Weekly Digest: Leaving the City

Welcome to my weekly digest for June 2, 2023.

For new subscribers, this contains a roundup of my recent writings and podcasts, as well as links to the best articles from around the web this week. You can control what emails you get from me by visiting your account page.

Leaving the City

You’ve probably heard about the exodus from urban areas during the Covid pandemic, and how, with the rise of remote work, some of this shift to suburban or even exurban or rural populations has proven persistent.

My latest column in Governing magazine is a bit of a wonky piece putting some data around this using IRS data to drill in on the Columbus, Ohio area.

Numbers from Columbus, Ohio, offer a good example of what is happening. During the decade of the 2010s, Columbus was the growth superstar of its state. The Columbus metro area grew by 12.5 percent, far exceeding the national average of 7.4 percent. The rest of Ohio was essentially flat. Columbus was growing through migration — drawing people from the rest of Ohio. Toward the end of the decade, that draw began to decline, and was reversed during the pandemic

What accounts for this shift? In addition to pandemic-related trends, housing prices have increased significantly in Columbus, just as they have in many places across the country. According to the Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey, from 2013 to 2023 the price/income ratio for housing in Columbus grew by 50 percent, from a very affordable 2.7 to today’s 4.1. That is, the median home in metro Columbus now costs 4.1 times the metro area’s median household income. Chicago’s price/income ratio is only 4.2, meaning that housing prices relative to incomes in Columbus are basically identical to those of Chicago. It’s likely that a search for more affordable housing underlies some of these exurban or rural moves.

Click through to read the whole thing.

Best of the Web

NYT: What does healthy masculinity look like? - A roundtable podcast that includes Ross Douthat.

The Conversation: Most super rich couples have breadwinning husbands and stay-at-home wives, contrasting sharply with everyone else

WSJ: Why Americans Are Having Fewer Babies

Samuel D. James: Does maturity still matter?

Michael Foster: The Dangerous Allure of Reactive Externalism - “This post is about the dangerous allure of reactive externalism. It’s about patriarchy, beards, weight-lifting, modesty, head-coverings, etc…”

New Content and Media Mentions

My podcast this week is why conservative boycotts tend not to work, but why the Bud Light one did.

Paid subscribers can read the transcript.

You can subscribe to my podcast on Apple, Google, or YouTube.

I also wrote a piece this week on high trust as force multiplier, looking at an attempt to reduce crime in Medellin, Colombia and what it tells us about why it’s so important to manage for trust.

At American Reformer, there were two recent pieces on the Christian nationalism debate. Alan Atchison writes on the problems of Christian nationalism, and Jacob Honeycutt asks if baptists can be Christian nationalists.