The numbers speak for themselves: the Energy Corridor covers some nearly 2,000 acres, 20 miles west of Houston’s central core. It is home to eight Fortune 500 companies, has 67,000 jobs, 27 million square feet of office space, and nearly 4 million square feet of retail and restaurant space. The residential population is 20,000 strong and growing, and should continue to thrive so long as fossil fuels continue to supply four-fifths of the world’s energy supplies. It and a host of new communities further west — many developing their own retail and residential centers — have accounted for nearly 86% of the region’s growth since the year 2000. 

Houston’s light touch regulation and openness to urban expansion accounts for much of the new development, according to Tim Cisneros, a local developer and architect. Over excellent steak at a local Uruguayan restaurant in the Energy Corridor’s City Centre dining-and-retail hub, Cisneros tells me his big opportunities are increasingly in the peripheries, in places like Sugar Land, Pearland, the Woodlands, and Cinco Ranch, all metropolitan Houston or adjacent communities created in the past few decades. “In places like this,” Cisneros says. “You get the urban experience even when you are not in the city.”

The conventional wisdom is that being big and dense is the key to success. As Neil Irwin wrote in The New York Times in 2018, the future would be one “where a small number of superstar companies choose to locate in a handful of superstar cities.” However America’s essential story has always been one of migration — first from New England to the Midwest in the early 19th century, then from the countryside to big cities, followed by mass migration to California after World War II. Today’s big shift is the movement of companies and people to business-friendly regions in the suburbs and exurbs.

Corporations are leaving the great urban cores of New York, Chicago, San Francisco, or Los Angeles due to high energy prices, regulatory constraints and sky-high taxes. They are locating instead in less glamorous places like Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, Nashville, Phoenix, Salt Lake City, and Raleigh. A ranking of American business climates by Site Selection gave top ratings to Texas, Georgia, Virginia, Arizona, Florida, and Midwestern states like Ohio and Indiana. 

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Houston has emerged as first in job creation among the nation’s largest metro areas, growing 50% faster than New York, twice as fast as Los Angeles, and over seven times faster than greater Chicago in the past year. Overall, mid-sized metropolitan areas, with populations of between 1 million and 10 million, are adding jobs the fastest. 

It used to be that dense cities were considered to be inherently more productive. However, technology such as remote work, video conferencing, and instantaneous communication is enabling  worker dispersion, bearing out Frank Lloyd Wright’s prediction that in the future “the city should be everywhere and nowhere.” And a recent report from Brown University suggests that neither city size nor density strongly correlates with higher productivity. This merely reflects reality: today, the 50 fastest-growing counties, almost all in metropolitan peripheries, are gaining jobs at well more than two times the general rate.

In the once glittering downtowns, there has been a 90% decline in the prices of commercial real estate in some cases. This is not just a post-pandemic phenomenon. Office occupancy started to decline by the turn of the new millennium, and construction of new space also began to fall around that time. In 2019, before the pandemic, construction was one-third the rate of 1985 and half that of the year 2000.

This reflects an economy already dispersing at a rapid rate. Between 2010 and 2017, 91% of employment growth among major metropolitan areas was outside of central business districts. Remote work has proven a gift to some outlying areas, sparking growth even in parts of southern Appalachia. The 50 highest-growth counties, almost all of them in exurbia, experienced an employment increase of more than 2.5 times that of other counties in 2019. These aren’t “bedroom communities”; they are spread out cities.   

Some urban cores, notably Manhattan, remain powerful in terms of media and culture, but no longer dominate the country’s economic life. The rise of AI may accelerate this process by downsizing many of the activities key to urban centers. 

Growth in the business-services industry has also trended toward smaller metro areas of 1 million to 5 million people, particularly over the most recent five year period. Booming business service-industry hubs include smaller metros such as Austin, Nashville, Salt Lake City, Raleigh, Indianapolis, Charlotte, Omaha, Orlando, and Portland, Maine. In contrast, San Francisco and San Jose are suffering the nation’s biggest employment declines, as well as stubbornly high vacancies for commercial real estate. 

Moving out of big urban areas used to mean a downgrade in earnings, but now, salaries across the 19-state American Heartland region, essentially the territory between the Appalachians and the Rockies, are above the national average.  The hinterland’s improving conditions are further buffeted by growth in jobs making material goods. Cities like Miami, Charlotte, and Knoxville — none of them historically associated with industry — have seen the most robust industrial growth, while the last generation’s industrial leaders — cities like Los Angeles, San Jose, and Seattle — suffered a marked decline. Traditional manufacturing-oriented communities such as  Indiana, Wisconsin, Michigan, Iowa, and Ohio, are also benefiting from re-shoring businesses and foreign investment.  

