoning's impact on Chicago property values from a few years ago. He found that the act of upzoning and any resulting new housing construction could produce a short-term boost in property values, rather than a decline, because property owners see an opportunity to recoup their investment. There’s even a name for it – housing exuberance.

But if we want to place blame on NIMBYism (Not-In-My-Back-Yard) for today’s affordable housing crisis, I suggest starting with studying the OG of NIMBYism causes, Black/White segregation in American cities.

How NIMBYism became learned behavior

Brookings Institution Senior Fellow Andre Perry has done exactly that. Perry has written extensively about the devaluation of homes in majority Black neighborhoods across the country. In a study he conducted in 2018, Perry found that home values in neighborhoods with a Black population of 50 percent or more were valued at 50 percent less than homes with few or no Black residents. When adjusted for homes of similar quality and amenities, Perry found that homes are still worth 23 percent less in majority Black neighborhoods, or about $48,000 per home on average, when compared to neighborhoods with few or no Black residents.

When Perry’s study was published, he estimated that the cumulative loss of wealth to Black homeowners was about $156 billion. Perry noted that the study found “a positive and statistically significant correlation between the devaluation of homes in Black neighborhoods and upward mobility of Black children in metropolitan areas with majority Black neighborhoods.”

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

Photo: courtesy Corner Side Yard Blog

Toronto Falls Into Pit of Urban Decline that's Plagued U.S. Cities

Joel Kotkin — Mon, 18 Mar 2024 20:28:58 -0400

For years, American urbanists and city planners have looked at Canadian cities with envy, as they had managed to avoid the searing decline of their American counterparts. And Toronto was where the late Jane Jacobs chose to make her home, largely due to her enthusiasm for urban neighbourhoods.

But more recently, the Greater Toronto Area has been showing signs of the urban ills that are commonly associated with city life south of the border. Carjackings, for example, have boomed; one recent victim was Maple Leafs star Mitch Marner.

Last year, CTV reported that downtown infrastructure has been deteriorating, as have cleanliness and order, which were once the city’s strong suits. Thomas Caldwell, chairman of Caldwell Investment Management Ltd. and former governor of the Toronto Stock Exchange, took out an ad in the Globe and Mail last fall describing Toronto as a “declining city.” Even with the pandemic gone, Toronto restaurants have reported declining customers for in-person dining.

Toronto’s downtown malaise, which is mirrored in other Canadian cities, reflects in part the accelerating decline of what Jean Gottman once called the “transactional city” — a place defined largely by high rise offices. In the United States, office occupancy has been declining since the turn of the century.

This crisis has been made worse by planning policies, which are common throughout Canada’s largest cities, that limit suburban growth, the normal way cities have long expanded. Seeking to squelch the development of new single family homes, planners have targeted the aspirations of Canada’s young families. This has had two unintended effects: making housing in and near the city more expensive; and, ironically, chasing people even further away to the far fringes of the region and beyond.

According to Demographia’s 2023 survey of 94 major housing markets around the world, Toronto was the 10th least affordable. The region’s price-to-income ratio (“median multiple”) has increased from 5.2 in 2010, to 9.5 today, making Toronto more expensive than virtually any American city outside California and Hawaii.

For its part, Vancouver had the third-worst median multiple according to Demographia’s survey, trailing only Hong Kong and Sydney. Vancouver’s price-to-income ratio has increased from 5.3 in 2005 to 12 in 2023. Imagine this: Vancouver is pricier than London, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Chicago.

Read the rest of this piece at National Post.

Photo: Toronto Views, via Flickr, under CC 2.0 License.

Transit Carries 74% of 2019 Riders in January

Randal OToole — Sun, 17 Mar 2024 20:28:58 -0400

Driving and flying have been hovering around 100 percent of pre-pandemic levels for the last year and Amtrak has been around 100 percent for the last six months, but transit is still stuck at just below 75 percent, according to monthly data released by the Federal Transit Administration yesterday. Transit first reached 73 percent last March and 74 percent in September, and even exceeded 75 percent in November (a month that had more business days in 2023 than 2019), but it doesn’t look like it will get significantly above 75 percent for a long time.

The results vary by urban area, of course. Above-average areas include New York (80.5%), Miami (90.5%), Washington (80.6%), San Diego (80.6%), Tampa-St. Petersburg (83.4%), Las Vegas (83.6%), Cincinnati (96.7%), Austin (82.8%), and Richmond (113.1%). Remaining well below average are Chicago (62.6%), Atlanta (53.0%), Boston (62.0%), Detroit (54.7%), Phoenix (50.4%), San Francisco-Oakland (59.0%), St. Louis (58.6%), Pittsburgh (54.5%), and Jacksonville (56.9%).

