Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by badfrog 2664 days ago
And because a much larger percentage of those people want to live in big cities compared to 50 years ago.
1 comments

In developed countries things haven't changed that much.

If you look at London (since that's essentially the article), population has actually only reached back to its 1950 level.

But attractive cities can now pull people and investment from a global pool of billions of people and thus the market does its thing and prices move accordingly.

It's definitely a thing in the US. 64% of the population lived in urban areas in 1950 compared to 81% in 2010.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_in_the_United_Sta...

Be careful of that though. Urban is very broadly defined by the census. I live in a 7,000 person town 40 miles outside of a major city. Myself and 2 neighbors are collectively on 75 acres and are adjacent to conservation land. This area is considered urban.
It was 74% in 1970 (50 years ago). It is not a massive change.

The massive change in urbanisation is happening in developing countries. In developed countries it happened earlier and is not really a thing anymore.

I haven’t seen recent details but as of a few years ago, there was an uptick in college educated young people moving to a handful of mostly coastal dense urban cores but the overall urbanization trend in the US was rather limited.