Increasingly, great urban centers play an essentially symbolic role, known for glamor and high-income residents. In New York, while the overall population has declined, the number of ultra-wealthy residents has also increased. The result is a bifurcated urbanity, more like that of a stratified Medieval city rather than an engine of upward mobility; for example the Bronx, just across the Harlem River from increasingly bourgeois Manhattan, remains the country’s poorest urban county. Even as poverty in suburbs has increased, the suburban poverty rate is only half of that found in big cities. 

These stark class divisions have helped progressives to gain elected office in blue cities like Seattle, Chicago, Washington, LA, and Portland, Oregon. These groups, notably the ascendant Democratic Socialists of America, embrace policies that weaken law enforcement, allow for public camping, and seek an expansion of the welfare state by imposing higher taxes on businesses and wealthy individuals. Ultimately, such policies backfire as technology allows key executives to become more mobile.

The second shift lies with migration of people, particularly young families. America’s urban core counties lost 3,259,000 net domestic migrants from 2020 to 2024, which was three times the rate of loss in the previous decade, according to demographer Wendell Cox. Growth has shifted to peripheral areas, largely to areas 20 miles or more from the central core.

This is a longtime trend. In 1950, nearly 24% of the US population lived in the core cities. Today, according to one MIT study, roughly 80% of the nation’s metropolitan population lives in suburbs or exurbs, while barely 8% live in the urban core and another 13% live in traditional transit-oriented suburbs. Since 2010, suburbs have accounted for about 90% of all US metropolitan growth.

In many ways, this represents a return to deep-seated patterns. Americans have long tended to favor single-family houses in lower-density neighborhoods. In the 2020 Census, 92% of the population lived in counties with typical suburban population densities. In contrast, the urban cores, with population densities of at least 7,500 per square mile, accounted for barely 4% of the population, mostly located in and around New York City.  

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These trends seem likely to increase as the two key demographic groups, Millennials and immigrants, continue to move to suburbs, and increasingly the exurbs. In the past, many younger people headed for big cities like New York, as well as places like Seattle and Denver, but high  housing prices make settling in these places more difficult, particularly for families. Instead they are moving to affordable regions, such as Atlanta, Las Vegas, and Houston, where Millennial homeownership has surged. 

The key is that Millennials, born between 1981 and 1994, and now the largest portion of the population, are entering middle age. Lured by lower crime rates, single family homes, and better schools, educated Millennials now are migrating to suburbs or smaller cities. In contrast, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and even Seattle have lost some of their once magnetic appeal. The top 10 cities for Millennials include Austin, Dallas, Jacksonville, Tampa; Salt Lake City, and Henderson, Nevada.

Attitudinal swings associated with entering middle age are responsible for this shift, according to Robert Schottenstein, CEO of Columbus-based builder M/I Homes, Inc. “This is a flight to safety and security,” Schottenstein told me. “The Millennials are getting older and they are transitioning as they start families.” Even before the pandemic, two-thirds of Millennials preferred suburban living. One clear sign: high-growth exurban counties have added residents ages 25 to 34 by almost four times the national rate.  

Minorities and immigrants, who make up a large share of new buyers, favor not dense metros but sprawling areas such as South Florida, Houston, and Dallas-Ft. Worth, all of which now attract more immigrants than gateway cities like New York and Los Angeles. This reflects a preference for affordable single-family houses; something particularly marked among Latinos.  Roughly half of all Asians and Latinos live in single-family homes.  

Meanwhile it seems likely that migration patterns out of the dense, blue states will continue for the foreseeable future. In a poll taken in early 2026, roughly half of Massachusetts residents said they have considered leaving the state. Similarly, one-third of New York residents already plan to leave within the next five years, as do 4 in 10 Californians. Recently, more are moving not just to Texas and Florida, but even to “hillbilly states” like Alabama, Arkansas, and Oklahoma. By 2050, according to the most recent projections, Texas is on track to surpass California as the nation’s most populous state. 

Over time, birthrates will further propel these trends. Dense urban areas such as Los Angeles, Portland, San Diego, Boston, and Chicago, have experienced the most rapid decline in birthrates. The next generation of high school graduates will be concentrated in places like Texas, Florida and the Carolinas, while huge drops are expected in California, New York, and Illinois.  

