The media has been churning out stories about the exodus of people from cities, to escape crowding and coronavirus. People, they say, are rushing to the suburbs.
New Yorker Peter Goodman dissents. He believes that city life will bounce back in time. New York City already is healthier than most other parts of the nation, though mass transit has not yet recovered from the pandemic. Everything ground to a halt in mid-March, and city life is only now beginning to resume, but with masks and social distancing.
Goodman argues that “Cities are the Engines of Democracy, Innovation, and Growth and Schools Play a Major Role.”
As cultural life revives, so will cities.
Ambitious young people flock to them for exposure to museums, dance, concerts, theater, and civic life and diversity of people and experiences.
An interesting article on a real estate website called Curbed.com says that the “urban exodus” story is mostly a myth. True, there has been flight from two of the most expensive places in the U.S—San Francisco and Manhattan (but not Brooklyn!)—but the flow out of cities has not accelerated.
But a nationwide, pandemic- or protest-induced urban-to-suburban migration taking place on a scale that impacts both urban and suburban housing markets in a measurable way? There is zero empirical evidence to support such a trend. None. Nothing. Zero.
Earlier this month, real-estate-listings giant Zillow published an exhaustive study examining every conceivable housing-market data point related to cities and suburbia to see if there are major divergences that suggest an urban-to-suburban migration trend.
Are pending home sales between urban and suburban areas different now than they were before the pandemic? They aren’t!
Are suburban homes selling more quickly than homes in urban areas? Nope!
Are suburban homes selling above their list price at a higher rate than urban homes? Not at all!
Are urban homes seeing price cuts at a higher rate than suburban homes? If anything, the opposite!
Are home valuations accelerating faster in suburban areas than in urban areas? Urban zip codes have a slight edge!
Are suburban home listings getting a larger share of search traffic relative to urban areas now than they were last year? The suburban share is actually down 0.2 percentage points!
There is a German saying: Stadtluft macht frei (“urban air makes you free”). It has been true for centuries. It will be true again.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
NYC will bounce back.
In 10-20 years.
It won’t take that long. Unless you think COVID is here to stay and there will never be a vaccine.
I think it is here to stay, although we may get a vaccine. But covid isn’t the reason. The city’s finances are. A million lost jobs since March, and the MTA’s finances have been destroyed.
Capitalism at it’s best.Too bad, would have been nice if it led to more fair and equitable housing.
Yes there needs to be an answer for the rising property taxes and decreasing benefits. If folks aren’t evicted due to job loss, they’ll end up leasing their urban home due to prop tax delinquency. Mine doubled last year. If they double again, then what? I can only imagine paying these and paying HOA, why on earth do those people stay? Also in my city they take Prop tax $$$ and give it to developers (TIF) . They siphon a lot. Classic taxation w/o representation. Reconciliation of these matters will be a pre-req for the new urban renaissance. The city was building units hand over fist to bring more revenue and now vacancies are on the rise.
My extended family and I (we’re Black) resided in Chicago’s North Lawndale, West Garfield Park and Austin (all predominately Black), for many years. 😐
A few years ago, we left Austin for good, due to drive by shootings and not being able to sit in the park or on our front porch in peace. ☹️
Some our former neighbors didn’t like the schools. They found moving was their only solution. ☹️
China has 102 cities with over one million people living in each one. When the pandemic arrived, there was not a mass exodus from those cities. Instead, the Chinese people cooperated and did as that country’s leaders and health experts advised. The people wore masks and practiced the proper distancing to lower the risk of exposure. Many self quarantined and stayed home. No one was beaten or killed when they were told they had to wear a mask to shop.
The United States has 10 cites with over one million people living in each one. Thanks to Donald Eek Thinkly Skin Always Lying and Stirring Up Trouble Trump, millions of hateful, sometimes violent AR-15 toting Americans refuse to wear masks or practice proper distancing, behavior that did not happen in China, and most countries around the world.
In the U.S. people that were allegedlyTrump supporters were throwing COVID-19 parties and/or cramming into faux Christian churches without masks, withing distancing.
China has a population of more than 1.4 trillion with 85,077 total verified cases resulting in 4,634 COVID-19 deaths.
The United States has a population of 328-million with more than 6.3 million verified cases of the virus and 190,610 COVID-19 deaths.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/?utm_campaign=homeAdvegas1?
Lloyd, do you trust the Chinese data?
It seems privatizers are very quick to point out and exaggerate any hint of declining enrollment in city public schools. They don’t want a good disaster to go to waste. They want any excuse they can find to cut funding. It’s dishonest, par for the course.
In Chicago, ironically, it was Then Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Then CPS Superintendent Barbara Byrd-Benett (both Liberal Democrats) (2013), who closed 50 under utilized public schools. ☹️
None of those schools have been repurposed into tutoring centers, activity centers or anything. 😐
On another note, “many” Catholic and Lutheran schools have closed over the years. ☹️
Where and how does a Black South Sider and Black West Sider attend school in Chicago, if they’re “always'” disappearing? ☹️
Eddie,
Eve Ewing wrote a beautiful book about the Chicago school closings called “Ghosts in the Schoolyard”—I urge you to read it
Thanks for providing facts! The curbed.com article was particularly informative.
