Over the weekend Richard Florida sent out a tweetstorm that compared Toronto and New York City, and made the argument that Toronto’s “incredible diversity, density, and industry mix” is making the city feel a lot more like New York and London compared to any other North American city.
He even went so far as to say that, even though it may not be the bigger metro in terms of raw population, Toronto increasingly feels like North America’s second city after NYC. I’m obviously incredibly biased in this discussion, so I would be curious to get your thoughts in the comment section below.
If you can’t see the embedded tweetstorm below, click here. Regardless, you’ll likely need to click through to see the entire thread.
1. Just back to Toronto after a week in NYC: Got me thinking about what Trump could mean for US cities.
— Richard Florida (@Richard_Florida)
In response to President Trump’s proposed immigration bill, Brookings recently analyzed census data from earlier this year to demonstrate the importance of immigration for growth within much of the United States.
I’d like to share three tables from their analysis.
The first two look at international migration grains and domestic migration gains over the last 3 decades (the last decade isn’t quite a decade).
Here you can see that New York, Los Angeles, and Miami (all port cities) have dominated international migration to the US since 1990. But at the same time, international migration has become less geographically concentrated. From 1990-2000 the top 5 cities received almost half of all immigrants moving to the US. More recently, that number has dropped to 34%.
Domestic migration is different in that it’s a zero sum game. When one US city gains, another US city loses. Here there is a very clear migration trend toward cities in the southwest – arguably because of weather, job growth, cheaper housing, and probably a bunch of other factors.
If we look at actual international and domestic migration numbers over the last 6 years, the 12 largest metropolitan areas look like this:
The key takeaways here are that 8 of these cities are losing people to domestic migration and only 7 of these cities have a positive net migration number – meaning their population is actually growing.
What is clear is that the international migration column is a pretty important one if you believe that growth is valuable.
If you’re Dallas, Houston or Atlanta, maybe you care a little less about that column. But for most of the other cities, international migration is either the only way you’re growing (look at Miami go) or keeping your population losses in check (see Philadelphia).
I have Richard Florida’s recent book, The New Urban Crisis, sitting on my bedside table. I’m only about ¼ of the way through it, but I’m really enjoying it. I’ll write more once I’m done.
What I instead want to talk about today is a recent (and related) article that Florida published in CityLab called: Did Land-Use Restrictions Save the Rust Belt?
In it, he leans on the research of two economists – Chang-Tai Hsieh of the University of Chicago and Enrico Moretti of the University of California at Berkeley – and makes 3 valuable points.
They are:
It is estimated that land-use restrictions (which limit development / supply) have reduced overall GDP in the U.S. by about 9% or approximately $1.5 trillion per year. It is also estimated that housing supply constraints alone lowered overall growth by more than half between 1964 and 2009.
At the same time, these land-use restrictions may have benefited other regions – such as the Rust Belt – that would have otherwise lost more people and jobs to places like New York and San Francisco. The research found that without these land-use restrictions, employment growth between 1964 and 2009 would have been more than 1,000% higher in New York and almost 700% higher in San Francisco.
The final takeaway is one that we’ve talked about before on this blog. One of the most effective things we can do to counteract geographic inequality is to build great transit; transit that connects both people and land to the most desirable areas of our city.
And with that, Happy Canada Day weekend all.
Photo by João Silas on Unsplash