New Haven Airport in Connecticut is the nation’s fastest-growing airport, thanks to Avelo’s decision to plant a flag there.

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The other day I was at the small airport in Redmond, Oregon – an airport I regularly pass through to visit my daughter and her family, and one that’s almost always dead. But it was a Friday in July at lunchtime and so it was more crowded than I’d ever seen it, mostly with families going on vacation. Not a seat to be had anywhere – at the restaurant, in the waiting areas, at the gates.

July is the peak of air travel season, with about 3 million people a day boarding planes in the United States, including lots of families crowding onto airplanes alongside regular business travelers like me. Of course, leisure air travel is a drop in the bucket compared to vacationers who drive – about 90% of vacationers drive somewhere – but every day we push the air system to its limit in order to keep our economy on the move. So it’s a good time to think about the role air travel plays in our understanding of the future of where.

The bottom line is that there’s a noticeable shift in air travel patterns after COVID that both reflects and foreshadows the kinds of places that Americans are seeking out.

The Hot Big Cities: Nashville, Austin, Miami

Obviously there was a huge drop in air travel during COVID, so the best thing to do is to compare the Federal Aviation Administration’s tracking of “emplanements,” as they are called, from 2019 – before COVID – and 2024, the last year for which numbers are currently available.

Overall, passenger boardings increased 5% between 2019 and 2024. And, both before and after COVID, the vast majority of boardings – about three-quarters – came in the 30 airports the FAA categorizes as “large hubs”. These include huge airports that serve as destinations – LAX, JFK – and the major airport hubs, like Atlanta (which still has more boardings than anybody else), Chicago, Dallas, and Denver. (Boardings are the hub airports, of course, come in large part just from people changing planes, so it’s hard to know what the impact of all that activity is on the local economy.)

Austin-Bergstrom Airport has seen a huge increase in passengers.

But here’s what’s interesting: the three large hubs that had the biggest increase in boardings.

In order: Nashville, Austin, and Miami. The three hottest cities in the country post-COVID – the ones that are consistently pointed to as the new tech and innovation hubs likely to dislodge Silicon Valley and attract Californians. This dislodgment isn’t really happening at a huge scale, but it’s apparently big enough to drive a significant shift in the pattern of air travel.

These three airports together accounted for 30% of the increase in air travel among large hubs. Each saw their boardings increase by about a third. The Denver hub was in fourth place, and it wasn’t even close. (By comparison, boardings at LAX were down 12%.)

But from my perspective at jam-packed RDM the other day, this wasn’t the most interesting shift. The FAA’s figures show that large hubs increased their boardings by around 4% and “medium hubs” (places like Jacksonville, Charleston, Boise, and secondary airports in large metros like Burbank, Dallas Love, and Houston Hobby) grew by only 2.5%.

Why “Small Hubs” Are Where The Action Is

But small hubs like RDM increased their boardings by 14.5% -- far more than larger airports.

Admittedly, these small hubs – there are about 75 of them – are a mixed bag. They include what you might call tertiary airports near major cities (White Plains, New Haven, Long Beach), resort destinations (Palm Springs, Jackson Hole, Bozeman, Panama City in Florida’s panhandle), and just plain hot smaller markets like Redmond (which services the zoomtown of Bend), Sarasota, and Bentonville (where Walmart is headquartered). This category also includes Spokane and Chattanooga, two hot cities where I’ve been working lately.

As I mentioned above, this is not a huge shift when you look at overall air passenger service. There are about 1 billion boardings a year in the U.S., and the small hubs only capture about 100 million of them. Still, this shift suggests that for small to mid-size regions, air service is becoming more important – especially for regions that are laying an economic bet on outdoor recreation.

What makes it tough for cities and regions wanting to pursue this strategy is the chicken-and-egg nature of increased air service’s impact on a region’s economy. There’s no question that increased air service increases a region’s economic activity. (You can find a dense economic analysis of this question here.) But it’s a little like sports franchises: There are 500 airports in the country and only about 10 viable airlines. So does demand drive service? Or does service drive demand.

A Lot Of Airports And Not Many Airlines

Take, for example, the small hub that had the biggest increase in passenger boardings between 2019 and 2024. New Haven, Connecticut, is, of course, home to Yale University. It’s a metro area of 570,000 people 80 miles away from New York. But it’s proximate to the affluent New York suburbs in Connecticut. Between 2019 and 2024, passenger boardings at New Haven rose elevenfold, from 48,000 to 560,000.

