GOD HELP THE ’BURBS
THE mass exodus of wealthier people from dense cities such as New York and San Francisco will be a catastrophe for the cities if it keeps up. It will also be a disaster for the suburbs to which these affluent refugees are moving.
The escape of upper-middle and higher earners is “similar to the rush to grab toilet paper and people grabbing the biggest [house] they can find,” Sotheby’s real-estate agent Kevin McDonald told The Wall Street Journal. And emerging data back up the anecdotes. FlatRate Moving tells the Journal that “moves from New York City to Connecticut have more than doubled from the prior year.”
On the southern tip of Long Island, the Amagansett school district predicts enrollment will double. Bloomberg notes that Jersey suburbs are seeing the biggest price hike since before the housing bubble burst. Banks and law firms are looking for office space closer to where their workers live. The South and West are doing well, with Realtor.com seeing spikes from Little Rock to South Carolina.
It’s obvious that this is bad for cities. By a New York Times estimate, 420,000 people have left Gotham — and they skew richer and younger.
That means the Big Apple is at risk of losing a big chunk of its tax and consumer base: the audience for restaurants, high-end stores and culture. New York, San Francisco and other hubs may be left, disproportionately, with people who don’t have other choices: the homeless, poor elderly, families without the resources to compete for space away from the five boroughs — and with fewer tax resources to help them.
But it’s also bad for the ’burbs. Consider New York’s suburbs: our own suburban counties, Connecticut and New Jersey.
Real-estate prices across Westchester, Long Island and northern New Jersey have long been out of reach of the middle class. The average home value in Nassau County is nearly $600,000, according to Zillow.
For now, the influx of cash will only push these prices up.
New construction might alleviate supply — but what kind? Building single-family homes on big lots only condemns people to sit in traffic (assuming they’re not going to stay at home forever).
It also harms economic mobility.
New York works as an engine of opportunity because people from The Bronx to East New York can get to work — or school, or the library — on transit. Moving the locus of high-end demand for labor to the ’burbs only forces more people to buy cars to get to their jobs — or not work at all.
It makes more sense to build denser housing — condos and rentals centered around commuter-rail stations. Nassau County Executive Laura Curran was encouraging this development before the pandemic hit.
But it’s always been a tough sell for suburbanites, who, after all, left the city to get away from density. It will be a harder sell now, with people leery of transit commutes and, with offices and cultural events still closed, no reason to take transit to the city, anyway.
Away from the northeastern and Californian ’burbs, the South and West face even bigger planning risks.
At least New York and San Francisco start from a culture of density and transit.
Over the past 30 years, by contrast, Florida, Arizona and South Carolina have already thrown up millions of single-family homes to accommodate demand from coastal denizens fleeing high taxes and high property prices. This sprawl has already condemned people to record-long commutes.
And crime: While the big, bad city looms as a nexus of lawlessness, it’s sprawl, and poverty isolated from jobs and schools, that help enable crime.
South Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, Florida, Arizona — all have murder rates above 5 per 100,000 inhabitants. In South Carolina and Tennessee, the rate is double the 3.5 per 100,000 inhabitants of recent-year New York City.
Gated communities — and long drives from dangerous neighborhoods — insulate middle-class and wealthy suburbanites from crime. If they aren’t scared for themselves and their children, they don’t think about it.
If New York City, ’Frisco and other cities can’t regenerate themselves with better policies post-COVID — by giving people a quality of life for what they pay for — it isn’t just diminished urban cores that will suffer. The country will.