Trends in American housing

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Americans are famous for their geographic mobility, of picking up and striking out for new places and better opportunities.

But they are less mobile today.

That is both a mystery and a problem.

By covered wagon and jetliner, from East Coast to West, Rust Belt to Sun Belt, Americans’ propensity to be on the move – to new jobs and new places – has historically provided the economy with a critical dose of oomph.

But as fewer and fewer Americans are loading up the moving van in search of opportunity, that advantage may be slipping away. In recent years, economists have become increasingly worried that a slide in job turnover and relocation rates is undermining the economy’s dynamism, damping productivity and wages while making it more difficult for sidelined workers to find their way back into the labor force.
 

“It’s possible that one reason people aren’t changing jobs is because they’ve all found jobs that are great for them and they’re happy,” Betsey Stevenson, an economist at the University of Michigan and a former member of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, said. “But the other possibility is that people stay in jobs that aren’t as good for them because they’re terrified of changing, and that’s bad for the overall economy.”

This means fewer promotions and lower salaries for workers who do not move, and a less productive and efficient workforce for the nation. This also creates a ripple effect, where entry-level workers cannot move up because mid-level people did not quit and move onward and upward.
 
Job security has been diminishing for a long time. The expectation was that this would spark more mobility, but there is less of it. "People are not moving as much out of what used to be entry-level and temporary jobs." There is a chicken-and-egg question of causation, of whether reduced geographic mobility is promoting this trend, or vice-versa.
 

Mobility normally drops during downturns, and that was the case during the Great Recession. Millions of jobs vanished, and those fortunate enough to be working were less inclined to give up the one they had.
 

But even as much of the wreckage wrought by the crash has been cleared, fluidity has not bounced back to prerecession levels. Although there was a common perception that the mortgage crisis had stranded many Americans in place, economists found scant evidence to support that notion. Moving declined similarly among both renters and homeowners. Something else appears to be going on.

There are other factors, such as an aging population and two-income families, that make resettling less appealing and less possible.
 
One of the more intriguing patterns was the correlation between low levels of "social capital" (social networks) and mobility. One might expect those with limited local contacts to be more eager to move, but just the opposite is the case.
 

One of the more intriguing findings was the role of declining social trust and what is known as social capital — the web of family, friends and professional contacts. For example, the proportion of people who agree with the statement, “Most people can be trusted,” has been shrinking for more than three decades. Researchers found that states with larger declines in social trust also had larger declines in labor market fluidity. The lack of trust may increase the cost of job-hunting and make both employees and employers more risk-averse.
 

Ms. Wozniak added that the benefits of LinkedIn and Facebook friends may not replace the personal connections that still remain the best way to find a job.

Now let's look back to the phase above that "Moving declined similarly among both renters and homeowners."
 
The worry among some economists was that as home-ownership rates increased, geographic and income mobility among Americans would decline. However, because renters turn out to be just as immobile, that correlation now seems dubious.
 
But let's try to connect the increased desire for home ownership that marked the housing bubble with the increasing levels of social alienation that correlate with decreased mobility. (Orange County, California was considered "ground zero" of the real-estate meltdown; it is also the locality in the US with the least social connections or 'social capital'.)

American houses are getting bigger -- for now...

Why did Americans develop a mania in the 2000s not just for buying a house, but a gigantic house?
It's been said that home-ownership is the "American Dream". This is not correct. As historians like Jim Cullen and Lawrence Samuels have written, this idea is all very recent.
 
An NPR article from 2006, "Behind the Ever-Expanding American Dream House" offers clues.

The increasing size of American houses cannot be understood entirely by rational, economic explanations.

When asked to speculate on why houses are getting bigger and bigger, Fergerson and her dining companions at Bobby Van's, a classic, old Bridgehampton restaurant, throw out dozens of ideas. Real estate agent Barbara Bornstein says land is so expensive, builders have no choice: They have to build big houses to make a profit.
 

"You know, we are very tenuous," says local architect Ann Surchin. "No one knows when the next 9/11 will happen. And these houses represent safety — and the bigger the house, the bigger the fortress."
 

Town planning-board member Jacqui Lofaro says that people who work in cities see bigger homes as a source of peace of mind.
 

"If you have people coming out from the city, where they are bombarded by people, the tendency is to isolate themselves," Lofaro says. "Their house is their community. It is not the community's community, it is their community."
 

Even those in the real-estate industry are just guessing.

An economist interviewed in the article explains that good public schools exist in neighborhoods with massive houses; some middle-class families feel compelled to move there in order to send their kids to good schools. Subsequently, other middle-class families feel envious and inferior, and so they buy houses they cannot really afford.

But this supersizing of houses is recent behavior. Why did this behavior not exist before, when these conditions - good schools in expensive neighborhoods with tony houses - have always existed? The economist did not historically situate his explanation.

In contrast, a developer interviewed in the article does historically situate one of his observations. For him, there is something fishy going on nowadays.

Trunzo says there's a different mindset among the wealthy today, compared to when his father started the family business.

"Most of the big houses were visible from the road," he says. "You didn't wall yourself in with hedges and hide." Now, he says, the wealthy "want their own private little enclave. And they don't even want the general public to know that they are there."

Finally, a historian is interviewed.

For Trunzo, it's just a bit strange. But for John Stilgoe, a professor of landscape history at Harvard University, it's emblematic.

 

"The big house represents the atomizing of the American family," he says. "Each person not only has his or her own television — each person has his or her own bathroom. Some of these houses are literally designed with three playrooms for two children. This way, the family members rarely have to interact. And the notion of compromise is simply out one of the very many windows these houses sport."

Today, Americans still want big houses, when they should be downsizing. And it makes no financial sense.

Americans still want bigger homes -- even though they should downsize instead

By Rick Newman February 26, 2015 11:56 AM

 Don’t do it, people!
 

New research from real-estate data firm Trulia shows that Americans still crave big homes, even after a brutal housing bust proved the perils of overspending on real estate. In a Trulia poll, 43% of people said their ideal home is bigger than the one they live in now, while just 16% said they’d prefer a smaller home. Forty percent said they’re satisfied with the size of their current home.
 

There’s nothing wrong with dreaming, of course, but the trend toward purchasing ever-bigger homes seems to have resumed after the disruption caused by the housing bust that began in 2006. The average size of a new home has dipped in recent months, according to data from the National Association of Home Builders, but at about 2,600 square feet, it’s still close to record highs, as this chart shows:

The Trulia poll results are predictable in some ways. It’s no surprise, for instance, that young people want more space, as do Generation X families with growing kids. But you might think baby boomers on the verge of retirement would be preparing to downsize en masse. Not so. Among boomers, 26% say they want a bigger home, while only 21% want a smaller home. Here’s a breakdown of the Trulia numbers by age:

That's a bit disturbing. It's disturbing because in economic terms, it's irrational.

From a more recent article in the Wall Street Journal:

U.S. Houses Are Still Getting Bigger

The median size of a new home is 2,467 square feet, 61% bigger than 40 years ago

The median size of new homes is now 11% bigger than it was a decade ago. 

By Jeffrey Sparshott Jun 2, 2016 12:02 pm ET

Americans want bigger houses. Or at least that’s what they’re getting.

The median size of a new single-family house was 2,467 square feet last year, the biggest on record, according to Census Bureau data out this week.

With all that floor space, homes are 61% larger than the median from 40 years earlier and 11% larger than a decade earlier.

“McMansion” may not be a popular term post-housing bust. But American homes have not only been getting larger, they’re also including more bathrooms and amenities such as air conditioning. Some 93% of new houses had air conditioning in 2015 compared with 46% in 1975. About 96% of new homes last year had at least two bathrooms versus 60% four decades earlier.

That may go some way toward explaining rising prices. The median sales price of a new home was $296,400 last year, according to Census, a new high. Even when adjusted for inflation, new-home prices hit a record last year.

More recent data suggest the housing market is gaining strength amid steady job creation and low mortgage rates, though rising prices and short supplies are constraints. U.S. new-home sales in April posted their strongest month in more than eight years. And sales of existing homes, which account for the bulk of the market, rose for the second straight month in April, the National Association of Realtors said last month.

A separate Commerce Department report out last week showed housing starts rebounded in April, leaving builders on pace to break ground on 778,000 single-family homes this year. Still, the number of starts remain well below historical norms.

Let's look at so-called 'Baby Boomers' born after WW2 and before the mid-1960s who are not downsizing, at least according to this 2015 article.

 

They rocked at Woodstock, marched in protest on campus, distrusted authority and then, as adults, took out mortgages and bought lots of real estate. But now, some economists say, baby boomers aren’t selling their houses as earlier generations did — they’re not downsizing fast enough as they approach and pass traditional retirement ages — and that’s contributing to shortages of homes for sale as well as to rising prices.

 

Boomers are part of a “clogging up [of] the whole chain of home sales,” Sean Becketti, chief economist of giant mortgage investor Freddie Mac, told me last week.

 

“They appear to be staying in the family home longer than previous generations,” Becketti wrote in a new outlook report, “and the imbalance between housing demand and supply continues to boost prices.”

 
Because of its size and wealth, this postwar generation has always had a tremendous influence on American society. That is still true today, with boomers controlling two-thirds of all home equity in the US, with a value of $8 trillion. But they are not selling their big houses and moving into apartments, which is throwing the real estate and mortgage industry, as well as potential home buyers, off track -- and raising the price of real estate.

How to explain this hesitancy to downsize on the part of Baby Boomers?

Many of them are still recuperating from the 2009 Great Recession.

Lawrence Yun, chief economist for the National Association of Realtors, says there are multiple factors at work here, especially the lingering effects of the housing bust and the Great Recession. Homeowners of all ages lost billions of dollars of equity wealth from 2008 to 2011, he argues, and many owners are still rebuilding sufficient equity to allow them to sell and move without having to bring money to the settlement. Boomers are a part of that group, and some have been forced to postpone their moves and sales.

Also, by not selling their homes, Baby Boomers have thus driven up the price of all real estate, including the price of the apartments that they would have moved into. So they cannot afford to buy because they hesitate to sell (because they cannot afford to buy, etc.). It's a vicious cycle.

David Crowe, chief economist for the National Association of Home Builders, points to a feedback-loop effect that is discouraging some boomers from listing and selling: Fewer listings means more competition for a limited supply of homes in hot markets. That competition pushes up prices for everybody, including boomers who might like to downsize but can’t find a replacement home that’s both affordable and acceptable. So they wait.

Eventually, the other shoe will drop. Boomers will get older and be forced to sell for all kinds of reasons. This could lead to a national real estate 'correction', for better or worse.

But changes are coming. Fannie Mae’s Simmons observes that the boomer logjam is a temporary issue. “Boomers will not inhabit this vast inventory [32 million homes] forever,” and when their circumstances change — which they inevitably will, with age — watch out. “Their actions will reverberate through the housing market.”

The economists provide their insights. But at no point do they actually talk to or listen to the actual human beings whose actions they are explaining.

However, another article from 2015 did just that.

As part of a broader initiative to understand where future home and community demand is headed, The Demand Institute surveyed more than 4,000 Baby Boomer households about their current living situation, moving intentions, and housing preferences.

We found that the common wisdom, which holds that Baby Boomers will downsize and head for a condo in a sunny place, appears to be wrong. First, nearly two-thirds of Boomers have no plans to move at all. They will “age in place” in homes and communities where they have often lived for a decade or more. Second, those who are moving are not going very far. Sixty-seven percent of movers will stay in-state and over half will move within 30 miles of their current home. Being close to their communities and families is very important to them as they age. “Wanting to be closer to family” is as common a reason for Boomers to move as seeking a “change of climate.” Third, and perhaps most surprisingly, we find that many Baby Boomers are still seeking their “dream home.”

Of greater economic importance, nearly half of those that will move (46%) plan to increase the size of their home or spend more for a home that is  the same size as the one they have now. Perhaps this seems odd—why are they upsizing at this life stage? What we are seeing is that many who are living in smaller homes than they would like, and many who are renting, are now acting on the housing plans they had to delay as a result of the economic difficulties of the past few years.
 

The desire to maintain a sense of community might also include the desire to avoid change and to avoid unfamiliar faces and places. In fact, "community" might be a code word for stasis.

But the drive to own a "dream home" has more to do with American culture and popular ideology. Just as Muslims want to make a pilgrimage to Mecca at least once in their lives, so Americans want to finally attain that "dream house", fully paid off -- "free and clear" as Willy Lowman said in "The Death of a Salesman". In the modern world, religion fades, but elements of practical life take on religious significance.

 Let's take a closer look at what older Americans face when they do downsize.

If the 1980s were about greed and accumulating possessions, the current era is about downsizing and letting go of those possessions, says Denver gerontologist Karen Owen-Lee, author of “The Caring Code: What Baby Boomers Need to Learn About Seniors.”

“The Baby Boomers already started turning 65, and their parents are in their 80s, and they need to assist their parents from moving to their house of 40 years to independent living or assisted living,” Owen-Lee said.

“That can be psychologically hard. Last week, a woman called me and said that her mother is paralyzed by the task of cleaning out the basement. So we talked about some options. We came up with having a therapist talk to the mother, not more than for 15 minutes initially, to help understand that paralysis. And gradually increase that time, as the mother can handle it, until she’s ready to tackle the basement.”

Brace for the emotional, physical and, if you’re not careful, monetary tolls of downsizing.

Does the new home mean moving from a longtime neighborhood full of friends, shifting to an unfamiliar church or other house of worship? How will you forge relationships in the new community?
Reluctance to give up possessions tempts some people to rent storage units that cost $40 to $230 per month.

 
For downsizing Baby Boomers, "community" indeed turns out to be a code word for familiarity.

The article goes on and on, but there is no further mention of community, oddly. The bulk of the article is about consulting professionals ("personal moving consultants", "downsizing specialists", therapists, etc.) for advice on how to let go emotionally of one's personal belongings accumulated over a long life.

The real dread that Baby Boomers and others experience when facing downsizing turns out to be the prospect of discarding their household items.

Their stuff is their ultimate community.

Each item comes with a memory, and each of these memories is woven together to form the narrative of a life.

The memorialization of personal objects seems to be a cross-cultural, universal phenomena.

But for contemporary Americans, the grand narrative culminates in the final attainment of owning an overly large "dream home" packed with a super-abundance of nearly forgotten relics.

"Be fruitful and multiply." (Genesis 9:7)

There is the narrative of personal fulfillment and self-actualization in the ownership of a big house packed with old, familiar items. But aside from the universal quest for existential meaning, there is another side to Americans buying overly big homes.

Americans are taking more road trips -- for now

Americans might be less mobile in terms of moving to new places, but they are plenty mobile in terms of their vacations.

Americans were hitting the road again in 2015hanks to cheap gasoline and changed attitudes toward how to enjoy life.

 

The great American road trip is back.

It’s partly that gasoline this driving season is cheaper than it has been in 11 years, according to the AAA motor club, and that the reviving economy is making people more willing to part with their money. But there is more than that at play here. This may be a cultural shift, as Americans experiment with the notion that maybe money can, in fact, buy happiness, at least in the form of adventures and memories.

It is a change that appears to have taken root in the years since the 2008 financial crisis.

“Postrecession, people are focused on memories that cannot be taken away from them, as opposed to tangible goods that expire and wear out,” said Sarah Quinlan, a marketing executive at MasterCard Advisors. “There’s a sense that you can take away my job, you can take away my home, but you can’t take away my memory.”

Whatever their motivation, Americans last year drove a record 3.15 trillion miles, according to the Department of Transportation, beating the previous mark, set in 2007. So far this year, both travel and gasoline consumption are up again.

Since the Great Recession, Americans have rethought their infamous acquisitiveness, and traded in their hunger for buying stuff for a thirst for adventures that make great memories.

But this new quest for experience is not any less wasteful environmentally and financially than is the obsessive accumulation of objects.

Importantly, in some respects, the younger generation are not so different from their progenitors.
 

The desire to get behind the wheel still comes as something of a surprise. The conventional wisdom was that driving mileage had probably peaked in 2007. The demographic bulge represented by the baby boomers is aging out of the driving years; people typically drive less as they hit retirement.

At the same time, millennials were not sharing the passion for the open road that previous generations of young adults had. Many, in fact, preferred to live in the nation’s downtowns, eschewing personal cars in favor of shared Ubers, or walking to their work and play.

But it turns out that both generations are driving more than anyone expected. “A lot of millennial behavior was really deferred assimilation,” said Steven E. Polzin, a transportation researcher at the University of South Florida. In other words, just like Mom and Dad, they were destined for a more traditional lifestyle — the marriage, the home, the garage — they just took a little longer to get there.

Eventually, the city dwelling millennials will move out to the suburbs, just like everyone else. 

One such millennial is Jenna Bivone, a 29-year-old website and app designer, who two years ago left downtown Atlanta to live on the outskirts of the city with her boyfriend. “We used to walk everywhere, but the rents were too high and we wanted some land for my dog,” she said. “In a more suburban area we found good schools, stuff like that for future plans.”

Now she has a daily commute of at least a half-hour each way, and on weekends she and her boyfriend drive around Georgia and neighboring states looking for the best hiking. Over the last three years they have taken road trips in Wyoming and Colorado to hike in the national parks.

“When we travel we want to go to places we might never see again,” she said. “We’re not going to be young forever.”

But there are reasons to believe that this is not a long-term trend.

What are some trends in how Americans spend their money post-Great Recession?

Here's a graph describing the drop in spending on gasoline in the face of the 2008 oil price rise (and the following recession).

The graph had predicted reduced gasoline consumption in the future. That has not held up, apparently, with cheap oil.

But is the current fallback to earlier American patterns of high gasoline consumption a permanent trend?

