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 Special interests here have run wild with an outdated, inefficient, overregulated system.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.)

We talk a lot about housing supply on this blog. And most of the time it is about creating more and better infill housing, In other words, housing that leverages existing infrastructure and uses previously developed land as efficiently possible.

But I suppose there are other options. You could, for instance, form an anonymous holding company, raise hundreds of a millions of dollars from leading venture capitalists in the Bay Area, spend $800 million on cheap agricultural land, and then just build an entirely new city about 60 miles northeast of San Francisco.

And apparently that is happening:

In 2017, Michael Moritz, the billionaire venture capitalist, sent a note to a potential investor about what he described as an unusual opportunity: a chance to invest in the creation of a new California city. The site was in a corner of the San Francisco Bay Area where land was cheap. Mr. Moritz and others had dreams of transforming tens of thousands of acres into a bustling metropolis that, according to the pitch, could generate thousands of jobs and be as walkable as Paris or the West Village in New York.

Here's the area; it's generally between Fairfield and Rio Vista in Solano County:

The real estate opportunity is an obvious one. The majority of the land in Solano County, roughly 62% of it, is zoned for agricultural uses. So it was and is relatively cheap to acquire. In isolation, I would imagine that it would be pretty difficult, if not impossible, to rezone any of it for other uses. But if you buy enough of it and if you have the resources, then maybe you figure it out.

And if you do, it'll all be worth significantly more, which is why this group has been reportedly paying many multiples of market value over the last 5 years. Because here's the thing, paying $6,000 per acre instead of $1,500 per acre is almost certainly not going to move the needle considering the broader strategy. More important is that you get enough contiguous land to execute on the vision of a new city.

This will be an interesting one to watch. And from what I have read, it sounds like they're just now coming out of stealth acquisition mode and preparing to engage the broader community.