There’s an Exodus From the ‘Star Cities,’ and I Have Good News and Bad News
When it comes to the fate of big cities in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, there are two sets of overlapping economic and political consequences, but they are not necessarily what you might expect.Declining tax revenues, business closures, spiking rates of violent crime and an exodus to smaller communities have left major urban centers anxious about surviving the pandemic’s aftermath and returning to a new normal.But all is not lost.In a paper published earlier this month, “America’s Post-Pandemic Geography, two urbanists who come from very different political perspectives, Richard Florida, a professor at the University of Toronto, and Joel Kotkin, a professor at Chapman University, argue:Any shift away from superstar cities may augur a long-overdue and much-needed geographic recalibration of America’s innovation economy. High-tech industries have come to be massively concentrated — some would say overconcentrated — in coastal elite cities and tech hubs. The San Francisco Bay Area and the Acela Corridor (spanning Boston, New York, and Washington, D.C.) have accounted for about three-quarters of all venture-capital investment in high-tech start-ups. In the decade and a half leading up to the pandemic, more than 90 percent of employment growth in America’s innovation economy was concentrated in just five major coastal metros: San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle, San Diego, and Boston, according to the Brookings Institution.In addition, Florida and Kotkin write:The current shift to remote work makes geographic rebalancing of these industries more feasible, and a number of leading big tech companies have openly embraced it. Such a rebalancing might help not only smaller cities develop more robust economies but also take some pressure off the housing and real-estate markets of superstar cities and tech hubs, making them more affordable.In an email, Florida argued that a key motivating force driving many of the recent departures from big cities was the desire to be away from the pandemic, as well as from pandemic restraints imposed by local governments:More affluent people, especially risk-oriented entrepreneurial types are fleeing to less restrictive more open environments, where they choose to undertake their own risks and, if they have kids, to send them to school.There is also political fallout from the nation’s changing demography.Jonathan Rodden, a political scientist at Stanford and the author of “Why Cities Lose: The Deep Roots of the Urban-Rural Political Divide,” explained in an email how the geographic dispersion of Democratic voters may help slowly shift Republican and competitive districts in a leftward direction:Even before 2020, there was already a strong correlation between net county-level in-migration and increasing Democratic vote share. In 2020, this relationship was incredibly strong. All around the country, counties that experienced in-migration saw increases in Democratic vote share — in some cases very large increases — and places experiencing out-migration saw increases in the Republican vote share. These in-migration counties that trended Democratic were mostly suburban, and the out-migration counties that moved toward the Republicans were both urban core and rural counties.For decades, Rodden continued,Democrats have been excessively concentrated in urban centers, which makes it difficult for them to transform their votes into commensurate legislative seats. But as cities lose population, most of the growing suburban counties are either red counties that are trending purple, or purple counties that are trending blue, and very few are overwhelmingly Democratic.Democratic suburban gains were already evident in the 2018 and 2020 elections in states like Georgia, Arizona, Texas and North Carolina.At the same time, the movement of Democratic voters from urban centers is very likely to moderate the agenda-setting strength of progressive urban voters. This process will lessen an ideological problem that plagued Democratic congressional candidates.In “Why Cities Lose,” Rodden wrote:Voters in the urban core congressional districts are ideologically quite distinct from the rest of the country, and quite far away from the median district. And the most extremely conservative rural districts are actually not very far away from the pivotal districts around the median.Rodden continues:In most U.S. states then, urban districts are far more liberal than the rest of the state. As a result, Democrats face a difficult challenge in trying to manage their statewide party reputation. If it comes to be dominated by urban incumbents, they will find it hard to compete in the pivotal districts.In his email, Rodden argued that because Republicans control congressional redistricting in many more states than Democrats do, Democrats may not make immediate gains in the House as a result of these population shifts. But, he noted, as these trends continue, districts gerrymandered at the beginning of the decade may shift in a more progressive direction over time:Republican map-drawers will be working with a rapidly moving target, and the task of making projections for elections 6 or 8 years into the future in suburban and exurban areas might be difficult. The future political orientation of suburban areas depends, in part, on choices that will be made by both parties in the years ahead. Gerrymandering takes very little effort when your opponents are already geographically packed. As they spread out and mingle with your supporters, the job becomes more challenging.John Austin, director of the Michigan Economic Center, pointed out in an email that “even before the pandemic, there were a growing number of exceptions to the seemingly inexorable march of a tech and knowledge economy to consolidate in handfuls of superstar global cities.” He cited as especially attractive those smaller cities with research universities, including Iowa City, Iowa; Ann Arbor, Mich.; State College, Pa.; and South Bend, Ind.“Many techies realize they can flee the costs, congestion and craziness of the coasts (like the Bay Area),” Austin said,and find a lot of people like them and robust culture and diverse community in the Nashvilles scattered across the county. This kind of tech-talent immigration only happens to places these folks perceive to be a place with lots of people like them and a rich culture mix — coastal techies now know Phoenix and Boulder fit the bill — but this is also a huge opportunity for places like Madison and Ann Arbor and the Marquettes and the Ashevilles, which do have a rich and diverse talent base, tech-scene, food and music and all that.Austin believes that the movement of high-tech workers to smaller, redder states will benefit the Democratic Party.As these areas gain knowledge workers, Austin wrote, they will see local politicsevolve to be more progressive, and better inoculated against the appeal of right wing populist demagogues like Trump. Local residents will become more optimistic and forward looking, not responding to the siren song of nationalism, nativism and pullback from the international order. Newcomers leaven the polity. This is clearly what we see in places like Grand Rapids in West Michigan and other smaller tier former manufacturing centers in the Midwest.Once a rock-ribbed Republican county, Grand Rapid’s Kent County voted for Biden over Trump 51.9 percent to 45 percent.In their March 2021 paper, “From L.A. to Boise: How Migration Has Changed During the Covid-19 Pandemic,” Peter Haslag and Daniel Weagley, professors at Vanderbilt and Georgia Tech, identified the highest percentage of movers from one state to another, topped by California residents going to Texas, then New York to Florida and Illinois to Florida.The geographic trends are striking. Of the top 20, 19 were from blue states to red states.Last year, Manhattan’s population fell by 20,337, the largest drop in 30 years, according to data compiled by William Frey, a Brookings senior fellow.Over the three decades from 1990 to 2020, Frey found that in large metropolitan counties, the population of inner and outer suburbs grew twice as much, at 38.7 million, as that of center cities, at 18.8 million, as shown in the accompanying graphic.Pandemic’s urban population loss nothing newPopulation growth in the urban cores of large metros has been dropping sharply since 2016, but only became a net loss in the last year. In those regions’ suburbs, growth has cooled, but still showed a net gain during the pandemic. More