These trends suggest an America that will look more like the Energy Corridor than like a historic urban core. This prospect may not thrill urban sophisticates, but developers like architect Tim Cisneros are not about to miss an opportunity to meet the aspirations of America’s perpetually restive population. “You go there,” he says, “because that’s where the action is.”

“I think you feel very, very strongly about peace in the Middle East,” suggested Trump, barely suppressing a giggle at the obviously outrageous understatement. “We desperately want it,” Mamdani replied earnestly. Not, “we desperately want a fair and equitable and safe and prosperous New York”. Not, “we desperately want justice and harmony and security in New York”. No. What New York City’s next mayor desperately wants is peace in the Middle East.

Mamdani then went on, fawningly, to praise Trump — whose termination of foreign aid programs is reckoned to have endangered millions of lives — as being the answer to voters who “wanted an end to the taxpayer dollars we had funding the violations of human rights”. But he was at his giddiest when salivating over how “the President and I spoke about the importance of not only building more housing, but also making sure that regulation of housing is something that is manageable to actually get through and not the cause of yet another wait that we see in our city”.

Building housing and sweeping away regulatory protections against profligate construction are certainly causes close to Trump’s heart. He was sued in the Eighties for harassing tenants out of buildings he had bought, and in turn, he himself sued the city for tax abatements for his luxury housing, establishing a framework in which tax dollars supported unaffordable apartments. For both Mamdani and Trump, then, the answer to the housing crisis in New York is: build, build, build. To be sure, they have very different conceptions of building. But the two faux-populist demagogues agree on one thing: real estate is the defining issue of our time.

From the moment the first human grunted “mine”, the principal, and perhaps the only, cause of war has been a struggle over land. It is easy to see why. Moira is the ancient Greek word for your particular portion of fate. Land expands, establishes and concretizes your moira. It is a solid counterpoint to the evanescence of time. You own your life, the good and bad of it; there is no escaping that. When you own land, you are reproducing the basic freedom of your biological existence.

Yet for the first time in history, a powerful world leader sees the world in terms, not of land, but of real estate. The difference between the two is simple: land has an intrinsic value: the place where people, cultures, civilizations establish themselves and grow. Real estate’s value lies in the marketplace: it is determined by how much people will pay for it. People belong to land. Real estate belongs to people.

The idea that the inhabitants of Gaza and Ukraine are fighting for their humble moira, which binds them to their forebears and to a stretch of time that is not, as time essentially is, apathetic, but is part of their memory and senses, is meaningless to Trump. Money is all that matters to Trump, and money is fungible. For land to make money, it must also be fungible. You miss your grandfather’s olive grove, with its sharp heady scents, where your private memories formed and where soulless impersonal apathetic time became stamped with your essence? Don’t be so sentimental. Make room for beachfront towers, shopping malls and gyms. Let history slide, will you? When Trump felt nostalgia for Scotland, his mother’s birthplace, he simply bought it and planted a flag on the links he bulldozed there.

The same coarse vision is iterated in Trump’s new National Security Strategy just released by the Trump administration. America’s former allies, the liberal democracies of Nato, are portrayed, not as rich civilizations bound to the land they grew on, but as depreciated properties whose value has been diminished by undesirable people — immigrants — moving into the neighborhood. Russia and China, also rich civilizations built on land, but which yearn to appropriate more land they believe belongs to them, are now regarded by America as dazzling potential real estate developments. Toynbee is out. Sotheby’s is in.

Now, at first glance, Trump’s efforts to make real estate rather than land the driver of history might seem like a humane innovation. It makes everything so straightforward. Cash incentives replace nuclear deterrence. Immense profits provide an effective alternative to emotional power.

But that is the superficial perspective. If real estate replacing land ever came to be a universal condition, individuals would be reduced to derivatives — mere packages of mortgages and assets. They would lose the concrete embodiment of their biological existence that the ownership of land confers. Everyone would be on the verge of being exchangeable with everyone else.

It is almost poetic, then, that this conflict between land and real estate has now begun to play itself out in New York City, where our soi-disant “democratic socialist” mayor has stumbled into his first political fight.

It involves a privately owned “garden” in New York’s Nolita neighborhood, wedged in between Soho and the Lower East Side. The irony here is that, like Trump, Mamdani wants to turn this land into transferable real estate. Unlike Trump, though, he wants to make the real estate public, and not commercial. That is what socialism is, after all: the conversion of real estate back into land — where you can build the framework of a life for your own values — courtesy of the state.