Crisis exposes trends

There is a rule of thumb in military science that war exposes new trends in warfare and also accelerates those new trends (e.g., mechanization, computerization, etc.).
 

Perhaps serious economic crises likewise expose and accelerates long-term trends. However, whereas the military refashions itself post-war in order to address ostensible new trends in warfare, the post-crisis economy slips back into complacence, reassured that things have returned to normal.
 

If this is the case, then reduced gasoline consumption is indeed the way of the future. It might have been put off for a while with cheap oil resulting from the fracking boom and reduced demand from China and so forth.

But in the long run, this might be the future: Less travel.

Here is a graph of miles of travel per American by year, from 2002 to 2012. It had been a downward trend since 2003.

 

To some extent, one can see how within the period between 2000 and 2014, the number of miles being driven annually was inversely proportional to the price of oil.

But in a longer time frame, this correspondence between oil prices and miles travel becomes more problematic.

Historically, until the year 2000, oil prices have been $20 per barrel (adjusted for inflation). Oil prices have fallen since 2014, but they still hover in the $60 per barrel range. Until 2000, the number of vehicle miles fluctuated largely without regard to oil prices. After the Great Recession, oil prices and vehicle miles rose together as the economy recovered. Since the 2014 oil price decline, vehicle miles have risen.

A graph describing the number of teenage drivers with driving licenses from 2007 to 2014. 

The current boom in travel might prove like a hiccup based on cheap oil.

All of this might help explain why Americans have become less mobile.

That  is, if there is indeed a long-term trend toward reduced travel, this might be part of the reason for the current lessened geographic mobility in American life.

Americans might be traveling more on their vacations thanks to cheaper oil, but in their own lives, they are less mobile and more cautious.

But this might also be true for home sizes. During and after the 2009 Great Recession, home sizes fell. So the current ongoing expansion of home sizes might prove temporary.
 

What would a very strong trend look like?
 

Conceivably, a strong trend would resist the influence of a recession and of the subsequent recovery, even while it bucked other trends that happened during the recession (e.g., reduced spending).

One interesting trend that was confirmed by the 2009 Great Recession was increased spending on pets. While spending in all areas of American life diminished during the recession, pet-related purchases increased as people re-examined their values and identified what was most important to them.
 

Interestingly, this reflects the common reaction to having one's house burn down. People will run back into a burning home in order to retrieve either their pets or their photographs. In a sense, something like a road trip, meant to build memories for a lifetime, is also a way to build up a personal photo gallery.

What would be the result of people turning more toward pets and photographs as a source of fulfillment rather than accumulation? A nation of people looking at cat photos? That is now a reality.

One result might be fewer strays as people spay and neuter their pets and keep their pets indoors. Here is a graph displaying cat intake and euthanasia levels at a shelter in Ontario from 2007 to 2014.

Here is a NYC graph of euthanasia rates stretching from 2001 to 2011.

These are remarkably even, consistent graphs, especially considering the differing geographic and historical settings.

Cats and dogs have gradually transitioned from farm workers to domestic companions. It's been a long-term transition. But the 2009 recession might have exposed and accelerated that transformation.

In sum, what are a few potential trends in the United States?
 

1) Smaller houses.

1b) Less stuff in the house.

2) Less geographic mobility.

3) Not so many road trips (depends on the price of oil).

4) Incredibly pampered pets (and fewer strays).

5) Photographs of everything.

Disruptive Innovation

How might 'disruptive innovation' influence home buying patterns in the United States?

What do we mean by 'disruptive innovation' in its proper technical sense, as opposed to popular usage?

The term was developed by the Harvard professor of business Clayton Christensen.

A disruptive innovation is an innovation that creates a new market and value network and eventually disrupts an existing market and value network, displacing established market leaders and alliances. The term was defined and phenomenon analyzed by Clayton M. Christensen beginning in 1995. More recent sources also include "significant societal impact" as an aspect of disruptive innovation.

Christensen distinguishes between disruptive innovation versus 'sustaining innovation'; in the latter case, mainstream technology improves, either in a revolutionary or evolutionary manner. Disruptive innovation, by contrast, comes from outside the mainstream market and sweep through it and destroys it, usually by providing a cheaper alternative to the dominant technology.

Not all innovations are disruptive, even if they are revolutionary. For example, the automobile was not a disruptive innovation, because early automobiles were expensive luxury items that did not disrupt the market for horse-drawn vehicles. The market for transportation essentially remained intact until the debut of the lower-priced Ford Model T in 1908. The mass-produced automobile was a disruptive innovation, because it changed the transportation market, whereas the first thirty years of automobiles did not.

The classic pattern of disruptive innovation is when an inferior but less expensive and more convenient technology finds a market niche on the fringes, develops over time and improves in quality, and then suddenly undermines the mainstream market.
 

Disruptive innovations tend to be produced by outsiders. The business environment of market leaders does not allow them to pursue disruption when they first arise, because they are not profitable enough at first and because their development can take scarce resources away from sustaining innovations (which are needed to compete against current competition). A disruptive process can take longer to develop than by the conventional approach and the risk associated to it is higher than the other more incremental or evolutionary forms of innovations, but once it is deployed in the market, it achieves a much faster penetration and higher degree of impact on the established markets.

To address the question of houses and disruptive innovation, we first need to look at how pets are disrupting families and replacing children.

Americans are having dogs instead of babies.

The fewer babies Americans give birth to, the more small dogs they seem to buy.
Birth rates in the US have fallen from nearly 70 per 1,000 women in 2007, to under 63 last year—a 10% tumble. American women birthed almost 400,000 fewer little humans in 2013 than they did six years before. The drop-off has come exclusively among 15- to 29-year-olds. This chart, taken from a recent report by the US Department of Health (pdf), does a pretty decent job of showing how much of the growing disinterest in having babies is due to younger women:

 

Meanwhile, the ownership of small dogs—that is, pets weighing no more than 20 pounds (9 kilograms)—is doing just the opposite. Americans have been buying more and more small dogs each year since 1999. The population of little canines more than doubled in the US over that period, and is only projected to continue upwards, according to data from market research firm Euromonitor.

 

“You do not have to go to many pet shows to realize that the numbers of small and tiny dogs are on the increase,” a report by Pets International opened in 2010 (pdf).

And rightly so. The number of small dogs has grown so fast that they are now the most popular kind nationwide.

It could just be a coincidence that Americans are birthing fewer babies at the same time as they’re buying a lot more little dogs. But there’s pretty good reason to believe it isn’t, Damian Shore, an analyst at market-research firm Euromonitor, told Quartz. “There’s definitely some replacement happening there,” he said.

It is young women who are deferring marriage who are buying the small dogs.

One telling sign that the two are not entirely unrelated is that the same age groups that are forgoing motherhood are leading the small dog charge. “Women are not only having fewer children, but are also getting married later. There are more single and unmarried women in their late 20s and early 30s, which also happens to be the demographic that buys the most small dogs,” Shore said.

This is one more reason for the increased spending on pets.

There’s also evidence people are treating their dogs a bit more like little humans these days. Premium dog food, the most expensive kind, has grown by 170% over the past 15 years, and now accounts for 57% of of the overall dog food market.

 

There are now tools to monitor your dog’s fitness, ice cream trucks exclusively for canines, and vacations designed exclusively for dog-having people. “The animals in our homes are family. They’re like children,” David Grimm, the author of the book Citizen Canine, told Wired this week.

Then there is, of course, the changed mode of living and its effect on pet ownership.

Of course, small dog ownership isn’t rising just because people want kid substitutes. Fashion trends aside, small dogs are also emblematic of a national migration to cities, where big dogs are harder to keep. Nearly 80% of Americans live in urban areas. “Smaller homes and apartments are also helping drive the growing popularity of smaller dogs,” Shore said.

This is very incorrect. First of all, as we have seen, Americans homes are expanding in size. Second of all, 80% of Americans do not live in cities: roughly one quarter (26%) of Americans live in cities, about one fifth (21%) live in rural areas, and a little over half (53%) in suburbs. "Urban area" = suburb + city.

But more on this later. Back to disruptive innovation.

In terms of disruptive innovation, there is a double disruption going on here:

1) Dogs are disrupting families and replacing children.

2) Small dogs are disrupting and replacing big dogs.

Small dogs are disrupting and replacing big dogs, but there is another disruptive innovation within the world of dogs.

Crossbred dogs are replacing purebred dogs.

So much of the enthusiasm for mixed-breed dogs can be traced back to the marketing in the 1980s of pug-beagle mixes -- "puggles" -- by the mass dog breeder Wallace Havens. This trend intersects with increasing urbanization.

Havens, a towering man of 70, has spent much of his career breeding cattle and owns a chain of Play Haven day-care centers. He is best known as the originator of the puggle, a pug-beagle cross with an irresistibly wrinkled muzzle, forlorn eyes and suitable dimensions for cramped city apartments. He first marketed puggles 20 years ago, but by late 2005, the dog suddenly had a cadre of celebrity owners, four-figure price tags and a brimming portfolio of magazine write-ups and morning-TV appearances. Puggle-emblazoned messenger bags and ladies’ track suits followed. For a time, in New York especially, you couldn’t swing a cat without hitting a puggle.

Around the same time in Australia, serious breeders sought to create a new breed of service dog to help people who were otherwise allergic to dogs.

In the late 1980s, an Australian dog breeder crossed a standard poodle with a Labrador retriever, struggling to fashion a capable guide dog for the blind with the poodle’s more hypoallergenic coat. He called the puppies Labradoodles. In 1998, a small partnership began exporting loping, shaggy-headed pet Labradoodles to the United States for upward of $2,500 each. Before long, Macy’s and Lord & Taylor sold thousands of Labradoodle stuffed animals to benefit cancer research; last year, Tiger Woods got a Labradoodle, and a metal Labradoodle replaced the Scottish terrier game piece in a special edition of Monopoly.

People might want a mixed-breed 'designer dog' because they cannot make up their minds on a particular breed. This is especially true when husbands and wives clash over what kind of dog to get.

“I think the majority of the poodle problem is not the poodle itself,” she told me. “It’s the froufrou coat. It’s the haircut. Poodles are great dogs. But it’s hard to sell a poodle to a man.” Typically, she adds, a husband will want something like a beagle. “But the woman says, ‘Well I’m not buying that slick-haired dog, that beagle, because they’re not fuzzy and cute.’ ”

Havens’s granddaughter, who works at Puppy Haven, says she receives apprehensive phone calls from men, pleading for a small, apartment-friendly dog that will please their wives without being too poofy. They end up with puggles, she said. The breeds that satisfy these same criteria, like the Brussels Griffon, have seen some of the highest spikes in A.K.C. registrations over the last decade, as have smaller breeds in general. Everyone seems to be chasing the next small thing. Dedicated breeders have shrunk the Alaskan husky into a raccoonlike throw pillow, breeding it true and naming it the Alaskan Klee Kai. Even the puggle is now being superseded by the “pocket” puggle.

As more women work for a living, within the household they exert more power of choice. This includes the choice of dog, but it also includes just about everything (hence the recent trend of husbands making "man caves" out of a spare room or the garage or attic, whereas once upon a time, the whole house was his "castle").

But a two-income family is also a family that is less likely to relocate for a job opportunity.
 

The homes families live in have less yardage. City life presents this challenge, but so does suburban life; since the 1950s, house sizes have more than doubled, but lot sizes have shrunk. (Also, in the 1950s people let their dogs and cats roam the neighborhood, producing more animals.)
 

“People don’t have the space they had before,” Bob Vetere of the American Pet Product Manufacturers Association told me. “Maybe you’ve moved from a 30-acre ranch into a two-room, fifth-floor walkup. Maybe you love the look of a mastiff, but want a 20-pound version of that.” Studies show that adults retain strong loyalty to breeds they’ve grown up with. And baby boomers, Vetere said, are unwilling to abandon the idea of pets as they retire. “Now,” he speculated, “maybe you could wind up being able to crossbreed the dog, to calm the dog down, to make it a little more friendly, a little more manageable.”

It could be that dogs will be disrupted by cats.

Pet cats now outnumber pet dogs.
 

We may see in designer dogs the potential, however real or empty, of making dog ownership easier. In the ’80s, Vetere noted, the number of pet cats in America exceeded the number of dogs for the first time, after scoopable litters hit the market. People were working longer days; more families were two-income. Cats, already equated with self-sufficiency, could now be left all day without us having to muss with that box as frequently or with such fetid intimacy. An equally hassle-free arrangement with your dog meant hiring a pet sitter.

Finally, one more disruption in the world of dogs: according to the American Veterinarian Medical Association, 85% of dogs are today are adopted from shelters, and are spayed and neutered upon adoption. (The American Pet Products Association claims that the number is closer to 37%, but continues to rise.) This is yet another disruptive innovation in the pet ownership, one that will downsize the dog population. (When one used to meet people walking their dog, they would introduce him and say, "He's a purebreed." Now they say, "He's a rescue.")

 
In fact, do people today even want dogs? The idea of a dog "breed" is only about a century old, and coming into existence in Britain in the Victorian age. (Previously, there were only local "types" of dogs, like shepherding dogs and retrieving dogs, that would be bred within a general type, not a strict breed with a closed and recorded lineage. Also, some "breeds" like the Border Collie are really 'landraces' that emerged in a locality without consciously being bred by farmers.) That was a time and a place when dogs morphed from farm workers of mixed background to living works of art that could be cultivated like prize-winning flowers. Today, dogs are family members -- but even that status is changing.

Katherine C. Grier, a cultural historian and author of “Pets in America,” told me: “The dogness of dogs has become problematic. We want an animal that is, in some respects, not really an animal. You’d never have to take it out. It doesn’t shed. It doesn’t bark. It doesn’t do stuff.” I found even the maker of Amazing Live Sea-Monkeys, which launched its tiny crustaceans in 1960 with the slogan “Instant Life,” now forcefully rebranding itself, targeting parents who refuse “to get stuck with caring for another living thing."

What people want in a pet today is the affection of a dog with the low-maintenance of a cat. What to do?

Could a virtual pet or a pet robot replace cats and dogs as companion animals? Will robot dogs replace pets in super-dense cities?

In a study in Frontiers in Veterinary Science, Rault predicts that as urban populations grow the cities of the future may not offer enough living space for 9.5 billion people and their faithful pets, and he claims that technology may offer lower-maintenance replacements in the form of robotic dogs or virtual-reality pet simulators.

Something like this happened in Japan, but only marginally.

Sony introduced the Aibo in 1999, at a price of 250,000 yen (about $2,000 at current exchange rates). The beaglelike robots could move around, bark and perform simple tricks. Sony sold 150,000 units through 2006; the fifth and final generation was said to be able to express 60 emotional states.

Even in Japan, a densely populated, aging country with an animist tradition that maintains that all things have souls, the Aibo was never a big seller. But when the product was discontinued and owners could no longer find replacement parts for their robotic pets, funeral arrangements for their robotic pets were often made.

Even the Japanese, with a large population of lonely senior citizens living in cramped quarters in large cities, are not turning toward robotic pets. Robotic pets are a marginal phenomenon, even in animist-inflected Japan.

But that might change. As of February 2018, Sony has resurrected a new, improved Aibo that is winning hearts and minds.

The new Aibo is quite simply adorable. It has touch sensors on its head, chin, and back so you can pet it. It responds to touch and voice, and 22 actuators enable more realistic movement than previous models. Its eyes are OLED panels. It has a camera on its nose to help it recognize family members and search for its bone — which is called Aibone — while a camera on its back helps it navigate to its charging station like a Roomba. (Aibo gets two hours of playtime and takes three hours to charge.)

And is America really urbanizing? Are Americans flocking to cities?

How 'urban' is America?

According to the US federal government, as of 2015, 63% of Americans live in cities, which compromise just 3.5% of the land mass of the United States.

A majority of the U.S. population lives in incorporated places or cities, although these areas only make up a small fraction of the U.S. land area, according to a new report released today by the U.S. Census Bureau. The percentage of the population living in cities in 2013 was highest in the Midwest and West at 71.2 percent and 76.4 percent, respectively.

“The higher percentage of people living in cities in the West can partly be explained by the limited access to water outside of western cities and federally held land surrounding many of these cities, which limits growth outside incorporated areas,” said Darryl Cohen, a Census Bureau analyst and the report’s author. “This is especially true in Utah, where 88.4 percent of the population lives in an incorporated place.”

The definition of 'city', of course, revolves around density.

The population density in cities is more than 46 times higher than the territory outside of cities. The average population density for cities is 1,593.5 people per square mile, while the density outside of this area is only 34.6 people per square mile. Population density generally increases with city population size. The population density of cities with 1 million or more people is 7,192.3 people per square mile. 

Additional findings: 

Density 

Cities with the largest land area are mostly in the West and have fewer people per square mile. Four places in Alaska are among the nation’s largest in land area, such as Sitka city and borough, which consists of 2,870.4 square miles of land and has 3.1 people per square mile. 

Among large cities, density levels increased the most for those with strong population growth and stable boundaries. Population density increased by over 700 people per square mile in both New York City and Washington, D.C., between 2010 and 2013, the highest increases in density among cities of 100,000 or more population.  

Population decline or increases in land area caused decreases in population density in other places.

It's a stunning development, that almost two-thirds of Americans live in cities that make up less than 4% of the land mass of the United States. In fact, it's counter-intuitive to almost everybody.

That's because it's only true depending on how one defines 'city'.

Words like 'urban' and 'city' and 'built on' are used interchangeably sometimes, or used with great specificity at other times but with divergent definitions.

For instance, there is a distinction between 'urban' and 'built on', as one finds in the United Kingdom with "The great myth of urban Britain'.

