Leaving poorly run Dem cities

 Ryan Streeter:

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Before COVID-19 separated place of work from place of residence for millions of workers, larger cities could afford to be unaffordable. Their leaders could champion progressive notions of “equity” while quietly pricing out the middle class, just as they could decry “racist cops” while silently relying on police to keep their streets safe. Two years after the summer of 2020, things have changed.

The recent cascading announcements by companies such as Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Oracle Corp., Boeing Co., Citadel, among others, that they are leaving high-cost urban areas for more livable cities in states such as Florida, Texas and Virginia have not happened in a vacuum.

Urban leaders who have treated cost-of-living concerns, crime and schools as unworthy of their attention are discovering that many residents no longer find their cities worthy of their continued loyalty, or tax dollars.

As crime rates soared, urban elites downplayed the crime problem that every urban resident knew was worsening. They defunded or restrained the police as violence skyrocketed. People fled urban areas and others stopped moving to them.

Between 2020 and 2021, roughly the same share of Black residents left large cities as moved into the suburbs.

Historically, when people leave troubled cities, they head for places we might call “opportunity metros” (places such as Austin, Texas, Nashville, Tennessee, and Raleigh, North Carolina, for example) with good job prospects and livability.

They still do, but because the location of one’s job is less relevant for millions of workers, people have moved primarily because of quality-of-life and affordability concerns, which have exposed the deep weaknesses of America’s higher-cost cities.

So, two years after America’s unplanned COVID-and-crime experiment began, we can take stock of some lessons for reformers.

First, opportunity metros did well during the pandemic. Among the 56 metro areas with more than a million residents, familiar destinations such as Austin and Raleigh continued to serve as landing pads for coastal migrants, but so did places like Jacksonville, Florida, and Oklahoma City.

Apartment rental data shows that Miami was the top destination for people fleeing New York, and data from the real estate company Redfin shows that Los Angeles was the No. 1 point of origin during the past two years for people moving to Dallas.

The common characteristics of those destination cities – relatively affordable housing, amenities, good jobs – can be found almost anywhere people have moved to during the pandemic.

Second, new business growth and business confidence have migrated to opportunity metros, heartland cities and the suburbs. In an unexpected reversal of a 40-year trend, startups increased during the pandemic, especially in places such as Houston and Charlotte, North Carolina.

Census surveys show that two years after COVID lockdowns began, Charlotte; Riverside, California; Miami and Phoenix were the four cities where most employers said their operations had returned to normal. San Francisco and San Jose were at the bottom of the list.

Employers in New York, San Francisco and San Jose were among the most likely to say COVID had hurt their businesses, while those in Indianapolis, Tampa and Denver were the least likely.

The trend is obvious. Whether expressed by footloose workers with marketable skills or employers trying to grow their businesses, the geography of opportunity has skewed away from long-established large older cities.

The third and most publicized lesson since 2020 is that devaluing policing, either by defunding or restricting police operations, is disastrous for entire metro areas. Surveys show an uptick in concern about crime even in the safer suburbs of cities that have been awash in violence.
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There is more.

Another trend since the pandemic is people leaving cities to build in rural areas.  I did that decades ago, but on my country road, I am seeing dozens of new homes.  

I go into Houston often and the building there continues to be impressive.  I saw a recent story that said that Houston has more new homes built in the last year than the entire state of California.  I believe it.  

On the outermost loop, i.e. the Grand Parkway not only do you see thousands of new homes but even more new apartments.  To give you an idea of the size of the city, the State of Road Island would fit inside the Grand Parkway.  This does not include outer suburbs like the Woodlands which is now a huge city and just north of that is Conroe which has been ranked as the fastest growing city in the country.

Certainly, Florida is also seeing exceptional growth along with Tennessee and the Carolinas.