Any transit agency planning major improvements needs to reduce its forecasts to account for post-pandemic changes in travel patterns. That means, at the very least, that if an agency has recently been carrying 75 percent of pre-pandemic numbers, all ridership forecasts should be reduced by 25 percent. Much better would be if agencies recognize that the urban areas they serve are no longer monocentric and completely redesign their transit networks to serve multiple economic centers.

Transit has not fully recovered from the pandemic largely because so many people are working from home and such remote working had impacted transit more than driving. This is true for two reasons: first, a high percentage of pre-pandemic transit riders were downtown office workers and these are the most likely people to have shifted to working from home. Second, many transit riders before the pandemic were using transit to avoid congestion, but increased telecommuting has reduced congestion allowing more people who don’t work at home to drive to work.

The latest data on remote working indicates that, on any given day in January, about 29 percent of people were working from home. These data were collected using an on-line survey and the researchers who collected them admit that the survey may undercount people who only have high school diplomas or are otherwise less tech-savvy.
Whether the exact number is 29 percent or a little less, what remains important is that the share working from home in monthly surveys has hovered around 29 percent since at least August of 2022, suggesting that it is not going to change significantly in the future. This in turn means that transit ridership isn’t going to change significantly either.

Unfortunately, neither of those are likely to happen anytime soon. With billions of dollars to give away, the Federal Transit Administration doesn’t even seriously care what ridership forecasts say. And with transit agencies getting millions to billions of dollars regardless of actual ridership, they don’t seriously care if they serve more than a tiny fraction of the people in their regions or not.

The Antiplanner has posted an enhanced version of the Federal Transit Administration’s monthly database. The FTA’s raw data are in cells A1 through JO2288. Annual totals from 2002 through 2023 are in columns JP through KL. Column KM compares January 2024 with January 2019. Column KN compares January 2024 with January 2023.

National and mode totals are in rows 2290 through 2309. To show New York’s importance, row 2314 shows the percentage share of ridership that takes place in the New York urban area. Transit agency totals are in rows 2330 through 3319. Urban area totals are in rows 3321 through 3811. These enhancements are on the ridership (UPT for unlinked passenger trips) and service (VRM for vehicle-revenue-miles) worksheets. I hope you find this spreadsheet useful.

Read the rest of this piece at The Antiplanner.

Graph: When measured as a percent of pre-pandemic travel, transit continues to lag well behind all other modes of travel. Highway data for January 2024 should be available soon. Courtesy, The Antiplanner.

Woke Big Tech Launched a Crusade Against Free Speech

Joel Kotkin — Thu, 14 Mar 2024 20:28:58 -0400

The technological revolution once promised a new era of expanded democracy and enhanced opportunity. Instead, we face today a reality that blends the worst aspects of George Orwell’s Big Brother and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World controllers.

Don’t believe me? Look to the launch of a recent version of Google’s Gemini AI, which produced black and female versions of Vikings, the founding fathers and even Nazi soldiers as historically correct. While comical for some, this seemed less to show the tech giant’s casual incompetence, but rather a deep-seated desire to reinvent reality along progressive lines.

It also reflects deeply entrenched bias in Google’s development team, who appear to see it as their mission to reshape society, and even the past, to fit their predilections. Gemini was ambivalent when asked whether Elon Musk or Adolph Hitler had a more negative effect on society – hardly the sort of reasoning one would expect from the supposed technology of the future.

If this was an isolated case, we could all enjoy a good laugh about the latest Californian lunacy. But this is hardly a one-off. Even before AI, staffers at Google, Facebook and Twitter share what could be likened to an ideological hivemind, curating content in a way some conservative lawmakers have suggested is discriminatory towards Right-wing views.

Former employees have suggested these companies algorithms intended to screen out “hate groups”, even though programmers often have trouble distinguishing between “hate groups” and those who might simply express dissenting but legitimate views.

Most dangerous of all, these big tech firms have become giant oligopolies with almost unlimited funds and a net worth greater than Canada, Russia, South Korea, Australia and Spain combined. Nor can we expect these firms to be tempered by traditional market capitalism.

