Small Cities

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.  read more »

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?  read more »

Over the past half century, media and academic sources repeatedly suggested that increasingly dense cities would dominate the future.  read more »

For the last two centuries, one of the most important demographic trends has been the movement of people from rural areas to the cities.  read more »

Further evidence of the continued dispersion of the US population is revealed by an examination of net domestic migration data  read more »

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  read more »

Between 2020 and 2023 (annual population estimates, as of July 1), more than 3.2 million US residents moved from counties with higher urban population densities (number of urban residents divided by urban square miles), to counties with lower urban densities.  read more »

I’ve always been intrigued by the role of universities in the growth and development of cities. It’s well known that universities can have an outsized role on smaller towns and cities  read more »

Americans are familiar with steep political divisions on issues like race, class, and gender. Perhaps less understood, but arguably more definitive, is the widening gap between the cognitive elites concentrated in big cities and the rest of the country.  read more »

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  read more »