Prices Pushing Home Buyers to Suburbs

Cities like Austin are seeing their growth move from the city center to the suburbs. Hays County, southwest of the city is growing instead. "The county, where builders have transformed farmland into gleaming new subdivisions with slogans like “Where Austin goes to grow”, expanded by 5% between July 2016 and July 2017," The Economist writes.

They see this change, the scale of which was shown by Brookings Institution, as driven in large part by prices. "Growth in America’s three largest metropolitan areas is sluggish. Los Angeles grew by just 0.19% from 2016 to 2017, while New York expanded by 0.23% and Chicago actually shrank by 0.14%. In 2017, five times as many Americans moved to New York’s suburbs as moved to the Big Apple," The Economist reports. They point out that the stereotype of millennials who hate cars and love cities is exaggerated as millennials are more likely than the generation before them to opt out of living in cities as young people.