Toto’s Here To Stay

Over the week-end the New York Times revealed  a profoundly interesting trend: last year, for the first time in decades, more people moved INTO the city than out of it.

What I found amusing about the article was the disjunction between those interviewed about why they stayed in (or returned to) New York and the statements from the talking heads who were asked to opine about the trend overall. While the actual people said their decision to remain or come back to New York was all about the quality of life, the demographer from the Brookings Institute seemed to think it was all about the inability of people to sell their homes. Speaking for myself, I don’t buy that line of reasoning.

Don’t get me wrong; we as real estate agents understand as well as anyone how hard it can be for some consumers to sell their properties in the current environment. But is that really the factor most profoundly impeding an exodus from the city? I don’t think so. The fact is, in most of the city as a whole there is a marketplace. Properties will sell. They may not sell at the numbers sellers hope to achieve, but if these same sellers are planning  a move to other parts of the country, where the markets are often far more depressed than they are here, they will still get plenty of bang for their buck. I truly believe that the reduction in people leaving New York, especially to move to the suburbs, is less about home value than about satisfaction and convenience. As I have noted in this blog before, the notion of suburban/commuter life was built around two realities of ‘50’s and ‘60’s life: the 9 to 5 workday and the one-working-parent family. In today’s world in which both members of the couple work ten hours a day, who wants to add two train rides to those already long hours? And for those with kids, when do you see them?

What about the people moving INTO the city? As the article notes, many who leave are drawn back. They find they miss the energy, the vitality, and the it’s-11 PM-the-night-is-young-what-shall-we-do-now sense of endless possibility. Young people are drawn here in huge numbers simply because the city is so exciting and (relatively speaking in this very challenging economic environment) replete with opportunity. It seems that, more than ever, people are drawn to New York not only from all over the world but also from all over the country. Of course, some of this is to be expected. We all know that globally populations are tending increasingly to gravitate away from rural and towards urban environments . And with 7 BILLION people now in the world, it also seems inevitable that there will simply be more people in all of the world’s cities as time goes by.

That said, so many converts to our city arrive like the dazzled Dorothy Gale to Oz, murmuring “Toto, I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore.” No Dorothy, you’re not, and probably, based on the data, you won’t be going back there any time soon.

Read the New York Times article here: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/12/nyregion/in-shift-more-people-move-in-to-new-york-than-out.html?_r=1