Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman cites eight ways in which the U.S. economy has changed in the decade after the financial meltdown, including widening income inequality, and the rise of the second city.
What Detroit, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and others have in common over the last decade? They were "left for dead," on the heels of the financial crisis, says Kelman. Once housing demand started to tick up again, Americans who could not afford to live elsewhere flocked to this cities. That "has turned the fundamental narrative of 20th century American migration on its head," by prompting major migration shifts, says the Redfin CEO, quoting the mayor of Oklahoma City, "it’s like the Wrath of Grapes.”
Ten years ago, on September 15, 2008, the great financial crisis began with Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy. I remember a board meeting in which an investor said her husband was loading the car with bottled water, in case our civilization collapsed. I remember learning in a lunch line that we had just hired another real estate agent, when I’d already begun thinking about a lay-off. I remember the lay-off. And I remember that many of the houses that I saw on home tours got uglier, because their owners had left in a hurry or in anger, or just knew there was no point in fixing them up. History had arrived.
