People forget. Demographics is glacial. We talk of surges, of waves, of tsunamis of new people and household patterns, but, by and large, demographics sculpts its changes in decades or scores of years, not this year, or next Spring selling season.

So, what happens on a yearly basis, or in four-year increments, for instance, tends to zig and zag--sometimes dramatically--on the way to reflecting where a macro pattern takes shape.

For home builders and residential developers, the notion of a "new geography" reshaping America's landscape is an important one, as its assumptions tie to where real estate investment might most productively anticipate human pathways, and meet housing needs before or as they take their new shape.

This decade--the period from 2010 to 2020--will go far to answering two (but not just two) very big, pressing questions for home builders and developers, and when, how, and where they and their investor and lender partners commit resources will separate industry winners from losers during this period of the mid-decade through 2025.

One burning issue is well on its way to clarity. It is [or was] the question of whether a new generation of adults--those now in their mid-20s to mid-30s--would take to homeownership or not. Our HIVE dean, demographer and housing policy expert Dowell Myers, analyzed the issue of whether young adult homeownership rate latency is a structural issue or cyclical aftershock of the Great Recession, and concludes that it's probably a bit of both, which we'd agree with.

Now, more and more of the data has started to reveal that hypothetical and intentional demand for homeownership among Millennials and real demand have a strengthening, not weakening, relationship. So, it's been "pent-up" after all, surprise, surprise. Which brings us to the second of two critically important questions that the current decade will reveal solutions to...

Where?

Smart money in home building and development will read between the lines of the obvious when it comes to the migration and eventual settling of the mega-force young-adult household that will shape the character, economics, social, and cultural contours of the first half of the 21st Century.

Yes, we'll look at the current scramble that wedges job opportunity against housing affordability, as does demographer Wendell Cox in this New Geography manifesto that asserts that middle-income households are being forced out and away from cities because of spiraling home prices and rents. Cox writes:

Between 1969 and 2014, the gap between the highest and lowest cost major metropolitan (over 1,000,000 population) housing markets had expanded 260 percent. This increase has been largely driven by markets that have become more restrictively regulated. In the more lightly regulated rental market the gap between the highest and lowest expanded only 30 percent, just one-ninth the change in the house price gap.

In some highly regulated markets, notably California, it has become all but impossible to build the consumer-favored detached housing in the suburbs associated with the “American Dream.”

Cox rages against "smart growth," declaring it the bane of a resilient city's existence, and depleting its most vital resource of all, human capital.

Migration to, and migration from have been signature themes in American history and society, and, by the looks of it, migration--or the lack of it--may print a profound design on the coming five to 10 years as young adults strike balances between a need for geographical flexibility and nimbleness and the need for geographical anchors that family life has historically engendered.

We look for signs, for proxy population patterns to give us hints, what vanguard groups and adjacent activity may reveal about a broader wave to come.

Here, New York Times staffer Quoctrung Bui looks at states that either attract or repel college graduates--one of those proxy population patterns--as a dashboard into newly shaping geographical and economic magnets.

Bui writes that cities, particularly clusters of cities, are where opportunity draws college educated young adults:

The map shows the total net migration figures for those with a college degree under 40 between 2000 and 2015. (People who grew up in one state, went to college in another and then moved somewhere else are counted as migrating from the state where they attended college.) Generally, Rust Belt and Midwest states like Ohio, Michigan and Iowa, and Plains states like South Dakota and Nebraska have seen the largest net losses in younger, college-educated people.

The places that are gaining college graduates tend to be coastal and Southern states like California, Maryland, Texas and South Carolina. Two exceptions to this trend are New York and Massachusetts, states that also produce a large number of college graduates to begin with.

But what Bui doesn't look at is the power of housing when housing is a power.

Housing has not emerged as a true economic power in the current recovery for a number of reasons, but a symptom of them all is that young adult buyers have not truly nor fully kicked the low-end of the market into gear.

Inventory of homes--new or resale--in the $160,000 to $250,000 range has been scarce or non-existent for most of housing's recovery as we know it. This will change. This is where home builders and developers have agency, where they can and will--someone will--overcome all the constraints and complaints about regulatory fees and local expenses, and deliver.

This is where the need is. And you know what? It's everywhere. In every market, big or small, there's a submarket where a sub-$200,000 house will sell as fast as you can build it.