Known as the Elizabeth Street Garden, the one-acre, lush and eccentric small park, with its wrought-iron chairs and benches, fanciful sculptures, shrubbery, trees, flowers and herbs, has existed since 1991. It was the property of Allan Reiver, who owned an art gallery nearby; now it belongs to his son. Back then it was a private operation; you had to enter the art gallery to gain access to the garden. In 2012, a City Council member proposed that the park be converted into affordable housing for seniors. Reiver promptly and cannily made the park a nonprofit entity and opened the replenishing space to the public, thus retaining ownership. It remained his own land, accompanied by a smile, and a deed, from the state.

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The fight to convert the garden into affordable apartments for seniors continued, however. For over a decade, lawsuits were filed and contested. The current mayor, Eric Adams, had been all set to turn the park over to some nonprofit developers. But when Mamdani promised to do just that the instant he was in office, Adams reversed and declared the garden a public park. It was not for sale. Outgoing mayors, especially in the hardscrabble politics of New York City, often make parting shots to vex their successors. The affordable-housing initiative is now dead. Mamdani’s intention of giving seniors a little piece of land in the cold, commodifying city went nowhere.

There’s a further irony surrounding Mamdani’s doomed push. Of course the park, in one of the most expensive urban neighborhoods in the world, is cherished by the people who live in the neighborhood — the sort of well-heeled millennials who overwhelmingly voted for Mamdani. And like it or not, they have dispossessed the people they claim to want to empower. They were supported by celebrated liberals such as Robert De Niro and Patti Smith who were also squarely on the side of the Garden — on the side of privilege and wealth, playing the role of reactionary landowners! Their attitude toward the garden is very much like Trump’s toward his Scottish golf course. Sentimental realtors all.

I am deeply skeptical of Mamdani, whose grand ambitions and vaunting rhetoric will never match the grimy reality of governing New York City. If he sticks to the divisive and opportunistic tactics and sentiments he used to get elected, he will run the city into the ground. But I did admire his valiant plans to convert the garden into desperately-needed affordable housing. They were the first fruit of his ambitions as a democratic socialist. Yet they foundered on the resistance of the wealthy, privileged millennials who supported his democratic socialist ambitions. When push came to shove, they could not sacrifice their individual self-interest to the common good. Perhaps they thought that the utopian Garden of Eden Mamdani spun out in his TikTok campaign would remain just there, on TikTok. The Garden before the fall, if you will. It’s not clear who bit the apple of rebellion — did Mamdani’s base defy his principles, or did he test their sincerity by trying to come through on the promises he made to them?

Either way, Mamdani and his crowd have tumbled out of the cynical fantasy of his campaign and into the real world. The clawing back of private land, even land held under the pretext of being a public park, into state-sponsored real estate for the people is no easy, or straightforward, task. Even less so is the dignified restoration, in a city and a country where just about everything is up for acquisitive grabs, of individual moira.

Investing as the head of the Witkoff Group, he has been updating classic Manhattan office buildings like the Woolworth tower and creating luxury condominium high-rises like 111 Murray Street. Even today, his son Alex is rescuing One High Line — the pair of angular Bjarke Ingels-designed waterfront towers in West Chelsea — from an ignominious fate as the misbegotten condo development of a collapsed investing group.

Along the way, Witkoff has built a reputation for a high risk tolerance that suits Trump as the two of them seek to settle the ultimate real-estate dispute: namely, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The prize is unquestionably attractive. Yet given the stakes and the sensitivity of the region, Gotham-style real-estate wrangling could also prove disastrous.

Witkoff’s journey to the world of high diplomacy began, of course, in his friendship with fellow developer Trump. Indeed, so close are the two men that Witkoff was on the golf course at Mar-a-Lago last year when a second failed assassination attempt was made on Trump. According to a New York real-estate source, who declined to be identified because he didn’t want to get involved in Trumpian affairs, Witkoff’s grandson was named Donald after his grandfather’s friend, the president. And Trump attended Alex’s bar mitzvah reception, the person said.

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Trump rewarded Witkoff’s personal loyalty by naming the latter his envoy to the Middle East. When it comes to the bedeviling region, Trump has from the beginning thought outside the box. Witkoff’s position is roughly the same as that of Jared Kushner — Trump’s son-in-law, also a major figure in New York real estate — in the first term. Despite just about no previous experience as a mediator, Jared, son of real-estate mogul Charles Kushner, produced the Abraham Accords that opened diplomatic relations between the Jewish state and four Arab states: the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan.

