Full Citation
Title: Urban Revival in America, 2000 to 2010
Citation Type: Miscellaneous
Publication Year: 2015
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Abstract: This paper documents and explains the striking reversal of fortune of urban America from 2000 to 2010. We show that almost all large American cities have experienced large increases in young professionals near their Central Business Districts over the last decade. We assemble a rich database at a fine spatial scale to test a number of competing hypotheses explaining this recent trend. We first estimate a residential choice model to assess the relative roles of changing amenities, job locations, and housing prices, as well as changing attitudes regarding these factors, in drawing the young and college-educated downtown. We find that diverging preferences for consumption amenities - such as retail, entertainment, and service establishments - explain the diverging location decisions of the young and college-educated relative to their non-college-educated peers and their older college- educated counterparts. In complementary analyses, our data rejects other hypotheses, such as changes in home ownership rates or changes in household formation rates due to delayed marriage and childbirth. These stark new trends within cities have important implications for the future of America’s downtowns, whose current revival does not appear to be driven by temporary trends.
Url: https://www.aeaweb.org/conference/2016/retrieve.php?pdfid=970
User Submitted?: No
Authors: Couture, Victor; Handbury, Jessie
Publisher: University of California, Berkeley University of Pennsylvania and NBER
Data Collections: IPUMS NHGIS
Topics: Land Use/Urban Organization, Other
Countries: United States