Ten Most Popular CSY Posts for 2023
Another year is in the books. It's hard to believe I'm entering my 12th year doing this, but as I've said before, I'll keep going as long as the ideas come to me.
This year, no ruminating on any running themes among the most popular posts on the blog you see below. I'll just post the links and include some key quotes without any extra commentary.
A wonderful and happy New Year to you and all those you love.
10. Why Do *You* Want To Be An Urbanist?, 4/26/23:
"The term “urbanist” was virtually nonexistent in 1919 in books in the year I started the (Google Books Ngram Viewer) search. The word reached a very mild peak in 1971, before sliding downward for the next 14 years. “Urbanist” sort of took off as a term at the same time as the start of the Clinton Administration in 1992 before reaching a new peak in 2002. The word slid in popularity once again then, sliding again through 2011 before trending upward again through 2019.
Being pro-city during the period of greatest suburban ascendancy? Not necessarily a good thing. Becoming pro-city when cities are being viewed in a generally positive light for the first time in decades? It brings an entirely different perspective to the term."
9. Next Up For Suburbanism, 6/25/23:
"The suburbs that recover from the early 21st century urban revitalization era will be the ones that doubled down on their family-oriented nature, while adding a mix of uses that makes them more adaptable, more appealing to more potential residents. That’s also going to be a work in progress."
8. On NIMBYs, YIMBYs and PHIMBYs, 2/10/23:
"So here are the housing battle lines as I see them. NIMBYs want to insulate their neighborhoods to protect their character, keeping values high. YIMBYs want to increase market-rate housing, bringing values down. Left-NIMBYs or PHIMBYs seek to avoid the unavoidable outcomes of increased market-rate supply – gentrification and displacement – by increasing the amount of subsidized housing."
7. Demographically, "Cities" Will *Always* Lose To "Suburbs". How We Compare Them Has To Change. , 7/16/23:
"The 1970 Census was the first to show that more Americans have lived in suburbs than core cities. That gap has widened since. But how much have core cities expanded outward in the last 50 years, 100 years, or even more? Not much. How much has the amorphous “suburbia” expanded outward in the same period. A whole helluva lot. Once what we defined as suburbia surpassed cities in population, cities were never going to catch up to the suburbs, let alone pass them.
Comparing physically constrained cities with boundless suburbs is ridiculous."
6. The "Urban Doom Loop", And The Experiential Advantage, 9/10/23:
"If there's anything we've learned over the last 30 years of urban rebound, it's that cities maintain an experiential advantage over suburbs and smaller cities. Cities have learned to play the wealth of commercial, social and cultural amenities to their benefit."
5. It's Well Past Time For "Creative Economy Michigan", 6/11/23:
"Because of Michigan’s stout support for the working class, it fell behind as a new professional class led the new knowledge economy. Because of Detroit’s shunning, it hardly benefitted from the urban comeback witnessed in cities across the nation since the early 2000’s."
4. Beauty And The Rust Belt , 8/13/23:
"Rust Belt cities weren’t built for beauty, they were built for enterprise. Sure, there was wonderful beauty incidentally built along the way, but usually never in the majestic or monumental ways you see in some East Coast cities. There’s plenty of understated natural beauty in many places, but little of the spectacular scenery (and great weather) found in Sun Belt or West Coast places. Rust Belt cities were built principally as production centers, not commercial centers. However, once they lost the economic luster that brought millions of people to them, they emptied out as people sought economic opportunity and an improved quality of life elsewhere.
An emphasis on improving aesthetics could go a long way toward bringing them back."
3. Suburbs: Still Bashing Cities, Are You? , 5/14/23:
"Suburbanists: can we stop with the myopic focus on extraneous data points to indicate the rise of the suburbs and the ultimate fall, once and for all, of cities? Please? Things aren’t turning out quite the way you might think they are.
Every week another data point comes out to suggest that suburbs are winning, but more importantly, cities are losing. The post-Covid work-from-home phenomenon has permanently diminished the market for office space in downtown business districts. WFH millennials, often cited as the most urban generation in the last century, are increasingly choosing suburbs for quality schools and quiet lifestyle. Internal Revenue Service migration data, which tracks tax filing addresses annually, continues to find that people are leaving cities in favor of suburbs. The same data also finds that, in what I consider the urban-to-suburban shift writ large, people are leaving costly coastal cities and downtrodden Rust Belt cities for cheaper Sun Belt locales. Crime is turning people away from cities. Progressive ideology and the sense that cities are ungovernable is turning people away from cities.
All of these things are happening. Yet none of these things, individually or collectively, signifies that this is the End of the Urban Era ™."
2. Illinois: Skilled Moving In, Unskilled Moving Out - At A Net Loss, 12/30/23 (actually, originally published 12/27/23; INEXPLICABLY DELETED BY AUTHOR 12/29/23; republished, 12/30/23):
"A report by the Illinois Economic Policy Institute last October found that while the state’s population has been trending downward since 2010, those moving into Illinois as well as those electing to stay in-state are having better economic outcomes than those who leave. The report’s authors found that the exodus out of Illinois is led by younger residents (an average age of 32) who were more likely to be Black, less likely to have college degrees, and more likely to have lower incomes than those moving into the state. Illinois in-migrants were more likely to have a college degree (64 percent domestically, 70 percent internationally) compared to out-migrants (59 percent).
The findings in the report suggest that Illinois, led by the two-thirds of Illinoisans who live in the Chicago metropolitan area, is undergoing a restructuring of its demographics. The state has become more urban and more educated, with more foreign-born, female and Hispanic residents, and increased in income – despite losing residents."
1. On Chicago's Weekend Disruption, And "Whipping Boy" Syndrome, 4/19/23:
"There’s seemingly this national desire to single out (Chicago as) the nation’s “worst” city. I was born and raised in Detroit during perhaps its most tumultuous period, but many other cities have received the same kind of stigma – Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, DC, St. Louis, even New York City and Los Angeles come to mind...
(However people) wanted to see New York and LA succeed. I don’t know if the same could be said about the Detroits and Clevelands of America, which have had to move forward without the same level of national empathy. I’m fearing Chicago is getting the same treatment."