What proportion of Britain do you reckon is built on? By that I mean covered by buildings, roads, car parks, railways, paths and so on - what people might call "concreted over". Go on - have a guess.

Until recently, conflicting definitions have made the calculation tricky but fortunately, a huge piece of mapping work was completed last summer - the UK National Ecosystem Assessment (NEA).

Five hundred experts analysed vast quantities of data and produced what they claim is the first coherent body of evidence about the state of Britain's natural environment.

Having looked at all the information, they calculated that "6.8% of the UK's land area is now classified as urban" (a definition that includes rural development and roads, by the way).

The urban landscape accounts for 10.6% of England, 1.9% of Scotland, 3.6% of Northern Ireland and 4.1% of Wales.

Put another way, that means almost 93% of the UK is not urban. But even that isn't the end of the story because urban is not the same as built on.

In urban England, for example, the researchers found that just over half the land (54%) in our towns and cities is greenspace - parks, allotments, sports pitches and so on.

Furthermore, domestic gardens account for another 18% of urban land use; rivers, canals, lakes and reservoirs an additional 6.6%.

Their conclusion?

In England, "78.6% of urban areas is designated as natural rather than built". Since urban only covers a tenth of the country, this means that the proportion of England's landscape which is built on is…

... 2.27%.

This map from the NEA report - also seen on page 20 of the PDF report above - helps to visualise what the country actually looks like.

But even it cannot reflect the extraordinary finding that almost four-fifths of what is designated urban land is not built on.

One useful distinction that might be made is between developed areas that are either suburbs or cities, versus relatively undeveloped or rural areas that are either wilderness or devoted to agricultural uses.
 

In the UK, such developed areas make up ten percent (10%) of the UK (described above as 'urban', but it includes suburbs). In the US, these developed areas make up about four percent (4%) of the land area, whereas in New Zealand such areas make up about 6% of the country's land area.
 

This can be explained by a couple of facts.

The UK is slightly smaller than Oregon, with a population of 65 million.

New Zealand is about the size of Colorado, with a population of 4.5 million.
 

(Interestingly, Germany has the same area as Montana, but Germany has one hundred times the population of Montana's 800,000 residents.)

New Zealanders in particular are famous for the low-rise, suburban nature of their development. Suburbs are a mode of land use that diverges considerably from the city-centric development of Asian and continental European societies, but which have characterized the English-speaking world since the Industrial Revolution.

The United States is, by contrast, comparatively vast.

So if the US federal government says that almost two-thirds of Americans live in 'cities' that occupy 4% of the land, this should be understood to include suburbs as well. Very little of the land in the US is developed.

 Here is a more critical look at those government numbers.

America has grown even more urban. According to new numbers just released from the U.S. Census Bureau, 80.7 percent of the U.S. population lived in urban areas as of the 2010 Census, a boost from the 79 percent counted in 2000. That brings the country's total urban population to 249,253,271, a number attained via a growth rate of 12.1 percent between 2000 and 2010, outpacing the nation as a whole, which grew at 9.7 percent.

Overall, these results aren't very surprising.

But we're not just talking about cities here. The new figures represent the population in "urban areas," which the Census Bureau defines as "densely developed residential, commercial and other nonresidential areas."

There are officially two types of urban areas: “urbanized areas” of 50,000 or more people and “urban clusters” of between 2,500 and 50,000 people. For the 2010 count, the Census Bureau has defined 486 urbanized areas, accounting for 71.2 percent of the U.S. population. The 3,087 urban clusters account for 9.5 percent of the U.S. population.

Though these smaller urban clusters account for a relatively small portion of the total population, they make up the vast majority of the roughly 3,500 "urban" areas in the U.S. But is a town of 2,500 people really what we think of as "urban"?

According to the Census Bureau, a place is "urban" if it's a big, modest or even very small collection of people living near each other. That includes Houston, with its 4.9 million people, and Bellevue, Iowa, with its 2,543.

If roughly 80 percent of our population is urban, roughly 80 percent of our urban areas are actually small towns.

But with such a wide spectrum making up the definition of the word "urban," maybe it makes more sense to think of the U.S. as majority non-rural.

So to come up with the statistic that 80% of Americans live in urban areas, 'urban' was defined as city + suburb + small town.
 

What about the 'emic' or insider perspective on this matter?
 

That is, what do regular Americans think about how 'urbanized' America is?
 

Interestingly, as far as governments are concerned, the word 'city' is a legal-political term, and, as such, its official meaning is divorced from common sense use.

What, exactly, is a city? Technically, cities are legal designations that, under state laws, have specific public powers and functions. But many of the largest American cities — especially in the South and West — don’t feel like cities, at least not in the high-rise-and-subways, “Sesame Street” sense. Large swaths of many big cities are residential neighborhoods of single-family homes, as car-dependent as any suburb.

Cities like Austin and Fort Worth in Texas and Charlotte, North Carolina, are big and growing quickly, but largely suburban. According to Census Bureau data released Thursday, the population of the country’s biggest cities (the 34 with at least 500,000 residents) grew 0.99 percent in 2014 — versus 0.88 percent for all metropolitan areas and 0.75 percent for the U.S. overall. But city growth isn’t the same as urban growth. Three cities of the largest 10 are more suburban than urban, based on our analysis of how people describe the neighborhoods where they live.

What the government says about how urbanized the US is diverges from both the common experience of Americans and geographic reality.

It turns out that many cities’ legal boundaries line up poorly with what local residents perceive as urban. Nationally, 26 percent of Americans described where they live as urban, 53 percent said suburban and 21 percent said rural. (This comes close to the census estimate that 81 percent of the population is urban if “urban” is understood to include suburban areas.)

Furthermore, the new census population data shows that the fastest-growing large cities tend to be more suburban.

City growth, therefore, does not necessarily mean more urban living. In order to understand policing, schools, property taxes and other typical responsibilities of city governments, we need to look at cities as defined by their legal boundaries. But when we’re looking to understand the economic, social and demographic issues facing urban and suburban America, city boundaries can mislead. Looking instead at neighborhoods, classified by their characteristics into urban, suburban and rural, shows more clearly how suburban America — including many of its largest cities — actually is.

Are cities really growing? Or are suburbs growing?

One thing seems certain...

Young, Educated, Prosperous People Are Moving to the Cities

It seems to be a fact.

Influx of Younger, Wealthier Residents Transforms U.S. Cities

Educated, relatively high-earning workers are flocking to urban neighborhoods at a rate not seen since at least the 1970s

By Laura Kusisto

The Baurs are part of a wave of young, educated, relatively high-earning workers flocking to many American cities at a rate not seen since the U.S. Census Bureau began tracking such data in the 1970s. The shift began last decade and accelerated during the housing bust.

This sounds like a very strong trend, that is, an ongoing trend that actually accelerated during the economic crisis (whereas a 'strong trend' like pet ownership trends was unaffected by the crisis, and more moderate trends like buying bigger houses and going on road trips temporarily dropped during the recession, then came back).

The movement is injecting new life into tired urban cores, prompting renovation of older residential and commercial buildings while spurring new real estate developments as well as upgrades to transit systems, parks and cultural institutions.

A range of factors is driving the urban influx, economists say, from job growth and declining crime in cities to young professionals waiting longer to have children—or deciding not to have them at all. Tighter mortgage lending and concern about homeownership risks also weigh on young people, turning many into long-term renters.

For landlords and developers, rising rents and home values are a boon. But the costs can push out lower-wage employees as well as teachers, police and other middle-income public servants, making it harder for employers to attract such labor.

As many of the displaced move to suburbs, new strains are emerging there, on schools, transportation and services for the needy.

“The housing affordability issues are no longer limited to the high-cost coastal cities” such as New York and San Francisco, said Stockton Williams, executive director of the Urban Land Institute’s Terwilliger Center for Housing.

 

Those who have moved to revived city neighborhoods say they love the new amenities. And for some there is another plus: no need for a car.

Joe and Melanie Baur, in Ohio City, say they bike, take public transit and walk, including jaunts with their dog, Moses Cleaveland, named after the city’s founder, who spelled his surname with an extra “a.”
The car “was such an albatross,” Mr. Baur said. “I hated it.”

Relatively affluent, young, talented folks are moving to the cities, and in some respects driving out the less fortunate into the suburbs.

This raises another issue: The suburbs are the new slums.
 

Americans still tend to think about poverty as an inner-city problem. But some time around the dot-com bust and 2001 recession, the number of poor people living in the suburbs actually outstripped the total residing in cities. So why is suburban poverty often treated as out of sight, out of mind?

One reason may be that it’s more diffuse. In urban areas, the poor are often packed into predominantly low-income neighborhoods. In the 'burbs, they’re generally scattered through more economically diverse communities. In other words, the U.S. suburbs are home to lots of impoverished people, but they’re not home to lots of slums.

That’s beginning to change, though, according to a new brief by Elizabeth Kneebone of Brookings. During the 2000s, suburban poverty not only grew—it also became more concentrated. In 2000, 27 percent of poor suburbanites lived in neighborhoods with a poverty rate of at least 20 percent. During the 2008–2012 period, the figure was about 38.3 percent.

This would seem to be a very strong trend, that is, a consistent, ongoing trend that was only accelerated by crisis.
 

[M]ost suburban communities aren’t really equipped to handle the needs of the poor: The public transport systems are meager, the schools don’t offer English-as-a-second-language courses for immigrant children, and there aren't the same networks of charity organizations dedicated to working with struggling families. The only upside of living in the ‘burbs as a poor household is that you might not be surrounded by as many other poor households; research suggests that it's better to be broke in a neighborhood with a low overall poverty rate than a high one. In a high-poverty suburb, though, families are getting the worst of all possible worlds.

The cities are getting the rich folks, the suburbs are getting the poor.

But are the cities growing? And the suburbs?

From 2014, a Time magazine article "The Cities Are Slowing But Suburbs Are Growing".

While cities are still outpacing suburbs, the gap is closing 

The United States’ biggest cities grew more slowly last year as suburban areas ticked up, according to figures released by the U.S. Census on Thursday, suggesting that city-dwelling Americans may be looking to the suburbs again. While city growth overall is still outpacing the suburbs, the gap between the two is shrinking after several post-recession years in which downtowns and older urban cores around the U.S. saw significant population increases.

“The slowing growth in these urban cores and the increasing gains in the suburbs may be the first indication of a return to more traditional patterns of city-suburban growth,” said University of New Hampshire demographer Ken Johnson.

There is again the issue of how to define 'city'.

The new Census figures show significant growth in suburban areas in the South and West. Almost all of the fastest-growing cities with a population of 50,000 or more were suburbs of major cities like Dallas, Salt Lake City, Phoenix, Nashville and Houston. 

Texas suburbs saw the largest growth between 2012 and 2013, especially in areas around Austin, a city millennials have moved to in recent years for its tech jobs and cultural opportunities. The U.S.’s fastest growing city is San Marcos, whose population grew 8% in 2013. Cedar Park and Georgetown were also in the top seven fastest-growing cities, and all three Texas cities surround Austin.

So the article assures us that 'cities' are still growing -- but then it turns out that it is the suburbs of major cities that are growing most.

 How did the 2009 recession affect patterns of habitation?

Historically, Americans have moved from downtown city cores to suburbs as they got older, had children and needed more space. Suburbs grew three times as fast as cities from 2000 to 2010, according to an analysis by William Frey, a demographer with the Brookings Institution. But the recession quickly reversed that as many older Americans felt frozen in place and decided to stay put, temporarily halting that city-to-suburban flow. At the same time, those in their 20s and 30s have flocked to downtowns in that same period, often lured by jobs and the ease of commuting in an urban area.

But Frey says the U.S. is a long way off from the kind of suburban sprawl it witnessed throughout the 1990s and 2000s. Many of those living in cities have likely decided to stay put for good, Frey says, or are still financially unable to move or buy a house. “We may never see that kind of suburbanization again,” he says.

So suburbs are still growing faster than the cities, and some of these 'cities' are actually suburbs of major cities.
 

But what about the jobs and money scene in these localities?

Good Jobs and Smart People Move to the City, 
the Rest of Us Go to the Suburbs.

According to this 2015 New York Times article, more new jobs are in city centers, while employment growth shrinks in the suburbs.

For decades, most Americans working in metropolitan areas have gone to work outside city centers – in suburban office parks, stores or plants, not downtown skyscrapers. But as people increasingly choose to live in cities instead of outside them, employers are following.

In recent years, employment in city centers has grown and employment in the surrounding suburban areas has shrunk, a striking change from the years before, according to a report published Tuesday by City Observatory, a think tank. The changes are seemingly small, but they represent an important shift in the American work force. As recently as 2007, employment outside city centers was climbing much faster than inside.

Economically, there has always been a virtuous-vicious cycle of jobs seekers moving to where the employment is, and employers going where the talent goes. Increasingly, talent and jobs are headed to the urban core.

Some cities — especially big ones hemmed in by water, like New York and San Francisco — have held onto a large share of employment near the city center. But now, urban job growth is increasing more quickly in those cities than before. And in other cities — including Chicago, New Orleans, Orlando, Charlotte and Milwaukee — employment is growing in the urban core and declining in the suburbs.

We pay close attention to the number of jobs gained or lost. But the location of jobs is just as important — including for making decisions about employment, housing and transportation policies.

Unfortunately, the increase in urban employment opportunities is mainly in the best paying jobs. That means that most folks would get priced out of cities (as was explained in an earlier article, above).

“How do you connect people to economic opportunity and the kinds of jobs that can give them secure footing and a path out of poverty?” said Elizabeth Kneebone, a fellow studying metropolitan policy at the Brookings Institution. “The first step is understanding where jobs are located, and can people afford to live where the good job growth is happening.”

The jobs in the heart of cities tend to be highly skilled and high-paying ones, in industries like finance and tech. Working-class jobs, like retail or construction, are more likely to be suburban. So with the recent growth of downtown jobs, the risk is that cities will continue to become havens for the wealthy and inaccessible to the middle and working classes.

Historically, there was a long exodus from the cities to the suburbs since the 1950s -- first of people, then jobs.

The vast majority of jobs are still outside city centers, the result of a retreat from America’s cities that has been going on for decades. At the beginning of the 20th century, people lived and worked in high-density areas and walked where they needed to go. By the 1950s, most lived in suburbs and commuted to work in cities. In the decades that followed, employers decamped to the suburbs, too. By 1996, only 16 percent of metro area jobs were within a three-mile radius of downtowns, according to the economists Edward Glaeser and Matthew Kahn.

 

The recession accelerated the recent decline in urban sprawl. Industries based outside cities, like construction and manufacturing, were hit much harder than urban ones like business services. Jobs disappeared everywhere, but more rapidly outside cities.

First, 'urban sprawl' really means suburban sprawl.

Second, the recession did slow the expansion of suburbs. But this does not seem to be an acceleration of a "recent" trend; the articles above suggest continued suburban expansion. But the suburbs seem to be getting poorer.
 

But there seem to be new trends that make the enrichment of the cities more than a fleeting fashion.

But the data indicate that more lasting forces are at work. People increasingly desire to live, work, shop and play in the same place, and to commute shorter distances — particularly the young and educated, who are the most coveted employees. So in many cities, both policy makers and employers have been trying to make living and working there more attractive.

Cities are also better able to hold on to jobs than they were before. “It means healthier cities,” said Joe Cortright, who runs City Observatory and is president of Impresa, which does regional economic analysis. “If the urban core is economically weak or fiscally troubled, that creates a burden for a whole metropolitan area.”

 And, of course, YMMV -- Your Mileage May Vary.

Some cities have not followed the trend, like Dallas and Houston, where employment outside the city is still growing faster. In others, like Jacksonville and St. Louis, jobs have been declining in both locations, but more quickly outside urban centers. Cities with a high concentration of urban jobs include Austin, New Orleans and Portland, Ore. In Atlanta, Los Angeles and Miami, meanwhile, less than 10 percent of jobs are in the urban core.

This transformation seems to be the culmination of the shift to the post-industrial knowledge economy.

The 110-story Willis Tower in downtown Chicago is a microcosm of the shifting geography of jobs.

 

Originally called the Sears Tower, it was built in 1970 by Sears Roebuck and Co. But in 1988, Sears left it for a green suburban campus in Hoffman Estates, Ill. Then, in 2013, United Airlines moved its world headquarters and 4,000 employees into the tower. Other companies like Motorola Mobility and Archer Daniels Midland have also recently relocated to downtown Chicago from suburban campuses.

 

Chicago has gained more creative jobs, international tourism, university centers and residential development. The Chicago Loop, the city’s central business district, has been transformed from a financial district that emptied at 5 p.m. to a seven-day-a-week entertainment zone, said Aaron Renn, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

The changes have been driven in part by employees wanting to live and work downtown, said Mr. Renn, who writes the Urbanophile blog: “Today there is more of an expectation on the part of both people and employers that they have to be more flexible and accommodating of their work force.”

Economists have described the benefits of workers clustering in a dense urban area: For a certain sector of knowledge jobs, ideas bloom from spontaneous, face-to-face interaction in coffee shops or elevators. But what does urban employment growth mean for other types of jobs?

But that is cold comfort to the majority of us who are not a part of that economy.

Some say more highly skilled jobs in an urban area will lead to more of all kinds of jobs. For every college graduate who takes a job in an innovation industry, five additional jobs are eventually created in that city for waiters, carpenters and teachers, according to Enrico Moretti, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley. As The New York Times reported this month, New York City is adding jobs at a furious pace, and they range from making software to busing tables.

But others say the shift overwhelmingly favors the highly skilled. “The problem with the general trend is that the poor are being priced out of cities,” said Mr. Glaeser, who teaches at Harvard University and wrote “Triumph of the City.”

