In the News: Are Young People Going to Abandon Cities for the Suburbs?

We’ve previously discussed the debate concerning the future of the suburbs: specifically, whether young people are turning toward, or away, from suburban life in favor of a more urban experience.  On the one side, the Brookings Institute put out a white paper positing that traditional “white flight” from the cities to the suburbs was evolving into “bright flight” from the suburbs to the city — young people fleeing the suburbs to become part of the urban core. On the other side, we’ve seen pushback from some analysts pointing to Census data that actually supports the opposite argument, that young people are actually choosing to migrate to the suburbs.

Here’s Joel Kotkin in a piece that he published on his NewGeography site, which which was republished in Forbes, entitled  “Why America’s Young and Restless Will Abandon Cities for Suburbs”:

Some demographers claim that “white flight” from the city is declining, replaced by a “bright flight” to the urban core from the suburbs. “Suburbs lose young whites to cities,” crowed one Associated Press headline last year.

Yet evidence from the last Census show the opposite: a marked acceleration of movement not into cities but toward suburban and exurban locations. The simple, usually inexorable effects of maturation may be one reason for this surprising result. Simply put, when 20-somethings get older, they do things like marry, start businesses, settle down and maybe start having kids.

An analysis of the past decade’s Census data by demographer Wendell Cox shows this. Cox looked at where 25- to 34-year-olds were living in 2000 and compared this to where they were living by 2010, now aged 35 to 44. The results were surprising: In the past 10 years, this cohort’s presence grew 12% in suburban areas while dropping 22.7% in the core cities. Overall, this demographic expanded by roughly 1.8 million in the suburbs while losing 1.3 million in the core cities.

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These findings should inform the actions of those who run cities. Cities may still appeal to the “young and restless,” but they can’t hold millennials captive forever. Even relatively successful cities have turned into giant college towns and “post-graduate” havens — temporary way stations before people migrate somewhere else. This process redefines cities from enduring places to temporary resorts.

This is a really interesting debate, so we’ll continue to track it.  I think part of the divide depends on what you mean by “young people.”  The “bright flight” argument, to the extent that it points out the obvious tendency of unmarried, childless people in their 20s to move to cities, seems self-evident.  But the responding point, that those same people start to move to the suburbs in their 30s, seems equally self-evident.  That is, is anything really changing?

Put it this way: you could not have kept me in the suburbs when I was in my 20s if you pulled a gun on me.  For most of the last 20 years, in fact, I lived in cities even though I inexplicably kept getting jobs in the suburbs: I lived in Manhattan when I had a clerkship in Uniondale, Long Island; I lived in San Francisco when I was in graduate school in Palo Alto; and I lived in Manhattan for over 10 years while I taught in Brooklyn (technically, okay, not a suburb) and then started working in the Hudson Valley.

But over time, I not only found myself losing friends to the suburbs, but realizing that the things that were keeping me in the city were things that were becoming less a vital part of my life, and that I could have an easier life (particularly for me, who actually did a reverse commute) if I just gave in and move to the suburbs.

Which means I went through the exact process described by Kotkin: urban in my 20s, then moving to the suburbs as I got older.

To paraphrase an old quote from Winston Churchill: “If you’re not living in the city at twenty you have no heart, if you’re not living in the suburbs at forty you have no brain.”

In the News: Are the Suburbs Dying? Not quite yet.

As part of keeping this blog, I’ve been following some recent debates about whether the suburbs have started to lose their appeal.  This, as a newly minted suburban, is kind of important to me for a bunch of reasons, not the least of which is that I’m pretty sure I’d like to sell my condo someday, and I’m hoping that there will still be people who want to buy it.

Essentially, what’s going on is that some urbanphiles (academics, pundits, politicians, urban planners) have been seizing on census data to argue that the historical migration pattern from the cities to the suburbs has started to reverse itself as people begin to resent “suburban sprawl” and opt instead for more densely populated urban centers.  I’ve noted a few times, for example, the Brookings Institute report this year that coined the term “bright flight” to reflect how young, ambitious people are becoming more attracted to living in cities, which, as I’ve argued before, doesn’t seem like a particularly new development to me.

The underlying perspective behind this analysis is simple: suburban sprawl is bad, dense walkable downtown areas are good.  Driving bad, public transportation good. Stuff like that.  For example, New York Times columnist David Brooks was recently quoted saying that he had changed his previously positive view of suburbia, which he actually wrote a WHOLE BOOK ABOUT, and is now more “skeptical” on the theory that the disconnect people have when living at such remove to each other has potentially negative neuroscientific — okay, forget it, I can’t follow whatever he is trying to say.  It’s David Brooks.  Assume he had a cup of coffee in a diner and overheard a waitress say something to a trucker, and now he’s going to write a whole new book that entirely refutes his last book.

Anyway, the general point is that suburban sprawl is a bad thing, and that more people should live in walkable, ecofriendly, interconnected communities.  Even as a suburbanite, I don’t disagree with any of that.  Indeed, when I moved from the city, I was particularly looking for an area that provided a walkable downtown, which I found in Nyack.  No one likes sprawl.

But that said, I’m not so sure I buy the idea that Americans have turned their backs on the suburbs, at least not yet.   Indeed, we’re starting to see some pushback, including two interesting pieces from NewGeography.  In “The Myth of the Back-to-The-City Migration”, Joel Kotkin, NewGeography’s executive editor, argues that urbanphiles are engaging in wishful thinking to believe that “America’s love affair with the suburbs will soon be over,” and that the “great migration back to the city hasn’t occurred.”

Kotkin points to a special report in NewGeography by demographer Wendell Cox, a former LA transportation commissioner and visiting professor in Paris, who analyzed recent Census data to conclude:

In short, the nation’s urban cores continue to lose domestic migrants with a vengeance, however are doing quite well at attracting international migration. Thus, core growth is not resulting from migration from suburbs or any other part of the nation, but is driven by international migration.

For example, ccording to the data, the New York Metropolitan area lost about 1.9 million people from 2000 to 2009, with the “core” area of the city losing about 1.2 million and the suburbs losing about 700,000.  All told, for almost 50 metropolitan areas, the core city areas lost about 4.5 million people, while suburban counties gained more than 2.6 million domestic migrants.  Cox concluded that “the trends of the past decade indicate a further dispersal of America’s metropolitan population,” and that “the more urban the core county, the greater are the domestic migration losses.”  So there’s really no data to support the idea that historical urban-to-suburban migration patterns are reversing themselves.

Finally, with regard to the “bright flight” argument made by Brookings, the “revelation” that young people want to live in cities, Kotkin points to survey data showing that even they recognize that they probably won’t stay in the city forever:

Research by analysts Morley Winograd and Mike Hais, authors of the ground-breaking “Millennial Makeover,” indicates this group is even more suburban-centric than their boomer parents. Urban areas do exercise great allure to well-educated younger people, particularly in their 20s and early 30s. But what about when they marry and have families, as four in five intend? A recent survey of millennials by Frank Magid and Associates, a major survey research firm, found that although roughly 18% consider the city “an ideal place to live,” some 43% envision the suburbs as their preferred long-term destination.

In other words: people live in the suburbs when they’re kids, move to the city when they’re young, and move back to the suburbs when they have kids of their own.  I’m one of those people, so I guess it’s nice to know that I’m not alone.