More Census Data Indicating that the Suburbs are Growing

May 2, 2012 by

Wendell Cox of New Geography has an interesting analysis of suburban migration patterns coming out of some new Census data.  As we’ve discussed before, the Census reveals that the suburban population grew from the 2000 census, partly at the expense of urban areas but even more through migration from more rural areas:

Despite the higher gasoline prices and the illusions of a press that is often anti-suburban, both the suburbs and the exurbs continued to attract people from elsewhere in the nation. The core counties, which contain the core cities, continued to lose domestic migrants to other parts of the country, principally to the suburbs and the exurbs of the large metropolitan areas.

Cox also points out that current economic conditions have actually reduced domestic migration, particularly among young people who would be more likely to start moving around if they actually had somewhere to go — like, for a job.

We’ve commented on Cox’s work before.  He’s particularly vocal about challenging the prevailing assumption that people want to live in dense urban environments, arguing that the Census data simply doesn’t support that idea, and in fact shows increasing migration to the suburbs.  move

Some interesting charts and data.  Check it out.

Filed Under: News, Suburbs versus Cities Tagged With: ,

Who’s Moving to the Suburbs? Pawn Shops, That’s Who!

April 28, 2012 by

If you live in the suburbs, and you’ve been wondering how you can offload that used Rolex for some walking around money, I have good news for you:

A slice of urban grit is moving to the suburbs.

Pawn shops are becoming increasingly more popular in areas outside New York City, and some residents aren’t pleased about it.

The sign of the pawnbroker, familiar in the concrete jungle of Gotham, is coming soon to a suburban street near you.

This is very exciting news, I think.  I’ve become a big fan of all those cable shows featuring pawn brokers buying up stuff, so I’m looking forward to something like “Pawn Stars: Westchester” on my basic cable lineup this fall.

And anytime that I find some antiques lying around the house, and am looking to get a good 20 cents on the dollar on my way to Atlantic City, I no longer have to lug them into the city.

Seriously, do people really need pawn shops anymore? Ebay is basically a big pawn shop where you can sell basically anything and probably get a better price rather than negotiating with a guy who probably knows more about what you’re selling than you do, and does this all day long.

While I’m on the subject, why do people bring specialty items into pawn stores?Every week on Pawn Stars, some guy comes in with a Civil War rifle or something, and big bald Rick tells them he’ll have to bring an expert in to appraise it.  Why don’t those people just bring it to the expert in the first place?  And then why do they stand there and let the appraiser value it, only to then sell it for 60 cents on the dollar to Rick?  Those people drive me crazy.  GO TO EBAY!

All that said, as the honorary and self-appointed driver of the “Moving to the Suburbs of Manhattan” Welcome Wagon, let me just say to the owners of all these wonderful pawn shops — Welcome to the Suburbs!

Filed Under: News, Who's Moving to the Suburbs? Tagged With: , ,

Where Do Most New York Cheating Spouses Live? In the Suburbs!

April 28, 2012 by

Oh man, this is not good.

Lots of coverage this week of a report from Ashley Madison, a website apparently designed for people looking to have affairs, identifying the best places in the New York to try to cheat on your spouse.  Essentially, Ashley Madison looked at the overall population of towns and cities, and then calculated the percentage of people who were members of the site.

So, for example, at least 3% of the adults who live in Great Neck, Long Island are on the site, living in cheater’s paradise. That’s pretty alarming.  I mean, if you live in Great Neck, and you’re in a room with 33 other people, statistically speaking one of you is on Ashley Madison looking for some strange.  And one of those people might be your spouse…..

Indeed, the report showed that seven of the top 10 cheating areas were in the suburbs.  Here’s the full top 10 list:

1). Great Neck, L.I.

2). Park Slope, Brooklyn

3). Upper East Side

4). Forest Hills, Queens

5). TriBeCa

6). New City – Rockland County

7). Douglaston, Queens

8). Riverdale, The Bronx

9). Howard Beach, Brooklyn

10). Garden City, L.I.

I think that’s a little surprising.  After all, who would have thought that the quiet, boring suburbs would be such hotbeds of sweaty illicit action?  I mean, seriously — New City?  I’ve been to New City.  I don’t even think that the people in New City have sex with their spouses, much less other people’s spouses.  I need to get out more, apparently.