Was that because New Haven was suddenly a hot market or vastly increased its population? Not really – it’s because a brand-new discount airline, Avelo, initiated service there. Following the path of new discount airlines all the way back to Southwest, Avelo planted a flag in a small, underutilized airport near a major population center. (It’s easy to forget that Southwest originally cracked the New York market by flying out of Islip on Long Island.)

It’s not surprising that RDM is undergoing a major expansion (using jetways for the first time) and New Haven just got a big expansion approved.

Small hubs are hot. And they have great potential to expand the economy of a small region, a hote region, or a resort region. But they’re extremely dependent on the decisions of a small number of privately owned airlines. So cities and regions have to have an extremely nuanced understanding of how airlines approach markets – and which economic development targets require better air service.

The CP&DR Podcast Is Back

For California planners who follow our sister publication California Planning & Development Report, the CP&DR podcast is back! Check out the stimulating conversation I had the other day with my colleague Josh Stephens, talking about reform of the California Environmental Quality Act, the controversial zoning reform law SB 79, and the dampening effect Los Angeles’s “mansion tax” has had on housing construction. You can find the podcast in front of the CP&DR paywall here.

With 5 million people, California’s Inland Empire is both a separat metropolitan area according to the Census and still a suburb of Los Angeles.

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In my recent call to have readers “Ask Me Anything,” David Baab – a longtime urban designer in Irvine – challenged me to think about metro areas and suburbs in a different way.

He did so by asking two questions:

1. Why do we name our metro areas after the central city?

2. How come we call any city outside the central city as a “suburb”

What David is really calling for is a complete rethinking of the geographical nomenclature of our metropolitan areas. (That was three long words, sorry.) And maybe we’re past time for a rethinking.

After all, the federal government first created our modern definition of “metropolitan areas” in 1949 and hasn’t really updated that definition since 1983 (though more and more counties are being added to our ever-sprawling metropolises). The “micropolitan” areas – regions so small in population they cannot be considered “metropolitan” – were added in 2003.

And through all of this, the Census Bureau still used the central city as the basis for the nomenclature, just as it has done since it first began defining metropolitan areas in 1910.

We’ve had various attempts over the years at creating a new and more informal nomenclature for overgrown suburbs. Back in the early ‘90s, for example, journalist Joel Garreau came up with the term “Edge City,” which got a lot of publicity. But Garreau was describing a very particular type of suburban development: densely built job centers like Century City in Los Angeles, The Galleria in Houston, and Tysons Corners in Virginia (or suburban D.C., depending on how you name it). It wasn’t really an attempt to rethink the whole suburban landscape.

And as our metro areas have sprawled farther and farther afield, the Census Bureau has struggled to keep up. For example, in 2003 the Bureau finally gave Southern California’s Inland Empire separate metropolitan status (naming it the Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario MSA, for three “central” cities ranging in population from 200,000 to 300,000).

There’s no question the Inland Empire is huge – at almost 5 million people, it has about the same population as Boston and it’s much larger than Seattle. But it’s hard to argue that it’s anything more than the world’s biggest suburb. The IE’s ratio of jobs to residents is by far the lowest of any big metro area in the country – about the same as the resort community of Hilton Head, S.C. (It’s worth noting that the Inland Empire is still part of the Los Angeles consolidated metropolitan statistical area as defined by the Census and also part of the L.A. regional planning agency, the Southern California Association of Governments. And there’s that phrase “Southern California” – more on that later.)

Renaming Our Suburbs and Region

But none of this quite captures what’s really going on. What we don’t have is two things:

First, a word that describes and unites the concept of human settlements. Community, ot quote.

And second, a word that accurately describes the modern archipelago of separate but interconnected communities that make up the typical American landscape.

I’m not sure I have a good answer for the first one. “Cities” is too limiting, since it has too many different meanings (a municipality as well as a place) and it turns small-town and rural folks off. My friend Henry Cisneros, the former Mayor of San Antonio and Clinton housing secretary, often used to use the phrase “cities and towns,” but this too can be confusing, because the term “town” can have many meanings. (In the United Kingdom, city planning is usually called “town planning,” and in the U.S. towns and townships are often subdivisions of counties, not specific human settlements.)

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I often try to get around this problem by using the term “community,” which sort of gets at the idea of a human settlement that hangs together. But “community” is oftern overused in other contexts, since we tend to use is to describe communities of interest as well as geographical communities. (For example, “the development community,” “the gun community,” “the gay community”.)

