Social Econ Blog

Ok, so maybe you all don't want to live in Manhattan specifically. However, I suspect that nearly all of you want to live downtown in a major metropolitan area. Further, I argue that many of you would choose to locate there even if the jobs you want were to be uniformly scattered throughout the metro area. That is, you would reverse commute out of the city if necessary (in fact, on Friday, I met with I guy who used to travel 4 hours a day commuting from Brooklyn to White Plains). Why would you all do this?

Well, because cities are cool. They are especially appealing to the young and single and the old and retired. Ed Glaeser, Jed Kolko, and Albert Saiz document the changing role of cities and explain what makes some cities more appealing than others in their paper "Consumer Cities." Here is the abstract:

Urban economics has traditionally viewed cities as having advantages in production and disadvantages in consumption. We argue that the role of urban density in facilitating consumption is extremely important and understudied. As firms become more mobile, the success of cities hinges more and more on cities' role as centers of consumption. Empirically, we find that high amenity cities have grown faster than low amenity cities. Urban rents have gone up faster than urban wages, suggesting that the demand for living in cities has risen for reasons beyond rising wages. The rise of reverse commuting suggests the same consumer city phenomena.