Kushner sees the Middle East as a real-estate opportunity — albeit, one in which the main hazards aren’t so much New York regulators withholding construction permits as Islamist groups and states that periodically go boom. Kushner parlayed his position in the first Trump administration into the leadership of Miami-based Affinity Partners, an investment firm which he founded and which has been raising investment capital largely from Middle Eastern companies — $3.1 billion as of October, to be exact, according to a Wall Street Journal story.

Witkoff brings a similar mentality to the region. Although Witkoff, like Kushner, lacks previous diplomatic experience, he does have an international cast of friends and contacts, in the Middle East and around the world. A longtime associate in New York’s real-estate industry calls him an “excellent negotiator”.

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Despite nominally serving as the president’s ears and mouth in the Middle East, Witkoff was also dispatched to Moscow to negotiate the release of Marc Fogel, a teacher who had been held in prison for three years on marijuana charges. Witkoff is also part of the negotiating team seeking to end the Russia-Ukraine war, over and against Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s objections and others who warn that the Trumpians are ignoring Kyiv. Witkoff is unperturbed by such talk. In a news conference shortly after Fogel’s release, he described his role this way: “He [Trump] asks, and we say yes.”

Witkoff, in his light brown overcoat and perfectly starched collar, has become a fixture of television news as he represents the Trump administration globally. It’s a long way from the days in the early Nineties, when he used to personally collect rent, while carrying a gun, from his tenants in The Bronx, and where he got his start in the business.

Born in 1957 in The Bronx, he graduated from Hofstra Law School on Long Island in 1983. Afterwards, he landed a job with the real-estate law firm Dreyer & Traub, where one of his clients was none other than … Donald Trump. He then formed a partnership with the late Laurence Gluck that was known as Stellar Management (the “Ste” in Stellar stood for Steve, and the “Lar” part stood for Larry).

Although their business and political paths have long overlapped and even converged, Witkoff’s approach to real estate differs from Trump’s. While Trump built his brand around showy towers, resorts, and golf courses, Witkoff followed a more tried-and-true path through commercial and residential real estate, keeping a low profile and letting his bank accounts do the talking.

Even so, Witkoff would gain a measure of notoriety that few real-estate investors achieve. He moved fast in the business, blowing his way past the stodgy families headed by scions three or four generations removed from the enterprising paterfamilias. He was a scrappy hustler determined to build on his early successes. It helped that this was the Nineties, when commercial real estate had been beaten down by the savings-and-loan scandal, which led to the bankruptcy of several small banks that had a large number of failing new properties on their books. Those who bought low were richly rewarded. Witkoff was one of them.

He was fortunate, too, to have in his corner a financier named Andrew Stone of Credit Suisse First Boston. Stone — who viewed himself as the “Star Trek lender”, boldly lending where others on Wall Street wouldn’t — made bets on up-and-coming real-estate entrepreneurs who showed the ability to spot properties with the potential to bring in enough money to achieve well over their debt service. Besides Witkoff, Stone backed Trump, the developer Harry Macklowe, hotelier Ian Schrager, and the post-Soviet fertilizer king-turned-development mogul Tamir Sapir, among others.

What set Stone apart from most financiers in his position was his willingness to underwrite as much as 97% of a commercial real-estate purchase. That can be deadly if the property doesn’t lease up — if it fails to find enough tenants willing to pay a premium for the quality and location. But if it does lease up, the owner can amass untold riches. Hence, Witkoff’s reputation for high-risk, high-reward deals.

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Besides the famed Woolworth Building, designed by celebrated architect Cass Gilbert, Witkoff’s portfolio at one time included the Daily News Building on East 42nd Street, which the tabloid long ago abandoned, and 33 Maiden Lane downtown.

“He can be tough when he needs to be tough, and he can be charming when he needs to be charming,” said Jonathan Mechanic, chairman of the real-estate department at the law firm Fried Frank and a key figure in New York commercial real estate. “Although I’m not sure I would have seen this coming 20 years ago. I have no doubt that he can feel comfortable talking to anybody at any time.”

Mechanic recalled joining Witkoff at a meeting with Goldman Sachs on the financing of the Daily News building. Witkoff “had been up in The Bronx, and he had his gun attached to his ankle. When he leaned forward, and the gun could be seen”. Aware of the impression he’d made, Witkoff vowed to “come a little lighter afoot” next time.

Whether this combination of gun-toting gumption and charm can bring peace to the Middle East’s warring factions is a different question. As it is, America’s Arab allies have been left unnerved by Trump’s brainstorm for removing Gaza’s population to develop the territory into a sort of Middle East riviera. At stake is nothing less than the expansion of the Abraham Accords to include what once was unthinkable: formal relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia.

High risk, high reward, indeed.