How can this be? Well, the methodology is a little whack, since it’s based on taking the total number of people who live in a town/city and then dividing it by the number of people on the site.  So I can see how smaller towns might be more likely to make the top 10 list, simply because they have fewer people and a relatively small number of members could forge a higher percentage.

But it also might actually be a reflection of the general atmosphere of the suburbs: more married people, more boredom, more free weekends with not a lot to do. And maybe people in the suburbs need a site like Ashley Madison to hook up, since you don’t have the urban density of the city to provide fresh new opportunities to destroy your married life and ultimately cut your life savings in half.

I have to be honest that I’m very happy that Nyack didn’t make the list, because I have enough problems at home.

Filed Under: Humor, Living in the Suburbs, News Tagged With: ,

Who’s Moving to the Suburbs? Ryan Reynolds, That’s Who!

April 26, 2012 by

Hollywood Life is reporting that movie star Ryan Reynolds is moving to the suburbs! And not just the suburbs, but the Manhattan suburbs:

Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds want to escape city life and settle down in the suburbs, Us Weekly reports. We think they’re ready to take the leap!

The Gossip Girl star and her super-hot boyfriend of six months “have been looking around different areas of Connecticut” for a house, an insider tells the mag.

They were spotted strolling through New Canaan, an upscale town about an hour outside of NYC, on April 12, and checked out several home decor stores while they were there, according to Us.

Blake, 24 and Ryan, 35, “would like to live, as much as they can, like a normal couple,” the insider says. “They love getting out of the city and appreciate a slower pace.”

Hopefully the couple doesn’t plan to slow down their careers, though — we don’t know what we’d do without Serena on Gossip Girl!

This is a pretty nice get for us in the suburbs, although I have to be honest that I have absolutely no idea who Blake Lively is…….

Filed Under: News, Who's Moving to the Suburbs? Tagged With: , ,

Who’s Moving to the Suburbs? Usher, That’s Who!

April 24, 2012 by

First Beyonce and Jay Z, and now……Usher?

Could R&B singer USHER be prepared to settle down and make ANOTHER family???? Well he was out HOUSE HUNTING yesterday in Hudson, NY – a FAMILY FRIENDLY town outside of NYC.

Okay, so it’s from website I’ve never heard of, and no one else picked it up, and it looks like all he was doing was driving around Hudson County (hey! shout out to Hudson!), probably not for himself.

But I take whatever I can get. Sooooo……………

Welcome, Usher!  I don’t actually know any of your music, because I’m so completely lame, but you’re famous and all, so we’re thrilled to have you aboard!

Filed Under: News, Who's Moving to the Suburbs? Tagged With:

Who’s Moving to the Suburbs? Lesbians, That’s Who!

February 28, 2012 by

Here at the Move to Suma, we’ve been keeping track of all the people who are moving to the suburbs, which is really just a thinly-veiled attempt to validate my own decision.  The more people who are moving to the suburbs, the better I feel.  So in the past year or so, we’ve commented on census studies showing that immigrants and African-Americans are increasingly migrating from the cities to the suburbs, and pointed out a few celebrities who are also making the move.

So now, we also want to welcome our newest addition — lesbians!

It used to be that gay, lesbian and bi-sexual people in the suburbs found the climate less than welcoming. LGBT people had to blend in to make it in suburban neighborhoods. Not so now. These days suburban living is viewed as a real option for LGBT people and they are moving to suburbs that are close to NYC as well as towns further out.

According to Gary Gates, a demographer from the Urban Institute who did a study for HRC after the 2000 census, gay male couples largely prefer urban environments (45%) to suburbs (41.3%) and lesbian couples settle more often in suburban locales (46%) than city centers (38.2%).

The post from Its Conceivable recounts the story of a lesbian couple with a one-year old daughter who moved to New Rochelle, a lovely suburb of Manhattan, where they’ve found a community of new York City “ex-pats.”

So what do we think of those stats, showing such a mixed preference among gays and lesbians for the cities versus the suburbs?  I mean, it certainly flies in the face of conventional wisdom that the LGBT community would prefer the traditional greater levels of tolerance and diversity of the cities.  But I think key to those stats is that they come from COUPLES, not singles.  That is, it’s sort of interesting that gay and lesbian couples, particularly, I imagine, couples with children, have the same impulse to move to the suburbs that straight couples do.  My guess is that gay and lesbian singles would have much stronger preferences for the city (which is, again, not so much different from straight people).

