The New Counter-Urbanization
On why more people will live outside cities in the 2020s.
One of the most striking trends of 2020 was the sharp decline in the movement toward ever-greater urbanization. According to an Oliver Wyman Forum survey, nearly one in five American urbanites is now planning or considering leaving their city.
Available listings in San Francisco’s rental market have nearly doubled since last year as tech workers take advantage of remote work opportunities and decamp to more affordable cities and towns around the country.
Home sales in New York’s adjoining suburbs are up nearly fifty percent over the same period, driven by the hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers who’ve left the city, taking tens of billions of dollars in high-marginal rate tax revenue with them. Vacancies in Manhattan are at a sixteen-year high.
Here in Canada, things have followed a similar trajectory. Rents in Toronto’s investment-driven condo market fell nearly 20% in 2020, leaving many new landlords with negative cashflow on assets that had virtually been a license to print money for the past decade. The average price of a home in the city’s surrounding counties rose up to 80% over the same period. A Millennial-aged couple started a hugely popular blog called Ninety Minutes from Toronto, which provides economic and demographic information and offbeat real estate listings for often-overlooked communities surrounding the city. Overnight, it seemed like Toronto was no longer the center of the Canadian universe for young people.
None of this did happen overnight, of course. This wave of counter-urbanization has been gathering momentum for a decade, or perhaps longer. Looking back, we may understand the COVID-19 pandemic as a period that drastically accelerated the trend while at the same time solving thorny coordination problems that have forestalled departures from the world’s global cities.
This abrupt migratory shift from metropolitan to non-metropolitan areas clashes with typical expert predictions for future human settlement patterns. The UN Department for Social and Economic Affairs, for instance, has forecasted that nearly 70% of the world’s population will live in cities by 2050. Nothing in history is a straight line. Periodic downturns in prevailing trends aren’t just normal — they’re expected.
Nor would the COVID-19 pandemic mark the first time people have fled the threat of disease in cities for the relative safety of the countryside. Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron and Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year provide details of the hollowing-out of 14th century Florence and mid-17th century London, respectively, as the well-heeled took to their country estates — and the poor to the woods.
The evidence remains overwhelmingly on the side of those predicting a dense urban future. The periods during which trends in settlement patterns have tilted toward counter-urbanization are often brief, and their effect mild.
On the other hand, it’s an underappreciated fact that a significant number of urbanites would prefer not to live in big cities if given the option. According to a 2018 Gallup poll, only 12% of Americans express a preference for living in big cities, while 27% say they’d prefer to live in rural areas. The percentage of Americans currently living in these environments is 20% and 15%, respectively. Americans, on the whole, like living in less dense places.
All things being equal, a transfer of roughly 8% of Americans from big cities and 12% into rural areas would bring the country’s settlement patterns in line with Italy and Switzerland — and with the UN projections for the mid-21st-century global average. That would mean 36 million more Americans living, working, and building community in the small towns that have struggled to adapt to their post-industrial, big-ag realities.
If we examine the current counter-urbanism trend’s underlying drivers, a migratory shift of this magnitude might not be so far-fetched. There are good reasons to believe we may be in the early stages of a new equilibrium in settlement patterns.
In the future, more of us may choose to permanently live outside our densest cities.
The Varieties of Counter-Urbanism
There are complex reasons for counter-urbanization’s ebb and flow pattern. In Canadian geographer Clare Mitchell’s paper “Making sense of counterurbanization,” she offers three sub-types, each with its own socio-cultural drivers: ex-urbanization, displaced urbanization, and anti-urbanization.
Let’s explore each of these counter-urbanization sub-types, and examine how emerging technological, economic, and cultural trends are changing their dynamics in ways that suggest the 2020s may be a counter-urban decade.
Ex-Urbanism and the Digital Economy
Ex-urbanization is a migratory trend driven by urbanites moving to the countryside to enjoy access to its amenities — like its recreational spaces and relative tranquility — while maintaining economic ties and deriving income from the city.
