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Indulge me please as I tried to write my first sports column. No, I have no intention of applying for the job of newgeography.com’s sports editor and others have been far more prolific on this issue. I have been falling out of love with sports for decades now.  

That does not mean, however, that I ignore the sporting world. I may be withdrawing from spectator sports    but I am interested in statistics they produce. Attendance figures have always intrigued me. It is impressive that more than 100,000 fans routinely fill stadiums in Ann Arbor, Columbus, Tuscaloosa, Baton Rouge, College Station, State College, Austin, and Knoxville.  Even so the largest crowds no longer occur, such as Notre Dame, Navy and USC, which drew the largest college football crows in history, at Chicago’s Soldier Field when its capacity was 165,000 (capacity source: 1929 World Almanac). Baseball’s record was more than 115,000 at a Los Angeles Coliseum exhibition game in 2008, celebrating 50 years since the Dodgers moved from Brooklyn.

Recently, major league baseball announced its annual attendance figures. Living in St. Louis, a middle-sized market that has usually drawn large market crowds, it struck me that it might be interesting to compare attendance figures to the population in the commuting sheds of the major league markets. By commuting sheds, I mean the combined statistical areas or where they do not exist, the metropolitan statistical areas.

So I did a simple calculation of the major league attendance in each market compared to the population. The attendance data is readily available on the ESPN website for any wanting a more in-depth look.  Obviously, the market with the highest annual fans per capita would be the best baseball town. I frankly expected that it would be St. Louis. It was not .  The figure below shows the results.

The Top 5

The five best baseball towns are all on inland waters, on the Great Lakes and the other four on the Mississippi River and its tributaries. .

#1: Milwaukee

Milwaukee, the Great Lakes (Lake Michigan) entry, is number one. In 2015, the Brewers attracted the equivalent of 1.24 trips to the stadium per capita. This may be surprising, because the Brewers are nowhere near the top in terms of their capacity used during games (approximately 75%) or in their average attendance of 31,000, one-third short of the major league baseball leading Los Angeles Dodgers (46,000).

#2: St. Louis

The expected leader, river-city St. Louis came in second, attracting 1.21 visits per capita. However St. Louis drew many more people than Milwaukee, with an average crowd of more than 44,000. Even if I had wanted to go to a game (I have been to at least one in three decades), it could have been hard to find a seat. The Cardinals filled 98.8% of their seats in 2015. However, they had to settle for second place on this indicator as well, as the San Francisco Giants were number one with 99.4% of their seats filled each game (The timing of this article is purely coincidental with the announced move of the National Football League Rams from St. Louis to Los Angeles: See Note 1)..

#3: Kansas City

The state of Missouri’s other team — also on a river — ranked third. Kansas City drew 1.12 fans per capita in 2015. The Royals had an average crowd of 33,000 and filled a creditable 89% of the stadium on average.

#4: Cincinnati

The Cincinnati Reds placed fourth, with an average of 1.09 fans per capita. The Reds, however, had an average crowd of 30,000 and filled only 70% of their seats each game on the banks of the Ohio River.

#5: Pittsburgh

Pittsburgh, also a river city, was in fifth place, with 0.94 fans annual per capita. Pittsburgh’s average attendance was 31,000 and did a bit better in filling its capacity, at 80%.

The Bottom Five

The average fans per capita falls off dramatically among 2015’s bottom five baseball towns.

Last: New York

New York, of course, has two teams, the Yankees in the Mets. The New York fans per capita figure is calculated by adding the attendance figure for its two teams, as is also the case in Los Angeles and Chicago with their two teams. But with a commuting shed of 24 million residents, even filling every seat would not have been enough to grant New York an exit pass from the bottom 5. The Yankees attracted 80% capacity crowds, while the Mets averaged 75%. Overall, New York averaged 0.24 fans per capita, approximately one-fifth that of baseball’s best town in 2015, Milwaukee.

2nd to Last: Philadelphia

Philadelphia ranked second to last, with approximately 0.26 fans per capita. Philadelphia average 23,000 per game, which is only 53% of capacity.

Third to Last: Miami

Miami was third to last, averaging 0.27 fans per capita, with an average crowd of 22,000, which took up 57% of capacity.

Fourth to Last: Atlanta

Atlanta ranked fourth to last, averaging 0.32 trips to the ballpark per capita. The average crowd was 25,000, which represented only 50% of capacity.

Fifth to Last: Houston

Houston ranked fifth to last, slightly above Atlanta at 0.32 fans per capita. The Astros drew 27,000 per game and filled 65% of capacity.

