America’s 3 core city archetypes — and why YIMBYs need to approach each differently

Over the weekend, Pete Saunders caught some flack from San Francisco YIMBYs for correctly pointing out that Chicago is extremely different from San Francisco, and thus the optimal policies for the Bay Area may not be the optimal policies for Chicago.

I imagine the criticism of Pete stems from a lack of understanding of just how fundamentally different urban dynamics are in the Midwest, relative to the areas that the vast majority of YIMBY activists organize in.

Most YIMBY activism takes place in handful of coastal metros, lead by San Francisco, Seattle, New York City and Los Angeles. The fundamental problem facing these areas is too much demand and not enough supply. Due to extremely strong job markets in high-paying fields like tech and finance, strong urban infrastructure (for American standards), and cultural agglomeration effects, there is tremendous demand to live in those areas, making them among the most expensive places to live in the world. The primary tool to fix this problem is to build more housing — dense housing, both in the core cities and their inner ring suburbs. YIMBYs are right about this, and NIMBYs across the ideological spectrum are wrong and bad.

However, rust belt cities are different. Unlike in San Francisco and Seattle, there actually are high vacancy rates in cities like Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh and St. Louis; and these aren’t vacation homes like in Florida — they’re completely abandoned due to a lack of demand. Because of this, high housing costs are not much of an issue in these core rust belt cities:

San Francisco’s housing market operates on a completely different plane than the rust belt’s core cities

The YIMBY gameplan from California, Seattle and NYC cannot be seamlessly ported over to the Midwest.

But American cities cannot be cleanly seperated into just those two groups — high-demand coastal cities and declining rust belt cities — there’s also a third group: sun belt cities, which have grown rapidly over the past 70 years, but have done so mostly through sprawl, replicating the horrific development patterns used to build out the Midwest’s suburbs during the same time frame.

Here I’ll break down the three archetypes that most of America’s major cities fall into, talk about how they differ, and what it means for urban advocates.

Type 1: Superstar Cities

Examples: New York City, Boston, Washington D.C., San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, San Diego, Portland
The Good: Strong economies, strong demand to live there, dense housing and respectable transit systems (for American standards), high foreign migration
The Bad: Extremely expensive, NIMBYs blocking development and capping growth, high levels of inequality, low levels of net domestic migration

Superstar cities have strong economies and sky-high housing costs. All of them have grown in the past decade, but some have grown much more than others, with the differences being driven mostly by land-use policy. Seattle is America’s YIMBYest city, and it’s efforts have payed off with a 24% population growth rate over the past decade. Washington D.C. and Boston also posted strong growth, while bad land-use policy resulted in much more modest gains in California and New York.

Superstar cities are way more expensive than the rest of the country due to the economic opportunities and urban amenities they offer, and a lack of housing growth relative to demand

Superstar cities have grown at different rates recently, mostly reflecting different levels of willingness to build housing

These are the cities YIMBY activists have operated almost exclusively in, and they understand the correct solutions for these areas: build more housing, both in the core cities and inner-ring suburbs, break down the political structures that allow NIMBYs of all types to block development, and circumvent local NIMBYs through state-level reforms.

Type 2: Sun Belt Cities

Examples: Atlanta, Nashville, Charlotte, Orlando, Miami, Houston, Dallas, Austin, San Antonio, Phoenix, Las Vegas
The Good: Rapid population growth, both from domestic and foreign migration; decent affordability, mild winters
The Bad: Development has been sprawling and car-centric

These are cities that have boomed since World War 2, but have done so largely through sprawling, car-oriented development. Most of these cities are landlocked and have large boundaries, allowing them to have high populations and low densities simultaneously.

These ten cities, all in the Southeast and Texas, have more than tripled in population since 1950. In the Southwest, Phoenix and Las Vegas have grown at even faster rates

Because their geographies allow them to easily sprawl (unlike California with its mountains and forest fires), these cities and their suburbs have built a ton of new housing and thus kept housing prices affordable while still growing. But the fact that this growth occured via highways and single-family homes was a tremendous missed opportunity that is extremely difficult to undo. Urbanists should be fighting to get these cities to redirect growth towards their urban cores and establish legitimate transit systems. It won’t be easy, but it’s another pathway to reducing car dependency when most of the cities that already have decent levels of density and transit have their growth potential capped by NIMBYism.