Ex-urbanites do not typically participate in the productive activities of the countryside. They are unlikely, for instance, to take up commercial farming or logging as a vocation. However, they are invested in preserving their adopted communities’ character and traditional lifeways and will resist the incursion of coarsening developments like big-box retailers and open quarries to protect their chosen community’s heritage-scape and leisure-scape.
Historically, ex-urbanism as a lifestyle strategy has only been possible for the wealthy. Imagine a white-collar professional in a senior managerial role who can avoid a daily commute, or someone in a position to live either partially or entirely off passive income streams, or wealthy retirees, and you have some idea of the typical ex-urbanite.
The ongoing worldwide experiment in remote working may change that. Before the pandemic, employers typically provided remote working privileges for employees reluctantly and mostly in exceptional circumstances or as a negotiated perk. Employers’ unease with remote work came down to a raft of productivity concerns. For example, remote employees might be more likely to misuse or falsely report work hours, and sparsely populated physical office spaces may damage the morale of remaining on-site staff.
Early studies suggest that these fears are unfounded. A survey of 9000 knowledge workers conducted by Slack found that two-thirds would either prefer to work from home all or most of the time post-pandemic. A move away from offices would also significantly reduce businesses’ ongoing carrying costs. A Capgemini survey of 500 companies found that 88% of them realized real estate cost savings in the third quarter of 2020, with 92% expecting additional savings over the next two to three years.
On the productivity front, the same survey also found that 63% of companies reported increased productivity during the third quarter of 2020 due to “less commuting time, flexible work schedules and the adoption of effective virtual collaboration tools.” At the level of individual workers, a recent paper by Natalia Emanuel and Emma Harrington, two doctoral students in economics at Harvard, found that remote working increased worker productivity in call centers by 8–10%.
Not every job can be made remote, but the size of the digital economy and the workforce required to run it continues to grow. Already, it accounts for nearly 20% of GDP in some developed nations — which is, in some cases, a larger share than legacy sectors like mining or oil and gas extraction. And as it grows, so too will the number of workers who can perform their duties from any location with a reliable, high-speed internet connection.
The lack of high-speed internet access in rural areas has been a significant limiting factor in ex-urban growth. That may be about to change — and quickly — due to the arrival of near-Earth-orbit satellite internet services like SpaceX’s high-profile project, Starlink.
Over the past few months, a small group of Starlink beta testers has begun submitting the service’s first consumer-reported speed tests to its fan-run subreddit. So far, its performance relative to traditional satellite internet and cell tower-based services is astonishing.
As the near-Earth-orbit satellite sector continues to expand, hundreds of millions of people living outside the world’s cities will go from having Internet connections that struggle to load simple web pages — or worse, from having no Internet access at all — to connections that can handle high-definition media streaming, videoconferencing, and large file transfers with ease.
A worldwide broadband blanket will provide isolated communities with improved access to desperately-needed services like healthcare and education. At the same time, it may also lower the barrier-to-entry for ex-urbanism, significantly closing the gap between where people live and where they want to live.
Displaced Urbanization and Financialization
Displaced urbanization describes the migratory patterns of people “failing” out of cities — a group sometimes referred to as “distress movers” or “urban dropouts” that leave cities for “new employment, lower cost of living and/or available housing,” according to Mitchell.
Among the most significant contributors to the rising costs of city living — and, ultimately, urban displacement — is housing prices.
To understand why housing prices are out of control, we need to briefly touch on the financialization of global real estate. Financialization describes a process in which something is purchased primarily as an investment vehicle rather than for its intended use — in the case of homes and condos, as a dwelling. When an area’s real estate market undergoes financialization, it creates artificial housing scarcity, which decouples housing prices from the real wages of people living and working in those markets.
Both local and global speculators drive financialization. In Manhattan, half of the luxury condos built since 2015 are vacant. The borough’s upscale condominiums are a Potemkin village disguising the unattainability of a well-heeled, cosmopolitan lifestyle. Large swaths of Vancouver’s condos are pieds-à-terre for the global ultra-rich who use them as safe places to hide money from confiscatory home governments. And then there are the ghost hotels: the invisible, mostly unregulated, and unregulatable swarm of short-term rentals that have transformed mid-market condominiums into crash-pads and party-pads. Toronto has over 10,000 of them. That’s 10,000 fewer places Torontonians can rent, let alone own, which means artificially high price tags for doing either.
