[ghaff]

What makes you think these are impulsive buys? As people get older and, especially as they have families, there's always been a tendency to move to the suburbs/exurbs if they weren't there already. The main difference today is that big cities have tended to be attractive to young professionals to a degree that they really weren't 25 years ago.

The pandemic has probably accelerated a migration that would have happened anyway--but arguably slowed down the new grads moving into cities to replace them.

[chiefalchemist]

Right. So where suburban homes are ticking up, urban living spaces are going to contract. Then does the contraction (i.e., lower prices and more choice) trigger people to not leave urban areas?

[ghaff]

>trigger people to not leave urban areas

A lot of different factors come into play which I certainly don't claim to be able to predict--and will likely vary by city.

On the one hand, lower prices make urban areas/city cores relatively more attractive for those who want to live there. (I doubt living in the cores of top cities is ever going to be cheap; it wasn't in Manhattan in the 1980s.)

On the other hand, there may well be less need to be in a city for certain jobs. Furthermore, if city services are a mess, crime is up, and a lot of the restaurants and small businesses are closed, urban living may be less attractive.