Reece Martin is perhaps best known for his YouTube channel focused on transit. He has over 330,000 subscribers, and I have mentioned him a few times over the years on this blog. But he has since retired from YouTube and he now has a new blog called "Next Toronto," which you should all subscribe to. I just did that today.
In his latest post, he makes "the case for a 24-hour Toronto" and compares our city to various other global cities around the world including New York and Tokyo. This post really resonates with me and I agree with his view that there's something quintessentially urban about things being open all the time, or at the very least open late.
According to ChatGPT, Toronto is a "semi 24-hour city." Its deficiencies:
Here's how I generally think about it.
Step 1 is reasonable daytime hours. As a North American, I still find it frustrating how some/many restaurants in Europe close between lunch and dinner. Call me spoiled, but what if I got held up at work and couldn't eat during the generally accepted time? Or if I went to the gym in the morning and now I suddenly have a dire caloric deficit?
Step 2 is staying open kind of late, including on Sundays. A few weeks ago I was driving around the suburbs of Toronto — on a Sunday — and I decided to take advantage of this rare occurrence to stop in at what's called an enclosed shopping mall. So I got all the way there, pulled confidently on one of the front doors, and then realized it had closed 2 hours ago.
Step 3 is the rarified big leagues; you're a "24-hour city." Reece gives the example of Apple's Fifth Avenue store, which, in case you forgot, never closes. I don't typically shop for consumer electronics at 3AM, but I might. And there's something oddly comforting about knowing I could. This isn't possible in all cities, but it is in New York. That says something.
Last week, we spoke about affordable housing in Paris. Today, let's talk about tourist rentals in the city. The city of Paris and Greater Paris (i.e. la Ville de Paris and la Métropole du Grand Paris) recently commissioned Apur (which is a non-profit that I regularly follow) to do two studies on this topic. The first was for Paris proper and the second was for Greater Paris. What they found is super interesting:
In August 2024, Greater Paris had 149,936 tourist rentals, of which 124,988 were available for immediate booking. This represents an 84% increase compared to August 2023, which is a massive number, but maybe not entirely surprising given that Paris hosted the Olympics last summer.
Paris proper had 97,975 listings in August 2024 and 90,299 in December 2024. Overall, the city sees fairly muted seasonality. It's also worth noting that 31% of these listings belong to hosts that own multiple properties (that is, at least two).
But let's put these figures into context. Here's a map showing the density of Airbnb listings:
Here's a map showing the number of Airbnb listings compared to the number of principal residences:
And here's a map showing the percentage of unoccupied homes in the city, which totalled 268,500 as of 2021:
The report defines an "unoccupied home" to be any home that is not used as a household's primary residence. So in addition to flat out empty homes, it includes homes that are used sporadically throughout the year for pleasure and/or for work. And as you can see, there are large sections of the center of the city where "unoccupied" and second homes make up over 28% of the total housing stock.
These areas also closely mirror the areas where tourist rentals are most popular, and where Airbnb listings make up over 20% of the housing stock. (See the second chart above.) And as far as I can tell, these are mutually exclusive classifications, meaning there are sections of the city where a large percentage of the housing stock (perhaps up to half?) is either a short-term rental or a second home.
This tells you a lot about the housing market in Paris, especially when you compare it to other global cities:
NYC, for example, is shown here as having 8.8 million people, compared to 7.1 million people in Greater Paris. And yet Greater Paris has about 4x the total number of short-term rental listings. The number of available listings (where the property was available for at least one day of the year) also increased by 84% from August 2023 to August 2024 in Greater Paris; whereas it dropped by 16% in NYC, likely because the city basically banned short-term rentals.
The two reports can be found here and here (note they're in French). And they're rich in data if you'd like to learn more about some of the dynamics impacting Paris' housing market.
Cover photo by Kris Atomic on Unsplash
Here is a chart, via the New York Times, showing the US states with the greatest net migration in 2023:
This is calculated by looking at the difference between arrivals and departures for each state, but only within the US. And for the first year since 2014, Texas has overtaken Florida, though admittedly not by much.
I saw some discussion about this on Twitter, but I think it's important to point out that this is only domestic migration. Between 2023 and 2024, the US grew by some 3.3 million people. And 84% of this growth (about 2.8 million people) came from international migration.
So let's include those numbers (data via the US Census Bureau).
Here are the most populous states:
Here are the top 10 states by numeric growth:
And here are the top 10 states by percent growth:
When looking at overall numeric growth, Texas and Florida still land at the top. (They're also among the highest in terms of percentage growth, despite already being the second and third most populous states.) But now states like California and New York show up on the top 10 list, which speaks to their ability to draw people from around the world.
None of this is particularly surprising, but I still think it's valuable to see the numbers.
Cover photo by Courtney Rose on Unsplash