I haven't seen this sort of data before and it's an interesting way of looking at job access, transit connectivity, and overall built form:
I haven't seen this sort of data before and it's an interesting way of looking at job access, transit connectivity, and overall built form:
The above is a table from New Geography (using data from the University of Minnesota). And what it shows is how many more jobs, across the US, can be accessed within a 30-minute commute by car versus by transit. For example, what this data tells us is that, on average across the US, there are about 56x more jobs that can be quickly accessed by car versus by transit.
But there is also huge variation across the 50 largest cities in the US. On the top end is Detroit, where there about 130x more jobs that can be accessed by car (again within 30 minutes). This isn't at all surprising. Also not surprising is the fact that New York is on the lowest end with only 5.6x as many car-versus-transit jobs. This is one of the reasons why I spoke yesterday about NYC being such an ideal candidate for something like NYC 25x25.
What a lower number tells us is that the city is far less reliant on personal vehicles and almost certainly has a higher urban density. That's why you see cities like New York, San Francisco, Boston, and Chicago near the top of this list. And in my opinion, this is where you want to be. The goal should be to minimize this multiple.
I haven't seen a dataset like this before, but I'm now curious to see how it varies globally. It feels like something that more of us should be monitoring. Because we know that there are strong links between jobs access and the overall economic performance of a city.
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)?
For years, the data has been clear. Many Americans are moving from expensive cities, like Los Angeles, to less expensive metropolitan areas like Dallas-Fort Worth.
But Wendell Cox's recent article over at New Geography is a good reminder that these data sets can be limited. The US Census Bureau currently tracks domestic migration at the county level only. This can be a bit of a problem as counties vary dramatically in terms of geography and population.
The New York metropolitan area, for example, is comprised of 25 different counties averaging about 750,000 residents. The Los Angeles metropolitan area, on the other hand, is compromised of two counties averaging about 6.6 million residents.
These sorts of nuances become important when you're trying to figure out things like whether people are moving to/from urban cores or the suburbs. Case in point: The San Diego metro area is compromised of a single county. When people move there, the data says nothing about how urban or suburban they might be.
Dallas-Fort Worth is a lot easier to read. Since 2010, it has had the largest net domestic migration of any metro area in the US: +443,000 residents. But county data reveals that it is entirely suburban. The core (Dallas County) actually lost 57,000 people from 2010 to 2019. And this is not unique to the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
Photo by Gabriel Tovar on Unsplash
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