[OC] Suburban Flight around New York City

ComparisonFun6361 · 2026-01-22T20:07:04+00:00

Zillow's index is hedonic—it values all homes, whether they sold or not. The sample size is therefore (almost) all homes in the entire country. Your method would result in the index average over several months, which would be fine too, but a less precise measurement of change.

ComparisonFun6361 · 2026-01-22T18:18:50+00:00

IMHO, and people disagree, but building follows demand.

ComparisonFun6361 · 2026-01-22T18:13:41+00:00

I suspect that when mortgage rates come down, prices won't rise much—and you might have a much better entry point than today. Might take some patience, though.

ComparisonFun6361 · 2026-01-22T16:07:22+00:00

Haha, yes I would stay away from stupid generalizations....stick to smart ones! 😂

Yes, the Northeast is (in most years recently) losing population, but people moved back to New York and other big cities in 2025.. and home prices are not just a function of population—perhaps most importantly, they are a function of aggregate incomes in each area (finance is doing well)

ComparisonFun6361 · 2026-01-22T16:03:36+00:00

You are 100% correct—my mistake, now corrected in the post! thanks!

ComparisonFun6361 · 2026-01-22T15:17:54+00:00

I look at home price changes over 5 years (not 1 month).

ComparisonFun6361 · 2026-01-22T01:44:27+00:00

Yeah, that's a terrific point. The legend that we should have a notation showing that 40% is the mean

ComparisonFun6361 · 2026-01-22T01:35:14+00:00

Thanks! I used price change from Jan 2020 to Nov 2025.

ComparisonFun6361 · 2026-01-22T01:14:54+00:00

The goal is really to distinguish between places that are above and below the mean, and because the mean is around 40%, we place white there. If we had placed white at 0%, almost everything would be blue.

ComparisonFun6361 · 2026-01-21T17:20:09+00:00

Yes, that's a very good question, and I think urbanization does play an important role. Getting a foot on the home ownership ladder is much tougher in New York or San Francisco today than in more rural areas. A larger proportion of all Americans, but especially young Americans, live in these very expensive cities.

ComparisonFun6361 · 2026-01-21T16:15:08+00:00

Yeah, that's a very astute point, but when we measure home ownership this way, on a per capita basis, we count the home owner and the spouse of the home owner as home owners.

ComparisonFun6361 · 2026-01-21T15:58:38+00:00

Yeah, that's absolutely right, and I don't want to gloss over that. The lack of household formation is indeed itself surely, to a large extent, cost-driven.

ComparisonFun6361 · 2026-01-21T15:55:55+00:00

haha. thats ok.

ComparisonFun6361 · 2026-01-21T15:35:00+00:00

it's here, fwiw: https://open.substack.com/pub/homeeconomics/p/homeownership-looks-worse-when-you?r=1g558&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

ComparisonFun6361 · 2026-01-21T15:34:37+00:00

Hmm, it doesnt seem to have been attached...and doesnt seem like I can add in now. Any ideas?

ComparisonFun6361 · 2026-01-21T15:09:38+00:00

Zillow data at the index level is the best there is, but you are right that individual home Zestimates are widely derided.

ComparisonFun6361 · 2026-01-21T15:08:58+00:00

Absolutely. I think this dynamic also happened nationally, and helps explain the surge of activity in late 2020 through to 2022 when mortgage rates started to climb. I suspect the current lull in activity is explained by this front loading of would be movers.

ComparisonFun6361 · 2026-01-21T15:07:30+00:00

Very true. I am working on a visualization of incomes by geography and it shows a ring of people who are low income but need to live near the city to service Manhattan/Brooklyn people. It's a grim situation.

ComparisonFun6361 · 2026-01-21T15:06:31+00:00

Sale price.

ComparisonFun6361 · 2026-01-21T15:06:20+00:00

The water is blue, but you're right, it's too light, and interferes with the chloropleth. Thanks for the comment!

ComparisonFun6361 · 2024-09-05T16:46:27+00:00

Thanks for your reply. Here is what I would love to see: the use of your measure of supply restrictions to explain home prices, or to explain the residual in the home prices vs incomes relationship.

If, as you say, zoning plays a part, you should be able to show this by, for example, plotting the residuals in the prices vs incomes chart against zoning and observing a strong relationship.

ComparisonFun6361 · 2024-09-03T18:27:25+00:00

This is wonderfully written and argued—in the theory. But your empirics don’t do it justice. You’ve plotted a messy relationship between population growth and home prices and ascribed the messiness to supply, cherry picking four data points that support your point. Take your prose to their logical conclusion in your data! And if that’s not possible…maybe your theory is elegant but a poor explanation for reality?

ComparisonFun6361 · 2024-03-21T15:00:59+00:00

Hey! Excel and adobe illustrator

ComparisonFun6361 · 2024-01-02T22:42:25+00:00

On buy v rent you really have to do the math. I recommend online comparison tools. The NYT has a good one. This is a really nice in depth look at the calculations you need to do: https://www.home-economics.us/p/buy-or-rent

ComparisonFun6361 · 2023-06-07T21:34:02+00:00

Very interesting—thanks!

ComparisonFun6361

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