Today's post is perhaps a good follow-up to yesterday's post about housing supply in Ontario. Below are a few charts taken from a recent article by Wendell Cox looking at net domestic migration across the US. The takeaway here is that the shift from larger cities to smaller cities seems to be accelerating, following a trend that started before COVID.

The data in these charts is organized according to population and by Core Based Statistical Areas (CBSAs). At the bottom are America's two megacities: New York and Los Angeles. Both have metro areas that exceed 10 million people. As you can, these two city regions have been losing the most people, both in terms of total humans and on a percentage basis. The goldilocks sweet spot seems to be cities in the 500k to 1 million range.

But the most telling figure is probably this one here:

This chart adds up all major metropolitan areas with a population greater than 1 million, and then shows net migration over the last decade. Here you can see when this trend started (around 2016) and how it has been accelerating. In this case, it does appear that COVID added some fuel to the fire. But the question remains: Why is this longer-term trend even happening?

Is it a short-term phenomenon? Is it because once a city reaches a certain size it simply becomes more annoying to live in it and people would prefer to live elsewhere? Or is it more about overall affordability? That is, if we could figure out how to deliver more affordable housing in our cities, could we stymie the bleeding toward smaller and more affordable ones?

I don't know the answers to the questions. But they have been widely debated and I still think they're interesting ones. If all things were equal (or closer to equal), how and where would most people choose to live? Put differently, how much of this is some sort of natural market outcome and how much of it is a direct result of our actions (or inactions)?

Resonance Consulting out of Vancouver has a new report out: 2018 Future of Millennial Travel. You can download a free copy here. Resonance does great work and really gets content marketing.

The first chapter immediately caught my attention, perhaps because it’s called, Cities are the Destinations. It talks about how big cities as a travel destination are a highly underreported tourism metric. Historically it’s been all about beach vacations and escaping.

According to their survey, Millennials (aged 20 to 36 years old as of March 16, 2017) are almost as likely to travel to a major city (38%) as they are to travel to a beach resort (40%) in the next 24 months. (I wonder where the mountains fit in.)

Also interesting is that this number increases when household earnings increase beyond $100,000. This subset of respondents is most likely to visit a major city on their next vacation (40%). It’s all about new experiences.

I’m not an expert on travel and tourism, but Resonance is calling this a sea change and a likely indicator that, in the near future, big cities will become the dominant travel destination. Is your city ready?

Photo by Nathan Ziemanski on Unsplash

When I was 18 years old, I moved from the suburbs of Toronto to Waterloo, Ontario, which is about an hour west of the city.

I largely did this for two reasons.

Firstly, I had started visiting friends at both Wilfrid Laurier University and the University of Waterloo while I was in high school, and I thought that I wanted that kind of University town experience.

Secondly, I started University as a Computer Science student and I figured that Waterloo was a pretty good place to study that. Research In Motion (later renamed to Blackberry) was an important company at the time and interesting things were happening.

Though to be clear, I was a student at Laurier and not at the University of Waterloo – the better of the two schools for Computer Science – because I didn’t have the grades for the latter.

But a funny thing ended up happening. I hated living in Waterloo. I felt so out of place. So much so that I spent every weekend back in Toronto visiting my friends who had instead decided to go to the University of Toronto.

And I remember vividly how I felt during those weekends. I would stand in my friend’s apartments – most of which had dens and solariums that were hacked into bedrooms so that they could afford to live there – and I would look across the skyline and think to myself: why the hell do I not live here?

So I transferred to the University of Toronto. And that solved that.

The reason I bring up this story today is that I was reminded of it while reading a recent CityLab article by Richard Florida called, The Self-Confident City.

The three main arguments in the article are:

(1) Where we choose to live has a massive impact on our life outcomes.

(2) Self-confident people – according to a recent study – seem to be drawn to big cities.

(3) Self-confidence can also be a self-fulfilling prophecy for people in big cities.

Now, I don’t know if it was really self-confidence and youthful hubris that told me I needed to live in a bigger city than Waterloo. (It was probably part of it.) All I know is that I wanted to live in a super dynamic place that felt bigger than me. I wanted to feel like I was a small fish in a big pond trying to make some sort of meaningful dent.

That was true for me when I was 18. And it remains true for me today at 32.