Honorable Mentions and others

As the figure indicates, attendance per capita falls off significantly after fifth ranking Pittsburgh. San Diego and Denver attract approximately 0.75 fans per capita. The Denver is particularly significant, since the Rockies averaged 55,000 per game in 1993, before moving to their specially built stadium. Last year, the best the Rockies could muster was an average crowd of 31,000, filling only 62% of their capacity. The Rockies holds the record of 4.5 million annual attendees in a season, though the New York Yankees have drawn more than 4 million fans in four years. Their best attendance was 4.3 million.

The Toronto Blue Jays (Note 2) are another team that drew more than 4 million fans twice in its heyday and averaged 50,000 fans in 1992. Toronto had been the first team to draw more than 4 million fans, in 1991. The New York Mets also drew more than 4 million fans in 2008, the same year the Yankees drew their largest figure.

As is indicated above, the Los Angeles Dodgers led major league baseball in attendance in 2015. However, just down the road, the Los Angeles Angels— who play in Anaheim (Orange County) —  ranked fifth in total attendance, giving Los Angeles a combined total of 84,000 between the two teams. The New York Yankees and Mets had a total combined attendance of 70,000. The Chicago Cubs and White Sox drew a combined attendance of 58,000.

Tampa-St. Petersburg put the “if you build it they will come” slogan to the test, in building a domed baseball stadium that opened in 1990. It took major league baseball eight years to come (that is not a record, San Antonio’s Alamo Dome has been waiting for nearly a quarter century for an NFL team). And, at least in 2015, not that many fans came. The Tampa Bay Devil Rays drew the smallest average crowd in the major leagues (15,000) and filled only 45 percent of its seats. Tampa-St. Petersburg did much better in fans per capita, at 0.43, for a ranking of 15th.

My Career as a Baseball Spectator

As may be obvious, I have not been to many baseball games. My first game was on a cross-country Trailways bus trip after high school when I spent my only night in New York at Yankee Stadium. But my most memorable game was in 1978, on the night the Dodgers set the then all-time attendance record (at least then) of 3,000,000 fans in a season. I don’t remember who they played or if the Dodgers won.

Note 1: The off and on again musical chairs game of franchise moves continues with the Cleveland/Los Angeles/St. Louis Rams, which have now become the Cleveland/Los Angeles/St. Louis/Los Angeles Rams. Soon perhaps the Los Angeles/San Diego Chargers will become the Los Angeles/San Diego/Los Angeles Chargers or perhaps the Oakland/Los Angeles/Oakland Raiders will become the Oakland/Los Angeles/Oakland/Los Angeles Raiders?

Note 2: The Toronto commuting shed includes the Toronto, Hamilton and Oshawa metropolitan areas, which Statistics Canada has indicated would be the combined statistical area if they were to designate one.

Wendell Cox is Chair, Housing Affordability and Municipal Policy for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy (Canada), is a Senior Fellow of the Center for Opportunity Urbanism (US), a member of the Board of Advisors of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University (California) and principal of Demographia, an international public policy and demographics firm. He is co-author of the “Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey” and author of “Demographia World Urban Areas” and “War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life.” He was appointed to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission, where he served with the leading city and county leadership as the only non-elected member. He served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, a national university in Paris.

Photo:  Best Baseball Town: Milwaukee (2015)

by Greg Hume (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

The rising cost of housing is one of the greatest burdens on the American middle class. So why hasn’t it become a key issue in the presidential primaries?

There’s little argument that inequality, and the depressed prospects for the middle class, will be a dominant issue this year’s election. Yet the most powerful force shaping this reality—the rising cost of housing—has barely emerged as political issue.

As demonstrated in a recent report (PDF) from Chapman University’s Center for Demographics and Policy, housing now takes the largest share of family costs, while expenditures on food, apparel, and transportation have dropped or stayed about the same. In 2015, the rise in housing costs essentially swallowed savings gains made elsewhere, notably, savings on the cost of energy. The real estate consultancy Zillow predicts housing inflation will only worsen this year.

Driven in part by potential buyers being forced into the apartment market, rents have risen to a point that they now compose the largest share of income in modern U.S. history. Since 1990, renters’ income has been stagnant, while inflation-adjusted rents have soared 14.7 percent. Given the large shortfall in housing production—down not only since the 2007 recession but also by almost a quarter between 2011 and 2015—the trend toward ever higher prices and greater levels of unaffordability seems all but inevitable.

The connection between growing inequality and rising property prices is fairly direct. Thomas Piketty, the French economist, recently described the extent to which inequality in 20 nations has ramped up in recent decades, erasing the hard-earned progress of previous years in the earlier part of the 20th century. After examining Piketty’s groundbreaking research, Matthew Rognlie of MIT concluded (PDF) that much of the observed inequality is from redistribution of housing wealth away from the middle class.

Rognlie concluded that much of this was due to land regulation, and suggested the need to expand the housing supply and reexamine the land-use regulation that he associates with the loss of middle-class wealth. Yet in much of the country, housing has become so expensive as to cap upward mobility, forcing many people to give up on buying a house and driving many—particularly young families—to leave high-priced coastal regions for less expensive, usually less regulated markets in the country’s interior.

