Urban sprawl is how much of the US provides new housing. And here's Conor Dougherty in the New York Times arguing that America needs more of it to fix its housing shortage:

Even if all the regulatory restraints were removed tomorrow, developers couldn’t find enough land to satisfy America’s housing needs inside established areas. Consequently, much of the nation’s housing growth has moved to states in the South and Southwest, where a surplus of open land and willingness to sprawl has turned the Sun Belt into a kind of national sponge that sops up housing demand from higher-cost cities. The largest metro areas there have about 20 percent of the nation’s population, but over the past five years they have built 42 percent of the nation’s new single-family homes, according to a recent report by Cullum Clark, an economist at the George W. Bush Institute, a research center in Dallas.

The obvious benefit is that the resulting housing tends to be cheap. The above article is filled with examples of people buying large homes for a few hundred thousand dollars in newly formed communities across Texas. And if you live in a high-cost city, the social algorithms have almost certainly found you at some point with a shockingly cheap house in one of these places. But, Dougherty also admits that sometimes this may be the only redeeming quality:

Escobar told me he moved to Princeton because he could find a big house there for less than $300,000, but now the city is home, and he didn’t like where it was headed. Over the next four years, he said, his goal is to redevelop the downtown, try to attract offices where locals can work and build out a park system that voters recently funded with a bond measure. “You ask anybody what they love about Princeton, and it’s simply just the affordability,” Escobar told me. “We need to be more than that.”

According to the article, this isn't necessarily a problem, because it's just how cities are built in this day and age. What you do is start with low-cost housing in fringe locations. You grow as quickly as possible until traffic becomes "godawful" and vital infrastructure can't keep up. Then you implement moratoriums on new housing, and start working on other uses like, you know, employment. Eventually, after all this chaos is complete, you end up with something that possibly resembles a real city.

Yeah, I don't know, this seems like a roundabout way of getting to where you want to go. Why not build and plan for something with a high quality of life right from the start?

Cover photo by Leon Hitchens 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

It was not my intention to make this building code week on the blog, but for some reason that has happened. So let's continue. Here is an interesting guest essay -- about elevators -- written by Stephen Smith for the New York Times.

Stephen is the founder and executive director of a Brooklyn-based non-profit called the Center for Building in North America. And what they do is conduct research on building codes, specifically in the United States and Canada, and then advocate for reforms.

Here's what he thinks about elevators (taken from the above essay):

Elevators in North America have become over-engineered, bespoke, handcrafted and expensive pieces of equipment that are unaffordable in all the places where they are most needed. Special interests here have run wild with an outdated, inefficient, overregulated system. Accessibility rules miss the forest for the trees. Our broken immigration system cannot supply the labor that the construction industry desperately needs. Regulators distrust global best practices and our construction rules are so heavily oriented toward single-family housing that we’ve forgotten the basics of how a city should work.

Here's how the US compares to a few European countries:

Nobody is marveling at American elevators anymore. With around one million of them, the United States is tied for total installed devices with Italy and Spain. (Spain has one-seventh our population, 6 percent of our gross domestic product and fewer than half as many apartments.) Switzerland and New York City have roughly the same population, but the lower-rise alpine country has three times as many single-family houses as Gotham — and twice as many passenger elevators.

And here's a set of cost comparisons:

Behind the dearth of elevators in the country that birthed the skyscraper are eye-watering costs. A basic four-stop elevator costs about $158,000 in New York City, compared with about $36,000 in Switzerland. A six-stop model will set you back more than three times as much in Pennsylvania as in Belgium. Maintenance, repairs and inspections all cost more in America, too.

If you're interested in this topic, I would encourage you to give the full article a read. It's highly relevant to our ongoing discussions around missing middle housing. If cities, like Toronto, hope to build a lot more apartment buildings (especially smaller-scale ones), they are going to need affordable and plentiful elevator options.

(Thanks to Michael Visser for sharing this article me.)