Why Are People Leaving Big Cities? - Prof. Steven Pedigo - #66

Yeah, and it is my understanding that people are in fact leaving bigger cities like New York, like Los Angeles, for example, and that second tier cities are on the rise.

Is that true? Do we have some numbers to back that up? And I don't expect you to have all the numbers like ready right now, but is that actually being reflected in the numbers or just something that I see happening through social media, for example?

Well, I think it's a, you know, so, so, you know, Julius, that's a great question.

It's, it's a, it's a bit of a mix, right? So, you know, clearly pandemic 2009, you know, 19 to where we were in the pandemic, what we saw across, I think across all the, not just in the US and North America and Canada, we saw this in Europe as well.

which was that you did see an exit of large, large cities, right? And everybody kind of wrote about the death of New York and particularly the death of San Francisco and Los Angeles.

And I think, you know, a lot of us had studied cities for a long time, really kind of thought that that would be kind of overplayed, right? I mean, look, you can go back and study all of previous kind of pandemics, right, that have happened in the health crises over the course of urban history.

And really what you find over time is actually large cities, yes, they contract, but they do roar back a lot faster, right? They're much more resilient.

I mean, one of the things that makes New York City, New York City is that it's extremely resilient place.

London, the same, right? These are places that have been...

resilient.

And a lot of the economic research would show that those cities have become much stronger.

So, you know, I think the death of large cities, and by the way, I'm going to talk in American context.

So, you know, the death of large American cities, I think, was a

bit overblown, for instance.

However that is, is not to say that the growth of small American cities has not happened.

And that has happened, right? I mean, we have seen smaller American cities.

Now, I'm not talking, you know, small, nowhere cities.

I'm talking about cities that were already on the trajectory.

So let's talk about those.

Like, think Austin, Texas, right? Think about Denver, Colorado.

Think about Nashville, for instance, right? I think about Miami and other places.

Now, those are cities that are, they're not extremely large.

Those are still pretty good-sized cities, right? I mean, one of the things that makes America so different is that we've got 52 cities, 52 regions over a million residents, right? That's a really unique attribute for who we are.

So while we've got a handful of super cities, we've also got a lot of these sort of minor and major metros as well.

And I think the wonder that I would say is that a lot of these cities that were able to do and create those ecosystems that were similar to larger cities, right? Which is to say innovative, you know, innovation, focused on innovation, focused on quality of place, diversity, which we just talked about earlier, have been pretty successful, right? They created a culture because what they start to do is kind of create these mini ecosystems, right? That you start to get in larger urban environments, right? So you do see the rise of, you know, the places that I just rattled off before, right? And Austin being a really great prime example of that.