Some cities have little hope of fixing their severe housing shortages unless they completely overhaul their strict zoning laws. Toronto, arguably, is not one of those cities. The roof of my old office in Toronto’s Chinatown had a panoramic view of the downtown core. We would sometimes go up there to smoke, chat, and count the many construction cranes around us. According to the RLB Crane Index, in 2019, Toronto had 120 cranes operating in residential and mixed-use construction, which is more than double the next two cities on the list — Los Angeles and Seattle — combined. In 2020, one-third of all such active cranes in North America were in Toronto.
Developers will complete many of these projects in the next few years, which will moderate housing prices. And the pandemic has reversed some of these pricing trends, if only likely temporarily. The price tag on the smallest condos in Toronto’s market — those units which are easy prey for investors and which feel cramped during stay-at-home orders — shrunk 10% in 2020.
But what does price moderation or reversal mean in this context? Today, the average price of a new condo build downtown is nearly $700,000, which is up almost 20% from two years ago. If Toronto represents our best effort to keep pace with housing demand in our Tier 1 cities, we are in trouble.
As housing prices continue ever-upward alongside growing healthcare and education costs, real wages have been flatlining for over half a century. Based on nearly 200 years of economic data, the investment group Schroders found that the gap between housing prices and real wages hasn’t been this large since before the First World War. Even middle-class people are being displaced from urban spaces by housing markets that have become dizzyingly decoupled from local labor markets. Much of that decoupling has occurred in the past decade, as global investors and private equity firms pulled out of the collapsing subprime mortgage market and trained their sights on desirable urban real estate as their next undervalued investment class.
As city real estate’s financialization continues largely unchecked, younger generations are also falling further behind their elders in age-adjusted wealth accumulation. You’ve probably heard people say that Millennials and Zoomers care more about experiences than ownership because they are less material and more enlightened than previous generations, and that their fondness for minimalism is a mark of refined, understated tastes. It must simply be a coincidence that people under forty control less than five percent of the world’s wealth. The reality is that many of them can’t afford to own and invest, even if that’s what they wanted.
A lot of this is down to bad generational timing. Many Millennials graduated during a massive worldwide recession into the worst job market in nearly a century. As they enter their peak earning years, we may all take the plunge again.
There’s more bad news. Like the trillion dollars of unforgivable student debt hanging over our collective heads. Why so much? Because education is shot through with Baumol’s cost disease; it’s gotten twice as expensive since the early 90’s because we need to pay legions of college administrators not to be investment bankers.
If we draw each of these trend lines forward, we arrive, according to geographer Joel Kotkin, at the conclusion that the “future of the luxury city — the pride of both Trump and Bloomberg — is an extraordinarily limited one, promising to return to the bad old days when the urban centers were largely abandoned except for visitors, the wealthy and people too young to buy a house or start a family.”
Taken together, real estate financialization, wage stagnation, high personal debt loads, and the compounding effects of rolling recessions — especially on young people’s earning potential during crucial periods of their early careers — strongly suggest that more people will have no choice but to build their lives outside of cities.
Anti-Urbanization and Social Influencers
Finally, anti-urbanization describes the movement of people who wish to reject urban life in favor of a more “Jeffersonian” existence in the countryside. Mitchell suggests that anti-urbanites also often desire to find work or practice a trade outside of dense urban centers and fully integrate into rural communities. Unlike ex-urbanism or displaced urbanism, both connected to a set of preferences — attainable or unattainable — for urban life, anti-urbanism involves its explicit rejection.
