The Return to Sprawl Is More About Supply Than Demand

Getting new housing built in San Francisco is a famously difficult endeavor. The city is hemmed in by water on three sides, ran out of greenfield tracts to build on in the 1950s, and is full of people who think their city is perfect as it is and doesn't need to get any bigger -- especially not if the newcomers are (horrors!) tech workers.

Still, the city added 5,114 net new housing units in 2016, which appears to be the most net new units added in a year since the 1940s.1494279055826 Another 4,087 units were permitted for construction last year. That was 28 percent of the housing permits granted in the entire San Francisco-Oakland metropolitan area, while San Francisco only accounts for 18.6 percent of the metro area's population. This new construction in San Francisco has been concentrated in and around the city's downtown.

So when you see headlines about "The Myth of the Return to Cities," it's important to note that it's not a myth everywhere. In fact, it's not really a myth at all. It's just ... complicated. That particular phrase was attached Monday to a piece in the New York Times by real estate economist Jed Kolko, where it was preceded by the words "Seattle Climbs but Austin Sprawls." That is, some metropolitan areas are getting to be more densely populated; most aren't. Yet another real estate economist, Issi Romem of the building-contractor site BuildZoom, described the same phenomenon Sunday in an examination of why housing construction has been so sluggish. What's going on, he wrote, is that:

This center-city rebound is apparent even in what Romem calls "expansive cities" such as metropolitan Austin, Texas. It's just that their urban cores tend not to be all that big, while there's still tons of vacant space along the fringes.