People are people, you know?  Gay, straight, as they get older they have the same sort of changes in their lives that sometimes compel changes in where they live.

As we’ve noted a few times in this space, it is interesting to see all these demographic studies that are showing how the suburbs are becoming more ethnic and diverse: immigrants, African-Americans, and now the LGBT community.  Most of these people come to the suburbs for the same reasons: more space, cheaper living, and an easier place to raise kids. It’s a universal need as you get older.  But the nice part is that as we start to see those changes in the suburbs, we might actually find the suburbs becoming more “livable” to exiles.  After all, one of the reasons a 17 year resident of Manhattan like me was willing to move to the suburbs was the opportunity to live somewhere like Nyack, which is relatively diverse and lefty and gay-friendly and all that.  It would be nice to think that the suburbs will eventually evolve to provide more neighborhoods like that, places where you don’t feel like you’re selling your soul when you leave the city.

So welcome to Kim and Philippa, the couple from the story, and welcome to everyone else joining me in the suburbs.

Filed Under: Living in the Suburbs, News, Who's Moving to the Suburbs? Tagged With: ,

Why Do People Move to the Suburbs? Simply Put, They Have Kids

February 22, 2012 by

Why do people move to the suburbs?  Let’s think about that for a minute, break down that question.

Note that the question is not, “why do people live in the suburbs,” which is, in my mind, a very different question.  People might live in the suburbs for a bunch of reasons. Maybe that’s where they grew up, and never left. Maybe that’s where they work, so it doesn’t occur to them to live anywhere else. Maybe they just never had the hankering for the big city lights, and prefer the quieter, slower pace traditionally associated with the picket fences and all that. Maybe it’s simple inertia.  Maybe they just like the Cheescake Factory.  It could be a million reasons.

But our question today is different: “why do people MOVE to the suburbs,” which implies that those people are currently living somewhere else, probably a city.  In that case, the answer is usually simple — they’re having a kid.

That’s what it almost always comes down to.  You don’t see a lot of happy-go-lucky 30 year olds — single, no kids, with a job — who suddenly decide to trade in their urban life so they can commute an hour or so every day to work. No single person wakes up one morning saying, “Hey, I’m just getting tired of Asian-Latin fusion takeout, and muddled drinks, and lots of 20-something single hotties who enjoy casual sexual relations, and being able to take cabs home when I decide to spontaneously celebrate Cinco de Mayo in September.  What I REALLY need is a guest bedroom!  Time to move to the suburbs!!!!”

No one does that. Single people don’t need space, they don’t care about schools, they don’t generally want the quiet. Even for married couples without kids, the tradeoffs of the suburbs versus the city don’t seem to make sense, so long as they can live in a a two room coop without ending up in a War of the Roses situation.

No, any discussion about moving to the suburbs is inexorably, invariably, going to become entwined with the decision to have kids. If it was all about you, then you’d stay in the city.  But when it’s suddenly all about a mini-you that doesn’t have a particular affinity for 20-something hotties or delivery Vietnamese or infused tequila, and who is currently sleeping in a crib at the foot of your bed, you start to re-think your priorities.

I did things a little backwards, of course. We moved from the city in 2009 simply on the anticipation of becoming parents in the near future, and our expectation that life would simply be easier for us and better for him/her in the suburbs. But for people who already have kids, who are actually living in confined space with a little child and realizing just how much becoming a parent is inconsistent with remaining an urbanized sophisticate hipster, I think the choice is even more compelling.

I was thinking about this because I came across this lovely piece by Jordan Reid in her Ramshackleglam blog, where she writes about her fear of how her life would change in moving to the suburbs: the fear that she won’t make friends, or that her friends won’t be the “kinds of friends that I have in my life now,” or that she’ll wind up feeling like she settled for a life that’s less exciting or interesting than the one she would have had in the city.

Ultimately, though, she writes that it ended up not being a difficult decision, particularly once she considered not what she wanted, but what her son needed:

Most of all, though, the reason we want to move is that city life is not what we want for our son. I grew up here, and I had a great childhood, but I want something different for him. I want him to have a yard to run around in with Lucy and Virgil. I want him to go fishing on Saturdays with his Dad not because it’s a big, special production involving car rentals and long drives, but rather because that’s just what they feel like doing. I want to pick up our pumpkin in a patch, not in a grocery store. I want him to have a swing set of his very own.

