There is an interesting flywheel effect going on in large productive cities, gentrification is pushing out those previously impacted by white flight. NIMBYs prevent dense suburbs, and we don't have adequate transportation for lower income folks to efficiently commute to job centers, what's our plan for folks without degrees? My prediction is a large increase in "welfare".
The answer right now is exurbs. Big City gets too expensive to live in (or doesn't have enough housing) so people move to the suburbs because they're desirable and usually have a nice community, school district, and downtown of their own. When the suburbs fill up or become too expensive, people move to commuter towns (exurbs). Towns with no character of their own, no political force, no real economic activity. The only thing they have going for them is a quick and easy connection to the bigger city.
A few years ago I co-founded a company that provides services to Midwestern exurban towns with the goal of turning them from just a commuter's bedroom into places people might actually want to spend some time (and some money). It's one of the hardest challenges I've ever taken on.
The company is called Citieo [1]. We work with tiny towns (usually less than 10k people, average is about 5500 residents) that have downtowns already built but the majority of their population leaves to spend their money and their time elsewhere. In our area (Midwest, very little public transport), our exurbs are built on major roads instead of rail lines.
Our public-facing presence is a digital media outlet (website, app, facebook) for each city we cover, but most of our work is done face-to-face with local business owners, the Chamber of Commerce, and the city government. It's a very small operation and we don't make a lot of money from it, but we think it's important to try to save our towns and, in the age of toxic social media and outlets like Next Door/Citizen/Neighbors, foster a real life community in your real life downtown. Outdoor, face to face.