No question we are seeing a sudden bump in our central/N-central NJ town in housing prices. Just a few days ago we were gagging at the recent purchase prices for med/ med-small-size homes in our town, many of which went for more than list price– $30-50k overpriced, we thought. We are only a 40-min train ride from midtown, & this is the typical starter house prized by fleeing NYC dwellers w/young families. So we assumed that was about mass covid flight as touted in news. However, curbed.com’s explanation makes equally good sense. That’s been an ever-tighter market here: high prop taxes means such houses are routinely expanded into [or even replaced by] larger houses. It makes sense that a 6-mo covid delay in getting them on the market would result in a backlog of demand.
Eddie–“16 shots & a cover up” Rahm Emanuel* is not –& far from–“a liberal democrat.” He’s what we would call a DINO–Democrat in Name Only or–worse–a neo-lib. He closed 50 schools & bragged about it. Yes, you definitely must read Eve Ewing’s book.*& why–esp. with what has been going on in this country–just today!–yet another police killing of a Black man in Rochester, N.Y.–he is still a “political consultant” (w/Chris Christie, yet!) on ABC Sunday Morning w/George Stephanopoulos, & that he was “featured” at the DNC (& just when I happened to turn it on–he was part of a number of people talking about how caring & compassionate Biden is) is–well, there is something VERY wrong w/that.
& “liberal Democrat” Barbara Byrd Bennett…went to jail. All about the $$$$.
Diane I wasn’t sure where to put this, but I thought here because it speaks of the run-up to Hitler’s takeover of Germany. Others have said juxtaposing Nazi Germany with Trumpism is hyperbolic. . . . however, I believe that the resonance between then and now is far from fictional.
Below is a link and a quote from a New York Book Review author who wrote about his experience with the health system as a black man who almost died from a combination of neglect and incompetence. The quote is not from that article but from another article he wrote about Hitler’s time. I thought it appropriate here and in our moment before the election: CBK
Quote: “On February 27, 1933 the German Parliament building burned, Adolf Hitler rejoiced, and the Nazi era began. Hitler, who had just been named head of a government that was legally formed after the democratic elections of the previous November, seized the opportunity to change the system. ‘There will be no mercy now,’ he exulted. ‘Anyone standing in our way will be cut down.’
“The next day, at Hitler’s advice and urging, the German president issued a decree “for the protection of the people and the state.” It deprived all German citizens of basic rights such as freedom of expression and assembly and made them subject to ‘preventative detention’ by the police. A week later, the Nazi party, having claimed that the fire was the beginning of a major terror campaign by the Left, won a decisive victory in parliamentary elections. Nazi paramilitaries and the police then began to arrest political enemies and place them in concentration camps. Shortly thereafter, the new parliament passed an ‘enabling act’ that allowed Hitler to rule by decree.
After 1933, the Nazi regime made use of a supposed threat of terrorism against Germans from an imaginary international Jewish conspiracy. After five years of repressing Jews, in 1938 the German state began to deport them.”
https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/02/26/reichstag-fire-manipulating-terror-to-end-democracy/
I neglected to post the other link to the same author’s essay about being a black man experiencing neglect and incompetence in the U.S. healthcare system. Here is that link:
https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2020/09/03/what-ails-america/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NYR%20Malcolm%20Kunzru%20Graeber&utm_content=NYR%20Malcolm%20Kunzru%20Graeber+CID_3c5e1913b18259ef6fc4ac370b51bc0b&utm_source=Newsletter&utm_term=What%20Ails%20America
I think, Biden is caring and compassionate. I support Biden. 😊
.
Emanuel or Daley closed mental health centers too. ☹️
Thanks for educating me. 🙂
You won’t find support for Rahm in these quarters.
All that being said about rising prices and fewer benefits and the specter of municipal bankruptcy…I am glad to NOT be a FL or AZ teacher. Maybe some of these professionals will reverse migrate out of a right to work state
I found this article very interesting and wanted to share our personal experience. We live on Long Island, a good hour from NYC. Homes in our highly praised school district suburb take an average of 6-8 months to sell. It is taking us 3 years to clean out our 3,000 sq ft home that we’ve lived in for over 30 years and raised 4 children in, now that we are retired. Our daughter convinced us to put the house on the market at a little higher price “just to see what would happen and what kind of feedback we would receive.”
Wow, we were shocked with the response we received! She took pictures on Friday, last weekend, posted it on Zillow “for sale by owner”, by 7PM that night, and by 9PM we had 2 appointments set for the next morning and 8 more throughout the weekend. We had 5! offers at or above the asking price, and our home was “in contract “ by Sunday night!
Two of those offers were made by 2 young NYC childless couples, one a fireman and one a policeman whose wives were now working remotely and did not need to go into their offices.
The other 3 offers were from LI families who wanted to leave their communities where their school budgets were defeated, and courses, sports and services would be cut. (When will people realize that voting down school budgets not only hurt children and their communities, but their property values as well!!)
True, interest rates have never been this low, and inventory in our town is low as well, but we were taken by complete surprise by the interest! And we are still getting calls about the house a week later!