Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 827

Bloomberg recently came up with a new index to define the distribution of wealth across adults in the world . They're calling it your "net worth number" and the scale ranges from -2 to 11. Sadly, because the gap is so significant between the rich and the poor, it is based on a logarithmic or non-linear scale. Here's how they break it down:

Logarithms of negative numbers aren't a thing, and so, technically, if your liabilities exceed your assets (i.e. you have a negative net worth) you shouldn't appear on this index. But Bloomberg has added those people -- which could be students with debt, after all -- into the -2 category of their scale. These are people with a penny to their name.

Now, the number of adults in each bracket is purely an estimate. If you look at different sources, you will end up with different numbers. Bloomberg believes that there are 2,800 adult billionaires in the world (numbers 9 to 11); whereas Credit Suisse's estimate is about 1,600. (I wonder if it's easier to estimate the number of billionaires or the number of -2's.)

Still, it is eye-opening to see where most adults sit (at number 3) and how bottom heavy this index is.

I have written about Medellín, Colombia before on the blog. But the content has mostly come from my urbanist friends. About five years ago, my good friend Alex Feldman -- who is a Managing Director at U3 Advisors -- wrote this guest post about what other cities could learn from Medellín. He wrote it following a trip to the city for the World Urban Forum.

I haven't been to Colombia, but it's high up on my list. So I enjoyed watching the story of Medellín's turnaround in this Future of Cities Retro Report . It is the same story that Alex told over five years ago, but that doesn't make the lessons any less valuable. (If you can't see the embedded video at the bottom of this post, click here .)

Eugenie Birch -- who is interviewed in the video and who is a professor at my alma mater -- hits the nail on the head when she says that a lot of this stuff isn't rocket science. Look, we know how to lay pipes. We know how to build transportation systems. It comes down to this: Is there the political will?

https://youtu.be/BoRx_zIwiXM

Newly released data from the US Census Bureau has just revealed that the average household size is increasing for the first time in over 160 years. Put differently, the formation of new households has started to trail overall population growth. And that is causing the average number of people per household to increase.

In 1790, there were about 5.79 people per household in the United States. That number has been in decline pretty much since then, though there was a slight increase in the decade that began in 1850. Last year (2018), the number grew to 2.63 people per household (2.71 for owner occupied households and 2.48 for renter occupied households).

Here are two charts from Chris Fry's recent piece at the Pew Research Center :

So what is causing this?

Well, we know that US fertility rates aren't on the rise. In fact, they're generally viewed as hitting record lows. I say "generally" because there are a number of different ways to measure fertility. There's the general fertility rate, completed fertility, the total fertility rate, and others. But we are seeing some alignment here: fertility rates are down .

One probable explanation is the fact that more Americans are living multi-generationally. According to the Pew Research Center, 1 out of every 5 Americans lived in such a household as of 2016. Part of this may be a result of immigration. Asian and hispanic populations are more likely to live in a multi-generational household compared to white people.

Another demographic trend is the increase in people living in shared quarters, whether that might be with a roommate or someone else. This is interesting because it suggests that there's an affordability constraint. Are people being forced to "double up?" The current co-living trend is at least partially because of this.

These are all noteworthy trends because household formation is viewed as " the underlying driver of long-term demand for new housing ." I am assuming that more people per household also means less square footage per person.

Graphs: Pew Research Center