****

But now it’s not about us anymore, not really: it’s about a little man who smiles so much when he looks out our New York City window, even when there’s nothing to see outside but the apartment building across the way, that all we want to do is set him free to study the sky. And when we take that into account…

well…

it’s not really a decision at all.

It’s just what we’re going to do. 

It’s really a beautiful piece, certainly better than anything I’ve ever written about the subject, so I’m looking forward to seeing what she has to say once she settles in.

And it certainly reinforces the point that for some reason has eluded me for so long. I’ve been belaboring my decision about moving to the suburbs, painting it as something I did by choice, something that I could second-guess if it didn’t work out.  But the more I think about it, the more I realize that, like Ms. Reid, I didn’t really have a choice.

The bottom line: people don’t move to the suburbs because they want to, they move because they have to.  And the decision often isn’t theirs to make. So I should give myself a break….

Filed Under: Best of, Living in the Suburbs, Moving to the Suburbs Tagged With: , ,

Who’s Moving to the Suburbs? More Asian-Americans, That’s Who!

February 7, 2012 by

The Associated Press reported last week that Asian-Americans are increasingly moving to the suburbs from the inner cities::

America’s historic Chinatowns, home for a century to immigrants seeking social support and refuge from racism, are fading as rising living costs, jobs elsewhere and a desire for wider spaces lure Asian-Americans more than ever to the suburbs.

***

Nationwide, about 62% of Asian-Americans in the nation’s large metropolitan areas live in the suburbs, up from 54% in 1990 and the highest ever. Tied with Hispanics as the fastest-growing group, the nation’s 4.4 million Asians are more likely than other minorities to live in the suburbs; only whites, at 78%, are higher.

Since 2000, nearly three-fourths of Asian population growth in the U.S. occurred in suburbs, many of them in the South.

This all makes sense, right?  We’ve noted before the trend for immigrants in general moving from the cities to the suburbs, so it’s not surprising that Asian-Americans are following the same path.  Indeed, it’s kind of what happened in previous generations — my Italian grandparents settled in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, but their four sons all ended up scattering to the suburbs of Dutchess, Rockland, Long Island, and Staten Island.  That’s pretty much the American experience.  Immigrants are initially attracted to urban centers, particularly those with a high concentration of fellow ex-patriates, but as they have kids, or as their kids have kids, they eventually find their way to the open spaces.  So it’s no surprise that Asian-Americans are doing the same thing.

A hat tip to the 8asian.com blog, which commented on the AP piece and shared a more personal perspective on the trend.  Unsurprisingly, as with most people who move to the suburbs, it’s all about the kids:

I later asked my parents why we moved to the suburbs in the first place. Why did my mother have to endure such a terrible commute? Why did we pick up and leave such a familiar community and move far away from our friends and relatives? For me, it was an uncomfortable experience. Besides having to make new friends, there were just so many cultural differences between the city and the suburbs.

My parents told me that they did it for the schools. More than anything else, they were worried that my sister and I wouldn’t get a good enough education in the city. What if we didn’t do well enough to qualify for entry into one of the specialized public schools? The schools we were zoned for were terrible. And not only were the schools in Great Neck strong, the neighborhoods were also quiet and safe. There, my parents wouldn’t have to worry quite as much about our safety and well-being.

Basically, my parents decided to move for the benefit of their children.

To me, that’s really the reason why so many APA families have migrated to the suburbs. It’s not merely to achieve some vague sense of the American Dream – a nice house, a front yard, and a prettier neighborhood.

It does seem like every time I come across someone writing about the difficult decision to move to the suburbs, they talk about the kids.  It’s the same for hipster urban couples as it is for people recent immigrants living in Chinatown.

All that said, I still find the suburbs pretty white-bread.  My wife and son are Asian, and it’s not unusual to look around when we’re out at a restaurant or a movie and find that they’re pretty much the only minorities in the place. But I know that in other areas of the suburbs you’ll find pretty high concentrations of ethnic residents, like the huge Korean-American population in Palisades Park and Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey.

