An article by Nancy Keates in today’s The Wall Street Journal indicates that more than 1,000,000 baby boomers moved to within the downtowns of the 50 largest cities between 2000 and 2010. The article quoted Redfin.com as the source for the claim.
In fact, the authoritative source for such information is the United States Census. The Journal’s claim is at significant variance with Census data.
First of all, according to US Census Bureau data, the areas within 5 miles of the urban cores of the 51 metropolitan areas with more than 1,000,000 population lost 66,000 residents between 2000 and 2010 (See Flocking Elsewhere: The Downtown Growth Story). It is implausible for 1,000,000 boomers to have moved into areas that lost 66,000 residents (Figure).
Secondly rather than flock to the city, as the Journal insists, baby boomers continued to disperse away from core cities between 2000 and 2010, as is indicated by data from the two censuses. The share of boomers living in core cities declined 10 percent. This is the equivalent of a reduction of 1.2 million at the 2010 population level (Note). The share of the baby boomer population rose 0.5 percent in the suburbs, the equivalent of 175,000. Outside these major metropolitan areas, the share of baby boomers rose three percent, which is the equivalent of 1,050,000. All of the net increase in boomers , then, was in the suburbs or outside the major metropolitan areas, while all of the loss was in the core cities.
Among the 51 major metropolitan areas, only seven core cities gained baby boomers (See table at Demographia.). Among these seven, only two had larger percentage gains than the suburbs in the same metropolitan areas. One of these was Louisville, which accomplished the feat by a merger with Jefferson County. Louisville’s gain appears to have been simply the result of moving boundaries, not moving people.
Note: The age groups used are 35 to 55 in 2000 and 45 to 65 in 2010, which approximate the baby boomers. There was a decline in the number of baby boomers between 2000 and 2010 (largely due to deaths). The figures quoted in this article allocate the same percentage loss from this reduction to the 2000 baby boomer population for each core city and metropolitan area (the national rate).
Comments
16 responses to “Wall Street Journal Reports Reverse of Boomer Moving Trend”
Top work, Wendell
Hope the WSJ publishes some kind of retraction.
Even Ed Glaeser has been presenting charts recently that are at odds with your analysis of Census data. Is he relying on the same faulty source somewhere else?
Who is redfin.com and why might they have got this so wrong?
Hmmmm, an RE booster site……
I constantly try to point out to people that the “vested interests” in growth containment planning are orders of magnitude greater than the vested interests in “sprawl”; and even worse, the former make massive unearned capital gains as a zero sum wealth transfer from everyone else, while at least those who benefit from “sprawl” are honestly supplying goods and services and building things and providing jobs; in response to legitimate demand. And in fact the benefits to society and the economy are MASSIVE, in the minimisation of economic “rent” (in contrast to the maximisation of them by growth containment planning).
Looking at the graph I can see that there’s a large increase of growth from 2000-2010. I do hope that our economy becomes better in time. http://www.orenjtechnology.com
On Friday August 9th PBS Newshour, following a segment on the ‘tear-down’ activity being undertaken by the voluntary private (i.e. not city) initiative of neighborhood residents, vaunted ‘conservative’ columnist David Brooks offered that these efforts likely offered a pathway by which Detroit could rebound, given the (supposed) creative and social networking advantages of concentrating people together.
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I see that the new Jeff Bezos property, the Washington Post, also is broadcasting the same numbers from the same Redfin source: “Between 2000 and 2010, more than a million baby boomers moved out of areas 40 to 80 miles from city centers and a similar number moved to within five miles of city centers, according to an analysis of 50 large cities by the online real estate brokerage Redfin.”
If the baby-boomer move-out numbers for “areas 40 to 80 miles from city centers” is accurate, I’d venture that had more to do with the collapse of the housing market, subsequent great recession and jump in gasoline prices (all of which hit urban fringe areas particularly hard) than the attractions of in-city life as the writers cleverly seem to suggest in their copy.
And, as the Census data Wendell offers indicate, these two phenomenon do not appear to be offsetting ‘vectors’, especially not in their magnitude. They’re certainly not the same people (“oops, we moved the wrong direction, honey!”); indeed, their demographic profile is likely to show many significant socio-economic differences. Like a tendency toward employment in the public sector, whose jobs are heavily concentrated downtown.
The WSJ is likely wrong about the 1m Boomers leaving the area beyond 40 miles from downtowns as well. According to Census Data, the over 40 mile population change among the 51 metropolitan areas with more than 1m population was an increase of more than 1 million. Highly implausible that a net million boomers left with these numbers.
And your point of the misleading connection between the specious under 5 mile claim and the apparently bogus over 40 mile claim is well taken.
Wendell Cox
Demographia
http://www.demographia.com
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When virtual presence comes of age, after the mania of downsizing everything into some portable gadget, people will flee the dense areas like the offering of 40 acres and a mule drove our forefathers West.
While ditch diggers have to report on site, in the information more and more people think for a living (sorry tea baggers, no future for you). With today’s technology, we can interact with people a continent away as easily as with the person next door.
The down side of being home so much is that our homes are too small and people living in the prison cells in the sky will go stir crazy. Thus, millions upon million more will move to where they can get more space at a cheaper price.
Traffic congestion will drop between 30 and 50% which means we need no new freeway and we certainly will not opt to live in the rabbit hutches that our masters are planning for us while trying to convince us how easy it to to carry home $157 of groceries on a subway. Subways will become the prime cause bankrupting cities as they will cost a fortune to run, but there won’t be any people to ride them. Thus they will become a huge burden on the dwindling tax paying base.
Just another article by a so-called ‘mainstream’ journalist that think it is their job to frame the news and create a narrative. The narrative doesn’t have to have any relation to reality, the whole point to craft a story to drive the agenda in the way that is desirable to ideological party you sympathize with and want to support regardless of how clueless they are. In most cases the supposed MSM is in lockstep with the prevailing un-wisdom of the pro-urban slum progressives who think that herding people into failed core cities will save their political party from being held accountable for their obvious failures to be fiscally responsible in how they manage their jobs.
Hugh Pavletich, “Performance Urban Planning”, and a co-author of the annual Demographia Surveys, has a theory that the extent to which “growth containment planning” is pushed by a local government, is a direct consequence of breakdown and inefficiency in bureaucracy. I am coming to see a lot in the theory.
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