People hate density (and love the 'burbs)

Daily Data: Ex-metro flight has slowed, but it's still flying

In today’s dispatch:

• getting the heck outta dodge continues apace

• SF > MF

• small cities > big cities

• smaller parts of small cities > small cities

• rural, ho!

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People hate density (and love the ‘burbs)

OK, not all people hate density, and not all the people who hate density now, have always hated density.

Hate is also a strong word.

This is more of an update on a running theme that ‘density uber alles’ is a terrible idea for housing policy and/or culture, generally.

If anything, people continue to demonstrate a desire to get the heck outta density dodge. Certainly, folks aren’t fleeing the cities as quickly as they were during the pandemic, but the trend hasn’t slowed as much as urbanites would like.

The fact is that the overriding preference is still for suburbs and exurbs (and away from density).

Why that’s the case is a complicated question, and I’m not going to get into it here, but suffice it to say, it’s an observation that urbanists have to grapple with—either that people just like suburbia, or that urbanists screw up cities so badly, they ruin whatever preference for urbanism people might have had.

Maybe.

Mostly this is a series of observations about the ongoing preeminence of the periphery.

Single Family > Multifamily

The data continues to show the ongoing strength of single family homes, relative to multifamily.

While multifamily starts have generally tanked, single family builders continue to build:

Haver

More houses on the way. Apartments? Not so much.

These are small houses too.

The real estate industry seems to think that we have more than enough apartments, at the moment. Not so for the homebuilders, who are moving onwards and upwards to meet robust demand for having ‘a place of one’s own,’ even in markets like Florida where there is plenty of inventory.

Builders are still trading at ~10x earnings, amazingly enough.

Smaller Cities > Bigger Cities

Migration data also continues to reflect urban flight.

It’s not a new observation, but it’s a very pretty visualization, so we’re gonna lead with it.

The towering metros of the Northeast and Midwest have been hemorrhaging people to the up-and-comers in the South (via

Aziz Sunderji

):

Home Economics

Big Southern cities grew the most, while big cities in the West, and the biggest cities in the Midwest and Northeast, were big losers.¹

Except for Columbus, which is also a smaller city, albeit not a Southern one.

Old Random Walk favorite, Columbus, OH, continues to be the cat’s meow:

Columbus leads the league in net population inflows (and still hasn’t added that much inventory, relatively speaking).

Columbus is where the smart money goes. Been saying so for a while.

Another thing to note: the flight from urbanity looks even worse, when looking at domestic migration only.

The only net-new additions to big cities are international migrants, who have accelerated their arrivals (as the locals leave):