https://quillette.com/2019/11/27/mayors-...the-world/
Worth a read of the whole article on the flight from cities and even the mega metropolitan areas.
"...In reality, the validity of the “back to the city” meme was never as pronounced as its boosters believed. And now it seems, if anything, to be reversing—first demographically, then economically—as workers and key industries seek more affordable and congenial environments. Furthermore, many elite urban centers are diverging, sometimes radically, from national norms which produces a political conundrum. As big city politics shift ever further to the left, particularly on climate and “social justice” issues, not only are they becoming toxic to the middle class, they are becoming places many avoid rather than models that invite imitation....
These elite cities, of course, still attract young people straight from college, but many don’t stay long. A new Brookings study shows that New York now suffers the largest net annual outmigration of post-college millennials (aged 25–34) of any metropolitan area—followed by Los Angeles, Chicago, and San Diego. Nearly half of all millennials in San Francisco described themselves as “likely” to leave the city by the Bay, a dramatic shift from a decade earlier.
Demographer Wendell Cox has noted that similar dispersive patterns can also be found in Europe. Since the 1970s, Europe’s suburbs have accounted for virtually all the growth in virtually every urban area, including Paris, Barcelona, Copenhagen, and Dublin. Zurich, a paragon of efficiency, has gone from 87 percent inner city to 68 percent suburban since 1950. Over the past three decades, across the continent’s largest 16 metropolitan areas, the suburbs and exurbs gained 8.2 million while the population overall declined in the cores....
Much the same pattern, with widening gaps between the top and the bottom of the social hierarchy, can be seen in Europe’s other leading cities, including Oslo, Amsterdam, Athens, Madrid, Oslo, Stockholm, and Vienna.
The emerging configuration of the new urban politics threatens many of the gains made over the past two decades. New York’s Mayor Bill de Blasio and increasingly militant anti-police protesters are actively unraveling the tough, but effective policing policies that worked under both Rudy Giuliani and his successor, Michael Bloomberg. The erosion of civil society, along with the introduction of high taxes and regulation are, according to a Bloomberg News report, leading to the flight of billions in capital from the city to states such as Florida...."
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Mayors losing people and control of their cities
