When I graduated from grad school in the mid-80s, I don't think a single one of my classmates who got a job in Massachusetts lived in the city proper.
https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/lead-exposur...
Younger people then moved back in (causing superficial gentrification) because they couldn't live in the actual richer areas because those had all blocked new housing (actual gentrification.)
But yes, before that it was limited to a few hotspots like St Louis which still had environmental lead problems. Meanwhile DC in 1990 was more dangerous than the Iraq War.
The Mother Jones article referenced above is arguing that the most effective thing that can be done to combat crime is lead abatement, I think that argument has taken a fatal hit. Some cities are in fact seeing homicide rates close to or even above the 1990s rates, that happened suddenly and it happened after leaded gasoline had been banned for 45 years.
You can't explain the massive increase in homicide in large cities in 2020 using environmental factors like lead, the cause has to be cultural or political.
Although I don't remember the "massive upheaval of lifestyles" suddenly happening at the beginning of June last year, is that your recollection of events?
A possible reason everyone was free to protest was they were unemployed.
That doesn't seem to actually be the case, but crime statistics is a notoriously tricky area.
There of course is also an effect where people think all of Portland is on fire because they saw a protest on TV once. But also Portland has had twice as much gun violence this year than all of 2020, which seems like a problem someone should do something about.
You're overlooking the qualitative motives for (somewhat incorrect) purely financial aspects. Younger people continued to move to denser parts of cities for at least a solid decade after in-city rents surpassed suburban ones. A large demographic group got married and started having kids much later than previous ones (this part traces pretty well back to economic factors, though!) so was looking for very different things in housing. As those factors started to change, they started following similar suburbanization patterns, and WFH accelerated that dramatically.
"Friends" is probably the clearest pop culture recording of this, showing the draw of living in the city for single 20-somethings in the 90s, and then the eventual appeal of the burbs for the later married w/ kids stage. Even in the 90s part of it, none of them were there because NYC was the cheap option.
But NYC has always had a singular appeal. And there was long a certain snobbery(?) about living in Manhattan specifically.
Sure. But my point was that, in the aggregate, they weren't. Maybe by the early 2000s, there were more jobs there, their parents lived there, their friends were starting to be there, etc. So, yes, at some point especially college-educated young professionals started to pay an urban premium for the lifestyle. We'll see to what degree that continues.
I actually agree with `astrange that by the early 2000s, if not a tad earlier[0], millennials were moving in-town (though not because their parents lived there! the opposite, if anything!), but I completely disagree on the "why" - their claim was that it was because it was cheaper because suburbs had zoning that caused them to get too expensive. My claim is that it was a lifestyle thing, not a "forced out" thing.
[0] I can't speak firsthand to earlier, but there were a lot of new or newly-redone apartment buildings by the early 2000s, suggesting that the trend had been going for several years already.
But also, the cities aren't naturally cities and the suburbs aren't naturally suburbs - they're suburbs because of restrictive zoning, and that's what caused them to be more expensive to starter homeowners and less appealing to young people.
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/abortion/
https://freakonomics.com/2005/05/15/abortion-and-crime-who-s...
Continues to happen too. The parts of the world with the most terrorism like Iraq/Yemen also most recently had leaded gas.
Young people tend to be economic migrants and the pockets of mass economic growth start in cities. They're also single and relatively poor so they live in multi-tennant housing near the downtowns where they work. As they get older, richer and more numerous (i.e. married w/ kids) they move out of the core. Cycle repeats with rising prices if growth is still there, or you hollow out the city and only the poorest remain. SF could stay like it is, or become a west-coast steel town, but it's unlikely to return to what it once was.
It's varies over time. With SV-style tech that hasn't been the case until quite recently. And, in the Bay Area, arguably the nexus of jobs is still in the South Bay. And this sort of situation is true for many other areas as well.
Depending upon how you characterize tech, there's still a lot in the northern and western suburbs, especially if you include the defense contractors. But, yes, there's now a lot in Cambridge and the Seaport, especially, as well as all the biotech/pharma in and near Kendall Square.