Anti-urbanism has a long history in American social and religious culture. Early American transcendentalism — as articulated by its sages: Thoreau, Emerson, and Whitman — has become canon. The philosophy of distributism — which promotes cultural traditionalism and agrarianism, as evidenced by one of its key slogans: “Three acres and a cow.” — continues to exert a strong influence over American political Catholicism. Of course, American Protestantism has always contained a streak of the counter-urbanism movement that was an essential driver for the country’s founding. Anabaptists like the Hutterites, Mennonites, Amish, and Bruderhof are among the fastest-growing communities in North America. In the secular world, the back-to-the-Earth commune movement dovetailed with the American counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s to form the foundations of contemporary anti-urbanist trends.
Many previous generations of anti-urbanites have turned away from cities due to their perceived vices — like crime, immorality, degradation, and pollution. By contrast, modern anti-urban movements seem to reject cities due to their growing cultural homogeneity and predictability, criticisms which, historically, have more often been leveled against the countryside.
Phenomena like the cottagecore aesthetic, back-to-the-land influencers like The Biggest Little Farm and The Elliot Homestead, and anti-modern collective The Dark Mountain Project each point to a persistent desire to seek creative and vital ways of thriving outside of cities. Social media communities extolling off-the-grid living and prepping have grown significantly in popularity during the pandemic.
For these anti-urban movements, the countryside is a space to exercise their creative expression and self-determination, which is increasingly difficult to do in big cities where time pressures, distractions, space constraints, and regulations conspire against them. Woodworking, crafting, hunting, gardening, canning, preserving, bushcraft, foraging, animal husbandry, parenting, and cooking-from-scratch all feature heavily in the new anti-urbanist’s vision of a fully realized life.
Comparatively, city life seems drab and threadbare to modern anti-urbanists — and they may have a point. Writer and theorist Kyle Chayka has noted how cities are converging on a predictable shared visual aesthetic and hermetic service-based economy under the influence of globalization and big tech. He believes the interior design trends, goods, and services catering to hip tastes that are so prevalent on social media sites have led to the adoption of a standard feature list for luxury city spaces:
“We could call this strange geography created by technology “AirSpace.” It’s the realm of coffee shops, bars, startup offices, and co-live / work spaces that share the same hallmarks everywhere you go: a profusion of symbols of comfort and quality, at least to a certain connoisseurial mindset. Minimalist furniture. Craft beer and avocado toast. Reclaimed wood. Industrial lighting. Cortados. Fast internet. The homogeneity of these spaces means that traveling between them is frictionless …”
The feeling of sameness that permeates urban spaces today is based on a style and feature set that appeals to people who are just passing through — whether for a layover, a work secondment, or a stint in grad school. Airspace is unlike Jane Jacob’s preferred style of urbanism, which provides us opportunities for an encounter with strangers and “the strange.” Instead, Airspace allows the modern global citizen to travel from city-to-city, state-to-state, country-to-country, or continent-to-continent without ever feeling out of place — or in a particular place.
At the same time that urban spaces are converging in their look and feel, the growing digital service economy centered in large cities is making the fulfillment of our moment-to-moment desires trivially easy — all too easy, for anti-urbanists.
Smartphones overflow with apps built to swiftly bring the world’s goods and services to our doors with minimal effort required. We can conjure media, games, food, cars, and on and on with a few clicks and swipes. Often, on the other side of these transactions are gig workers who move through the city in response to algorithms calculating their next pick-up and drop-off — an arrangement that workers describe as isolating and dehumanizing. For customers, the digital service economy’s endgame is idleness; for workers, it’s digital serfdom.
The new wave of anti-urbanists exhibit a complex set of motivations. A typical origin story among modern anti-urban influencers begins with an episode of burnout brought on by overwork — often, in some tech-mediated profession — and an intense urge to escape the city’s entanglements for something more immediate and open-ended.
But while many new anti-urbanists wish to put some daylight between themselves and the digital world, they seem unlikely to be neo-Luddites judging by their social media presence. Their back-to-the-land approach is rooted as much in a desire for constructive hardship and immediacy as it is any primitivist ideology. They may profess a faith or set of conservative values that are well-suited for rural environments, but they do not tend to belittle people’s lives in the city. They adopt rural vocations like farming without turning their backs on the wisdom of YouTube instructors and homesteading bloggers.