American cities have succeeded in reshaping their urban cores as places people want to live and work. The question is whether these benefits will apply to everyone — or just to high earners.

Now, who exactly is moving to the cities?

More specifically, upper management is moving to the cities in order to be around young, educated, creative types. Upper management wants to be in the city in order to hire the new talent that lives in the cities. But the top brass also wants to rub shoulders with the youngsters in order to become more like the Young Turks -- dynamic and innovative. 

Middle management, in contrast, is being farmed off to the cheaper suburbs.

"Why corporate America is leaving the suburbs for the city."

In a nutshell, the city is where the young, educated, creative, ambitious people are. They want to be in the city, not working in a cubicle in an office park in the suburbs. This is partly because American cities have really improved since the 1970s. Management want these kinds of diverse, dynamic workers because American corporations now see themselves engaged in "permanent revolution" (borrowing the rhetoric of Maoism) to constantly reinvent their companies. The west coast (San Francisco, Seattle) is the most creative region of the US, and this is particularly where corporate executives want to be located. 

Also, work can be done over the internet now, so that the whole corporation does not have to be ensconced together in an office park. So, properly speaking, it is upper management that is moving to the city, not the corporation itself. With the corporate downsizing that has been going on for decades in the United States, there are fewer people to take along when the upper echelon corporation picks up and leaves the suburbs for the city. Middle-management jobs are not only remaining in the suburbs, but they are moving to the suburbs from the city.

Besides blue-chip icons like G.E., McDonald’s and Kraft Heinz, venture capital investors and start-ups are increasingly looking to urban centers, particularly on the West Coast, said Richard Florida, an urban theorist and professor at the University of Toronto.

“The period of companies moving to suburbs and edge cities has ebbed, but I had thought that start-ups would continue to locate in so-called nerdistans, like office parks,” he said. But a recent study by Mr. Florida showed more than half of new venture capital flowing into urban neighborhoods, with two San Francisco ZIP codes garnering more than $1 billion each, he said.

The return of a top echelon of executives to American cities reflects — and may well reinforce — disparities driven by widening inequality, underscoring how jobs are disappearing in other locales.

There is a certain irony that liberal urban planners like Richard Florida celebrate the idea of the American city as a font of creativity. The irony is that this now represents the corporatization of creative urban life. One parallel might be the rebelliousness that supposedly existed in the (late) 1960s in the drug use, music and promiscuity of a minority of young people associated with the counter-culture ("hippies"); by the 1970s, this kind of behavior lost any sort of spiritual or political meaning as it went mainstream ("sex, drugs and rock-n-roll") and was co-opted by corporations. The current medicalization of marijuana represents both the victory of the old counter-culture, but also the victory of corporations who will eventually monopolize this trade.

Richard Florida's ideas derive from insights gleaned from British sociology from the 1950s. It was observed then, in the emerging urban blight of the UK, that urban regions went through a cycle of decay: a long period of blight was followed by young, artistic types moving into blighted areas in order to take advantage of cheap rents (as in Detroit today); later, young, upwardly mobile businessmen would move in. The peculiarity is that the British critique of urban cycles had a critical edge to it: The rich get richer, and the poor get poorer. The liberal American interpretation is one of shallow, complacent enthusiasm that seems clueless about how this cycle perpetuates and exacerbates income inequality ('equality of condition'). 

In the article, the conservative urban planner Joel Kotkin also weighed in, touting the continuing relevance of the suburbs.

Over all, there has been a slight pickup in employment and population in the central core of big cities, said Joel Kotkin, an author and urban geographer at Chapman University in California. But many close-in suburbs and neighborhoods are withering, particularly in the Northeast. More distant suburbs and exurbs are still thriving, especially in the Sun Belt.

“The elite functions are going downtown,” Mr. Kotkin said. “But at the same time, middle-management jobs are moving to the suburbs in places like Dallas, if they’re not leaving the country entirely.”

So rich people and jobs are moving to the cities, and the rest of us are getting priced out, so we have to move to the suburbs.

But it's even more dramatic than that...

...Even rich people are getting priced out of Manhattan!

 On how a hot real estate in the big city market spills over into the suburbs.

The bidding wars that have become the norm in New York City are now also common in select suburbs within easy commuting distance. Buyers priced out of the city are heading for the ’burbs, driving up demand and creating a more fraught buying process in close-in towns that have long enjoyed reputations for good school systems, lively downtowns and ready access to the city.

“The city is this pot of water that’s spilling over on the sides, and that excess demand is going to the suburbs,” said Jonathan Miller, the president of Miller Samuel, a New York appraisal and research firm. “It’s all being driven by the lack of affordability.”

This is not rich people looking for the idyllic life in the tranquil suburbs. They would rather be in Manhattan, and the one quality they want in a house is quick access to the city.

Generally speaking, buyers are not lining up for luxury properties. High-end homes — upward of $2 million or $3 million, depending on the location — are still going begging across the metropolitan area, agents said. Demand for these homes is weakest in affluent suburbs without a train station. “The reason is clear: The high-paying jobs in the region are now disproportionately located in Manhattan,” Mr. Otteau said. “And if that’s where you’re going, there’s just not enough hours in the day to involve a car in that commute.”

At the same time, the luxury market in rail-centric towns is also slow, as they vie for fewer Wall Street bonus dollars and compete with a growing preference for urban living. Said Mr. Otteau, “Because of the dramatic improvement in urban life in the last 20 years, it’s no longer a given that when you’re ready to raise a family, you need to go out and buy a house in the suburbs.”

But many buyers who would prefer to stay in New York City simply can’t afford to. In Pelham, “almost all of our buyers are coming from the city, increasingly from Brooklyn,” Mr. Scinta said. “They are being priced out in terms of the additional space they need. They’ve outgrown their apartments and can’t afford to move up to the next-size apartment.”

The 1950s are so over.

A Stong, Conservative Defense of the Suburbs

And now, for a strong, conservative defense of suburbs is the essay "A Planet of Suburbs" from the Economist magazine, December 2014.
 

The developing world is suburbanizing, just as the United States did after the Second World War. For the author, this is marvelous.

The shift in population from countryside to cities across the world is often called the “great urbanisation”. It is a misleading term. The movement is certainly great: the United Nations reckons that the total urban population in developing countries will double between 2010 and 2050, to 5.2 billion, while the rural population will shrink slightly. But it is nothing like as obviously urban. People may be moving towards cities, but most will not end up in their centres. Few cities are getting more crowded downtown; between 2001 and 2011 Chennai added just 7% more people while Chengalpattu swelled by 39%. In developed and developing worlds, outskirts are growing faster than cores. This is not the great urbanisation. It is the great suburbanisation.

The author admits the oddness of suburbs, and confesses their apparent sterility.

Suburbs are curious places, neither here nor there. They have been around since ancient Rome (which gave the world the word), but it was not until the 19th and 20th centuries that first the train and then the bus and car brought them truly into their own—the first places in human history where many people lived but far fewer worked. The idea of places with little purpose other than providing space for domestic life struck those from city and country alike as peculiar and diminished. In 1904 the Times worried that London would be surrounded by “a district of appalling monotony, ugliness and dullness”. That dullness was said to seep out of the suburbs’ tidily planned streets and into the minds of their inhabitants, giving rise to a condition known as suburban neurosis. To Lewis Mumford, an American urbanist writing in 1961, suburbia was:

a multitude of uniform, unidentifiable houses, lined up inflexibly, at uniform distances, on uniform roads, in a treeless communal waste, inhabited by people of the same class, the same income, the same age group, witnessing the same television performances, eating the same tasteless prefabricated foods, from the same freezers, conforming in every outward and inward respect to a common mould.

To observers like Mumford, suburbs were not just unfortunate urban appendages; they were anti-urban. They enabled a woman to opt out of the vibrant, sociable city, where she at least knew her local butcher and grocer, and live what he called “an encapsulated life” apart from others. Suburbs were machineries of isolation.

But this suburban isolation and generic blandness is exactly what people want.

Sometimes, we just want to get away from it all, get away from the rat race.

In one sense the critics are right: suburbs are a place apart. People who live close to the heart of buzzing cities can feel themselves part of a great project. Suburbanites have relinquished that, or forgone it. What they have gained in its stead is surprisingly consistent from city to city and from country to country. Suburbs are about family, ease and quietness. Searingly ambitious people find them dull, and some become alienated in them. But many others experience a humble liberation. D.J. Waldie, then an official in the southern California city of, as it happens, Lakewood, described his suburb as “adequate to the demands of my desire”. And to a great many other people’s desires, it turns out.

This is not accurate.

The article is celebrating the globalization of the suburbs. But the description in the paragraph above of ambitious urbanites describes major American cities today. In contrast, in the developing world, the wealthiest and most ambitious people live in the new, luxurious suburbs -- just as they did in the US in the 1950s and after. Also, in the US since the Great Recession, people live in suburbs increasingly because they have been priced out of the cities, not because the house is a haven for a weary heart. 

Just how powerful and widespread this centrifugal trend will be is suggested by the work of Shlomo Angel, a geographer at New York University. By using satellite images, old maps and population data, Mr Angel has run a ruler over some 3,600 metropolitan areas. He finds that, with few exceptions, they are less dense in wealthier countries (see map). Paris is less than one-third as densely populated as Cairo and barely one-seventh as dense as Mumbai. Even rich cities that seem packed are sparsely populated compared with poorer ones. Tokyo is only one-fifth as densely populated as Dhaka, for example.

Mr Angel also finds that almost every city is becoming less dense. In 1920 Chicago squeezed 59 people into each hectare of land; now, by his reckoning, it manages just 16. The urbanised area of Mexico City is about half as densely populated as it was in 1940. Beijing’s population density has collapsed from 425 people per hectare in 1970 to just 65 people per hectare, or about the same as Chicago at its most crowded. Few metropolises are becoming more crowded, and most of those that are were exceptionally spread out to begin with, such as Los Angeles and Johannesburg.

This is all true. Affluent countries are much less dense, and they continue to become less dense with ongoing suburbanization.
 

But this misses the point. The suburbs in the developed world are growing poorer.

The simple truth is that as people become richer they consume more space, just as they consume more energy, more goods and more services. Even if they live in towers, those towers are likely to be widely spaced, and the households that live in them will be small—wealth also being associated with small families. Mr Angel finds that population densities tend to drop when Chinese cities knock down cheaply built walk-up apartments and replace them with high towers. And many people will opt not to live in towers but in even less dense detached or semi-detached houses.

Wealth fuels sprawl. The process is happening apace in the developing parts of the world.

Again, this was once all true -- up until recently. The wealth is now headed to the city. But there is no mention of that.

A few years ago, when foreclosure and rising petrol prices held American suburbs in a vice, confident predictions were made about their abandonment and the repopulation of city centres. William Frey of the Brookings Institution, a think-tank, has shown that urban counties are indeed growing in population more quickly than they did a decade ago, while suburban growth has slowed. The two are now roughly equal (see chart). This does not, however, mean that Americans are now equally drawn to central cities and to suburbs. The fastest-growing parts of the country are now nearly all suburban (the exceptions are urban New Orleans, still bouncing back from Hurricane Katrina, and rural North Dakota, which is fired by a shale-gas boom). Between 2007 and 2011 the 25 biggest county-to-county migrations in America were all from more urban counties to more suburban ones.

Between 2012 and 2013 the areas that the Census Bureau calls “principal cities” absorbed 3.3m migrants from elsewhere in America—but they shed 5.4m people, leaving a net loss due to in-country migration of 2.1m. Foreign immigrants and babies saved them from outright depopulation. The suburbs, meanwhile, added 5.8m domestic migrants and only lost 3.2m, suggesting their pull remains enormously strong. A big part of the attraction is schools; they are still often dire in the middles of cities.

Mr Frey’s numbers show that the drop in suburban growth took place quickly, between 2006 and 2009. It was almost certainly the result of two sudden shocks: a tightening of mortgage lending standards caused by the financial crisis and a softening of the labour market. The bright lights of inner cities burn brighter these days, as they have tidied themselves up—but the young are also staying in them because they cannot buy homes. The drift to the suburbs may speed up as the economy returns to normal.

There has been urban renovation that has attracted the young and talented, and suburban home-buying plans have been deferred by the young in the cities. But the cities are now where the best jobs are. No mention of that in the essay.
 

Many old American suburbs have gone downmarket in the same way, and this has been treated as proof that they are failing. To the extent that low property prices are a sign of low demand, this is correct. Yet the people who moved out of Maryvale did not pile into the city centre; they went to newer, more distant suburbs. And the district’s new Mexican inhabitants are probably better off there than they would be crammed into tower blocks. They have space and freedom—to paint their houses bright green, to build extensions for grandparents, to have barbecues in their front yards, to keep chickens (a few even keep horses). Some run small businesses out of the local shopping mall, which has been turned into a mercado. They probably suffer less crime than they would in a more densely populated area, too. Brookings, which has crunched FBI data, finds that violent crime has dropped steeply in principal cities since the early 1990s—but only to a level twice as high as in either old suburbs or new ones.

Finally, suburban dysfunction is mentioned. But only one case is given (Maryvale, in Phoenix).

A few cities in the world appear to have undergone an actual “great inversion”. The best example is Tokyo, where the population is growing more rapidly within 10km of the city centre than farther out. This pattern, which cannot be found in any other large Japanese city, is partly the result of the dramatic shrinking of the Japanese family and the ageing of the suburban population. Old folk rattle around houses that once contained families. Tatsuo Hatta, an urban economist, says falling land values play a part, too: it is simply a bad investment to buy a large plot, of the kind that is mostly found in the suburbs.

The idiosyncratic example of Tokyo seems to be cherry picked to suit the author's hypothesis that the reality of the recently revitalization of city life in the developed world is an anomaly.
 

There is also the case of London's dramatic revival and the subsequent misfortunes of London's suburbs. For the author, this is primarily a result of the imposition of urban growth boundaries on London since the 1930s.

The rise of London's "knowledge's driven economy" is mentioned but not explored.
 

The example of London suggests that, given powerful restrictions on growth, a buoyant urban economy and excellent transport, cities can stop suburban sprawl. But they would impose great costs on many of their inhabitants in the process. Because of the green belt London has almost no modern suburban houses and very high property prices. A three-bedroom house even in rundown South Norwood costs around £300,000 ($470,000), which would buy you an entire cul-de-sac in Maryvale. To provide desperately needed cheap housing, garages and sheds there are being converted into tiny houses; Mr Hickman calls them “shanty towns”.

The freezing of London’s suburbs has probably aided the revival of inner-London neighbourhoods like Brixton. It has also forced many people into undignified homes, widened the wealth gap between property owners and everyone else, and enriched rentiers. It has forced many commuters out of the city altogether: between 2001 and 2011 the number of people with a fixed workplace in London who lived outside the city rose from 724,000 to 795,000, or from 19% to 21% of the total. Many parts of England that look like self-contained towns actually function as dormitories. Their inhabitants appreciate the beauty of the green belt through the windows of crowded trains and traffic-jammed cars.

But something like this is also happening in major American cities: high city rents, with the less fortunate being pushed out.

The pleasant character of many inner-city areas is partly a consequence of decades-ago sprawl. If the masses had been unable to move out of crowded urban districts, those places would never have become appealing to middle-class settlers. And, as suburbs come to seem more urban, the distinction between central cities and their suburbs is blurring. In time, the two may be almost impossible to tell apart—and the final victory of the compromising, humble suburb will be at hand.

First, it was the middle classes that moved out of the cities into suburbs beginning in the 1950s, not the "masses". Those moving into cities today might be better understood as "yuppies", not as the middle class.

Second, if suburbs are redesigned in the fashion of the cities, how is that "the final victory" of the suburb over the city? Couldn't the adoption of urban amenities -- coffee shops, book stores -- in the suburbs be just as easily portrayed as the emergence of the cultural hegemony of the city over the suburb?

One point to be observed is that conservatives like this author defend the suburbs. Conservative propagandists love the suburbs. But the suburbs are not conservative. Small towns are conservative.

Recent research shows that urban identification has a political bent, with self-described liberals greatly preferring cities to suburbs. But according to a 2014 Pew Research poll, conservatives do not think any more highly of suburbs, with most preferring rural areas and small towns.

Why the glorification of the suburbs by conservatives?

[T]he Republican party seems to have abandoned urban cores to the Democrats, preferring to stake out rural, semirural, suburban, and exurban territories. As those have been the areas of substantial growth, that might not be a bad idea. But as Baker points out toward the end of the article, the suburbs are changing, and they might not be safe Republican hunting grounds for much longer.

 
Historically, cities consistently vote liberal. But more affluent, upwardly mobile, young, educated, creative types (who are usually white) are moving to the cities. Today, they might be liberals cheering Bernie Sanders; as they age and grow even more wealthy, they may become libertarian. (Supporters of Ron Paul's 2012 presidential bid were often described as young white guys who like something radical; typically, they had been socialists who converted to the libertarian cause.)
 
This migration is pricing out the middle class, the working class and the poor, so suburbs are beginning to host the kind of people who once lived in cities: poorer minorities. So voting patterns may change in the future as a result of this.

But there is more than class warfare going on.

There is a stark different in the tangibility of the role of government depending on population density and the concomitant visibility and sophistication of the infrastructure.

[T]here is an underlying logic to the grounding of a political split in physical territory. (Fair warning: I, in general, support Democratic candidates.) Cities can only exist through the continual presence of a great deal of infrastructure that is visible. Mass transportation, cops on the beat, utilities, and everything that lets people live in such close quarters is necessary and in your face. Equally visible are both the rich and the poor, and thus the contrast between them. It is clear why government is necessary, and that we live in a society of contrasts in which we all have to get along—and perhaps even help each other.

