According to newly released US census data for 2010-2017 – which Brookings analyzed here – the “back to the city” movement appears to have peaked in 2012. (This is something that we’ve looked at before on the blog.)

Here is a graph from Brookings showing the annual growth rate for urban and suburban counties. Note how growth in the “urban core” peaked in 2012 and how growth in both the “emerging suburb” and “exurb” have increased since then.

The other finings from Brookings are that growth has slowed in large metropolitan areas (small metro areas and non metro areas, on the other hand are up) and that people are continuing to move from the Snow Belt to the Sun Belt.

If you look at population gains and losses from 2016-2017 for the 100 largest US metro areas, the only Snow Belt gainers within the top 20 are New York (15th), Columbus (19th), and Boston (20th). Dallas, a Sun Belt city, was first with a gain of 146,000 people.

So what’s going on? The narrative is that soon as the US economy and housing market recovered from the Great Recession of 2008, the trend lines simply reverted back to business as usual: sun and sprawl.

“Now the trick is that we gotta look like we don’t need this shit and they give us the shit for free.“ -Mike Peters

This is a line from one of my favorite movies, Swingers. Short video clip here. Mikey and Trent are in a Las Vegas casino trying to play it cool. They’re looking to make a scene at a table and Mikey throws out this gem of a line. He knows that people want what they can’t have and that confidence matters.

I was reminded of this line today after Amazon announced its HQ2 Request for Proposal (full RFP document here) and every city, from Chicago and Toronto to Philadelphia and Dallas, started swooning over the prospect of housing Amazon’s second headquarters in North America. 

But to be clear, I do not think this is a bad idea. I actually think Amazon HQ2 is an incredible city building opportunity that would generate countless positive externalities for the selected city. I’m thrilled that Mayor John Tory will be personally “leading the charge” with respect to Toronto’s response.

Over $5 billion in construction and as many as 50,000 employees making on average over $100,000 per year. Amazon is looking for about 500,000 sf of space in phase 1 (2019) and up to 8,000,000 sf in total. Based on the RFP, they seem to be pegging their capital investment at somewhere around $600 per square foot.

If I’m being as objective as possible, I honestly believe that Toronto is the city to beat in his competition. I think it will come down to access to talent. Human capital is the lifeblood of a company and Trump’s immigration policies simply put U.S. cities at a disadvantage in this regard.

Of course, Toronto is also awesome. So that’s my prediction: Amazon HQ2, Toronto.

In response to President Trump’s proposed immigration bill, Brookings recently analyzed census data from earlier this year to demonstrate the importance of immigration for growth within much of the United States. 

I’d like to share three tables from their analysis.

The first two look at international migration grains and domestic migration gains over the last 3 decades (the last decade isn’t quite a decade).

Here you can see that New York, Los Angeles, and Miami (all port cities) have dominated international migration to the US since 1990. But at the same time, international migration has become less geographically concentrated. From 1990-2000 the top 5 cities received almost half of all immigrants moving to the US. More recently, that number has dropped to 34%.

Domestic migration is different in that it’s a zero sum game. When one US city gains, another US city loses. Here there is a very clear migration trend toward cities in the southwest – arguably because of weather, job growth, cheaper housing, and probably a bunch of other factors.

If we look at actual international and domestic migration numbers over the last 6 years, the 12 largest metropolitan areas look like this:

The key takeaways here are that 8 of these cities are losing people to domestic migration and only 7 of these cities have a positive net migration number – meaning their population is actually growing.

What is clear is that the international migration column is a pretty important one if you believe that growth is valuable. 

If you’re Dallas, Houston or Atlanta, maybe you care a little less about that column. But for most of the other cities, international migration is either the only way you’re growing (look at Miami go) or keeping your population losses in check (see Philadelphia).