1. Rustbelt Revivals - fascinating new paper by Enrico Moretti & others (via @lydiadepillis) on why & how deindustrialized Rustbelt regions recover: nber.org/papers/w31948 2. Lots there but here are my main takeaways ...

1. Deep dive into mobility in America. The big takeaways. Lower income, less educated Americans are stuck in place their lack of mobility, explains the lack of mobility in America.

nytimes.com/interactive/20… 2. College educated Americans are far more mobile. In America today mobility = economic opportunity.

1. Super interesting new NBER paper on "Covid and Cities, Thus Far by Gilles Duranton & Jessie Handbury. Worth a quick thread on its main thrusts: nber.org/papers/w31158 2. Their main thesis is that "working-from-home changes the household location decision in two ways: the first is a reduction in commuting costs and the second is a reduction in, or tax on, the space one can consume at home to make room for an office."

1. This chart shows the evolution of America's class structure from 1800-2020. It is based on data on occupations or the kinds of work Americans do. 2. It divides the class structure into 4 main classes:
The Working Class who engage in manual labor in factories & related, maintenance, & construction.
The farming or agricultural class.
The service class who engage in the delivery of routine services, and ...

1. A few thoughts on the recent @Nature Study in the decline in disruptive science prompted by my conversation with @evan7257.
nature.com/articles/s4158… 2. First off, as the authors describe there is a basic numbers issue at work: "because the number of research papers overall has skyrocketed ...while the number of disrupted papers has stayed roughly constant, the fraction of all papers that are disruptive has declined." ...

1. Take a close look at this chart. It a very different & very useful take on downtown recovery of North American cities by my @UofTCities colleague @profchapple. 2. it is based on "visits" by 18 million smartphones to downtown points of interest by SafeGraph. As the study notes: "This indicator is much more comprehensive than office vacancy rates, public transportation ridership, and retail spending totals."

1. A short thread on the future or new reality of work. We too often think in binaries - work from home vs. work from the office. But the reality is we have been shifting toward more flexible work for several decades now. COVID again simply accelerates this shift. 2. Some stats:
Trend in work from home or remote work. It has been growing for a while ...
Less than 1% in 1980.
2.4% in 2000
5% in 2018
@I_Am_NickBloom projects 20% of workdays remote post-pandemic.

Two new papers on Post-COVID mobility by @Fcorowe
One on the UK: arxiv.org/abs/2206.03272
The other on Spain: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ps… 2. Key findings of the UK study: "Drawing on a data set of 21 million observations from Facebook, we analyse the extent & evolution of changes in the spatial patterns of population movement across Britain over an 18-month period from March, 2020 to August, 2021."

1. A little thread on the Boeing from Seattle to Chicago to DC move. (I always think it's a warning signal when a company relocates its HQ away from its hometown). 2. As with Amazon HQ2, Washington DC is attractive for many reasons. It is the center of US government, lobbying, relevant agencies. But not just that ...

1. A little thread on America's downtowns, having just re-read Robert Fogelson's necessary "Downtown: It's Rise and FALL, 1880-1950." originally published in 2001. 2. The big takeaway is that downtown has been through much worse before, and what downtown is going through today is part of a long historical trajectory. Indeed, Fogelson was much more pessimistic about downtown's future in 2001 than what has transpired since.

1. Here is a very interesting study of the impact of remote work on city's commercial property values & property taxes that I have meaning to tweet about all week. So here goes: itep.org/the-impact-of-… 2. The study examines the fiscal impact of remote work on 8 cities, including 4 which are said to be vulnerable to remote work NY, San Fran, LA & Chicago, and 4 which are thought to be gaining from remote work like Atlanta, Miami, Charlotte & Austin.

1. Checking the new @axios Poll on where college students want to live post-graduation. Interesting stuff in many ways.
axios.com/exclusive-poll… 2. The first thing that strikes me is the list looks a LOT like it would have 2 decades ago in 2000: NY, LA, Boston, DC, Seattle, Atlanta, Denver, San Fran, Chicago, Minneapolis, Dallas, Portland, Phoenix. Or Like the Amazon HQ2 list. With some shuffling of the ordering ...

1. There is something that really worries me about the increase in housing prices that I see few people talking about. Price is one thing. But carrying costs - property taxes, insurance etc on top of the cost of the house or mortgage matter too. 2. As housing prices rise and reset to a new set point, carrying costs rise too.

1. Much has been made of rising crime and so-called urban disorder in America's cities. But the data is not so clear. While murders are up, overall crime is down. What gives? A new study provides uses intriguing new data to provide some clues. 2. The study by Maxim Massenkoof the
Naval Postgraduate School & Aaron Chalfin of the
University of Pennsylvania uses data on foot traffic data as well as data from thew American Time Use Survey to measure personal exposure risk to violent crime. maximmassenkoff.com/papers/victimi…

1. Quick thread on the new @pewresearch analysis of the changing geography of COVID-19 deaths. Well worth a read: pewresearch.org/politics/2022/… 2. It uses New York Times COVID-19 mortality data to show how the geography of the pandemic shifted dramatically over time.

1. I don't completely buy it. And I have long been a work-from-home person. The pandemic had me thinking think more people would stay away from the office, but as things get back to "normal" and open back up, I'm less and less sure. bloomberg.com/news/articles/… 2. 2. For one, people just seem like they want to get out of their routine. They want to bounce back and re-engage. We saw this first with restaurants, going out, sports & travel ...

1. Big Tech and the City. Big Tech firms are taking on LOTS of office space in superstar cities and tech hubs.
geekwire.com/2022/in-seattl… 2. "Across the U.S., tech companies accounted for 36 of the top 100 office leases in 2021, up from 18 in 2020, for a total of 11.4 million square feet, CBRE reported. The next highest category was government and public administration at 5.1 million square feet."

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/… 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

1. Fantastic and fantastically interesting new @nberpubs study by @rebeccardiamond and Enrico Moretti on cost of living differentials by class of workers across US cities:
nber.org/papers/w29533 2. The study documents HUGE differentials in living costs/quality of life across US metros ...

1. The world of innovation is spiky and appears to be getting spikier, according the later NBER working paper by Bill Kerr and Brad Chattergoon at Harvard Business School: nber.org/papers/w29456?… 2. The study tracks patents for all patents, and for software and non-software patents from January 1976-December 2020. Here are some of the key findings ...

1. Some quick comments to contextualize this piece on the evolution of urban downtowns or central business districts.

https://twitter.com/Richard_Florida/status/1453359450174238728

2. This is yet another example of COVID-19 as accelerator (not disruptor).