The Brookings Institution recently published something called Metro Monitor 2026. It's an interactive dashboard that provides decision-makers with data on how the largest metro areas in the US performed between 2014 and 2024. You can check it out here.
As part of this analysis, they looked at the relationship between immigration and regional economic performance. More specifically, they examined how regional economies with growing immigrant populations have performed over the last decade, and how that growth has been shared across immigrant and native-born households.
To answer these questions, they looked at the change in the foreign-born share of the working-age population in the 196 largest metro areas, and then compared it to a variety of different economic markers. And what they found, not surprisingly, was that more immigrants tend to be better than fewer immigrants:
Metro areas with larger increases in the foreign-born share of their working-age population saw stronger growth in gross metropolitan product (GMP) and employment between 2014 and 2024, as well as in key prosperity metrics such as productivity and wage growth.
It increased employment rates for both native-born and foreign-born workers:
Between 2014 and 2024, employment rates in metro areas with the largest increases in their foreign-born workforce share were nearly 3 percentage points higher for both native-born and foreign-born workers than in metro areas with the smallest foreign-born workforce share increases. Put simply, metro areas with larger increases in the foreign-born share of their workforce tended to deliver stronger employment outcomes for both immigrant and native-born workers.
And it also increased median earnings, again for both native-born and foreign-born workers:
We find a similar pattern when examining changes in regional median earnings. Metropolitan economies with larger increases in the foreign-born share of their working-age population consistently recorded higher median earnings for both native-born and foreign-born workers.
Once again, we're reminded that, when managed properly, immigration isn't a zero-sum game. There is a common narrative that foreign-born workers depress wages and/or take opportunities away from native-born citizens. But the data suggests that the opposite is true.
Next up (or soon up): Let's talk about Canada's now-declining population.
Cover photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash
Rental housing in France is both heavily regulated and supported through dedicated public funds. Here's a high-level overview of what that means (via this 2021 Brookings case study by Arthur Acolin):
Homeownership rates in France went from 35% in 1954 to 56% in 2001
As of 2018, 58% of French households own, 40% rent, and the remaining 2% supposedly get free housing from either their employer or a family member
Not surprisingly, younger households are most likely to rent (the figure is > 60% for people aged 18-29)
Household size seems to play a major factor in how likely people are to live in public housing
France has some 4.5 million public housing units and 17% of all households live in them (which represents about 43% of all renter households)
Within the unsubsidized rental market, 93.5% of households live in homes owned by individual investors (this is as of 2013) and only about 3.5% live in homes owned by institutional investors
This is pretty typical of Europe, where multi-family isn't an established real estate asset class like it is in North America; so for those of you who like to hate on individual condo investors, check out France
In the decade between 2010 and 2020, 28 metro regions in France adopted some form of rent control and, in a few markets, like Paris and Lille, there are also maximum rents that can be charged for specific housing types
If you're interested in rental housing, Brookings also has articles covering the US, Germany, Spain, Japan, and the UK. They can be found here.
Back in the spring, I wrote about a study that was done by the University of Toronto and the University of California, Berkeley that measured “downtown recoveries” using mobile phone data.
In other words, it looked at where people’s phones were lingering to try and determine if they were back in the office and doing things downtown.
The headline finding was that San Francisco had the lowest recovery quotient (RT) and that Salt Lake City had the highest, alongside cities like San Diego, Baltimore, and Bakersfield.
But why was there such a spread in recoveries?
One possible explanation was commute times. The cities with the lowest average commute times seemed to generally perform better in this study and have higher recovery quotients. But it’s maybe more nuanced than this.
Here is a recent Brookings article by Tracy Hadden Loh that looks at this same study. And to give just one example, she notes that San Diego’s airport happens to fall within the same zip code as its downtown. Meaning, airport traffic would have been picked up as downtown traffic.
The article also includes the above chart, showing the amount of downtown apartments built since 2019. I don’t think I knew that Chicago was so prolific.