Archives for August 2010

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.