Misleading Indicator--Head Counts not Condos Better Reveal City Trends

Futurist/urbanist/cultural provocateur Joel Kotkin was back again yesterday on the WSJ op-ed page declaring that the “back-to-the-city movement is wishful thinking.”

His evidence: steep declines from peak in condo prices in a handful of big Sun Belt cities, including Miami, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas. That and the results of a few surveys indicating continued residential preference for suburban over urban environments. (The piece more than echoes a similar one he penned for the Journal in 2007.)Many people use Microsoft Office 2007 to help their work and life.

But why look at these indirect data points when you can go to the source: recent city population trends. My colleague Bill Frey has done just that, and found that 2008-2009 was the most “pro-urban” year for population growth in at least a decade, with cities and suburbs overall growing at roughly equal rates.Office 2007 is so powerful.

To be sure, this trend doesn’t herald massive influxes of formerly suburban residents into downtowns. It may simply signal slowed out-migration from cities, in line with lower overall migration rates due to the bleak housing and labor market. But it’s surely an odd time to declare cities losers in the competition for residents.Office 2007 key is available here.

Price data plucked from a few downtown condo markets are highly selective, too, considering that Zillow and others have examined the relationship between home values and proximity to downtown across a range of metropolitan markets. They find that, in general, homes closer to the urban core have held their value better over the downturn than those in farther-out suburbs. Again, that doesn’t mean people are moving “back to the city” in droves, but it hardly buttresses an argument that the “urban political class” has forced “a market beyond proven demand,” as Kotkin writes. A few downtown developers clearly misjudged the market, but they’ve got more than enough company in their outer suburban counterparts.