In the suburbs, much is invisible. The only large-scale infrastructure you tend to see are the highways that get you to where you live. Mass transit is not very present in most cases, and many developments pay for their own utilities. Cops cruise around in cars, and even their work is often outsourced these days. The poor are not readily visible unless you go closer to town or to older suburbs, and the rich hide in their McMansions. In a more fundamental sense, the choices we have made to continue to subsidize private home ownership and not much else, remains invisible. The suburbs would not have existed to the extent that they do without the massive amounts of money we put into everything from electrification to highways, but the bulk of that investment is now merely a fact on the ground.

In the suburbs, the consumption -- and depletion -- of natural resources is likewise carefully hidden away (which is not true in agricultural areas, especially, although those rural areas tend to be conservative).

Equally unseen are the natural resources that it takes to heat and cool the homes in isolation; the gas it takes to move between office, store, school, club, and home. Waste disappears somewhere else. Watersheds, forests, fields, and the open spaces of which we still sing in America the Beautiful also disappear.

Finally, there are the utopian aesthetics of the suburbs, in which all signs of conflict and messiness are washed away.

To a certain extent, the suburbs exist through smoke-and-mirror tricks. They pretend to be real places, throwing up smoke screens of domesticity, historical styles, and connection, while mirroring each other in sameness and hiding divisions, fissures, and reality. They are a dream of living with nature, with all of the modern conveniences and none of the pesky neighbors.

In cities, a lot of these issues are in your face, in the form of everything from smog to shadows from large buildings, and from contrasts between old and new to competing visions of what will make the city better or merely bigger. A good city works a bit like Oz, using its own magic to make us forget these facts, but rarely can we do so for long. We live in real cities, not in Woody Allen’s version of them. The reality is that we live in a democracy, and a messy one at that, in which we have to be mindful of others and our resources. Out in the Jeffersonian grid, it is every man and woman for him- and herself—and there, the republic dissolves into isolation. I believe that the Republicans have chosen that territory, both in a physical and in a social sense, while (most) Democrats choose to both face the reality of our urban core and to rely on the energy of its diversity.

  
Interesting. The author associates the American conservative devotion to the suburbs with an artificial, homogeneous and generic fantasia of a domesticated idyll in the countryside -- the Disney-fied version of "Little House on the Prairie".

In contrast, he states, it is liberals who live in the real world of the city, where the hard conditions that offer only messy choices require tough decisions. This is a reversal of the conventional equation of conservatism with realism, liberalism with idealism.
 
Unfortunately for the narrative above, liberals have their own utopian glorification of the city. Specifically, liberals perceive the city as an oasis of diversity as opposed to the suburbs as a refuge of homogeneity.
 
But this image goes back to the 1970s, and reflects the image of urban "white flight" from racial integration.

Dial the picture back to the 1960s, and one finds that these urban "whites" fleeing to the suburbs -- many of them Catholics and Jews -- had been supporters of the civil rights movement, at least prior to the urban riots of the late 1960s. (High expectations on the part of African Americans collided with a worsening economic reality that resulted from de-industrialization, dramatically increased immigration and competition for jobs, and drug addiction that afflicted all of American society, especially the poor. Things were getting worse just when everything was supposed to transform completely.)
 
In fact, the rise of the suburbs in the 1950s was, ironically, an urban phenomenon; the people who lived in the suburbs were from the cities and worked in the cities. The suburbs were never that homogeneous even in their origin. And the 'whites' in the suburbs were so often the descendants of yesterday's 'ethnic' immigrants. (This is why 'whites' may always be a majority in the United States, because the definition of being a 'white American' keeps changing as ethnic groups assimilate.)
 
As Adam Gopnik has written, every city is an assemblage of secret suburbs. That is, cities and suburbs are equally tribalistic and segregated. Cities hide their divisions the way the suburbs hide the messiness of life.
 
In fact, Gopnik writes that there is ambivalence toward the city across the political spectrum. Even liberals can turn against the city.

Cities can’t win. When they do well, people resent them as citadels of inequality; when they do badly, they are cesspools of hopelessness. In the seventies and eighties, the seemingly permanent urban crisis became the verdict that American civilization had passed on itself. Forty years later, cities mostly thrive, crime has been in vertiginous decline, the young cluster together in old neighborhoods, drinking more espresso per capita in Seattle than in Naples, while in San Francisco the demand for inner-city housing is so keen that one-bedroom apartments become scenes of civic conflict—and so big cities turn into hateful centers of self-absorbed privilege. We oscillate between “Taxi Driver” and “The Bonfire of the Vanities” without arriving at a stable picture of something in between.

Price implosion -- The Future of Real Estate?

To recap, there are two trends in real estate markets.

One trend in suburban America is for older couples to remain in their houses. There are different reasons for this including:

1) Americans are goal oriented, and to get a certain sense of completion, older Americans insist on paying off their mortgage and owning their house "free and clear" before selling it and moving out.  So they will stay longer in the house, even though their kids moved far away long ago, and then sell the house soon after finally paying off the mortgage. It is irrational and expensive.

2) The recession pushed many people's retirement plans off into the future. But they will eventually retire and move on.

3) The house and its contents have replaced children as family and people as community. It's sad, but it's the modern condition. (In fact, it might not be sad, people might be happier not dealing with children and buying lots of stuff instead, and buying lots of stuff might not be as expensive or as bad for the environment as having a bunch of kids who buy lots of stuff.) But no one lives forever.

The other trend is that the geography of American life is beginning to resemble continental Europe more than the traditional English-speaking world. Historically, in English-speaking countries, the rich live in the suburbs and the poor live in the city.

1) Young, creative, highly educated people are moving into cities, along with the very wealthy. Two-thirds of young millennials who live in the city claim they want to eventually move to the suburbs, but what they really mean is that they want to live in a house on the edge of the city eventually, not way off in the suburbs. But cities are shrinking.

2) Poor people  are moving off into the suburbs and suburbs are growing. But the poor are invisible in the suburbs, where social services are lacking. Notably, many houses in the suburbs are becoming boarding houses, reducing the sense of safety and community that draws people to the suburbs. Also, middle management are getting shunted off to suburbs, especially to less expensive mid-sizedcities like Phoenix; this is a great boon to middle management, and to the tech industry. 

3) Small towns are closing down. 

One of the projected future effects of these trends are a real estate price drop in the suburbs. 

When older couples finally move out of their four- or five-bedroom house and families with children move in, it is expected that this process will hurt real estate markets as demand is finally satisfied with existing supply. This is a common expectation among economists in the US. 

But the economists might not be looking at just WHO is buying these houses -- poorer people than those moving out. The size of houses in the United States keeps expanding, it is true, but eventually older folks move on and younger families initially buy minimal housing. The very big houses being built today will easily satisfy the lower standards of working families moving in from the city. 

Furthermore, as a thought experiment, one can imagine an extreme case where today's big house is tomorrow's boarding house, with an older, more affluent couple being replaced not by a family with kids, but by half-a-dozen working adults who are renting. That represents a dramatic decrease in housing costs.

But here is another trend -- the need for less farmland.

These charts supposedly illustrate that an "energy revolution" is upon us. They are impressive to glance through.

However, some forms of energy consumption are actually increasing.

'Server farms' -- vast computer processing and storage centers used by the likes of Google and Amazon -- consume up to two percent (2%) of the electricity in the United States. 

They require vast amounts of energy not just for processing data, but for their cooling needs.

One strategy to lower those costs is to use deep ocean water to cool the server farms.

These are usually situated near highly populated urban areas like the northeast and California to be closer to computer users to reduce response lag.

Microsoft is doing it.

Google is, too, it seems.

Another source of increasing energy consumption is marijuana cultivation, which may use up to one percent (1%) of electricity in the United States.

In indoor marijuana cultivation, there has been a shift away from fluorescent and metal halide light toward LEDs, which produce much less heat and can tailor light frequency precisely to a plant species and its needs throughout its life cycle.

But the use of LEDs is old news in regular vegetable cultivation in other parts of the world. Indoor growing of vegetables eliminates the need for pesticides and herbicides and vast amounts of water, and precludes the need for long-distance transportation and the resulting wastage.

Mortensen: So it's really within the last two to three years, I would say, and you can see that the price points are dropping very rapidly in multiple LED lighting fields. I would say in North America, we're five to seven years behind what I've witnessed in Asia. In Japan and Taiwan, you're seeing plant factories with artificial lights (PDF), that are becoming very much the normative in that part of the world. They're five to seven years ahead of anything I've witnessed here in North America.

GTM: And the crops are?

Mortensen: Vegetables. So you're seeing multiple types of lettuce, green leafy lettuce, you're seeing herbs, you're seeing basil and habanero peppers, and so on, that are being stacked on shelves that are about a foot apart. The example I use very often is a former Fujitsu semiconductor manufacturing facility in Japan that is 25,000 square feet was retrofitted. A year ago, the proprietors were producing 21,000 to 22,000 heads of lettuce per day. I just saw a press release within the last couple of weeks where they're now peaking out at 30,000 heads of lettuce per day, growing those with artificial lights indoors. We have nothing of that magnitude here in North America at this point, which is why I say we're many years behind from a technological development standpoint, at well as market acceptance.

GTM: Lettuce just seems like a low-value crop -- it's not going for hundreds of dollars an ounce, right?

Mortensen: Right, but you see that's where you get the opportunity to stack the lettuce, so when they go seven, eight, 10 levels high, then you're able to maximize the yield per-square-foot. You won't achieve the same dollars per square foot that you would in cannabis, but it's just a completely different thought process, because now you're eliminating pesticides, you're eliminating herbicides, you're now using somewhere around 90 percent less water. So, from an overall energy-efficiency standpoint, it's really a solution that we in North America haven't embraced yet.
...

I think the other is food production -- we're going to need to be more environmentally conscious, and also be more focused on the true organics, which is the elimination of pesticides and herbicides and other chemicals. We're seeing just huge percentages of crops that are ending up in the dumpsters -- lettuce being trucked from central California to the East Coast, 50 percent of that actually ends up in the dumpster here on the East Coast, because of the short shelf life and the usability aspect of it. We need to be more conscientious as Americans on those two fronts.

This confirms the observation by the economist Robert Shiller that in the long run, there is no real increase in the price of real estate, not even of farm land -- despite the quip "Buy land, they are not making it anymore." Land is not a scarcity because new construction drives down prices, and innovation reduces the amount of acreage needed for agricultural cultivation. 

We could be looking at a decline in the price of agricultural land with the rise of indoor LED farming, as well as a dramatic decrease in the use of chemicals, pesticides, herbicides, fuel for transport and water that is currently dedicated to agriculture. 

This could mean that agriculture could thrive in the most inhospitable places in the US.

It could also mean that humans could likewise live in these now-inhospitable areas, using fewer resources to do so, and with a high quality of life. 

Sleeping pods as homes

Sleeping pods are being introduced into Hong Kong's apartment supply, to much consternation.

Hong Kong is well-known for having some of the world's tiniest and most expensive homes, but one landlord is offering a modern twist on its famous "coffin apartments".

Ten "space capsule" units have just come on the market in the western Sai Ying Pun district, offering a total of 24sq ft (2.2 sq m) of living space for HK$5,100 ($658; £538) a month.

The listing on a local real estate platform says each pod comes with a television, air-conditioning and a memory foam mattress.

But despite such mod-cons, many netizens are enraged, describing the capsule as a glorified coffin and the landlord as unscrupulous.

"This is not a space capsule. This is sleeping in a coffin before your death," said Facebook user Ralf Cheung.

Jeri Lee said: "It has a fancy name 'space capsule', but this is nothing but an enlarged dog house. Asking for HK$5,100 has gone too far."

Hong Kong's property prices are among the highest in the world. Housing has become a hot-button political issue, and housing issues are in almost every politician's campaign platform.

"The government has to build more public housing so that citizens can lead a stable life," wrote Gnixu Zhong. 

Each sleeping pod will cost about US$663 to rent -- roughly $22 a day in American money.

Ms Wang is asking for HK$5,100 per month for each pod. She offers discounted rates for people who rent the pod for more than three months.

If every bed is rented, Ms Wang will be able to fetch more than $HK51,000 in a month at maximum.

An 800-sq ft flat in the same building listed on the same website asks for a monthly rent of HK$24,500.

"Space capsule" pods are not entirely new. In Japan, "space capsule" hotels are popular for travellers who want to cut expenses on accommodation. However, this listing in Hong Kong requires a minimum stay of one month.

The building is 48 years old, according to property agency website Centadata. But there is likely to be a great demand, as the neighbourhood is close to the central business district and the University of Hong Kong.  

We instinctively imagine that this is yet another exploitive Hong Kong real estate scam, like the vast "ugly" skyscrapers into which Hong Kong denizens are packed. Although the world thinks of Hong Kong as the ultimate ruthless free-market economy, half the population of the city live in public housing -- the ugly skyscrapers are owned by the government and provide low-cost housing.

These sleeping pods would seem to be a micro-level, privately owned version of less expensive real estate. 

This is not being forced on anyone. It's an opportunity.

Moreover, these sleeping pods are larger versions of what one finds in the first class sections of long-distance airline flights, offering what is often described as the best sleeping experience of a lifetime to affluent travelers.

What is most interesting is that this might represent an emerging trend in city life, especially amongst younger people. Although these pods are privately owned and operated for profit, they represent collective living -- precisely the reverse of government-owned apartments. In tech startups, people often work in open, shared spaces, not in offices and cubicles; there might be a tendency toward collective space in living arrangements among younger people, as well. It's more stimulating and creative (which is why tech companies adopt it -- for the profit motive), but it also saves space. 

This mode of collective urban living is starkly different from the home choices of older, affluent Americans who, for cultural and psychological reasons, live in suburbs and keep buying houses that keep getting bigger. 

But the trend is for affluent, educated, creative young people to move into the city and for the less affluent to move to the suburbs, so gradual generational change at some point will come to seem like sudden, radical change. 

This is exactly what has happened with Christian evangelical attitudes toward issues of social change, like same-sex marriage, which has been accepted by the younger generation of Christians.

Here is the sad story of very good, very nice, very decent, older, small-town Christians who suddenly find that their traditional attitudes are unacceptable to their own friends, neighbors and churchgoers. It is like woke up several years ago on a otherwise identical planet, or as if everyone they know had been replaced by alien replicas, like in "Invasion of the Body Snatchers". In reality, social change is, below the surface, gradual and ongoing, and has little to do with the superficial, tip-of-the-iceberg conflicts that one finds in the political sphere.

If one looks carefully at emerging living arrangements, one finds intimations of what might become long-term, generational change that may someday seem like a revolution. It would seem to be the shift toward dormitory living in the city and boarding houses the suburbs.

'Co-living' in a city dormitory

Here is an article in the New Yorker on the rise of 'co-living' in New York City.

It's basically a dormitory for adults. It's somewhat luxurious (food is supplied by neighborhood restaurants), but it's less expensive than typical living arrangements because less space is being used (e.g., with shared bathrooms and television, etc.). 

This nascent industry is related to tech startups, and the living arrangement is similar to the work environment of the software industry.

There is a sociological and historical aspect to this development. In particular, modern, urban, creative societies tend to delay adulthood ("For women, 30 is the new 20; for men, 40 is the new 20."). In contrast, traditional agrarian or pastoral societies, adulthood can arrive as early as puberty. 

People live in group homes for many reasons, and in many circumstances—think of retirement homes, rehab centers, and communes and kibbutzes. But co-living isn’t just about a living situation. It’s about a specific stage in the modern bourgeois life cycle: the period that sociologists call “extended adolescence.” This phase of experimentation and transition is generally associated with people in their twenties, but its boundaries are fluid. It has appeared in endless TV incarnations, where it’s mocked and worshipped in equal measure: “The Real World,” “Melrose Place,” “Friends,” and “Girls.” The comedian Aziz Ansari has described it as the “dicking around and having brunch stage.”

This goes back to 19th century American city life. The boarding house was where single young adults were safely warehoused.

Paul Groth, a professor of urban geography at the University of California, Berkeley, told me, “In the nineteenth century, the single person was sort of a social problem. What do you do with a single person?” In cities, the solution was the boarding house, often run by a matron, who served meals family style and might scold you if you got home too late. In 1842, one resident, Walt Whitman, declared that Americans, or at least New Yorkers, were “a boarding people”: “Married men and single men, old women and pretty girls, mariners and masons, cobblers, colonels, and counter-jumpers, tailors and teachers; lieutenants, loafers, ladies, lackbrains, and lawyers; printers and parsons . . . all ‘go out to board.’ ”

This was replaced by the hotel in the early 20th century.

As a new, mobile workforce flooded into cities, demanding more freedom, boarding houses were largely replaced by cheap hotels designed for long-term stays. Groth said, “As late as 1930, maybe one housing unit in ten was some variation of a residential hotel.” The Barbizon, a women’s-only establishment at Lexington Avenue and Sixty-third Street, opened in 1927, when large numbers of women were beginning to work outside the home. To its guests, the Barbizon offered closet-size rooms and lavish shared facilities: a beauty parlor, a swimming pool, a sun deck, Turkish baths, a coffee shop, squash and badminton courts, a solarium, and a roof garden. To their parents, it offered the assurance of respectability: chaperones roamed the hallways, and men were not allowed above the first floor. Sylvia Plath, a resident in the nineteen-fifties, featured the Barbizon in “The Bell Jar,” where it appears as the Amazon, a hotel for rich young women who “were all going to posh secretarial schools.”

In 1970, the "Mary Tyler Moore Show", about a young woman happily on her own in the big city, reflected a mainstream shift toward independent living. The average household size in Manhattan is 1.3 persons; independent living -- life without a family -- is often seen as the way of the future because of this.

