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Even in the U.S. to the extent they aren’t it’s because rents continue to rise dramatically as cities are not keeping up with the demand for housing in their urban cores.
Additionally, cities getting more crowded does not imply they should get more dangerous.
In fact, during the pandemic crime increased in many cities such as NYC, SF, etc as the numbers of people out and about in public dwindled. As the number of people in these city centers have increased since then crime has been dropping.
Finally, if there was indeed an exodus from cities to suburbs, that would be a disaster for suburbs. Suburbs are incredibly expensive and unsustainable. At least in the U.S. suburbs are almost entirely subsidized by their core cities. Even the trashiest block of a city might fit several residents, a corner store, a smoke shop and a liquor store, all of which would generate far more in taxes for the state than the barely 1 suburban single family home that would fit in that space, and both require similar infrastructure like roads, trash collection, sewer systems, electricity/gas/water pipelines, etc.
Without cities providing the tremendous bang for the infrastructure buck in taxes to states across the U.S., most U.S. suburbs wouldn’t be sustainable. Strong Towns has done excellent work in describing this phenomenon.
This is literally what happened. The population increases but building higher density (i.e. cities) is prohibited or made prohibitively expensive so instead the suburbs get built and people live there instead because the city doesn't have housing for them.
Then the city becomes less attractive because the advantage it would otherwise have over the suburbs gets offset by the high rents -- it stops being consumer surplus and gets captured by landlords through artificial scarcity.
This is essentially what happens in the absence of bad laws. If someone else would pay more then the landlord increases the rent. The occupant might still choose to stay and pay the higher rent, but then they're not paying less than the other person would. This is all fine and good because high rents are the market incentive to build more housing, which is the thing that lowers them again. The problem is reintroduced when you have other bad laws that inhibit housing construction; you have to get rid of both kinds of bad laws to not have a bad time.
> housing is a very strongly regulated market with poor liquidity
This is all the more reason people don't want to move into a city where rents are high. Then they'd be stuck there paying the high rents indefinitely until they suffer the cost to move again.
In that kind of market the long-term price is going to approach the cost of constructing new units, because if it was higher then someone could make money by doing just that, and they would, and then the increase in supply would lower the price. Supply and demand is in econ 101 because it's generally what actually happens.
This is why existing property owners don't keep prices high by colluding with each other -- cartels don't work with that many people. They have the government do it, by restricting where and how you can build housing, imposing expensive requirements on it, lowering the incentive to do it through rent control etc. Then when demand goes up through population growth, supply can't respond and instead prices go up.
If you want to claim the ordinary way that everything works isn't how this works, you have to explain why. "Not all housing units are perfectly fungible" doesn't do it -- in that case they won't all be the same price, which is obviously true, but you're still left having to explain why the cheapest ones aren't actually cheap and why nobody would want to make money by building more when prices are high unless the regulatory environment was suppressing their ability to do that.
Please though, enjoy, try to attract new residents. I'm sure eventually the commercial real estate people and rental property owners alike will crack down on crime. Or maybe go bankrupt first.
People also continue to move to cities in the United States. Some of those cities have more people leave than come, but people are still moving there.
What would be more interesting is seeing how the share of the population living in large cities has changed over time in the USA and abroad. On balance is it growing, shrinking, or staying the same?
In my country, cities are still seeing growth, but since 2010 a larger and growing share of the population are now living smaller communities, especially those with fewer than 30,000 people. I don't know if it is fair to call that an exodus as the cities haven't seen any real population decline (overall population is growing), but there does seem to be a change in preference.
> At least in the U.S. suburbs are almost entirely subsidized by their core cities.
More often, the core city invests in the suburbs, namely to see a flow of workers from those suburbs come into the city, increasing productivity.
Those who call it a subsidy hypothesize that if the city put up a wall, the suburbs would become unsustainable and the people would then move into the city centre, after which nothing would change for the city except the resources would stay within the city limits. But that is not a foregone conclusion. More likely the people would stay put, giving rise to economic opportunity in the suburbs. The work they were doing in the city is going to go somewhere.
Of course, if that were to happen, both the city and the suburbs would be worse off. Which is why the city is more than happy to invest in the suburbs.
Florence is still very much a going concern and I think cities are not going away. Many cities are quite safe, schools are what people want them to be, and they're also much better for the environment than suburbs.
People did not "flee Rome to Gaul and Britannia" for a bit of fresh air - they conquered those places at sword point.