Jeff Andrews, analyzing data for Curbed, debunks the story of mass-exodus from urban cores to suburbs:
“...a nationwide, pandemic- or protest-induced urban-to-suburban migration taking place on a scale that impacts both urban and suburban housing markets in a measurable way? There is zero empirical evidence to support such a trend. None. Nothing. Zero.”
Exodus? Not so much, at least not this time. Levittown, Long Island (Library of Congress).
Andrews writes that the media spin is based largely on what real estate agents are flogging (which is good for the real estate business) and that San Francisco and Manhattan (but not, he notes, Brooklyn) are seeing out-migration--but San Francisco and Manhattan were seeing out-migration before the Covid pandemic. Those two cities were over-inflated anyway, and their bubble was deflating.
That the “flight to the suburbs” was picked up and touted by antagonists of “Democrat cities” says more about those telling the tale than what’s actually occurring.
Full story on Curbed.
On the Media’s Bob Garfield also spoke with Andrews about this, if you’d like to hear the story.
