The Wall Street Journal recently published this article talking about how the young and educated are flocking to high-density urban areas all across the United States. Here’s a set of charts from the article:
The Wall Street Journal recently published this article talking about how the young and educated are flocking to high-density urban areas all across the United States. Here’s a set of charts from the article:
There are many people who will point out – probably rightly – that despite the “return to cities” that we are currently seeing, the world is still suburbanizing. But, it doesn’t appear to be suburbanizing in quite the same way as it did for prior generations. There’s also a socioeconomic shift taking place.
As an example, and to drive home the point that it’s not just the expensive coastal cities that are seeing rising home prices, the WSJ article focuses quite a bit on Ohio City – a neighborhood in Cleveland. Here’s what has been happening:
In the Ohio City neighborhood, the median income skyrocketed to $93,000 from $23,000 since 2006, according to Ohio City Inc., a local nonprofit development group. Median home values shot up 800% since 2000 to $270,000, according to Ohio City Inc. Median rental prices in downtown Cleveland as a whole jumped 47% from late 2010 to late 2015, according to the Center for Population Dynamics at Cleveland State University.
These are pretty dramatic increases – though $270,000 feels cheap to someone from Toronto. Still, it speaks to a trend. You and I both know that Ohio City isn’t the only neighborhood seeing those sorts of numbers.
Whenever I’m not sure what to write about, I just read. That’s one of the big benefits of daily blogging – it forces me to do that.
This morning I stumbled upon the blog of Jed Kolko. Jed is an economist and, up until 2015, he was Chief Economist and VP of Analytics at Trulia.
His most recent post argues – naturally with lots of data and charts – that for all of our talk of (re)urbanization, it’s actually a specific subset of the population that is far more likely to be have urbanized between 2000 and 2014: the young, rich, childless, and white. (Note: His post is talking specifically about U.S. cities.)
Below are a few of his charts.
In all cases, the x-axis represents % change in urban living between 2000 and 2014. All of the data is from Public Use Microdata Samples (PUMS) - 2000 decennial Census and from the 2014 one-year American Community Survey (ACS).
Here is age:
Household income:
Education and children:
And here is race/ethnicity:
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