While home ownership remains the dream of most Americans, fewer and fewer people here can afford to own one.
For the better part of the past century, the American dream was defined, in large part, by that “universal aspiration” to own a home. As housing prices continue to outstrip household income, that’s changing as more and more younger Americans are ending up landless, and not by choice.
Excerpted from an article that first appeared on Chief Executive.net.
A century ago Detroit was a boomtown and Los Angeles a sleepy refuge for sun-seeking Midwesterners. A half-century later, L.A. was the fastest-growing big city in the high-income world, while Detroit was beginning its long tailspin. In the ’70s, New York was the “rotten apple” and seemed destined for further decline. But for the past 20 years it has enjoyed an enormous surge of wealth, as have many of the countries’ dense, culturally creative cities.
In other words, when it comes to the death and life of American cities, things change, often in unpredictable, once unthinkable ways. Now, high prices and a lean to the left in the nation’s coastal metropolises could spell new opportunity for more business-friendly, less costly regions like Dallas-Fort Worth and Salt Lake City. If current trends continue, there may be new hope not only for Midwestern cities like Columbus, Indianapolis and Kansas City, but even for some long down-on-their-luck metros, like Detroit and Cleveland.
Read the entire piece at Chief Executive.net.
Joel Kotkin is the Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book, The Human City: Urbanism for the rest of us, was published in April by Agate. He is also author of The New Class Conflict, The City: A Global History, and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. He is executive director of NewGeography.com and lives in Orange County, CA.
Homepage photo credit: Salt Lake City, by Garrett via Flickr, using CC License.
This excerpt is from an article that first appeared at Forbes.com
Suburbs have largely been dismissed by environmentalists and urban planners as bad for the planet, a form that needed to be eliminated to make way for a bright urban future. Yet, after a few years of demographic stultification amid the Great Recession, Americans are again heading to the suburbs in large numbers, particularly millennials. Read more
This article first appeared at The Daily Beast.
The tech oligarchs who already dominate our culture and commerce, manipulate our moods, and shape the behaviors of our children while accumulating capital at a rate unprecedented in at least a century want to fashion our urban future in a way that dramatically extends the reach of the surveillance state already evident in airports and on our phones. Read more
This article first appeared at The Orange County Register
President Trump’s proposed trillion dollar plus infrastructure program represents a rare, and potentially united feel good moment. Yet before we jump into a massive re-do of our transportation, water and electrical systems, it’s critical to make sure we get some decent bang for the federal buck. Read more
This article first appeared at The Daily Beast.
It turns out that kids today want the same thing their parents did—a home of their own that they can afford to raise a family in.
It’s been seven years since I wrote about “the screwed generation.” The story told has since become familiar: Millennials, then largely in their twenties, faced a future of limited economic opportunity, lower incomes, and too few permanent, high-paying jobs; of soaring college debt and structural insecurity (PDF). The Census Bureau estimates that, even when working full-time, they earn $2000 less than the same age group made in 1980 (PDF). More than 20 percent of people 18 to 34 live in poverty, up from 14 percent in 1980 (PDF). Read more
This article originally appeared at Forbes.
The 2007 housing crisis was particularly tough on African-Americans, as well as Hispanics, extinguishing much of their already miniscule wealth. Industrial layoffs, particularly in the Midwest, made things worse.
However the rising economic tide of the past few years has started to lift more boats. The African-American unemployment rate fell to 6.8% in December, the lowest level since the government started keeping tabs in 1972. Although that’s 3.1 percentage points worse than whites, the gap is the slimmest on record. A tightening labor market since 2015 has also driven up wages of black workers, many of whom are employed in manufacturing and other historically middle and lower-wage service industries. Read more
This article first appeared at Forbes.
We often conflate high salaries with prosperity, but that can be deceptive. Someone who lives in New York or San Francisco might make more money than a counterpart in the same profession in Houston or Dallas-Fort Worth, but when the cost of living is factored in, their Southern colleagues may actually come out ahead.
At the Center for Opportunity Urbanism, we developed a Standard of Living Index to get a better sense of where workers are getting the most for their paychecks. We began with the Bureau of Economic Analysis regional price parities for the 107 metropolitan statistical areas with more than 500,000 residents, added the costs for purchasing the average house and weighted the index based on the national distribution of renting and owning (63 percent owning, 37 percent renting). Housing plays a disproportionate role in the difference in costs between the most and least expensive metro areas, as we will detail later.
This article first appeared on The Daily Beast.
The past decade has seen a gusher of books arguing for and detailing the supposed ascendancy of dense urban cores, like the inimitable Edward Glaeser’s influential Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier, and about the ‘burbs as the slums of the future, abandoned by businesses and young people, like Leigh Gallagher’s The Death of Suburbia: Where the American Dream Is Moving.
But as we show in Infinite Suburbia, the new book we co-edited, the vast majority of American economic and demographic growth continues to take place there.
Read more
This article first appeared at The Orange County Register.
Just a decade ago, in the midst of the financial crisis, suburbia’s future seemed perilous, with experts claiming that many suburban tracks were about to become “the next slums.” The head of the Department of Housing and Urban Development proclaimed that “sprawl” was now doomed, and people were “headed back to the city.” Read more
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