Doughnut effect
Slate:
Thanks to remote work, fewer people are living in downtowns and urban cores.
COVID-19 was transforming America's major metropolitan areas. Before the
pandemic, people paid top dollar to live close to the center of the D.C.
metropolitan area. But when COVID hit, people stopped going to the office,
bars and restaurants shut down, and the urban lifestyle became a lot
less enticing.
Some people responded by fleeing their metropolitan areas altogether.
Last year my colleague Alan Cole wrote about the Mountain Lions,
nine mid-sized cities whose growth was turbo-charged by the pandemic,
as people left Los Angeles and San Francisco for a better standard of
living in states like Utah or Idaho.
But others moved further out in their existing metropolitan areas. These
people have driven a massive real estate boom on the fringes of major
metropolitan areas.
