Episode Summary

  1. People are leaving urban areas and moving south and west. No surprise. But what might this mean for our political landscape and how suburbs and small towns continue to develop is anyones guess. If anything this migration shows how COVID has served as an accelerant and allowed more flexibility for people to live and work.
  2. There's two sides to every story. And the Urban/Suburban discussion is no different.
  3. Corner stores might be the trojan horse warehouse coming to a neighborhood near you. Imagine the local corner store but instead of having year old spagehittos on the shelf their inventory is powered by amazon's algo, and you can get fresh veggies, pick up your packages, and even have them delivered faster because common goods are staged closer to home.

Americans are rethinking where they live (8 min read)

Benefits of moving to the suburbs (4 min read). A response to living in the suburbs. (5 min read).

Public art is good for cities (6 min read). Corner stores are the latest silicon valley platform (6 min read).

Episode Transcript

Hey everyone. I’m Kyle Gulau and on this show, patterns of development, we take less than 10 minutes to deconstruct what's going on in real estate, architecture, and urban planing.

I hope this show provides value by giving you case studies and examples. Through repetition we can figure out if there's any patterns, ideas, thoughts that we can apply in our own backyards.

As this year comes to a close let’s take a look at how people are moving across the United States.

According to The Economist, 2 patterns of migration have revealed themselves:

  1. People have been leaving large, dense, expensive urban cores for smaller, less-dense cities and suburbs.
  2. Second, people and companies have been moving to warm, low-tax states in the South and Southwest.

More specifically The Economist’s analysis of data from the United States Postal Service, the three zip codes with the most changes of addresses for new arrivals were in suburbs and exurbs outside of Houston and Austin in Texas and Jacksonville, Florida. Property is cheaper, but people are still within driving distance of a city.

According to Bill Frey of the Brookings Institution, and I think this might be the most interesting observation from the article, "If the country’s population were expanding, where Americans choose to live might matter less. But in the past decade, its population grew at the second slowest rate since 1790, just slightly faster than during the Great Depression."

This migration has impacts on our cities of course, but could have a bigger impact on our politics. The spread of educated urban dwellers from blue strongholds into traditionally more red states and neighborhoods could change that big map we always see on election days. Texas perhaps is at the cutting edge here as what used to be a lock down red state is turning more purple.

But this show isn't about politics it's about our cities so if we know people are moving? Why are they moving?

Not to be left out, moving.com, published an article identify what they think are the 6 reasons people are moving to the burbs:

The 6 reasons are:

  1. More indoor and outdoor space.
  2. More bang for your buck.
  3. More peace and quiet.
  4. More highly rated school options.
  5. More safe neighborhoods.
  6. More convenience.

Well. That is a pretty compelling list and a reason why most people do, in fact move to the suburbs. A strong case on the for side. What about against? Do we have a rebuttal? In fact we do, and I don't have to create it. Through the wonders of the internet, the article was posted on social media platform Reddit where the top comment provided responses to each item.

The top comment was posted by user with an inappropriate word in there user name, there’s a link in the show notes if you’re curious. Not about the user name but about the source. Here are that users summarized responses:

There’s 6 reasons:

  1. More indoor and outdoor space only if you own it. Which actually results in less space for everyone.
  2. It’s true that land is cheap in America because we have a lot of it. And it’s true that new infrastructure is cheaper than maintaining old infrastructure. The problem is that by sprawling away from everyone else the cost to maintain that infrastructure increases, cost per house hold/person increases. Eventually resulting in a small population with a large tax burden
  3. More peace and quiet is correlation, not causation. Suburbs are quieter but only because there’s more space and less cars. Cars are the noise makers not the density of people.
  4. More highly rated school options is correlation, not causation. Wealthier people self-organize in less dense areas and those school districts become the “good schools” because the students are raised in stable, wealthy homes.
  5. More safe neighborhoods. You’re more likely to die in a car accident than you are to be murdered. Moving to place that requires you to drive actually decreases “your safety”. So safety is all in the eyes of the beholder.
  6. More convenience. There’s a paradox, logical fallacy of having everything available but needing a car to get to it. Then wishing you didn’t have traffic congestion. If you want amenities, but not congestion, your best bet is a neighborhood that’s walkable and bike-able.

The next interesting business development, speaking of amenities, is how tech companies are getting involved in the corner store. An article in the Atlantic titled, “Corner stores are the new darlings of the global tech industry” by Louise Matsakis discusses the billon dollar effort underway to turn corner shops into the next frontier for digital platforms.

To quote the article,

"While the tech investment in corner stores is happening everywhere, much of the money has flowed to South and Southeast Asia, where these shops are particularly dominant. “The region has tens of millions of [small and medium-size enterprises] that form the backbone of the economy,” says Abheek Anand, the managing director of Sequoia Capital India, a venture-capital firm that has invested in five corner-store start-ups, including ShopUp, which runs a digital-commerce platform for shops in Bangladesh. In September, ShopUp announced it had raised $75 million—the largest funding round for any start-up in Bangladesh ever."

Why invest, why do this? On this show we've talked quite a bit about last mile infrastructure this year and how business are looking to get that warehouse closer to town. Well what is a corner store, really? but a small inventory hub?

Continuing to quote the article,

"Their proximity to people’s homes already makes them well positioned to help remedy the logistical challenges that tech companies face, such as figuring out how to quickly get packages from a warehouse all the way to a customer’s doorstep. And because smartphones and 4G connections are becoming more widespread even in the developing world, start-ups are banking on the notion that it’s possible to get these old-fashioned shops to adopt new apps and other digital systems."

This leads us to our patterns of the week,

  1. People are leaving urban areas and moving south and west. No surprise. But what might this mean for our political landscape and how suburbs and small towns continue to develop is anyones guess. If anything this migration shows how COVID has served as an accelerant and allowed more flexibility for people to live and work.
  2. There's two sides to every story. And the Urban/Suburban discussion is no different.
  3. Corner stores might be the trojan horse warehouse coming to a neighborhood near you. Imagine the local corner store but instead of having year old spagehittos on the shelf their inventory is powered by amazon's algo, and you can get fresh veggies, pick up your packages, and even have them delivered faster because common goods are staged closer to home.

That's all for this week, talk to you soon.