Reports of Suburbs’ Death Greatly Exaggerated

Demographers have been predicting that Americans will increasingly leave the suburbs to move into urban areas, but a new report shows that to be anything but the case.

A recent New York Times Op-Ed piece asserted that Americans were abandoning “fringe suburbs” for densely populated urban areas, and another Times piece called for policies that will drive jobs back to the urban core.

But an analysis of the 2010 Census by NewGeography.com Executive Editor Joel Kotkin for Forbes.com found that “Americans are voting with their feet in the opposite direction: toward the outer sections of the metropolis and to smaller, less dense cities.”

During the 2000s, only 8.6 percent of the population growth in metropolitan areas with more than 1 million residents took place in the core cities, and the rest occurred in the suburbs. That 8.6 percent represents a decline from 15.4 percent in the 1990s.

The census also reveals that over the past decade, construction of single-family houses grew far more than either multifamily or attached homes, accounting for almost 80 percent of all new households in America’s 51 largest cities.

Also, demographer Wendell Cox observed that the United States gained nearly 8 million commuters who drive to work alone in the last 10 years, despite a huge boost in gasoline prices, while mass transit ridership has remained flat.

Kotkin points to the example of Chicago, where the outer suburbs and exurbs gained more than half a million people in the 2000s while the inner suburbs and urban core lost about 200,000 people.

“It turns out that while urban land owners, planners and pundits love density, people for the most part continue to prefer space, if they can afford it,” writes Kotkin, author of the book “The City: A Global History.”

“In fact, the media reports about the ‘death’ of fringe suburbs seem to be more a matter of wishful thinking than fact.”

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