By the nineteen-sixties, hotel life had given way to the new dream: a place of one’s own. In the sitcom “That Girl,” which premièred in 1966, Marlo Thomas played an aspiring actress, Ann Marie, who moves to New York to try to make it while working a series of odd jobs: waitress, department-store elf. In the show’s second episode, a friendly doorman helps her move into her own apartment. Standing on the threshold, she announces, “I’m my own occupant!” Like Ann Marie, young women seized one-bedrooms near First and Second Avenues, which became known for singles bars and “stew zoos”—buildings packed with female flight attendants. The inaugural issue of Cosmopolitan called the neighborhood “The Girl Ghetto”: “Thousands upon thousands of single girls flock to the upper East Side, cramming themselves into small apartments, subsisting on an apple and a quart of diet soda a day, waiting for a telephone to ring and having a mad, wonderful time.”

In “Going Solo,” from 2012, the sociologist Eric Klinenberg describes how these trends persisted, leading to our current state of affairs: a third of households in New York consist of one person. Klinenberg told me that, based on his surveys, “most people who can afford it want and feel great pride in getting a place of their own.”

Because of the current urban housing crisis, high rents are forcing those who would prefer to live on their own to cohabit, typically with a roommate. In the case of co-living, they might find that they prefer it to independence, at least while they are in their twenties (or thirties, if they are male).

These days, however, the most popular cities—notably New York and San Francisco—are mired in a housing crisis, the result of fifty years of underbuilding combined with the desire of wide-eyed youngsters to move to them. A modern Ann Marie would have a hard time finding her own place in Manhattan, where the average studio apartment goes for between two thousand and three thousand dollars. Instead, she would probably spend a few weeks couch surfing, perusing Craigslist postings inviting her to “Share My Apartment” and rent a “Great Room for a Girl.”

The proposed solutions to the housing crisis are endless: more zoning (so that luxury apartments don’t take over the city); less zoning (so that developers are encouraged to build more); micro-apartments (a tower of three-hundred-square-foot units is currently being leased in Kips Bay). Adam Neumann, the co-founder and C.E.O. of WeWork, told me, “The future is more expensive and less room! That’s just a fact.” Co-living is about rejiggering our expectations.

Even if city home prices were low, would there be a market for communal living?

No matter the price of rent in the city, living in what is basically a dormitory will always be less expensive, even compared to living with a roommate(s). 

Also, the need for shopping for food or furniture or amenities is precluded, as well as spending time and money trying to socialize. Time is money.

Co-Sufficiency supplants self-sufficiency?

According to this opinion piece in the New York Times, "On the Trail of Interdependence", there might be a trend toward what might be called "co-sufficiency" in American life, as opposed to an old-fashioned self-sufficiency.

I’ve begun to see these two approaches to life pervading every facet of our society. We could call the one “endarkic” and the other “exarkic” (from the Greek word arkeo, “to suffice”). In political science or economics, the word autarky is used to describe a state of self-sufficiency. Endarky is rather the drive toward self-sufficiency; exarky, its inverse.

We all know what an endarkist looks like. America has practically mythologized the type. Most of our best-known nature writers were vocal proponents of endarky: John Muir tramping off with a crust of bread tied to his belt, Thoreau hammering together a cabin beside Walden Pond, Edward Abbey advising his readers to “brew your own beer; kick in your TV; kill your own beef.”

In the past, we may have called these people “rugged individualists.” They tend to internalize information and skills. They grow their own food, build their own furniture, distill their own whiskey. Truly endarkic people crave solitude and, perhaps less consciously, cataclysm, if only  for the opportunity to prove their self-reliance.

The classic self-sufficient American type is also a certain type of classic rural type. City life requires a different ethos. (For example, the 1950 sociological analysis “The Lonely Crowd” argued that modern societies evolve away from being tradition-oriented to being inwardly oriented (Protestantism), and eventually, with increasing prosperity, evolve into an other-oriented society where people judge themselves in relation to one another.)

The exarkic person, on the other hand, is utopian, the type who believes in improving systems, not rejecting them; who does not shy from asking for directions; who would rather rent or share or borrow a home than own one; who has no qualms uploading his digital memories to something called the Cloud; who welcomes the notion of self-driving cars. Exarks prefer a well-trained police force to a well-oiled firearm. They walk, nimbly, with a kind of holy faith, atop wires others have installed.

But is urban interdependence really any more idealistic than "endarkic" icons of self-sufficiency like Thoreau, John Muir or Edward Abbey? The real difference would seem to be geographic: the urban culture versus the rural, each of which have their idealists who valorize their way of life. 

It is important to note that the distinction between self-sufficient ‘endarky’ and a networked ‘exarky’ is not the same as the distinction between ‘individualism’ versus ‘collectivism’, which has to do with competition versus cooperation.

While these terms roughly correspond to the age-old dichotomy between individualism and collectivism, they are not synonymous with those terms. Individualism and collectivism are framed primarily in terms of cooperation and competition, while endarky and exarky are framed in terms of sufficiency.

Take the ride-sharing application Uber, which is characterized by a strongly individualist but very exarkic philosophy — Uber drivers rely on the network to function, yet compete fiercely against one another (and against unionized taxi drivers) to make their living. An example of an endarkic collective is harder to imagine, but might look something like the famed Lykova family, who lived alone in Siberia for 40 years, never competing against one another, but each, presumably, capable of surviving if the others were all to die off. (The youngest of the Lykova children, a girl named Agafia, used to perform chores alone by moonlight. Asked by the writer Vasily Peskov whether she wasn’t frightened to be alone in the wilderness at night, she replied: “What would there be out here to hurt me?”)

The urban-ness and city-centricity of other-sufficient exarky become more apparent in the examples given. This urbanization is described as both inevitable and vulnerable to catastrophic collapse.

If the human race continues to expand at its current rate, some environmental scholars believe, we will need to embrace ever more exarkic strategies (car-sharing, public transportation, dense urban living, smart grids, computer-assisted efficiency algorithms) to survive. The problem is that the more other-reliant we become, the greater the possibility for widespread calamity. The hermit, alone in his hut, risks starvation, but not famine.

 The reliance on others involves both risk and reward: it allows us to expand beyond the boundaries of our individual bodies, but when the collective system that we rely on begins to buckle, it brings us all down with it. Recognizing the potential of this ever-looming (and ever-widening) disaster should impel us to make vast improvements on a structural scale, and fast. Like it or not, we are already living in the Age of Exarky.

But just how new is this kind of thinking? Are we really living in some kind of new, co-sufficient period of history?

Looking Backward

The kind of interdependent, communal city living that might be emerging today resembles in some respects what the journalist Edward Bellamy described in his 1887 utopian sci fi novel, Looking Backward. 

Looking Backward: 2000–1887 is a utopian science fiction novel by Edward Bellamy, a journalist and writer from Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts; it was first published in 1888.

It was one of the most successful novels of its time in the United States, not just in terms of popularity, but social impact.

It was the third-largest bestseller of its time, after Uncle Tom's Cabin and Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ. It influenced a large number of intellectuals, and appears by title in many of the major Marxist writings of the day. "It is one of the few books ever published that created almost immediately on its appearance a political mass movement".

In the United States alone, over 162 "Bellamy Clubs" sprang up to discuss and propagate the book's ideas. Owing to its commitment to the nationalization of private property and the desire to avoid use of the term socialism, this political movement came to be known as Nationalism — not to be confused with the political concept of nationalism. The novel also inspired several utopian communities.

In the novel, the young protagonist Julian West falls asleep in Boston in 1887 and awakens in 2000 to find himself in a socialist utopia. People use debit cards to order things over an Internet-like system that provides near-instant delivery, shop in warehouse-like stores, and dine in public kitchens. It's all run by the government, and there is little crime because income equality is the rule.

In terms of the amenities it promises, it sounds a bit like Amazon and Costco, and the living and dining arrangements sound like the kind of start up culture that co-living promises. 

Although something like the high-tech communal future that Bellamy predicted have come into being, they have done so via capitalism, not socialism, and they exist and thrive because they are more efficient and less expensive, not more fair or just. 

Socialism means shared ownership, and this often exist within families or in small villages engaged in subsistence living. In modern city life, by contrast, one finds instead the shared use of corporate-owned facilities. 

(It is interesting how, historically, Americans have engaged in periodic commitments to socialism, which would seem to go against everything in the United States -- from the economic system to the value system, to the "classic" American personality. But it might reflect the unusually strong pull of Christianity on American life as compared with Europe, as socialism resonates strongly with an egalitarian Christian ideal. This also explains how quickly the socialist ideal is eventually discarded by Americans as a kind of private fantasy, just as religion is privatized and individualized in the United States and understood as a mere matter of "personal belief" that does not belong in the public realm.)

Emerging problems

As affluent white people move into the cities, and poorer people of color are shunted off into the suburbs, one finds a different set of problems than American society has dealt with for generations.

Sydney, Australia offers a microcosm of what might be in store for developed countries.

The problem is urban gentrification, and what might be called the gentrification of public policy.

SYDNEY, Australia — Down the hill from my house, there is an old building with a saw-toothed roof that once warehoused trams, back when the bay was heavy with industrial waste and working-class people could afford to buy a home this close to the city and harbor of Sydney.

Now that building has been revived and repurposed as a dining destination for our perfect little inner-city neighborhood at Glebe Point. The graffiti that marked its derelict years have been retained — except for offensive words, which have been scrubbed out. A bakery mills its flour right there before you. A restaurant serves produce from farmers known to the chef. It is “local and authentic,” the kind of local and authentic that deserves scare quotes because it is just as likely to be found in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, or the Shoreditch neighborhood in London.

In the past, the problem was the wealth and power of sterile, conservative suburbs. Cities were torn to pieces at the behest of suburbs and their highways.

Liberals embraced the call to save the ethnically cities that hosted a working-class population that was genuinely "local and authentic".

The writer Jane Jacobs was an intellectual around whom liberals rallied in their defense of the city.

The work of the urban theorist and activist Jane Jacobs is the subject of public discussion again, with the recent publication of a biography about her, “Eyes on the Street.” Ms. Jacobs is credited with helping save her New York neighborhood, Greenwich Village, from the threat of an expressway. Through her books, such as the seminal 1961 work “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” she championed the diverse and dynamic urban neighborhood — sidewalks busy with foot traffic rather than automobiles and ripe for chance interactions; the friendly chaos of old and new, home and work, all within the same few blocks — seeding ideas that have been taken up in other cities around the world.

The liberal rhetoric that defends "local and authentic" diverse urban communities continues to thrive.

But something strange happened. Educated and creative liberals got rich and moved to the cities, and the "local and authentic" working-class folks were (and are getting) pushed out to the suburbs. The newly affluent cities are as affluent and sterile as the suburbs once were.

Yet for all its worth and triumph, at some point in the last 20 years, this dream died and became something else. Those urban villages, once diverse melting pots, became shiny, wealthy and inward-looking. The big ideas became small and hard and sparkling as diamonds.

This is the reality of contemporary urban Australia.

This is how it is playing out here in Sydney. In every direction the city center is ringed by desirable neighborhoods with exorbitant housing prices, where residents can dine, work and shop without ever traveling far from home.

It is a beautiful life, and effective at reducing car travel. But there is a darker side to it. The urban village ethos has encouraged prosperous neighborhoods to turn inward and even take pride in not connecting with fellow citizens in the suburban areas beyond.

The language we still hold on to about the inner city disguises the changes that have taken place. We still invoke the social justice battles of urban neighborhoods of the past — community, environment, heritage, people power — in an endless war to fight for even greater advantages for ourselves.

This is something I have thought about a lot this year when I wake before dawn for my long commute outside this bubble, to the public hospital in the outer suburbs of Western Sydney where I work as a doctor.

Western Sydney sounds as if it must be merely a quadrant of Sydney but it’s actually a vast region of suburbs that is home to nearly half the five million residents of the Sydney metropolitan area.

When I leave the house each morning I join tall, tight columns of car traffic inching along the road to the west. This road is also a construction site for a freeway linking the west with the city, a freeway that the inner city is fighting to stop because of the houses and trees that will be destroyed and because of the traffic it will spill onto our gentrified streets.

Meanwhile, our representatives fight for a ferry — a third mode of public transport, in addition to bus and a light rail — to help residents of my neighborhood make the short journey to the central business district.

There are at least two problems here.

One problem is the rich, white liberal NIMBYs who live in cities like San Francisco and New York fight the construction of new apartment buildings (the kind of buildings that they live in themselves). 

Less affluent people are thus priced out of urban areas.

But as the less fortunate among us move to the suburbs, there is a second assault on public policy. This might be called "NITBYism" -- "Not In Their BackYards". Rich white liberals in the cities do not want the diverse working class in the suburbs to enjoy the kind of amenities that urban yuppies take for granted. 

Late last year the state government announced that the Powerhouse Museum, the inner city’s beloved science and applied arts museum, would be sold to developers and moved here, closer to the bulk of the Sydney region’s population and especially its children.

The announcement was met with a revolt in the city proper. An alliance was formed. Letters were written. Business owners, designers, artists, filmmakers and gallery directors of the city, 178 of them, signed an open letter urging the government “to reconsider its plan to relocate the Powerhouse Museum from the heart of Sydney to Western Sydney.” From the heart of Sydney.

I accept that the fight to keep a historic building in public hands is a valuable one. And that the protesters do want some kind of museum for Parramatta. A good one.

But the fight left me uneasy. The language — against developers, in favor of public assets — served as a linguistic sleight of hand that disguised the fact that an influential, overwhelmingly city-based and white cultural elite was mounting a fight against sharing resources with a less privileged part of the Sydney area.

A similar position was put more bluntly in August when it was announced that Tropfest, which bills itself as the world’s largest short-film festival, would be moved from the city to Parramatta Park.

Adam St. John, a film producer who lives in the inner-city neighborhood of Newtown, told The Daily Telegraph that there was “no way I’m going to hop on the train and go to the middle of nowhere for it.”

One challenge in the future will be to transform these suburbs into high-density mid-sized cities in their own right. 

Withholding resources from them will not help to this end.

The 2016 Elections

The 2016 election in the US highlighted a growing rural-urban split.

Donald J. Trump fared very poorly in American cities in Tuesday’s election. Hillary Clinton did just as badly among rural voters. The political divide between the two groups has been growing more stark in America for years, and 2016 showed an even sharper split than 2012.

The distant 'outer ring' suburbs voted for Trump. They are, in effect, small-town conservatives. The middle and inner ring suburbs were up for grabs between the two parties. They can perhaps best be understood as moderate.

Multiple forces are pulling the American geography apart, as the inner- and middle-ring suburbs remain the contested political ground in between. The election reinforces the feeling that the prosperity of many metropolitan areas is not shared by the rest of the country.

Unlike the United States of one or two generations ago, the urban core is today prosperous, while the outer suburbs and small towns are in economic crisis.

There is a classic rhetorical strategy used by Trump (himself a quintessential wealthy, urban, secular man) in which he referred to these now-thriving cities as dysfunctional and dependent, harking back to a long-gone era.

Mr. Trump made no real play for urban voters, despite living and running businesses in their midst. He went so far as to depict them as dystopias, a strategy that has long helped Republicans stoke enthusiasm among voters outside cities. 

This leads to a kind of rhetorical schizophrenia, where cities are resented both for being filled with parasitic losers (impoverished ethnic minorities) and snobbish elites. 

Cities, for their part, are easily branded with some dissonance as embodying either professional elites or poor people who don’t deserve benefits (thus both Madison and Milwaukee, two very different places, come in for equal resentment within Wisconsin). 

Funny thing is, plenty of the young, educated creative types thriving in the major cities originate from more provincial regions.

Many of the young Democratic voters who live in blue cities like these, as Alec MacGillis has noted, have gravitated away from redder parts of the country from which they felt alienated. “There’s just nothing to do in Ohio,” lamented one voter who grew up there but now lives in Los Angeles. “The jobs are limited, but it’s not just the jobs and the industries that are in Ohio, it’s the mind-set that I didn’t gravitate to.”

There is an emerging consciousness that the fates of rural and urban areas are severed. (This is something that seems to have gone previously unreported.)

But the widening political divergence between cities and small-town America also reflects a growing alienation between the two groups, and a sense — perhaps accurate — that their fates are not connected.

As the relationship between density and partisanship has grown stronger over the last half-century, the structure of the economy has also changed in ways that reinforce the divide.

At the height of Detroit’s auto industry in the early 1950s, the C.E.O. of General Motors, Charles Wilson, memorably pronounced that what was good for the country was good for his company, and vice versa. That’s no longer true of the major industries in big American cities (or the people who work for them), argues Aaron Renn, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. G.M. had trouble selling cars when the national economy was bad. Its customer base depended on a stable middle class far from Detroit. That’s not true today of Facebook, or Google, or Goldman Sachs, Mr. Renn says. They don’t rely on dealers all over the country. Their bottom lines aren’t tied to material prosperity in small-town Wisconsin.

“In a sense, the high-end economy in these urban areas is disconnected from the success from the rest of the country,” Mr. Renn said. And the very things that drive success in Silicon Valley’s tech industry, or New York City’s financial sector, are what worries rural America: globalization, foreign trade, immigration. “Goldman Sachs and Google do not really need America to be a broad-based middle-class success in order for them to be personally successful.”

Those economic forces will probably grow only stronger, even as the effects of an election that pushed urban and rural America further apart recede.

The Generation Gap: Buying Experiences versus buying things.

It has been proposed that there is a generation gap in the United States, with the younger generation more focused on buying "experiences" rather than things.

The older generation are still focused on buying homes as the culmination of their lives.

