Are suburbs growing in popularity because of Covid?

[medaryman]

Yeah, it is COVID - not the 50% increase in crime, burning/looting, a mayor who looks the other way and even threatens residents who want to defend their neighborhoods (shout-out Bridgeport!). But, but.. the city has amenities - unless you actually live in a museum, work in theater and have Bulls season tickets these amenities are as easily enjoyed commuting from the suburbs as the city – and the suburbs have amenities too – lots of them. OK, to be fair, I was young once and the excitement of the city is not something that can be replaced in a suburb. I could tolerate the public transportation crowd and enjoyed my time with a diverse group of friends but with the conditions in the city in 2020/2021, not a chance - not interested in being carjacked in Wicker Park just to say I live some place trendy. I hope Chicago gets things back in order, I fell in love with the city and I still love it but it will be a couple years at least before I go back and that is even to pay it a visit.

[Curly Q. Bobalink]

Originally Posted by garyjohnyang

I don't know if I would say "vibrant burbs" so much as wealthy ones. Most of the people leaving Chicago due to COVID were high-income downtown residents. If you look at areas where demand has surged the most, they're generally more upscale suburbs (and, outside of the MSA, some of the beach towns in Michigan).

Crain's Chicago Business did an article on this back in November and they found that the biggest increase in sales were in:

•Riverside, +53%
•Lake Forest, +51%
•The Barringtons, +47%
•Wayne, +45%
•Highland Park, +35%
•Kenilworth, +32%
•Batavia, +31%
•Countryside, +30%
•Clarendon Hills, +28%
•Willow Springs, +28%

From my understanding downtown is where inventories are highest and sales have fallen the most, followed by the outer neighborhoods; and the suburbs and especially affluent suburbs , are experiencing generally very low inventory and higher sales.

Going back to Gary's early post in this thread (just having read it all now), I have to regurgitate the Sesame Street line "One of these things is not like the other", meaning that no one is going to confuse Riverside with Lake Forest, or Countryside with Kenilworth, they are at different ends of the "elite" spectrum. So it's probably safe to say that the trend has been "across the board".

However, the missing part of the puzzle is that unless there is a lot of existing empty housing, or new houses being built in an area (and I don't see that happening in most of the suburbs in Gary's list), for every Buyer, there has to be a Seller. So, where are THOSE folks moving to? If city-dwellers are moving outward into the suburbs, are existing suburban owners simply moving to other suburbs, or are they moving out even further, perhaps even out of state?

Looking at the big picture, there is a lot of migration from the northern states to southern and western states - Las Vegas, Phoenix, southern Utah, Tennessee, the Carolinas, Georgia, Florida, and lest we forget the monster under the bed, Texas. This obviously didn't start with the pandemic, but it does seem that this decade-or-longer pattern sure has picked up steam in the past year. As someone who has been planning to move for about five years now (first waiting on retirement, then family issues to be resolved), this sure looks like a great time to sell a home, but not a great time to buy one, having to get into bidding wars, etc., especially since I plan to trade up in value. They say it's a fool's errand to "time the market", but I'm not inclined to buy into a housing bubble, which it sure does look like we are either in or going in, at least from the cheap seats.

I have a buddy in Peoria, and keep my eye on housing down there, and I see some "bargains" vs. many "hot" markets. But, sigh, "Illinois", and it's out-of-control appetite for real estate taxes, which is only likely to get worse, sure does take the bloom off that rose. Other than that, I see the area as a superior alternative to Chicago as a retiree - less snow, less civil unrest, the River, much cheaper housing, better politics (at least for me), while still providing reasonable access to medical care, etc.. But if one is going to the trouble to move, might as well buy an extra tank of gas for the truck and head further south.