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.”

In any other decade, this would be a Hollywood trade story. In 2026, it is a diagnosis.

Young men now quote Bateman the way a previous generation quoted Fight Club’s Tyler Durden, which is to say that American Psycho has migrated into aspirational territory. Young men want to be the novel’s looksmaxxing, empty-sex-chasing protagonist. Mary Harron, who directed the original 2000 film version, keeps telling interviewers she is “mystified” by this. She always understood the novel as satire — specifically, “a gay man’s satire on masculinity.” Harron is a careful reader and a better director, and she still cannot quite say the obvious thing. It is not mystifying at all. A culture that elected Donald Trump twice — Bateman’s explicit role model in the 1991 novel — was always going to lose the ability to distinguish satire from a mirror. The Bateman problem is not that readers misunderstand Ellis. It is that they understand him the way a thirsty man understands an oasis.

The trends that culminated in the valorization of Bateman were already latent when the novel and the Trump presidency were mere gleams in the eyes of ambitious men. When Ellis came on the literary scene, it was as part of a Bennington College cohort that also included Jonathan Lethem, whose work the new film will inadvertently eulogize. Lethem attended Bennington College in Ellis’s class of 1986 but dropped out halfway through sophomore year, having had what he later called an “overwhelming collision with the realities of class” — his bohemian parents, he discovered, had actually been poor; the Bennington students were actually rich. 

Lethem went back to Brooklyn and spent the next 30 years writing the inverse book to everything Ellis produced. Where Ellis’s characters sit sealed inside their class privilege like terrarium specimens, Lethem’s characters can’t avoid their neighbors, can’t unsee the block, can’t pretend the adjacent kid’s trouble is not also theirs. The Fortress of Solitude, Lethem’s breakout book, pays homage to Jane Jacobs, a pioneer of urban community preservation, who valued neighborhoods above all else. Lethem’s Fortress is the great Jacobsian novel of the post-Jacobsian era, a long aching chronicle of the Brooklyn block as moral organism and what gentrification does to it — which is not only to displace people, but to implicate the remaining residents in the displacement.

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Call Ellis’s model the city of fear. His urbanism is vertical, predatory, cold; the characters don’t walk, but are driven, their class positions reinforced by every sealed surface. The streets happen to other people — people they don’t look at, people for whom the correct response is either the averted gaze or the raised partition. 

Call Lethem’s model, by contrast, the city of guilt. His urbanism is horizontal, all stoops and sidewalks, the corner store whose owner knows which kid’s mother is sick, and its governing emotion is the impossibility of moral insulation. For a long generation, American urban writing ran an unofficial referendum between these two visions, with every essay on gentrification mentioning Jacobs and her opposing force, the builder Robert Moses, who bulldozed whole neighborhoods in New York City in the name of Progress. Every Jacobs-versus-Moses seminar, every fight over bike lanes and broken-windows policing contests the ground between them. 

The referendum is over. Ellis won.

He won in the obvious places. Bateman’s Manhattan is now the Manhattan that turned SoHo into an outdoor luxury outlet and converted its own middle-class adulthood into an unwinnable quest for success and hipness. He won in the less obvious ones, too: in the Ubered, DoorDashed, Amazon-Primed private-city experience of the educated young, who have been trained to encounter the public street the way Bateman encountered it, as an interruption between secured spaces. He won in the quiet disappearance of the mixed-use retail block, the conversion of the corner bodega into a ghost-kitchen, the diner into a co-working subscription. He won, most painfully, in the Brooklyn Lethem actually wrote about. The Boerum Hill neighborhood — the central nervous system of The Fortress of Solitude — was gentrifying even during Lethem’s childhood; brownstones there cost between $3.5 to $8 million today. Nearby Bed-Stuy lost its black majority during the Eric Adams mayoralty. There, brownstones that sold for $50,000 during the period the novel depicts now trade north of $3 million. The homeowners who cashed out are not, in the main, analogs to the people Lethem’s narrator grew up watching. They are the beneficiaries of the Ellis settlement.