From the columnist David Brooks on the need to not get carried away by the fantasy of a perfect, high status life when one is shopping for a new home. It concludes: "The neighborhood you choose, and the social fabric you enter, is more important than the structure you adore."

http://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/06/opinion/the-home-buying-decision.html

But this advice seems a decade too late. It is indicative of the mentality of the older generation -- empty nesters holding onto five-bedroom houses, or still purchasing ever-larger houses -- which seems to be frozen in amber. 

There does seem to be a cultural shift in the younger generation toward a wariness of big purchases. 

The young self-help guru James Altucher forsakes a home altogether, and the experience of younger generation is that it is all a big scam.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/07/fashion/james-altucher-self-help-guru.html

“If I were to die, my kids get this bag,” Mr. Altucher said sardonically as he packed away his laptop, iPad, three sets of chinos, three T-shirts and a Ziploc bag filled with $4,000 worth of $2 bills (“People always remember you if you tip with $2 bills,” he said), and departed a friend’s loft on East 20th Street.

A few months ago, the boyish 48-year-old let the lease expire on his Cold Spring, N.Y., apartment, and dumped or donated virtually everything he owned, more than 40 garbage bags of sheets, dishes, clothes, books, his college diploma, even childhood photo albums. Since then, he’s been bouncing among friends’ apartments and Airbnb rentals.

Mr. Altucher is simply practicing what he preaches. Over the last half-decade, this former tech entrepreneur, venture capitalist and financial pundit has reinvented himself as a gimlet-eyed self-help guru, preaching survival in an era when the American Dream — the gold-embossed college diploma, the corner office, the three-bedroom home — seems like a sham. So one by one, he has shed all of them.

A bit of caution might be in order with regard to identifying a cultural shift, especially among younger Americans, toward the purchase of experiences rather than things.

The auto industry is worried about such a shift. But the auto industry really boomed in the 1950s with the invention of portable FM radio. Driving around in a car was one of the few escapes from a conformist society back in the day. Also, TV was also a new window of experience in the 1950s and 1960s, not just a status symbol. 

Today, the smartphone is likewise both a source of experience and a status symbol. People await the launch of the latest iPhone the way they used to follow the latest cars from Detroit. But cars back in the 1950s were not so durable, so people had to make more frequent auto purchases, and the average car today can last 12 years without serious problems. So there was a practical side to that kind of frequent, highly anticipated purchase. But just as the auto industry is worried about its future, companies like Verizon and Apple are experiencing their decline from the heights of success. 

The restaurant industry is a classic case of mistaking the trends. 

Sizzler went into decline in the 1980s, but tried to make a comeback in the 1990s by emphasizing "choice" and "freedom". In was being observed by the restaurant industry that Americans did not have time to cook; in order to live the good life, which included eating out, Americans had to work harder and longer, which meant they had to eat out. So Sizzler's strategy was that it would become a kind of grocery store where people could assemble diverse meals. But it turns out people don't want that much choice in dining. Sizzler made the wrong bet, although it seemed like the right bet at the time.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/04/17/this-glorious-sizzlers-commercial-from-1991-says-a-lot-about-food-in-america/?utm_term=.439d41152b2f

Indeed, instead of touting higher quality or speed of service, Sizzler invested in buffet spreads. Chapman suggests the strategy could have been a response to what consumers wanted at the time: something for everyone. Sizzler wasn't the only chain betting on buffets—Ponderosa, the Indiana-based chain, along with several other eateries, did the same.

In any case, the thinking appears to have been dead wrong. Not only did Sizzler file for bankruptcy in 1996, but the number of outlets has shrunk by more than 80 percent since its peak in the 1980s to 129 restaurants, according to data from Technomic. Most of those are on the west coast, mainly in California. The east coast houses exactly two Sizzlers today—one in New York, and one in Florida.

But then this idea that Americans would not cook for themselves was sorely tested in the 2008 recession. The overbuilt restaurant industry contracted dramatically. 

The restaurant industry again seems to be entering a recession in 2017.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/maggiemcgrath/2016/07/26/is-the-restaurant-industry-headed-for-a-recession/#7e25464846fc

One of the biggest pieces of evidence Barish points to is a supply glut. Thanks to an influx of capital from 2010 to 2016, restaurant unit growth has gone back to 2007 levels. Only this time there are even more smaller chains and independent/chef-driven concepts fighting for diners' dollars, so supply is even higher than it was at the last peak in the cycle.

One can see the trend toward more independent restaurants with better quality, locally sourced food colliding with the inevitable cyclical shakeup. 

One might expect the loser to be fast food, which the middle classes increasingly avoid the way they avoid tobacco products.

Alarmingly, recession in the restaurant business is an indicator of coming recession in general.

Westra doesn't stop there; he even goes as far to suggest that a restaurant recession could be a harbinger for a U.S. recession in 2017.

"From our restaurant-industry only perspective, when industry category comps decelerate simultaneously by -2% to -3% (like in the second half of 2000, first half of 2007 and now in the second quarter of 2016), then the lower 'new-normal' same-store-sales trend has lasted for at least two years -- typically the year-before and year-of a U.S. recession," he writes. "Accordingly, today, we adopt a below-consensus two-year second half of 2016 through first half of 2018 industry-wide comp outlook of +0.50% while also incorporating a below-consensus outlook of relative pricing power as price-wars typically ensue during dining-out slowdowns."

Rurality, and the decline of the American economy

There has been a tendency recently in the US to blame job losses on immigration and trade. It is understood that the problem with the world today, even in terms of terrorism, is the collapse of borders.

It's been pointed out repeatedly that since NAFTA was established in 1994, 85% of job losses in the US have been due to automation, and not to factories going overseas. 

It was pointed out in the media that as oil prices rise, petroleum output in the US is consequently rising -- albeit without any increase of jobs because of new technology. The article originates from the NYTimes.

https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/even-after-oil-prices-rebound-many-drilling-jobs-may-be-lost-to-automation

However, as if to correct itself on the topic, on the same day, the NYTimes' editorial board published their opinion that automation is not the problem either. If automation were the problem, both labor productivity and capital investment would be booming. In fact, they are both at historical low points. The problem in their eyes is a shift in public policy.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/20/opinion/no-robots-arent-killing-the-american-dream.html

The response in previous eras was quite different.

When automation on the farm resulted in the mass migration of Americans from rural to urban areas in the early decades of the 20th century, agricultural states led the way in instituting universal public high school education to prepare for the future. At the dawn of the modern technological age at the end of World War II, the G.I. Bill turned a generation of veterans into college graduates.

When productivity led to vast profits in America’s auto industry, unions ensured that pay rose accordingly.

Corporate efforts to keep profits high by keeping pay low were countered by a robust federal minimum wage and time-and-a-half for overtime.

Fair taxation of corporations and the wealthy ensured the public a fair share of profits from companies enriched by government investments in science and technology.

Productivity and pay rose in tandem for decades after World War II, until labor and wage protections began to be eroded. Public education has been given short shrift, unions have been weakened, tax overhauls have benefited the rich and basic labor standards have not been updated.

I would assume that all three of these historical developments -- globalization, automation, policy reversals since the New Deal -- might, in fact, each play some role in the declining fortunes of workers in the US.

But there is a fourth factor that is just as important as the others: The stubborn persistence of the small town in the face of obsolescence. 

Employment is up for blacks and Hispanics, but down for whites. This has less to do with ethnicity, however, and more to do with geography: Immigrants and minorities tend to live in cities, and small town America tends to be older and whiter. Cities are booming, and small towns are fading.

Here is an article on small town West Virginia, which is coal country. It was solidly Democratic until recently, but now it is Trump country, as well.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/in-the-heart-of-trump-country

In the 1970s, strip mining replaced lode mining (underground), which entailed a reduction of workers; tractors replaced men. That's when coal mining began to fall into decline, not with Obama or with fracking. Likewise, the death of the rural economy has been going on for a long time. But the people in these areas will not move away. The article describes how some families in these rural areas have been established there since before the Civil War. That's very different from life in the suburbs, where a family will pack up and relocate when there is a greater opportunity elsewhere. Critics complain that the suburbs are sterile and alienating, but that disconnection comes with certain opportunities and freedoms. Life in a small town is not about opportunities, it is about rootedness.

One big question is, What defines a 'small town'? 

That same question haunts the idea of the 'urban'. Up to 55% of Americans live in suburbs, and 25% live in cities. The word urban is used to describe both the suburbs and the cities as opposed to the rural areas that makes up the vast expanse of the United States, so it is often stated that the population of the US is 80% 'urban'. That's confusing because it implies that almost everyone lives in the city. And what is a 'city'? When you get down to it, every urban planner has his or her own method of defining an 'urban' area. For some, it can be measured by population density, but others use metrics like the walking distance from home to a "public-private" facility like a coffee shop or a store or a library. Some small towns have those amenities within a short walk from home, and some cities do not. So it's messy.

But the fringes of the suburbs are remarkably rural in character in cultural, if not geographic aspects. These areas are classified as 'suburban', but the cultural -- and political -- characteristics of these areas resemble those of the classic isolated, stand-alone small town (fiscally liberal, culturally conservative). These people also voted for Trump, and when times are tough, they hesitate to just "pack up and move" for greater opportunity the way the stereotypical suburbanite will. Moreover, they drive trucks and SUVs, even though they may commute like everyone else. (These are often expensive massive swollen trucks with four doors and a tiny bed in the back, with questionable utility.) You cannot get these fringe-suburb dwellers into a car, and you cannot get them to live in an apartment, and they don't want to move. So a big chunk of 'suburban' America might better be reclassified as 'rural'. Population density might not be such a good metric, compared to voting record or vehicle type, when classifying an area as suburban or rural.

The media often frame the political and cultural conflict in the US as that between the suburbs and the city, as if the present cultural and political disjuncture in the US were frozen in amber from some time in the 1950s and 1960s. In fact, the suburbs and the city are typically the same people at different stages in their lives. The real problem are the people in the small towns and fringe suburbs. They will not move, they will not drive cars, they will not use mass transit, they will not live in the cities. Their world is dying and they expect us to bail them out. 

The fate of JC Penney

The good news is that JC Penney has made its first profit since 2010.

The bad news is that they have decided to close up to 140 stores.

The worse news is that this will probably trigger the closing of many struggling shopping malls.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/jc-penney-to-close-130-to-140-stores-sales-dip-2017-02-24-12485289

Most of these articles on this subject frame it in terms of the rise of online shopping, or the executive mistakes of the past.

But it has been little noted that these store closings are in rural areas.

The story of the century is the decline, obsolescence and doom of small towns and outside suburbs, and so few seem to see this pattern. 

An optimistic story from September of 2016, when JC Penney was planning on replacing Sears and Macy's.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-rise-of-jc-penney-20160826-story.html

Some of J.C. Penney's most profitable locations turned out to be small stores in rural areas where the retailer pays almost no rent; two California stores opening this year will be completely funded by the landlord.

A less happy story from yesterday.

http://news.morningstar.com/all/dow-jones/us-markets/201702248502/jc-penney-to-close-more-than-100-stores-3rd-update.aspx

Penney on Friday eked out its first annual profit since 2010, but executives said they were closing weaker stores so they could focus their investments on revamping those in stronger markets. Penney said it would identify the locations that are set to close next month, though executives said many were smaller stores in rural locations. 

Geography is critical.

Optimism is still evident in some parts of the retail industry.

But another mall giant, Gap Inc., posted higher comparable quarterly sales for the first time in two years. "If you read the headlines today, you'll see the words dead, dying, sick. We are none of those," CEO Art Peck told investors late Thursday. "We are healthy and strong and have a plan and clear direction." 

Um, that's what JC Penney was saying last year....

The most popular vehicles

The most popular vehicles in January 2016:

http://www.goodcarbadcar.net/2016/02/usa-30-best-selling-vehicles-january-2016.html

1. Ford F-series.

2. Chevrolet Silverado

3. Ram P/U

4. Toyota Camry

5. Honda Civic

The three most popular vehicles are giant trucks, the type with four doors and a tiny bed in the back. Not exactly the most useful vehicles.

The question are, Just who is buying these trucks, and why?

According to NPR, everyone is buying big trucks and SUVs.

http://www.npr.org/2016/05/09/477301486/why-americans-are-buying-more-trucks-and-suvs-than-cars

According to this Quora discussion, the big trucks are especially popular in:

-- rural areas;

-- especially in the southeast;

-- most especially in Texas.

https://www.quora.com/Why-are-pickup-trucks-very-popular-in-America

This seems to confirm it:

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/31/us/texas-truck-culture.html

Looks like NPR glossed the issue. However, NPR did do some interesting research on the most common profession in the US today, which turns out to be driving a truck. Originally, Americans were farmers, then later factory workers, but by the 1970s even the factories were closing. By then, the most common job was being a secretary, which was made obsolete by the computer. Soon enough, however, trucks will be self-driven.

http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/02/05/382664837/map-the-most-common-job-in-every-state

Can culture -- or cultural change -- explain all those big trucks in rural America?

Here is a study of the contrasting political cultures of the rural Republican 'red states' and the urban Democratic 'blue states' by the columnist David Brooks. Brooks is from urban, upscale Mongomery county, MD, and traveled to rural Franklin county in Pennsylvania. 

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/12/one-nation-slightly-divisible/376441/

These rural areas are found throughout the US, but they all have the quality of the southeastern US.

The joke that Pennsylvanians tell about their state is that it has Philadelphia on one end, Pittsburgh on the other, and Alabama in the middle. Franklin County is in the Alabama part. It strikes me as I drive there that even though I am going north across the Mason-Dixon line, I feel as if I were going south. The local culture owes more to Nashville, Houston, and Daytona than to Washington, Philadelphia, or New York.

In rural America, it is as though the 1960s did not happen.

When Blue America talks about social changes that convulsed society, it tends to mean the 1960s rise of the counterculture and feminism. When Red America talks about changes that convulsed society, it tends to mean World War II, which shook up old town establishments and led to a great surge of industry. 

Rural America is all about modesty.

If I had to describe the differences between the two sensibilities in a single phrase, it would be conception of the self. In Red America the self is small. People declare in a million ways, "I am normal. Nobody is better, nobody is worse. I am humble before God." In Blue America the self is more commonly large. People say in a million ways, "I am special. I have carved out my own unique way of life. I am independent. I make up my own mind."

For a person in Blue America the blandness in Red America can be a little oppressive. But it's hard not to be struck by the enormous social pressure not to put on airs. If a Franklin County resident drove up to church one day in a shiny new Lexus, he would face huge waves of disapproval. If one hired a nanny, people would wonder who died and made her queen.

Brooks writes that one of the great distinctions within rural America that the rest of us do not know about is between the wild, independent hill people and the more sedate folks who live in the valleys (kind of like the highlanders and lowlander distinction in Scotland, which is where so many of these people originated from). Another distinction is between the rough-looking guys who work outdoors and the goody-two-shoe Christian types who work indoors (although this distinction turns out to be deceptive, because all these folks are devout). 

The more urban, educated, affluent areas of the US also have their own inner distinctions, which can revolve around vehicle type. In either case, urbanites like to show off, each in their own style.

The kinds of distinctions we make in Blue America are different. In my world the easiest way to categorize people is by headroom needs. People who went to business school or law school like a lot of headroom. They buy humongous sport-utility vehicles that practically have cathedral ceilings over the front seats. They live in homes the size of country clubs, with soaring entry atriums so high that they could practically fly a kite when they come through the front door. These big-headroom people tend to be predators: their jobs have them negotiating and competing all day. They spend small fortunes on dry cleaning. They grow animated when talking about how much they love their blackberries. They fill their enormous wall space with huge professional family portraits—Mom and Dad with their perfect kids (dressed in light-blue oxford shirts) laughing happily in an orchard somewhere.

Small-headroom people tend to have been liberal-arts majors, and they have liberal-arts jobs. They get passive-aggressive pleasure from demonstrating how modest and environmentally sensitive their living containers are. They hate people with SUVs, and feel virtuous driving around in their low-ceilinged little Hondas, which often display a RANDOM ACTS OF KINDNESS bumper sticker or one bearing an image of a fish with legs, along with the word "Darwin," just to show how intellectually superior to fundamentalist Christians they are. 

What kind of vehicles did people in rural America drive back in 2001, when Brooks wrote this piece? Life in rural America was all about modesty and frugality, and that was reflected in car purchases.

One man in Mercersburg, Pennsylvania, told me about a friend who had recently bought a car. "He paid twenty-five thousand dollars for that car!" he exclaimed, his eyes wide with amazement. "He got it fully loaded." I didn't tell him that in Bethesda almost no one but a college kid pays as little as $25,000 for a car. 

Boy, things sure have changed in rural America in 15 years. Frugal no longer.

The whole purpose of Brook's effort was to understand why Al Gore's 2000 presidential campaign floundered. Gore ran as an angry populist who promised working Americans that "I will fight for you!" 

But Brooks found that rural Americans did not see themselves as beset by economic injustice. In fact, they considered themselves the luckiest people in the world. Sure, the jobs in rural areas started disappearing in the 1970s. But life was always tough in these areas, and economic struggle is the heart of rural identity -- albeit without any sense of class consciousness (which is, ironically, the preoccupation of educated, liberal urbanites). 

On the one hand, rural folk don't value money, they value religion, family, community, tradition and work itself. On the other hand, living expenses are remarkably cheap in these areas. 

No wonder people in [rural] Franklin County have no class resentment or class consciousness; where they live, they can afford just about anything that is for sale. (In Montgomery County, however—and this is one of the most striking contrasts between the two counties—almost nobody can say that. In Blue America, unless you are very, very rich, there is always, all around you, stuff for sale that you cannot afford.) And if they sought to improve their situation, they would look only to themselves. If a person wants to make more money, the feeling goes, he or she had better work hard and think like an entrepreneur.