So if we’re going to come up with a new name for a suburb that reflects the fact that it is more than a suburb, I’m not sure what it is. I’ve often thought of a suburb as a place where you have to drive everywhere, but that means Orange County in California is a suburb, which it’s clearly not. (It’s got a gross domestic product that’s about the same size as South Carolina.)

But on David Baab’s second question – why do we name metropolitan areas after central cities that people who live in the region may have never been to and may be trying to avoid – I think there’s a better answer, and one that has profound implications for the sense of belonging people might feel for their metropolitan region.

Tysons Corners is in “suburban” Virginia but it’s not really a suburb.

People in Orange County don’t want to be part of Los Angeles. People in central New Jersey probably won’t want to be part of New York. People in semi-rural Maryland don’t want to be part of D.C.

But they all can feel like they are part of a region if the region is not named for the central city.

And, increasingly, these regions – for local purposes – name themselves after the geographical location where they are located rather than the central city. So we have Southern California (originally a marketing term for Los Angeles), South Florida (for Miami/Broward/Palm Beach Counties), the Wasatch Fron (Salt Lake City), the Puget Sound region (Seattle), DMV (for D.C., Maryland, and Virginia), Central Texas (Austin), Northeast Ohio (Cleveland), and on and on and on.

Of course, this hasn’t happened everywhere. In the sprawling Atlanta region, the City of Atlanta has only about 8-10% of the metropolitan region’s population, but the term “Atlanta” seems ubiquitous Even the regional planning agency is called the Atlanta Regional Commission. (And it has published an interesting take of its own on the Atlanta region’s ever-changing boundaries.)

But You’re Still From Cleveland

This does not mean these terms travel well around the world or even around the country. If you’re in Tokyo, you’re not going to say you’re from Northeast Ohio. You’re going to say you’re from Cleveland, or at least Near Cleveland, or maybe Near Where Lebron James Grew Up.

Which is a point worth making for two reasons. First, because it’s still the names of the big cities that are the brand names worldwide. And second, because the origins of almost all of our metropolitan areas emanated from the original central city. There would be no Orange County or Inland Empire without Los Angeles.

Nevertheless, using Southern California instead of L.A. and South Florida instead of Miami has the effect of inviting people in to the idea that they belong to a region. You can hate the central city – living in what we will call, for want of a better term, a “suburban area” and deliberately never going to the central city – and still feel like a citizen of the region.

Yes, you can still feel like you have little in common with those poor schlubs who live back in the central city. You can define yourself mostly by separating you and your community from others. And yet you can still feel like you belong to something geographically larger than your neighborhood or your suburban city. And that’s a really good thing.

Check Out My Appears On The Talking Headways Podcast

I had fun talking with Jeff Wood on his well-known Talking Headways podcast. Jeff is one of the most astute observers of urban and suburban trends in the U.S. – he lives in San Francisco but grew up in suburban Houston – and we had a wide ranging conversation covering all kinds of topics, including migration trends in the U.S., California’s zoning reform, and lots of other things that I often talk about here at The Future Of Where. So check it out!

The Fourth of July Street Fair in Ventura (via Ventura Sun)

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If ever there was a holiday that needs a Main Street, it’s the Fourth of July. It’s a holiday where American communities celebrate themselves as much as they celebrate American Independence, complete with parades, street fairs, and fireworks.

I was lucky enough to grow up in a town in Upstate New York with a Main Street that had a July 4 parade every year, which my parents took me to religiously – and which I dutifully covered, as a young reporter, on America’s 200^th anniversary. My adopted hometown of Ventura, California, has a truly American set of celebrations. It begins with the truly (small d) democratic “pushem-pullem parade” (in which anybody with non-motorized wheels can participate) and continues for the rest of the day with a truly great street fair. And Saturday night here in San Diego, as we stood on our balcony, we saw that every single car on Broadway stopped so that the drivers could watch the 20-minute fireworks extravaganza.

Yes, the 250^th anniversary of American independence was celebrated with true exuberance in communities all across the country. But setting aside the big-picture political turmoil and sharp divisions that we see across the nation, I have great fear that our communities and places are struggling. Where is not easy to maintain in troubled times.

As I often said when I was in elected office, a successful place is the result of a covenant between a community (meaning the local government and all the institutions that serve that community) and the people who live there. The community is committed to the well-being of the people, and the people, in turn, are committed to contributing to sustaining the community and making it better.