The Rise of the Exclusionary Region

The regions with the deepest declines in housing affordability, notes William Fischel, an economist at Dartmouth College, tend to employ stringent land-use regulations, a notion recently seconded by Jason Furman, chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors. In 1970, for example, housing costs adjusted for income were similar in coastal California and the rest of the country. Today house prices in places like San Francisco and Los Angeles are three or more times higher, when adjusted for income, than most other metropolitan areas. For most new buyers, such areas are becoming what Fischel calls “exclusionary regions” for all but the most well-heeled new buyers.

The biggest impact from regulation has been to diminish the supply of housing, particularly single-family homes. In a recent examination of permits across the nation from 2011 to 2014 for Forbes, we found that California regions lag well behind the national average in terms of new housing production, both multi-family and single family. Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth, areas with less draconian regulations, have issued three times as many permits per capita last year. Overall California’s rate of new permits is 2.2 per 1000 while across the Lone Star state the rate was nearly three times higher.

In the “exclusionary regions” along both coasts, high land prices have made it all but impossible to build much of anything except luxury units. In Manhattan this has taken the form of high-rise towers that have been gobbled by the rich, including many foreigners, but this new construction has done little to make New York affordable for most residents. Between 2010 and 2015, Gotham rents increased 50 percent, while incomes for renters between ages 25 and 44 grew by just 8 percent.

Making of Two Americas

Real estate inflation is redefining American politics and could eventually transform the nature of our society. In the dense, increasingly “kiddie-free zones” around our Central Business Districts (CBDs), according to 2011 Census figures, children between ages 5 and 14 constituted about 7 percent of the population, less than half the level seen in newer suburbs and exurbs. The common habitués of these high-cost, high-density urban areas—singles and childless couples—have emerged, according to Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg, as key elements of the progressive coalition.

The bluer the city, generally, the fewer the children. For example, the highest percentage of U.S. women over age 40 without children—a remarkable 70 percent—can be found in Washington, D.C. In Manhattan, singles make up half of all households. In some central neighborhoods of major metropolitan areas such as New York, San Francisco, and Seattle, less than 10 percent of the population is made up of children under 18.Perhaps the ultimate primary example of the new child-free city is San Francisco, home now to 80,000 more dogs than children, and where the percentage of children has dropped 40 percent since 1970.

In contrast, familial America clusters largely in newer suburbs and exurbs, and increasingly in the lower-cost cities in the South, the Intermountain West, and especially in Texas. Overall—and contrary to the bold predictions of many urbanists—suburban areas are once again, after a brief slowdown, growing faster than the urban cores.

America remains a suburban nation. Overall, 44 million Americans live in the core cities of America’s 51 major metropolitan areas, while nearly 122 million Americans live in the suburbs. And this does not include the more than half of the core city population that live in districts, particularly in the Sunbelt, that are functionally suburban or exurban, with low density and high automobile use.

The Geography of Inequality

Inequality may be a big issue among urban pundits, but, ironically, inequality is consistently more pronounced in larger, denser cities, including New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Manhattan, the densest and most influential urban environment in North America, exhibits the most profound level of inequality and the most bifurcated class structure in the U.S. If it were a country, New York City overall would have the 15th-highest inequality level of 134 countries, according to James Parrott of the Fiscal Policy Institute, landing between Chile and Honduras.

In our core cities in particular, we are seeing something reminiscent of the Victorian era, when a huge proportion of workers labored in the servile class. Social historian Pamela Cox has explained that in 1901 one in four people, mostly women, were domestic servants. But is this—the world portrayed in shows such as Downton Abbey and Upstairs Downstairs—the social norm we wish most to promote?

In contrast, research by the University of Washington’s Richard Morrill shows that suburban areas tend to have “generally less inequality” than the denser areas. For example, in California, Riverside-San Bernardino is far less unequal than Los Angeles, and Sacramento less so than San Francisco. Within the 51 metropolitan areas with more than 1 million in population, notes demographer Wendell Cox, suburban areas were less unequal (measured by the Gini coefficient) than the core cities in 46 cases. And overall the poverty rate for cities is close to 20 percent, almost twice that of suburban areas.

The differential of housing cost accounts for much of this disparity. High housing prices tend to stunt upward mobility, particularly for minorities. One reason: The house remains the last great asset of the middle class. Homes represent only 9.4 percent of the wealth of the top 1 percent, but 30 percent for those in the upper 20 percent and, for the 60 percent of the population in the middle, roughly 60 percent. The decline in property ownership threatens to turn much of the middle class into a class of rental serfs, effectively wiping out the social gains of the past half-century.

