The new boomtowns: Why more people are relocating to ‘secondary’ cities
I tend to think that a lot of migration trends are obscured by currency-based accounting rather than looking at numbers of people and their preferences.<p>I don&#x27;t know a lot about the US, but here in the UK, in a city like London I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s useful, for example, to say people are being &#x27;priced out&#x27;.<p>What&#x27;s actually happening is that those that own property as of N years ago are permanent residents, and will never really sell their properties, so it&#x27;s just full. You have suburbs full of families that will never move out, and if they do move out, will just rent the building out rather than selling.<p>The indirect effect of that is that prices go up, but you&#x27;re really just seeing that the commuter belt of semi-detached homes is full and that&#x27;s that.<p>It&#x27;s common to talk about knocking down homes or building more homes or whatever. The thing is that for the most part, only non-residents actually want that (because for them the choice is between high density or not living there). If you own a decently sized family home with a garden you&#x27;re just not going to give it up and move into a block of flats. It&#x27;s a strict downgrade in every sense of the word, even if the square footage is the same.<p>No-one wants to live in a block of flats unless they&#x27;re too poor to afford a house.<p>So yeah, the answer is to go elsewhere. Go to a city that actually welcomes newcomers. Places like London are no longer income-based, they&#x27;re wealth-based. Starting from scratch here you&#x27;re at an enormous disadvantage.