Increasingly, unfortunately, this isn’t what I see, and many of the struggles our communities face are a result of the fact that this covenant is beginning to break down. Many of these struggles are the result of larger societal trends, and it is not always possible for people at the “local place level” to effectively counteract those trends. But there’s no question that the threads are becoming frayed.

The most obvious example is housing, which has become unaffordable almost everywhere in the last decade. The bottom line is not enough of the right type of housing is being built at the right price for the way our society is currently organized. Again, not all of this is a community-level problem – interest rates are higher than they’ve been in a while, construction techniques are outmoded, and so forth. And so local action won’t solve the problem alone. But it is true that we have zoned most of the country for a Norman Rockwell-style ideal of the nuclear family living in single-family houses, and that’s just not our society today. It won’t be – and can’t be – the future of where in the United States, no matter how much we may want to wish this to be true.

The Big Sort

Then there’s the political and cultural sorting of people into different communities. This isn’t so much a problem of one community but of the relationship between communities. And it changes the nature of the covenant.

We have always clustered in some way or another into specific communities and specific neighborhoods. We have always separated ourselves by race, by ethnicity, and by economic class. But we used to do that within our communities or at least within our local cluster of communities (often at the county level). One of the most miraculous things about my time as an elected official in Ventura was the breadth of political and cultural diversity we saw within our city. There were usually a mixture of Democrats and Republicans on the city council, thus reflecting the city as a whole. And one of my most memorable experiences as mayor was to visit a different house of worship every weekend, which helped me to see just how culturally diverse our community was.

The 2024 county-level election results. Increasingly, we are isolating ourselves politically and culturally.

Increasingly, however, this political and cultural diversity is going away. Even as our society becomes more diverse, cities and communities are becoming more less diverse and more monolithic. And this creates a complicated relationship with the covenant I mentioned above. Because if our communities become more insular and unwelcoming to people unlike ourselves, then the covenant becomes a mechanism for reinforcing this insularity. In theory, the covenant is still working – the community is supporting individuals and vice versa. But people who work in our communities, who serve us – even sometimes our own children – are shut out.

The Strain on the Community Covenant

This strain on the covenant becomes even more evident in zoomtowns and zoomburbs, where a large number of people work remotely for companies that are located somewhere else. On one level, this is a good thing: Instead of commuting long distances, these folks have more time to devote to community life and many of them do exactly that. You might even say that remote work is part of the solution to the Bowling Alone problem of declining civic life.

Yet even as remote workers commit themselves to their local communities, they are accelerating the sorting. If you can work anywhere you can live anywhere, and increasingly people who can live anywhere cluster together. But these folks tend to be of a particular cultural and economic class, and they tend to drive up housing (and other) prices in the zoomtowns and zoomburbs where they settle. People with more modest incomes – especially service workers vital to the local community – get pushed out.

And, of course, remote workers are separated from the economic engines that sustain them. They draw a salary (or, if they are tech workers, they get a bunch of stock), but they are not invested in the community where their business is located and the business they work for is no invested in the community where they live. You can coach soccer, but your employer isn’t going to sponsor the local soccer team.

When I ran a small business in Ventura, I used to joke that my job was to import money into Ventura and then circulate it around town. My company sold its services throughout California and the nation, and with the money I received I employed local folks, bought local services, and donated to local causes all of which helped support my business as we moved forward in selling our services.

A 1906 parade on Genesee Street in my hometown of Auburn, New York

In that sense, the economic and cultural life of my community could not be separated. The covenant encompassed not just individuals and the municipal government, but everybody in the community and every institution that served the community, including businesses like mine. That’s the essence of a successful place. And I have to admit, as we celebrate the 250^th anniversary of our great nation, that’s what worries me the most about the future of where.

“Ask My Anything” Answers Coming Later This Week!

I was astonished at the breadth of questions I got in response to my “Ask Me Anything” pitch. I’ll respond with all the answers later this week!

Miami at night.

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Have we entered the post-post-COVID era?

I ask this question because I see – anecdotally at least – two trends that I never would have predicted in, say, 2023.

First, Miami’s up and Austin’s down.

And second, the Zoomtown craze appears to be dying down.

These two trends may suggest that we are seeing a kind of settling down and realignment in the whole concept of place and location now that COVID is several years behind us. So perhaps we are beginning to glimpse what the more stable “new geography of where” looks like.

Let’s begin with who’s up and who’s down.

