Mulligan
Give me a museum and I'll fill it. (Picasso) Give me a forum ...
- Joined
- May 3, 2009
- Messages
- 9,343
W2R said:To me, it seems like many who responded to this thread disagree with the conclusions of the article and the "two full books devoted to the trend". That's all. Although somewhere on the big wide world of the internet there are undubitably some other articles and "full books" disputing the trend or reasons implied for such a trend, nobody posted links to them. Instead, most people tend to simply post their own personal observations that differ when discussing an article they don't agree with. Just a fact of life on message boards, I guess.
If all real estate is local, as is often said, then I suppose it is inevitable that choice of home location would respond at least locally and temporarily (if not in a broader sense) to simultaneously rising gas prices and sinking home prices. However, the directions in which these two are changing could easily reverse, possibly (though not necessarily) reversing the trend or rate of change affecting the trend as well.
Your correct W2R. My perspective is based on my area I live in. And in the STL area, it is still following the classic model. The city proper is still losing people, the county surrounding it that had been absorbing the out-flight is now starting to lose people, and the recipients are outlaying areas.
St. Louis was the nation's eighth-largest city with a population of 856,795 in 1950. Now, for a couple of decades, it hasn't even been Missouri's largest city. Kansas City's population grew to 460,000 in the latest census, widening the gap over St. Louis, though the St. Louis metro area remains significantly larger.
Since the mid-20th century, the exodus of St. Louis residents to the suburbs has been startling. And people keep moving farther away from the urban core. St. Louis County lost population in 2010 for the first time, down 1.7 percent to 998,954 in 2010, as residents relocate to communities like St. Charles, O'Fallon, Wentzville and Troy.
"This is a time for an urgent rethinking of how we do everything as a region," Slay said. "If this doesn't jump-start a discussion about the city re-entering the county and how we start thinking more as a region, nothing will."
St. Louis is unique in that it is its own county. St. Louis city and St. Louis County are completely separate entities. Slay said that leads to redundancies of service that are unnecessary.