Cities are more expensive than ever
In the midst of covid, many predicted the “death of in person work”. To a large extent, this has been true - many companies have chosen not to go back to the office and have instead started hiring workers from all over the country. Why then do we see rents in places like New York City and San Francisco skyrocketing to higher than pre-pandemic levels?
While it’s true that rents initially dropped at the beginning of covid as people moved out of cities amidst the uncertainty, they have stormed back in numbers even greater than before as they come to terms with what moving away was like. When everyone is able to work from home, why would someone choose to live in a 500 square foot, $3,000 a month apartment in Brooklyn when they could live in a house more than double the size and less than half the cost in a midwestern suburb?
I think the answer to this question lies in something deeply true about human nature. People need to be around other people. They desire to have easy, walkable access to things like restaurants, bars, and grocery stores. These things demonstrably improve quality and happiness in our lives. Now more than ever it’s clear that the car centric suburban experiment we’ve been sold as the American Dream for the last 75 years (which was legislated into reality) is an abject failure.
But the tides are turning, people are realizing that they are better off living in denser communities, close to their daily needs. They are moving back to high population cities, and rents are skyrocketing. They are moving from the suburbs and buying up real estate in the denser urban cores of midwestern cities. This trend is nothing new, but like so many things, it’s been exaggerated by covid - after a year plus, people have realized the void that isolation left in our collective lives, and how much better it can be . We have always innately known1 that living in close-knit and walkable communities is more life-giving, even when we’ve been told the dream is to live in the suburbs.
More often than not (especially with current gas prices), when you’re choosing between staying in or driving 20+ minutes to a bar somewhere to deal with parking, you’ll choose to stay in. When the options are instead to walk out your door to a diverse range of local restaurants or to choose to stay in, you’ll choose to go out and be around people. It really is that simple. People are willing to pay an extreme premium, both monetarily and in quality of housing, to be close to interesting things. They are not just willing to put up with some of the downsides that come with density in most American cities in order to live in a walkable area, but choosing to more than ever, even in the remote work era.
But therein lies the problem. Currently, due to years of poor zoning practices, living in this type of mid-density community is outrageously expensive. It’s out of reach for most people, so they have to live in car-dependent suburbia; there is no other option. Shouldn’t this cause us to think? Shouldn’t this cause our city planners to revisit our insane and outdated building codes that prevent these developments and lead us to reform our zoning across the country? The mixed-use medium and high density housing most people long for is effectively banned in all but a few places2, leaving it out of reach and prohibitively expensive for all but the wealthiest Americans. But clearly, the demand is there. People want this type of development. It doesn’t have to be this way. We shouldn’t have to choose between just a few cities that offer livable communities. We shouldn’t have to pay most of our paychecks to live in a walkable area. We deserve better.
Footnotes
[1]. There is a reason that most people who went to college view it as one of the best times of their life - it is the only time in many people’s lives when they experience the kind of proximity to friends, work, restaurants, and everything else they need that most college campuses offer.
[2]. It only exists in a handful of cities that didn’t have the chance to bulldoze their dense urban cores for parking lots when cars become commoditized.