The U.S. Census Bureau recently released it’s 2016 city and town population estimates. The press release can be found here.
The headline isn’t a new one. Southern cities continue to grow quickly. This is not a new trend. Humans seem to like warm weather and the housing supply in southern cities tends to be more elastic. This keeps home prices relatively in check and allows the cities to more easily accommodate growth.
From July 2015 to July 2016, 10 of the 15 fastest growing large U.S. cities were in the south (based on % growth). 4 of the top 5 were in Texas.
From 2010 to 2016, the population in large southern cities grew an average of 9.4%. Cities in the west clocked in at 7.3%. And cities in the northeast and midwest were at 1.8% and 3.0%, respectively.
Two outliers near the top are Seattle and Denver. Since 2010, the population of these two cities grew 15.39% and 14.87%, respectively. I’m going to say it’s because of the skiing and snowboarding. Half-joking. For the top 25 large cities ranked by 2010-2016 growth rate, click here.
“If I meet one more anti-gentrification activist who moved to Seattle ten minutes ago, I shall scream.” -Dan Savage
So it’s not just developers who are frustrated by the many paradoxical desires that we have of cities. We are concerned about housing affordability and we want to minimize displacement, but we do things that restrict new supply and put increasing pressure on our existing housing stock.
Below is another excerpt from Dan Savage. It’s from an article called: Doing Something Real About Gentrification and Displacement. Dan writes a sex-advice column, but clearly also feels passionate about urban issues. When he talks about “this city” he’s talking about Seattle.
“Housing scarcity—exacerbated by the ridiculous amount of this city zoned for single-family housing—deserves as much blame for the displacement crisis as gentrification. More. And unlike gentrification (“a once in a lifetime tectonic shift in consumer preferences”), scarcity and single-family zoning are two things we can actually do something about. Rezone huge swaths of the city. Build more units of affordable housing, borrow the social housing model discussed in the Rick Jacobus’ piece I quote from above (“
Oftentimes when I visit a city I like to ask myself: Which neighborhood would I want to live in if I were to move here?
Today I spent much of the afternoon hanging around Venice. After we got there, I told my friend that if I moved to LA, I would probably want to live there. I told him that, relative to the rest of the city, I liked the compressed scale of the neighborhood. There are many pedestrian-only lanes and streets beyond the boardwalk. And I told him that I thought it was interesting how the neighborhood seems to combine both bohemians and yuppies (though many people seem to hate the yuppy part).
But I’m obviously not alone in my thinking. My friend quickly informed me that Venice is one of the most expensive neighborhoods in LA and that it’s been adding essentially no new housing supply. Here’s an excerpt from an LA Weekly article published at the beginning of this year:
Anti-development activists like to argue that development fuels gentrification, that the construction of new, high-end apartment buildings makes the whole neighborhood more expensive.