He won, too, in Altadena, a close-knit California community that was a suburban equivalent of Bed-Stuy. A year after the January 2025 fires, nearly 70% of severely damaged homes there show no rebuilding activity, and black and Asian homeowners — Altadena was an anomaly of black homeownership, with an 80% ownership rate in 2023, roughly double the national average — are the most likely to remain stalled. Commercial lease prices in the surviving blocks have spiked. The people who understood Altadena the way Lethem’s narrator understood Boerum Hill’s Dean Street are being priced into storage. The speculators circling the burned lots understand those lots the way Ellis’s characters understood the street: as inventory, passed through tinted glass.

The TikTok embrace of Bateman is therefore not a misreading, but a graduation certificate. The readers who now quote him admiringly grew up in the city he built — organized around sealed interiors and contempt for exteriors — and correctly identify him as a role model in this new world. Guadagnino’s casting trouble is the final footnote. You can no longer play Bateman ironically if there is no longer a shared moral floor against which the irony registers. The actors who have passed on the role may or may not have theorized it this way, but they have felt it. The character no longer reads as the predator he was designed to be, because the culture has lost its capacity to recognize predation. The only honest performance now would be the straight one, which might be why so many A-list actors have turned down the role. 

Some untidiness, however, mars Ellis’s victory. On Jan. 1, Zohran Mamdani became the 112th mayor of New York City on the most Lethemite platform of the postwar era: a four-year rent freeze on roughly a million rent-stabilized units; the addition of 200,000 permanently affordable units over 10 years; a revived Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants; public grocery stores and free buses; and a pied-à-terre tax on luxury second homes. The campaign was unapologetically Jacobsian in its moral grammar — the block as moral organism, the tenant as legitimate claimant on the landlord’s conscience, the city as shared custody rather than asset class. Mamdani’s election, and the wave of younger Gothamites who embraced him, suggest a new playbook for Chicago, Minneapolis, and Boston. Lethem’s vision returned like the repressed: the city of guilt asserting itself as policy after two decades of being merely literature.

Mamdani’s first 100 days have been a tutorial on why Ellis won. The new mayor inherited a $12 billion deficit and has cut it to $5.4 billion, in part by appealing a court order that would expand the city’s rent-voucher program — thus breaking a promise he had made on the trail. He proposed a 9.5% property tax hike that the deputy speaker of his own progressive council immediately branded “not equitable,” opening the first crack of what could become a tax revolt. Former Mayor Eric Adams, in his final weeks, stacked the Rent Guidelines Board with appointees designed to delay the rent freeze; the preliminary vote is not expected until May, the final until June, and any freeze would not take effect before October.

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The Preliminary Citywide Racial Equity Plan released in early April has already drawn the attention of Trump’s Justice Department. The pied-à-terre tax requires the state legislature’s cooperation, which Albany is withholding. None of this is precisely a failure — yet. It is the normal friction of governance meeting the permanent architecture of American urban capital. It is also, without exception, the machinery Ellis described. The real-estate state — the phrase is the author Samuel Stein’s — is not moved by elections. It is moved by ownership, and ownership is a formidable opponent. 

The wave of socialist mayors should be read honestly. It is not the Lethem vision reasserting itself as lived urban reality. Neither is it a victory for Jane Jacobs over Robert Moses. It is the Lethem vision appearing as electoral ethics inside cities whose physical and financial architecture is permanently Ellis. Americans now vote for the city of guilt and live in the city of fear. The vote registers the yearning; the architecture registers the verdict. You can campaign against the real-estate state, but you govern inside it. You can read The Fortress of Solitude on the F train, but the F train is delivering you to a neighborhood that priced out the families Lethem wrote about a decade before the book came out.

Guadagnino’s film, when it arrives, will be an accidental document of this settlement. He will find a Bateman, or he will not; the picture will be well-reviewed, or it will not; Bale’s ghost will be appeased, or it will not. None of that matters. Ellis’s novel, written in 1991 as a scalding joke about a world the author assumed his readers would recognize as grotesque, is now read by those readers as reportage — or even a how-to guide. Lethem’s novel, published in 2003 as an elegy for a Brooklyn block that was already mostly gone, is now read — when it is read — as speculative fiction. The city of fear won. The city of guilt is what we are now obliged to feel about having let it.