The Geographic Shift

High housing prices are also rapidly remaking America’s regional geography. Even areas with strong economies but ultra-high prices are not attracting new domestic migrants. One reason is soaring rents: According to Zillow, for workers between 22 and 34, rent costs claim upwards of 45 percent of income in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, and Miami compared to less than 30 percent of income in cities like Dallas and Houston. The costs of purchasing a house are even more lopsided: In Los Angeles and the Bay Area, a monthly mortgage takes, on average, close to 40 percent of income, compared to 15 percent nationally.

This is leading to a renewed shift even among educated millennials to such lower-cost regions as Atlanta, Orlando, New Orleans, Houston, Dallas-Fort Worth, Pittsburgh, Columbus, and even Cleveland. As millennials enter their 30s and seek to buy houses, these changes are likely to accelerate.

Millennials may be staying in the city longer than previous generations, but their long-term aspirations remain fixed on buying a single-family house. This trend will accelerate in the next few years, suggests economist Jed Kolko, as the peak of the millennial population turns 30. Faced with a huge student debt load, a weaker job market, and often high housing prices, millennials face tougher challenges than some previous generations, but retain remarkably similar aspirations.

Bringing Back Levittown

Clearly America needs a new approach to housing. Democrats may enjoy their strongest base in the cities, but many of their young constituents likely will end up in the suburbs, or will continue to move to smaller, less reflexively progressive cities. Finding ways to make suburbs more sustainable, both environmentally and for families, will have more long-term appeal than trying to eliminate their preferred way of life.

Some attempts to force developers to build low-income units have, if anything, worsened the situation by discouraging new production while actually boosting prices for the vast majority. In some cases, as in New York City, the forced construction of low-income units in otherwise market-rate buildings has resulted in such absurdities as the so-called “poor door,” through which low-income residents, who are denied most of the amenities offered to wealthier residents, must enter.

Republicans too may need to change their tune. As suburbs become more multi-cultural, and dominated by millennials, the GOP will have to embrace some of the environmental and social priorities of the new residents. They also have to realize that middle-class homeowners do not always share the same interests as Wall Street investors. Under the current regulatory regime, slavish adherence to the ambitions of big investors could undermine the dispersed ownership culture, replacing it with one primarily rental-based, even in single-family homes. Essentially this could transform large areas, including suburbs, into far less socially stable areas, particularly for families.

One potential solution would be to draw on the successful policies enacted after World War II. At that time, the nation suffered a severe housing crisis as servicemen returned from the war. The solution combined governmental activism—through such things as the GI Bill and mortgage interest deductions—with less regulatory control over development. The result was a massive expansion of the country’s housing stock, and a dramatic increase in the level of homeownership.

Bringing back the Levittown approach would require jettisoning ideological baggage that now accompanies the contemporary discussion about housing. Libertarians tend to favor loosened regulations—something welcome indeed—but seem to have less than passionate interest in addressing the housing interests of working- and middle-class Americans. As we saw in the late ’40s, at least some government support for affordable housing is critical to expanding ownership.

But increasingly the worst influence on housing stems from the proclivities of contemporary progressivism. Whereas earlier Democratic presidents, from Roosevelt and Truman to Johnson and Clinton, strongly supported suburban single-family growth, contemporary progressives display an almost cultish bias toward the very dense, urban environment. The fact that perhaps at most 10 to 20 percent of Americans prefer this option almost guarantees that this approach would be unacceptable to the vast majority.

How we deal with the housing crisis will shape our future, and will largely determine what kind of nation we will become. Although some developers outside the coastal areas are trying to revive smaller “starter homes,” at least in more reasonably priced markets, this may prove all but impossible to accomplish in “exclusionary regions” unless there is serious change.

Following our current path, we can expect our society—particularly in deep blue states—to move ever more toward a kind of feudalism where only a few own property while everyone else devolves into rent serfs. The middle class will have little chance to acquire any assets for their retirement and increasingly few will choose to have children. Imagine, then, a high-tech Middle Ages with vast chasms between the upper classes and the poor, with growing dependence—even among what once would have been middle-class households—on handouts to pay rent. Imagine too, over time, Japanese-style depopulation and an ever more rapidly aging society.

Yet none of this is necessary. This is not a small country with limited land and meager prospects. A bold new approach to housing, including the reform of out of control regulations, could restore the fading American dream for tens of millions of families. It would provide the basis for a greater spread of assets and perhaps a less divided—and less angry—country. Rather than waste their time on symbolic issues or serving their financial overlords, candidates in both parties need to address policies that are now undermining the very basis of middle-class democracy.

This piece originally appeared at The Daily Beast.

Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com. He is the Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book, The Human City: Urbanism for the rest of us, will be published in April by Agate. He is also author of The New Class Conflict, The City: A Global History,
and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. He lives in Orange County, CA.

Photo by cinderellasg.