1. Miami just overtook NY and LA and of course the Bay Area as the nation's most unaffordable housing market. This trend was patently obvious for sometime, and does not bode well for the region or other hot rising centers.
therealdeal.com/miami/2022/02/…
therealdeal.com/miami/2022/02/…
2. Miami's housing market has soared driven by an influx of rich, indeed super-rich buyers from NY, LA and other places. Houses are routinely being flipped for multiples of their pre-pandemic values
3. The hand writing was on the wall even before the pandemic. For context, let me send along links to several reports we did for the now defunct @MIAUrbanFuture. Here's one from 2019 on ehem Miami's housing affordability crisis: digitalcommons.fiu.edu/mufi-reports/6/
7. The fact of the matter is that a metro like Miami is not equipped to handle this kind of growth. The influx of out-of-towners - the global super-rich - puts extraordinary pressure on the housing market ... and more.
8. And local wages/ incomes are low, in what is still mainly a hospitality and tourism economy, among the lowest in the country. Although things are changing, the Miami economy still looks more like Las Vegas than NY or the Bay Area.
9. And it's not just the poor and the essential workforce - think workforce housing - that are priced out, increasingly professionals/knowledge workers are priced out.
10. Then there is the traffic, the pressure on schools, the lack of slots at private schools ... I could go on.
11. And this is not just a Miami problem, it is impacting all the rising COVID big sort metros - Austin, Denver, Nashville, and ZoomTowns like Bozeman, NY's Hudson Valley, and on and on.
12. Some call this "trickle down" migration, and it is. But it adds up to a rapidly metastasizing housing affordability crisis. I am getting an earful about lack of inventory, bidding wars, & unaffordability in just about every place I visit ...
13. When outsiders from bigger, more affluent cities come in, they quickly housing prices up. If a metro like Miami with 5-6 million people cannot scale sufficiently to absorb this influx, it becomes that much harder in smaller metros.
14. What is unique and exceptional about Miami is that with very few exceptions, there is a general unwillingness to even raise or discuss or have a conversation about such challenges. The default is a kind of extreme boosterism.
15. Miami lacks the civic institutions like the RPA or Center for an Urban Future in NY, or SPUR in San Francisco, or universities in Boston - or even that exist in Austin, Denver, Nashville to focus and mobilize around the key challenges.
16. Hard to see how these issues of housing affordability, inequity, transit all elements of the New Urban Crisis that have already hurt coastal superstar cities can be addressed.
17. These become real limits to growth. Perhaps the region can continue to "grow" based on imported capital. But these problems can only worsen.
18. This is why I increasingly like to say the New Urban Crisis has super quickly become an almost Everywhere Crisis.
19. It will be interesting to see which of America's rising metros can effectively address these challenges.
20. At the end of the day, the reason we have very few US metros over 6 million people is that cities are very, very hard things to scale ...
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