Boy, things sure have changed. Now they feel plenty resentment against elites, and feel very disempowered. But they differ from Bernie Saunders in that they channel their resentment toward foreigners like Muslims and Mexicans, and not Wall Street. Or, they merge in their minds the image of elites and foreigners, and end up resenting "elite" Jews like Senator Saunders.

There might be two things at work here that explain these divergences from Brook's 2001 description of frugal people with no resentments.

On the one hand, in terms of unemployment, a trickle has turned into a flood. There is a saying that if you throw a frog in boiling water, it will jump out; but if you place it in warm water and heat it to a boil, the frog will get comfortable and then perish. That might be what has been happening recently in rural America: in 2008, the water started to boil.

On the other hand, there is the rise of the internet and the outer suburbs.

That is, happiness is based on comparison, and now rural America does just that because of new technological realities and geographic conditions.

Here is the Easterlin paradox. It argues that the general level of happiness in all societies, rich or poor, is the same. It is within countries that levels of happiness differ, with happiness correlating with income. That is, within countries, richer people tend to be happier than poorer people, but between countries, it's about even.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easterlin_paradox

The Easterlin paradox is a concept in happiness economics. It is named for the economist Richard Easterlin, who suggested that a higher level of a country's per capita gross domestic product did not correlate with greater self-reported levels of happiness among citizens of a country, in contrast with people inside a country.^[1] Later research has questioned whether Easterlin's conclusions about the non-correlation were accurate.

Easterlin presented his research in the 1970s, by which time it was already disintegrating. Newer research has shown that richer countries are generally happier than poorer countries, especially prosperous Scandinavian countries with relatively high levels of income equality. What seems to have happened is the rise of television. Whereas Italians were once as happy as Germans on average, as Italy developed and Italians came to buy televisions and watch TV shows like "Dynasty" and "Dallas", Italians began to "realize" (imagine) that Italy was poor and miserable and America filthy rich. Happiness is based on comparison, and the telecommunications revolution has allowed people to constantly compare themselves with faraway peoples, not just what they see on the street in their town. 

Also, people from small towns are migrating to the outer suburbs, as far away from the city as possible, yet within commuting distance of good jobs. The typical Trump voter has an income that is above the American average; that describes the outer suburbs, which voted for Trump, not the dying small town. But here they are exposed to the amenities and luxuries that were once limited to the city. This makes them less happy than they were in the modest small town.

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/11/cities-economic-fates-diverge/417372/

Into the 1970s, anyone who wanted to shop at Barnes & Noble or Saks Fifth Avenue had to go to Manhattan. Anyone who wanted to read The New York Times had to live in New York City or its close-in suburbs. Generally, high-end goods and services—ranging from imported cars and stereos to gourmet coffee, fresh seafood, designer clothes, and ethnic cuisine—could be found in only a few elite quarters of a few elite cities. But today, these items are available in suburban malls across the country, and many can be delivered by Amazon overnight. Shopping is less and less of a reason to live in a place like Manhattan, let alone Seattle.

Rural life in the outer suburbs has been gentrified, even as the rate of rural job losses in the small town has accelerated. Hence the rise of both the Ford F-150 as well as Donald J. Trump.

There is a political divide in the US based on geography.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/12/26/upshot/duck-dynasty-vs-modern-family-television-maps.html

The cultural divide largely falls along urban/rural lines. We saw a similar divide in November, with Hillary Clinton winning in cities, college towns, Native American reservations and areas with black and Hispanic majorities. Mr. Trump earned more votes in rural areas.

A study of television viewing habits reflects this political division, as well as ethnic divisions.

When we looked at how many active Facebook users in a given ZIP code “liked” certain TV shows, we found that the 50 most-liked shows clustered into three groups with distinct geographic distributions. Together they reveal a national culture split among three regions: cities and their suburbs; rural areas; and what we’re calling the extended Black Belt — a swath that extends from the Mississippi River along the Eastern Seaboard up to Washington, but also including city centers and other places with large nonwhite populations.

It was not like this a generation ago.

In the 1960s and ’70s, even if you didn’t watch a show, you at least probably would have heard of it. Now television, once the great unifier, amplifies our divisions.

The article qualifies this by stating that television now tries to cater to niche markets that are especially profitable, so the issue is not just political division. 

This reflects the business of television as much as it does a fracturing national culture. In the past, notes James Poniewozik, the chief television critic for The New York Times, big network shows like “The Beverly Hillbillies” “reflected a business where sheer audience numbers were more important.” Now, advertising money is driven less by volume and more by demographics. You make more ad money, Mr. Poniewozik explains, by appealing to younger, more affluent, urban viewers.

This might be qualified further by observing that shows that once had broad appeal, like "All In The Family", were comprised of a politically divided audience. Liberals loved the show because it poked fun at the lead character Archie Bunker, an opinionated, working-class bigot. But what liberals did not realize is that half the show's faithful audience loved Archie Bunker and agreed with his political viewpoint. 

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/04/07/the-great-divide-emily-nussbaum

A Republican loading-dock worker living in Queens, Bunker railed from his easy chair against “coons” and “hebes,” “spics” and “fags.” He yelled at his wife and he screamed at his son-in-law, and even when he was quiet he was fuming about “the good old days.” He was also, as played by the remarkable Carroll O’Connor, very funny, a spray of malapropisms and sly illogic.

In some respects, looking back at what was politically 'normal' in the 1970s, even Trump is comparatively liberal.

There is the possibility that the US has never been less divided on cultural and political grounds.

This reminds me of something that I read some time ago, that during the 2000s, the most popular show in the liberal blue states like California was "Sex in the City", and that the most popular show in the Republican red states was "Desperate Housewives". The argument was that the former (at least originally) was a quite realistic depiction of social life in the city (it was modeled after gay men's lives) and the latter was a fantasy set in suburbia. I can't find that article, but the following article argues that "Desperate Housewives" 

not only emulates HBO Sunday night hits like "Sex and the City" and "Six Feet Under" in its cheeky, sardonic tone but brushes right up against them in language and action.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/24/arts/the-great-indecency-hoax.html

So "Desperate Housewives" is kind of like the generic, K-Mart version of more serious HBO shows. This would be a sign of cultural convergence between urban and rural cultures.

But "Desperate Housewives" might represent changing tastes in rural and working-class America in another way as well. One of the most popular shows on TV in the 1990s was "Roseanne". 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roseanne

Roseanne is an American sitcom that was broadcast on ABC from October 18, 1988, to May 20, 1997.^[2] Lauded for its realistic portrayal of the average American family, the series stars Roseanne Barr, and revolves around the Conners, an Illinois working-class family. The series reached #1 in the Nielsen ratings, becoming the most watched television show in the United States from 1989 to 1990. The show remained in the top four for six of its nine seasons, and in the top twenty for eight seasons.

Working-class tastes in entertainment might have become more luxurious since the 1990s. (Also, the favorite shows among blacks today are about wealthy black businessmen, not about poor or working-class blacks who were mainstays in TV comedies back in the 1970s.) 

That might connect with rural America's current love affair with gigantic trucks. That is, they always loved trucks (Sam Walton, founder of Walmart, made it a point to drive everywhere in his old, beaten up pickup truck), but not what amounts to a luxury vehicle pretending to be useful.

This might also connect with international relations. Westerners who live in Russia point out that with each passing day, Russian life becomes more and more like life in modern Europe. Russia is becoming like a gentrified suburb, replete with shopping malls and pizza restaurants, etc. At the political level, the reaction to this Westernization -- which is completely popular and voluntary -- is hostility toward the West. Maybe something like that is going on with the political divisions in the US -- denial. Parts of rural America are becoming suburban and gentrified, while the small town falls into ruin. So on television one finds:

-- on HBO, serious urban dramas;

-- on network television, kitschy knock-offs of those dramas set in an opulent suburbia; and

-- on free cable stations, reality TV shows about poor rural whites scrambling for money.

Whither, fair city?

What's happening in the city?

One of the latest developments (pun intended) in land development is the creation on the edges of cities of a inner suburbia that is a hybrid of the city and suburbs. 

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/16/realestate/the-new-suburbia-more-urban.html

Some suburbs around New York City are becoming decidedly less suburban, as new apartment buildings and condominium communities close to mass transit help expand the downtowns of these villages and towns. Multifamily housing is also popping up near highways and main thoroughfares.

Young professionals seeking more space than they can afford in Manhattan or Brooklyn, empty nesters looking to downsize and leave the snow shoveling to others and, to a lesser extent, millennials moving out of their parents’ basements are leading the charge to a more urbanized suburbia.

A potential development is that the cities might run out of the young adults who have been reviving cities.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/23/upshot/peak-millennial-cities-cant-assume-a-continued-boost-from-the-young.html

Over the past decade, many American cities have been transformed by young professionals of the millennial generation, with downtowns turning into bustling neighborhoods full of new apartments and pricey coffee bars.

But soon, cities may start running out of millennials.

A number of demographers, along with economists and real estate consultants, are starting to contemplate what urban cores will look like now that the generation — America’s largest — is cresting.

There are already some signs that the inflow of young professionals into cities has reached its peak, and that the outflow of mid-30s couples to the suburbs has resumed after stalling during the Great Recession.

The flow of young professionals into Philadelphia has flattened, according to JLL Research, while apartment rents have started to soften in a number of big cities because of a glut of new construction geared toward urban newcomers who haven’t arrived. Apartment rents in San Francisco, Washington, Denver, Miami and New York are moderating or even declining from a year ago, according to Zillow.

There it is: The laws of supply and demand. 

The debate is full of contours and caveats, but it really boils down to this: Are large numbers of millennials really so enamored with city living that they will age and raise families inside the urban core, or will many of them, like earlier generations, eventually head to the suburbs in search of bigger homes and better school districts?

Perhaps the answer is ... BOTH. They might be moving to the inner suburbs around major cities, which are beginning to look like medium sized cities, with condos and townhouses. 

This time, it seems that there has been a subtle shift toward a preference for city living. Young people have been moving to the cities despite high rents, and older city dwellers have postponed the move to the suburbs. 

But the bulk of millennials came of age when jobs were scarce, Mr. Myers noted. They started moving into cities and apartments during years when rent was historically high. The number of young professionals was rising, adding to apartment demand, but supply was tight because new construction stalled during the recession. When city populations started swelling in the early and mid-2000s, it had less to do with the first of the millennials moving in than it did with lots of slightly older people not moving out, according to Kenneth Johnson, a demographer at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire.

On the other hand, it does seem like a real shift, yet it is merely a shift in emphasis. The author notes that it has real implications for how cities and suburbs need to plan for the future. It also impacts how the public reacts -- or overreacts -- to demand. 

http://news.morningstar.com/all/dow-jones/us-markets/201702169082/los-angeles-looks-to-rein-in-real-estate-development.aspx

LOS ANGELES -- The second-largest U.S. city is considering a measure that would effectively halt all housing construction, the most extreme example yet of a revolt against development breaking out across the country. 

A boom in luxury development over the last five years has transformed urban America, bringing young people, restaurants, retailers and jobs back to city centers.

But construction activity has tilted toward the high end. Many longtime residents have become resentful of new towers that cast shadows over their neighborhoods of single-family homes and push up rents. Average apartment rents nationwide have surged 26% since 2010, according to MPF Research, due in large part to strong demand after the housing crash.

Now some activists are pushing back with actions that threaten to grind housing production in some cities to a crawl.

But there is also a kind of ideological passion, manifest in urban planners like the progressive Richard Florida and the conservative Joel Kotkin, surrounding the issue. The underlying hope seems to be that if people move to a certain location and stay there, they will -- somehow, magically -- convert to a new world view: If people move to the city, they will become liberal, and if they move to the suburbs, they will become conservative. First of all, the suburbs are not conservative, the rural areas and outer suburbs are (more precisely, fiscally liberal, culturally conservative). More generally, people do not convert to ideologies, they gravitate toward ideologies (and locations) that suit their already ingrained temperament. 

From 2015, a series of articles by the WSJ on demographic trends and transformations:

http://graphics.wsj.com/2050-demographic-destiny/

The year 2050 is right around the corner, and yet it​ is hard to imagine the sweeping changes the world will confront by then. In a multimedia series, The Wall Street Journal helps readers ​envision how we will work,how we will age and how we will live.

In the 1970s, the fear was of a "population bomb", that populations would grow exponentially while economies would not keep pace (Malthus). Today, however, the emerging challenge in the prosperous, developed world is population decline.

Previous generations feared a population explosion. But for today’s global economy, the problem is just the opposite. Falling fertility rates and aging work​ ​forces will plague the developed world. The race is on for innovative solutions​​​​.

Depopulation is related to the rise of automation. The depopulation and automation that characterized Japan in the past generation is now at work in China.

Long the world's factory floor, China will soon confront a serious labor shortage​, forcing scores of Western brands to remake their operations. The changes will mark a new chapter in the history of globalization, where automation is king​ and​ nearness to market is crucial​.

It's been pointed out that the potential re-industrialization of the US will not necessarily mean that the factory jobs will come back, because the production line will be more automated (perhaps, eventually, totally automated). The flip side of this is that poor countries cannot look forward to their own industrialization. 

Some economists worry that the factory-led model of advancement—which, for more than a century, has offered the quickest route out of poverty—is simply no longer available to today’s ​poorest ​and youngest countries.

On the role of women in demographic change:

Empowering women tends to lower fertility rates. The Wall Street Journal spoke to six teenage girls about how they see ​their future selves balancing education goals, careers and families​.​

A cultural preference for male children has ​damaged Asia​, economically and socially​. ​There are ​​​100 million women missing on the continent​ today​ ​because of prenatal gender selection and neglect​ of girls​. One country managed to turn the tide.

The poorest countries in the world have the highest population growth, in particular, in Africa and the Middle East.

In Africa, the biggest human increase in ​modern ​history is under way. Will this baby boom lift the poorest continent into the center of global affairs, or will it be yet another missed opportunity? 

In contrast, the decline of Japan's population, and Japan's decades of economic stagnation, could be a harbinger for what is to come for the West.

For pessimists, Japan's graying population is leading inexorably to economic disaster. But what if old people could be viewed as a resource? Entrepreneurs are exploring ​innovations​​ such as robotics​ to help unleash their potential.

On food production in a more prosperous world:

As the world's appetite for meat grows, agribusiness faces a monumental task. Researchers say poultry will be the animal protein of the masses, and the meat industry continues its quest to breed better birds.

On human migration, where some see crisis, others (Canada) see opportunities:

While Europe is swamped by the worst refugee crisis since World War II, Canada focuses on assimilating educated immigrants who fill job needs.

On increasing urbanization:

The world's cities are growing at a staggering pace, with as many as seven out of 10 people expected to live in an urban area by 2050. Places like New York City are at the forefront of efforts to use data to manage the buildup.

This is closer to the topic at hand: urbanization.

Are seven out of ten people really going to live in an urban area by 2050?

If the US is any indication, yes -- if the what we mean by "urban areas" includes suburbs. It is often pointed out that 80% of Americans live in "urban areas". But the US is 25% city, 55% suburb and 20% rural (and these "rural" areas are in some ways distant suburbs, not the classic small towns of yore).

What is going on in America with "urbanization"?

What one finds in Texas is the continued closure and/or consolidation of schools in small towns. The small towns are dying. 

But the suburban areas outside of Texas's cities continue to expand, with the expansion and/or creation of new schools. 

And to some extent, it's the same people moving from the small town to the outer suburbs. (They brought their small-town religion and politics to the suburbs, but they seem to have left their small-town frugality and modesty behind.) 

What one finds in cities is luxury development and popular resistance to it, but also falling real-estate prices due to development.

In the inner suburbs surrounding major cities, one finds the redevelopment of low-rise suburbs into condos and townhouses, but not into high-rises.

There is a mathematical correlation of the expansion of suburbs and cities. They expand together, they do not displace one another. As cities grow taller, suburbs continue to expand. 

Think of an inverted V that grows taller even as its base continues to expand. That is what happens in land development. The city gets much taller; the inner suburbs get somewhat taller; the outer suburbs continue to expand; the small town and farms disappear. 

The only alternative to this dual vertical and horizontal expansion is suppression of demand through reducing population. That is what is happening in Japan and Europe today. 

The US in unique in that there is a high immigration rate (14% of Americans were born elsewhere) and a high birth rate (1.9 children per family), so the American population continues to grow. This drives economic growth, which attracts immigrants and allows families to plan for children. 

But that might change. Even in family-oriented countries like Italy, when people who have developed a taste for the good life have to choose between buying cool stuff for themselves or having children, they will pick buying stuff over kids (the fertility rate in Italy is only 1.4 children per family). With all these rural Christians moving into outer suburbs and developing a taste for giant trucks, they might just eventually downsize their families. Also, they don't really seem to like immigrants, and educated immigrants (Asians) might just go elsewhere (or stay in an Asia that is growing economically).

When people choose to have fewer children, that creates a "vicious circle" in which there is economic stagnation ... so people decide to have fewer children ... so there is economic stagnation ... and so on and so forth.

But at some point, this stagnation just might become ingrained in the younger generation, and their habits of downsizing everything -- their living arrangements, their possessions, their hopes and dreams -- becomes a new kind of culture that supports new values and ideals. The supposed "vicious circle" -- economic stagnation, deflation, lowered expectations, lowered consumption, fewer children -- is then perceived by the young as a "virtuous circle" liberating them from what they come to see as the fetters of their parents' slavish consumerism.

This might be what is happening in contemporary Japan, and it might be a window into the future of the developed world. And it might be much more significant than the process of "urbanization" (whatever that means).