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Comment by graeme | Hacker News Reader

We had a similar phenomenon in Canada, without the same racial dynamics. My bet is that the car was the main cause.

We also had the surge in population in the west compared to the old cities of the east.

We are also seeing a gentrification of urban areas.

I could be wrong. Is there some major difference between the Canadian and American cases?

My working hypothesis is that the car was the main cause, and that the cause of regentrification is that suburbs reached their natural geographic limits.

Race and crime may have been an additional stimulus in the us, but I feel like on this question americans are guilty of not even bothering to glance at the natural experiment running to their north.

But again, I might be wrong: am I missing something about the american case? One thing I can think of is that I’m not sure Canadian downtowns ever got quite so abandoned.

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There's a demographic aspect to this I try to bring up every time these discussions arise.

Age demographics are very important for countries and cities. Due to the nature of demographic trends, there are a ton of people 20-35 in the USA right now, more than there are "baby boomers". Due to the similarities in taste due to age, many, many, people want to live in cities right now, which drives gentrification. Whether or not that continues probably has a lot to do with birth rates going forward for people 20-35.

What are the age demographics of Canada?

> Due to the similarities in taste due to age, many, many, [millennials] want to live in cities right now, which drives gentrification.

As millennials stop being poor, they start behaving more like the generations of before. College grads are starting to buy houses in the suburbs: http://www.npr.org/2017/09/15/551232392/as-millennials-get-o...

Right, though they are becoming less poor as they get older (and probably starting to have kids). Tremendously high housing costs in desirable core neighborhoods also muddy the trend, as it is simply impossible for the non-wealthy to buy in those neighborhoods, so millennials may be buying in the suburbs out of necessity, rather than preference.

There are a lot of conflating fine-grained trends that add up to aggregate shifts, which are not necessarily all that large (and therefore hard to examine). Cities/suburbs are not binary things. College-educated millennials don't have the same behaviors as non-college educated ones. Marriage ages and first child ages have shifted as have overall demographics. San Francisco is not New York City is not Detroit is not Austin. The cities that are thriving are much more livable than they were a few decades ago.

You end up with lots of fodder to spin tales that can reinforce just about any narrative you like.

Very similar, but one crucial difference: the provinces control funding to cities and equalize spending across county lines. So you don't end up with bankrupt cities, or super wealthy ones, and everyone tends to get the same services. Instead, at least in Toronto, you have "priority neighbourhoods".. poor communities that get extra funding and resources.

And, more specifically, it's mostly college-educated people in that age range who want to live in the core of a relatively small number of cities, generally on the costs.

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