Google and Apple account for nearly 90 per cent of all mobile browsers worldwide, while Microsoft by itself controls 90 per cent of all operating system software. Perhaps more ominously, two-thirds of the world’s cloud services – essential for AI – are controlled by Amazon, Microsoft and Google.

These geeky bad boys are essentially capturing not just the means of communication but control of content as well. They are becoming what Aldous Huxley called “a scientific caste system”. People like Jeff Bezos may see this as the “beginning of a Golden Age”, but it seems closer to what the French analyst Gaspard Koenig describes as “digital feudalism”.

AI looms as a force multiplier for these oligarchs. Already nearly two-thirds of US adults now get their news through social media like Facebook or Google. This is even more true among millennials, soon to be the nation’s largest voting bloc. Although the Gemini project is now being re-evaluated, we inevitably face AI bots that are more subtle and persuasive, particularly for a generation that reads little and knows even less.

Read the rest of this piece at Telegraph.

Photo: Jimmy Baikovicius, via Flickr, under CC 2.0 License.

Americans Moving to More Affordable Areas

Wendell Cox — Mon, 11 Mar 2024 20:28:58 -0400

In recent years, driven by the rising cost of living and the remote work revolution, Americans have been moving to more affordable housing markets. This is evident in an analysis of American Community Survey data gathered over five years (2018 to 2022).

Housing Affordability and Net Domestic Migration: The Nexus

This article looks at average annual net domestic migration for 927 metropolitan and micropolitan areas in the national housing market. The median house values were divided by the median households incomes, yielding a value to income ratio. This uses the Demographia housing affordability ratings that consider 3.0 or below as affordable, 3.1 to 4.0 as moderately unaffordable, 4.1 to 5.0 is seriously unaffordable and 5.1 or higher as severely unaffordable.

Figure 1 shows that since 2010 housing affordability net domestic migration (moving between locations in the 50 states and the District of Columbia) has been strongly moving from the least affordable markets to the more affordable markets.

Among the more unaffordable markets, net outward migration from the severely unaffordable markets increased from a net loss of 76,000 for 2010 to 2015 to a net loss of 810,000 in 2021 and 2022. These costly markets lost a population equal to that of the city of San Francisco. Most of these losses occurred in the largest markets, New York, Los Angeles and Chicago.

Among the seriously unaffordable markets, net migration domestic had an annual gain of 190,000 in 2010 to 2015 and rose to 345,000 in 2021 - 2022.

Among the moderately unaffordable markets, net domestic migration has risen from a gain of 116,000 in 2010 average to 369,000 for 2020 to 2022. Among the affordable markets there was a net loss of 171,000 on average between 2010 and 2015, which dropped to a net loss of only 4,000 in 2021 to 2022.

These trends are illustrated in Figure 1 (above)

More Than 500 Affordable Markets

Out of the 927 markets, more than 1/2 are affordable (513). Another nearly 250 markets are moderately unaffordable, while 83 are seriously unaffordable and the same number is severely unaffordable (Figure 2). The severely unaffordable markets are generally more strongly regulated, and often have urban containment regulation, which creates upward spikes in land at values at surrounding urban growth boundaries and greenbelts. These increases are telescoped throughout the area confined by the urban growth boundaries or greenbelt.

At the same time we have previously reported on the fact that net domestic migration is moving strongly away from larger markets (Figure 3). The strongest net in-migration has been in the smallest population category, markets with populations below 100,000. This is an entirely new demographic pattern, as opposed to most growth being in the larger metropolitan areas.

The Most Affordable Markets

An attachment to this article provides housing affordability ratings for all 927 markets. (View/download the list of 927 U.S. Housing Markets) Overall, six markets are tied for the most affordable in the nation, at a value to income ratio of 1.6. These markets are Borger, Texas; Centralia, Illinois; Gallup, New Mexico; Raymondville, Texas; and Vernon, Texas. Another five markets have value to income ratios of 1.7, including Bradford, Pennsylvania; Decatur, Illinois; Pampa, Texas; Parsons, Kansas and Pearsal, Texas. In these areas, housing is far less costly than the more expensive markets, such as San Jose, Los Angeles and Honolulu, where prices are more than 10 times incomes.

Some of these communities are close enough to larger metropolitan areas for people to work from home a day or two a week. In our increasingly dispersed economy, the lower cost of living typical of smaller communities and their lifestyles, which tends to be slower and more family oriented, has become more attractive in recent years.

Photograph: Bradford, PA, Old City Hall via Wikimedia in Public Domain.