Before and during COVID, Austin was the hottest city in the United States as it added a large amount of tech (and California tech refugees) to its economy. Up until around 2012, Austin had a normal economy. (One of my favorite charts, which I have shown several time in speeches in Syracuse, shows that up until 2012 median home price in Austin and Syracuse was about the same.) Then all of a sudden home prices took off and – unlike any other city in Texas – reached stratospheric California-like levels. Form 2012 to 2021, according to the St. Louis Fed, the median asking price per square foot almost tripled.

Then it all stopped. The St. Louis Fed’s numbers show a price drop of almost 15% since then. And the drop in Austin’s rents has been widely publicized. Most reports have attributed this drop to an increase in housing construction. For example, the City of Austin has greatly simplified its entitlement process and apartment construction has, in fact, gone up.

But that’s not the whole story. The problem in Austin was never so much a problem of supply as a problem of demand. Even when prices were going through the roof, Austin was building more housing per capita than any other metro area in the United States. (On a raw numbers basis, during this time Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston were first and second, and prices were going up there too.)

So part of the reason prices have gone down in Austin is that demand has lagged. The tech economy has cooled. Anecdotally, a lot of tech folks have gone back to Silicon Valley. (A joke around Austin has been that California tech folks moving to Austin traded a high state income tax for 105-degree summers and after a couple of years decided that a high state income tax wasn’t so bad after all.)

The Where Of Capital

At the same time that super-hot Austin is cooling, super-humid Miami is booming. So what’s that about? Part of it is that South Florida is appealing to rich Californians seeking to escape the state income tax. (I’ve always said that Miami is like a flat, green Los Angeles.) But part of it is that South Florida really is part of the New York economy, and is gradually siphoning wealth and capital away from New York.

As Chris Nocera, who writes the really great Business Of Places Substack, explained a while ago, the perception of South Florida has fundamentally change to New Yorkers since COVID. “ ‘Wall Street South’ sounded like a punchline in 2021. It sounds much more serious now,” he wrote. “Florida is no longer just where deals are celebrated. It’s becoming a place where they are made.”

Austin, for all the hype, was never the place where the deals were made. That was still Silicon Valley. So the fundamental shift that Nocera so astutely observed is not where people or jobs or investment go. It’s where capital goes. In spite of everything, tech capital has stayed in California. But New York capital is relocated to Florida.

Wither The Zoomtowns?

Even so, the relocation of tech workers and other affluent folks during COVID turned many cities upside down, especially in the Intermountain West, which drew a lot of remote tech workers from the Bay Area for lifestyle reasons. But something is … happening.

Take my favorite Zoomtown: Bend, Oregon. It’s my favorite in part because that’s where my daughter and her family live there, having bailed from the Bay Area in classic fashion during COVID. (Her husband is, in fact, a remote tech worker.) But it’s also my favorite because it has emerged as perhaps America’s leading Zoomtown. Close to 30% of Bend’s workers are remote, double the post-COVID national average. There’s even a web site called movingtobend.com, which caters to tech workers looking to move and work remotely.

The Moving To Bend website.

Not surprisingly, home prices have skyrocketed. Again according to the St. Louis Fed, home prices increased about 50% from the beginning of COVID to around 2022.

But since then, home prices have essentially been … stagnant. Stagnant at a high level for sure. With a median home price of over $700,000, Bend is way more expensive than Portland and not that far behind Seattle. But overall home prices have stalled. They’ve been at that level now for three or four years.

And it’s not because, as in Austin, supply has gone up. In part constrained by Oregon’s urban limit line law, home construction in the Bend-Redmond region has stayed more or less the same for the last decade.

No, it’s because Zoomtown demand is softening.

Some tech companies – often the very ones whose products facilitate remote work – are, ironically, calling their workers back to the office.

And more broadly, it may simply be that there’s an upper limit to remote work. Full-time remote work hovered at about 5% before COVID. Today it’s about 15% nationwide and, as I said, 25-30% in Zoomtowns like Bend. But how much higher can it go? Maybe not any higher than 30%.

The New Geography of Where

So, after seeing a big – if perhaps temporary – realignment of the whole concept of where during and after COVID, things are settling down. Home prices are permanently higher, which is really tough on folks of traditional homebuying age. The number of remote workers is permanently higher, which has dramatically changed any number of second-tier cities in beautiful settings in the Intermountain West and throughout the country. And capital – always much more mobile than jobs or workers – is gravitating to new places like Miami.

And that’s the new geography of where in the post-post COVID era. But the point is, the trends are deepening and solidifying. They’re not changing in unprecedented ways as they were only a few years ago.