Social media is catalyzing a strain of anti-urban movements that will spread much more efficiently and effectively through mainstream culture. As the conditions that motivate anti-urban sentiment increase in cities and the community’s influencers grow in reach and number, we should expect more people to adopt anti-urban lifestyles. When they are ready to leave the city, they will have the added benefit of cheerleaders and advisors that previous generations of anti-urbanists may have struggled to find.
The Future of Counter-Urbanism
The most lasting legacy of the COVID-19 pandemic may be its role in helping to solve a society-wide coordination problem that establishes a new set of employment standards for the workday and shifts our values toward a greater appreciation for stable and creative home lives. If so, we could see a wave of counter-urbanism that results in a long-term shift in the numbers of people living in metropolitan and non-metropolitan areas.
Counter-urbanism at the scale discussed here would likely have far-reaching and transformative effects. An influx of new residents and investment would lift struggling rural communities. In bigger homes than they could afford in the city and with fewer financial pressures, families newly in the country could have more children, which would help close the one-child gap between our actual and preferred family size. Greater counter-urbanization would force cities to compete more consistently with close-by geographies for residents, incentivizing them to improve services and livability. It may even help heal our current political schisms by weakening the association between settlement geography and ideology — a Big Jumble to reverse the Big Sort.
Further envisioning what a new wave of sustained counter-urbanism could mean seems like a worthwhile undertaking. I don’t yet have a clear sense of what that future may look like, but I am personally invested in its arrival.
After a decade of living in downtown Toronto, my wife Rachel and I decided at the end of 2019 that we would hand in the keys to our third-floor walkup rental apartment and move out of the city.
Our new full-time residence was a small chalet we’d bought several years earlier in rural Grey Highlands, two hours north of Toronto. We’d been using it as a getaway where we’d invite city friends to hike the Bruce Trail, climb in the Beaver Valley, and enjoy unspoiled night skies as we sat around the backyard firepit. Now it’s home.
We had faced a choice that so many young urbanites today confront. We could stretch ourselves to buy a fixer-upper far outside the downtown core, but then we’d be tethered to an outsized mortgage and forced to commute into work. Or, we could purchase a modest condo downtown, but then we’d likely have to pay for a parking spot and condo fees for amenities we’d never use. And all this for the privilege of owning “a box in the sky,” as a good friend puts it.
In the end, we chose neither.
Our counter-urbanization story contains facets of each of the phenomenon’s socio-cultural motivators outlined above. We were displaced by city housing prices. Then again, we genuinely enjoyed the countryside’s amenities and planned to maintain our economic ties to the city through remote work. Finally, we were animated by a growing anti-urban streak in our ambitions that led us to search for a new pace to life and connection to place.
I don’t think we’re the only ones with too many good reasons to build a life outside the city.
The fall after settling into our new home, we spent a day helping our local friend Johnathan prepare his sugar shack for the coming maple syrup season. We cleared brush that had grown over the paths that wound from the shack to the maples and loaded his beat-up pickup with dry logs cut from trees felled in past seasons. Others would split the logs we’d gathered into firewood to feed the shack’s evaporator — a large cylindrical oven that dominates its floor.
That night, we gathered at the shack to celebrate the opening of the season. We drank cider and spirits around the crackling evaporator, chatted about local goings-on, and plucked at the webs of rumor and conjecture spun, as naturally as spiders do, by people who live in small towns.
Later that evening, while standing outside the shack, my eyes drifted to the horizon. Trees — dark and jagged against a clear night sky — covered the valley’s high walls, which loomed over us.
Skimming through the sky along the treetops, I saw something odd: a chain of bright lights — perhaps a half-dozen or more — moving steadily and synchronously from east to west. After a moment of confusion, I realized that I was seeing something I’d been hoping to spot for a long time: a Starlink train.
Sipping bourbon outside of Jon’s sugar shack and watching the satellites pass overhead, I felt as though I was glimpsing the future I’ve been writing about here.
If you’re interested in discussing that future, or if you’ve been considering whether to join the current exodus from big cities, let’s talk.
You can contact me at jayar@themeta.io.