It’s a funny thing.  We call the suburbs “white,” but only because we’re largely talking about second- and third-generation immigrants who migrated in droves 50 years ago. After all, I’m “white,” but my Sicilian grandfather was certainly not “white” back 75 years ago when he changed his name from “Miserandino” to Rand. (chop off some letters on each side, and become an Anglo!).  We don’t think of Italian food as ethnic anymore, partly because of assimilation but also just because over time ethnicities weave themselves into the general fabric of society.

Now, when we talk about ethnic Americans, we’re talking about the Asian-American or Latino-American populations. But it might be that in 25 years we’ll be complaining about how the suburbs still lack diversity, but only because our understanding of diversity will have changed. As someone in a mixed-race family, I certainly would love to see an increase in ethnic diversity in my area, for all the obvious reasons.

Not the least of which is that hopefully, at some point, I’ll be able to get a decent bowl of soup without having to drive 25 miles into Manhattan.

Filed Under: Living in the Suburbs, News, Who's Moving to the Suburbs? Tagged With: , ,

Who’s Moving to the Suburbs? Jay Z and Beyonce, That’s Who!

January 15, 2012 by

Lots of cool people have moved to the suburbs, not just (ahem) me.  We had Amy Winehouse a few years ago, back when she was alive.  Then we got reports that more immigrants and African-Americans were moving into the suburbs. Then big-fat-and-now-thin-and-now-sorta-fat-again Jonah Hill.

You see?  It’s not just me, lots of people are fleeing the cities for the joys of picket fences and sports bars and no food delivery.

But now we have our biggest get yet:

MediaTakeOut.com got a SUPER WORLD EXCLUSIVE . . . Beyonce and Jay Z have CHANGED their primary residence . .. from NYC – to SCARSDALE, a suburb OUTSIDE of NYC.

We spoke to a person with FIRST HAND KNOWLEDGE who tell us that Jigga and Bey have been working FOR MONTHS, to finish a COMPLETE RENOVATION on a MEGA MANSION that the couple bought nearly 3 years ago.

According to our insider, the new mansion underwent a $2M RENO. The new house has a STATE OF THE ART security system and a tennis court and a full basketball court. They also made a separate GUEST HOUSE where Bey’s mom will use, when she comes to town.

So what about their $10M 8,000 Sq ft. Tribeca apartment? We’re told they’ll use it when their “in the city.”

Must be nice . . .

How about that, people?  Not so bad — maybe the biggest celebrity couple in the world, and they’re moving to SUMA.

Welcome to the suburbs, guys, love that music stuff that you do.

Filed Under: News, Who's Moving to the Suburbs? Tagged With: , , ,

First a Dog, Now a Baby: My Poop-Filled Life

January 7, 2012 by

I used to have a poop-free life.  Not completely poop-free, of course. I had to deal with my own poop.  Not a whole lot of fun there.  But at least it was only mine. One person’s pool.  Ahh, the good old days.

Then I got a dog, and that was the end of the poop-free life. I had to deal with poop pretty much every day. On a good day, it was a good poop: a poop on the grass, during our daily walks, while I was armed with a baggie. Or a poop on the wee-wee pad in my bathroom, which has become Kozy the Dog’s designated “inside poop zone.”  On a bad day, though, a bad poop: a poop, say, on the living room rug.  But good or bad, there was poop.  Every day.

Now I have a baby, and my life is nothing but poop. Bad poop. People warned me, but I never quite appreciated how babies are basically poop machines.  They’re amazing, these little tiny beautiful creatures, constantly pumping out an astounding flow of truly ghastly poop.

How do they do that? What kind of unholy alchemy is this? This transubstantiation of liquid into solid, or at least something that is partly solid.  You put in a little bit of harmless-looking formula, and you get back a noxious miasma of inhuman sludge.

People ask me what’s the biggest change now that I’ve moved to the suburbs.  That.  That’s the biggest change.

  • City = Poop Free
  • Suburbs = Poop Filled

Now, I know that I can’t blame it on the suburbs.  It’s really more correlation than causation.  I know that. But of the many things that I miss about living in the city, right at the top of what is a pretty long list is this: the loss of my poop-free life.

Filed Under: Best of, Having a Dog in the Suburbs, Humor, My Life in the Suburbs, Parenting in the Suburbs Tagged With: , ,
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