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Journal Article
Spotlight: Texas subprime mortgages: metros vary on risky loans--and delinquencies
The current financial crisis has brought a severe decline in subprime mortgage lending. Like the nation, Texas and its metros still have exposure to existing loans. Housing prices, unemployment and overall economic activity will play a significant part in determining how many of them run into trouble.
Journal Article
The Faster Growth of Larger, Less Crowded Locations
Over the past few decades, the population and employment growth of small and large locations in the United States have diverged. Many smaller cities and rural areas saw declining population and employment from 2000 to 2017 as residents and jobs migrated to larger, more prosperous locations. This migration might suggest that the benefits of size, such as business productivity and urban amenities, have become greater over time. However, the migration might also reflect other factors, such as the disproportionate specialization of smaller locations in the declining manufacturing and agriculture ...
Journal Article
Variations in Inflation across U.S. Metro Areas
Housing cost appears to play an important role when examining differences in inflation across U.S. metro areas.
Journal Article
The concentration of poverty within metropolitan areas
Not only has poverty recently increased in the United States, it has also become more concentrated. This Commentary documents changes in the concentration of poverty in metropolitan areas over the last decade. The analysis shows that the concentration of poverty tends to be highest in northern cities, and that wherever overall poverty or unemployment rates went up the most over the course of the decade, the concentration of poverty tended to increase there as well.
Journal Article
Competitiveness of Ethnic Minority Neighborhoods in Metropolitan Areas in the Seventh District
This article by senior business economist Maude Toussaint-Comeau explores employment change in ethnic minority neighborhoods in the Seventh District in comparison to job growth within their regions before and after the Great Recession. Among the high-level findings is that ethnic neighborhoods in economically growing metro areas tend to have high job growth, underscoring the value of policies that promote economic inclusion
Journal Article
Sprawl : friend or foe to rural places?
Discussion Paper
Economic distress and resurgence in U.S. central cities: concepts, causes, and policy levers
This paper provides a review of the literature on U.S. central city growth and distress during the second half of the twentieth century. It finds that city growth tended to be higher in metropolitan areas with favorable weather, higher growth, and greater human capital, while distress was strongly correlated with city-level manufacturing legacy. The article affirms that distress has been highly persistent, but that some cities have achieved resurgence through a combination of strong leadership, collaboration across sectors and institutions, clear and broad-based strategies, and significant ...
Journal Article
Three keys to the city: resources, agglomeration economies, and sorting
Metropolitan areas in the U.S. contain almost 80 percent of the nation?s population and nearly 85 percent of its jobs. This high degree of spatial concentration of people and jobs leads to congestion costs and higher housing costs. To offset these costs, workers must receive higher wages, and higher wages increase firms? costs. So why do firms continue to produce in cities where the cost of doing business is so high? Economists offer three main explanations. First, cities developed and grew because of some natural advantage, such as a port. Second, as cities grew, the resulting concentration ...
Journal Article
Hybrid Working, Commuting Time, and the Coming Long-Term Boom in Home Construction
The long commuting times from outer suburbs to the central business districts of large metropolitan areas have depressed single-family home construction over the last two decades. The shift to hybrid working during the COVID-19 pandemic, however, has reduced the time many people spend commuting and potentially increased their willingness to live farther from employers. Lightly settled land at the peripheries of metropolitan areas may become more desirable for development, relaxing a long-standing constraint on single-family home construction.In this article, Jordan Rappaport estimates the ...
Journal Article
Diversification and Specialization Across Urban Areas
Los Angeles is famous for the entertainment industry, San Jose for technology companies, and New York for the financial firms surrounding Wall Street. While each of these urban areas has a unique identity related to a particular sector of the economy, each is also, in fact, very diverse in its industrial composition. Urban areas differ in the extent to which they have a diverse set of industries or, conversely, the degree to which they are very specialized in a particular industry. Richmond Fed analysis supports previous research findings on the extent to which diversification or ...