Type 3: Rust Belt Cities

Examples: Detroit, Cleveland, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Buffalo, Philadelphia, Chicago
The Good: Used to have strong downtowns and transit, and some of them (Chicago, Philadelphia) still do; affordable housing costs
The Bad: Immense population loss over the past 70 years, suburbanization and job sprawl, segregation, lack of foreign migration

Rust belt cities are all either in the Midwest or Northeast, had extremely strong urban cores in the first half of the 20th century, and then were systemically disenvested in over the back half of the 20th century. As such, they all have fairly affordable housing — outside of a couple rich enclaves, most of which are in Chicago and Philly, and even those areas are still cheaper than superstar cities.

All of these cities posted their peak census count in 1950 (except Milwaukee, which did so in 1960), and every single one of them steadily lost population over the next 50 years, and mostly didn’t gain it back:

In total, these 10 cities — once America’s core economic engines — have lost 5 million residents from their peak, even as the country as a whole grew by 117% over the same time frame

The typical explanation for the downfall of these cities is that a combination of economic troubles (driven by the decline of American manufacturing) and changing climate preferences (driven by the advent of air conditioning) led to rust belt cities losing out to sun belt cities. While I do believe that these are supplementary factors harming the rust belt, they are not the main reason why these ten core cities are down 39% from their peak population. The primary culprit is suburbanization.

Over the same timeframe that core rust belt cities collapsed, their suburbs and exurbs boomed, growing far faster than the country as a whole:

The rust belt suburbs and exurbs have exploded, adding 17 million residents since 1950, and now have four times as many residents as their core cities

In the post-war era, the rust belt built outwards instead of upwards, layed asphalt instead of steel tracks, and enforced segregation through redlining. The end result was a set of metros that today generally consist of poor, majority non-white core cities, circled by affluent suburban boomlets.

Indeed, if you look at the growth patterns of individual suburban rust belt counties and individual sun belt cities side-by-side, it can be tough to tell the difference. Here on the left, we have Oakland County, Michigan — just north of Detroit and the 7th wealthiest county in America as of the 2010 census, with a median houshehold income of 99k. And on the right, we have San Antonio:

And here on the left we have Chicagoland’s DuPage county — home to Naperville, Oak Brook and Hinsdale— and Charlotte on the right:

The upshot of all of this is that it’s tough to argue that rust belt cities don’t have enough jobs to succeed, or that everyone hates snow and will avoid it at all costs. These regions have mostly done fine as a whole, their suburbs have just hoarded most of the benefits.

It will take a lot to revive these core cities: they need to recieve the infrastructure investments that they didn’t get when we were too busy building highways. They need to break down segregation — both between the cities and their suburbs, and within the cities themselves. And they need to attract middle-class families back from the suburbs.

These are no small tasks, but I believe the best way to drive a rust belt revival is through immigration. Immigrants are great, and lots of them really like cities and the opportunities they provide. Unfortunately, unlike the superstar cities and sun belt cities, rust belt cities have largely failed to attract large immigrant populations, with the exception of Chicago. I imagine that changing this pattern will be at the core of Yglesias’ new book.

Other than Chicago, rust belt cities have largely failed to attract foreign immigration, thus compounding and reinforcing their declines

Different Cities are Different

Not all major cities fit cleanly into one of these three categories. Indianapolis and Columbus are in the Midwest, but have growth patterns resembling the sun belt. Minneapolis and Denver are highly educated like the superstar cities, but with unique geographies and lower housing prices. And while I believe Chicago firmly belongs in the rust belt category, it’s a complex city and contains neighborhoods that closely resemble the superstar cities.

But the point here is that different cities have different histories and face different challenges today, and thus may require different policy initiatives to achieve what urbanists want, an America in which more people live in strong cities, free from car dependency. So when activists from the Bay or NYC turn their attention to Chicago and Philadelphia, or Atlanta and Houston, they should work to understand how these places differ, instead of always resorting to the boilerplate prescription of “upzone everything!”. After all, Houston doesn’t even have zoning, and it’s not exactly a bastion of urbanism.