Economy

Washington Post: “During the housing bubble, Americans moved in droves to the exurbs, to newly paved subdivisions on what was once rural land. Far-out suburbs had some of the fastest population growth in the country in the early 2000s, fueled by cheap housing and easy mortgages.”

“New Census data, though, suggests that eight years after the housing crash, Americans are starting to move back there again … The exurbs are now again growing faster than more urban places, according to Brookings Institution demographer William Frey.”

“That picture doesn’t mean that more Americans now live in exurbs than what Frey calls the “urban core,” nor that cities are even shrinking. It means, rather, that the most urban counties are now growing more slowly than counties containing the far-out suburbs.”

Pew Research: “In general, countries that have experienced higher economic growth since 2008 are more optimistic for the next generation than publics that have had less growth. For example, in China, which has experienced an average GDP growth of 9% between 2008 and 2013, 85% of the public says young people will be better off financially than their parents. Meanwhile, Italians, who have seen their economy contract by an average of 2% per year over the course of the global recession, are much less optimistic (15%).”

Washington Post: “Using job data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Pew analyzed the overall prevalence of certain professionals nationwide. They then compared the expected concentration relative to a state’s population to the actual concentration, to calculate the most unique job in each state, which are given on the map below.”

Christopher Ingraham: “New American homes were bigger than ever last year, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau. After a few years of shrinkage in the aftermath of the Great Recession, the median square footage of newly-built homes last year tipped the scales at over 2,400 square feet. That’s nearly 1,000 square feet larger than the median home built in 1982. The death of the McMansion has been greatly exaggerated.”

“Young first-time buyers, who are less inclined to buy big suburban houses, are largely sitting out of the market. Credit requirements are still much tighter than they were before the housing collapse, so much of the activity in the housing market is from wealthier families looking to trade up.”

“Another, possibly overlooked contributor? Politics … A Pew Research Center study last year found that conservatives overwhelmingly prefer communities where ‘the houses are larger and farther apart, but schools, stores and restaurants are several miles away.'”

Nick Timiraos of the Wall Street Journal: “Home sizes are rising even as sales have slowed because builders have competed for affluent buyers who aren’t likely to run into trouble qualifying for a mortgage and saving for a down payment.”

Washington Post: “Here’s definitive proof that San Francisco’s real estate market is insane. HSH.com, a mortgage research site, has estimated how much salary you need to earn to afford the principal, interest, taxes and insurance payments on a median-priced home in 27 metro areas.”

“On a national scale, a buyer who puts 20 percent down would need to earn a salary of $48,604 to afford the median-priced home in America. But that total varies a lot from city to city. Pittsburgh, Cleveland, St. Louis and Cincinnati rank as the most affordable metros in which to buy a new home.”

“New York, Los Angeles and San Diego are at the high end, requiring salaries of nearly $90,000 or more. But the most expensive city by far is San Francisco, where the site estimates you would need to make $142,448 to buy the median home in the area.”

Paul Krugman writes that “what we’re now looking at is an economy that in important respects resembles that of the 1990s.”

“Pointing out yet again just how wrong the usual suspects on the right have been about, well, everything isn’t the only reason to note parallels with the 1990s. There are also implications for monetary policy: Recent job gains have brought the Fed to a fork in the road very much like the situation it faced circa 1995. Now, as then, job growth has taken the official unemployment rate down to a level at which, according to conventional wisdom, the economy should be overheating and inflation should be rising. But now, as then, there is no sign of the predicted inflation in the actual data.”

“To me … the answer seems painfully obvious: Don’t yank away that punch bowl, don’t pull that rate-hike trigger, until you see the whites of inflation’s eyes. If it turns out that the Fed has waited a bit too long, inflation might overshoot 2 percent for a while, but that wouldn’t be a great tragedy. But if the Fed moves too soon, we might end up losing millions of jobs we could have had — and in the worst case, we might end up sliding into a Japanese-style deflationary trap.”

Washington Post: “The fastest-growing big cities in the nation are concentrated in the South and West.”

“As the newly released Census maps below show, cities with populations above 100,000 in those regions grew most between 2000 and 2010, and 2010 and 2013. And not all of them were the flagship cities in their region.”

“The city that grew fastest from 2000 to 2010 (at 90 percent growth) was Gilbert, Ariz., near Phoenix. North Las Vegas, Nev. was second, with 87.9 percent growth. Fayetteville, N.C., was next, followed by Fontana, Calif. (near Riverside), and Cape Coral, Fla.”

“While shrinking cities were spread out across the country, many of them were concentrated around the Great Lakes.”