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Americans' Shift To The Suburbs Sped Up Last Year (fivethirtyeight.com)
Jed Kolko, writing for FiveThirtyEight: The suburbanization of America marches on. Population growth in big cities slowed for the fifth-straight year in 2016, according to new census data, while population growth accelerated in the more sprawling counties that surround them. The Census Bureau on Thursday released population estimates for every one of the more than 3,000 counties in the U.S. I grouped those counties into six categories: urban centers of large metropolitan areas; their densely populated suburbs; their lightly populated suburbs; midsize metros; smaller metro areas; and rural counties, which are outside metro areas entirely. The fastest growth was in those lower-density suburbs. Those counties grew by 1.3 percent in 2016, the fastest rate since 2008, when the housing bust put an end to rapid homebuilding in these areas. In the South and West, growth in large-metro lower-density suburbs topped 2 percent in 2016, led by counties such as Kendall and Comal north of San Antonio; Hays near Austin; and Forsyth, north of Atlanta.
If self driving cars take off expect the suburbs to spread even further. A lot of people who wouldn't like an hour's drive each way wouldn't mind an hour reading, watching tv, and eating breakfast.
Cities are hotbeds of centralization enabled corruption.
Where the pie grows so large people are willing to do anything to carve off their slice. And where you get to pay for it.
Spend $4000 a month living in a shoe box apartment or put that into a mortgage on a decent sized house. Decisions, decisions.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
More Republicans!!!!
Dark Reflection
City planner always seem baffled that people like big houses on big lots in the suburbs. Even if it means you have to drive to get anywhere parking is free in the suburbs so most people are ok with that!
Cities are expensive.
An internal system operation returned the error "The operation completed successfully.".
It's not black people, it's angry poor people in general.
Yeah, but the suburbs are full of pickup trucks carting around uneducated white trash...
Since the suburbs are cheaper than the city n1ggers are moving there too.
You will have to keep moving to increasingly distant trailer parks every few years if you want to make sure that your trailer park is at least 80% white trash.
Suburbanization isn't a problem. If we planned cities properly we could serve city centers with high speed rail to secondary cities (suburbs, exurbs) and ease the urban housing crunch. Of course this would require taxation, debt, eminent domain, and operating at a loss for decades, which is not popular with short term thinkers, despite the fact that rail infrastructure has a lifespan measured in centuries.
By living outside the city I can avoid future "protests" which involves burning cars, looting businesses, and assaulting bystanders.
(((dB)))
Millennials are having kids and figuring out the school systems in the cities are generally horrible, thus the flight to the suburbs.
Well, in general, you do see less violence in the suburbs than the densely populated urban areas, and the school systems are often much better away from the inner cities.
You can't blame people for wanting to try to raise their families in a much healthier environment.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
It's no longer about where the jobs are. For a lot of people the office is wherever the worker happens to be. I work for major corporation but do so from home full time. I only have to physically visit a company facility a few times a year.
We just got back from three weeks in Arizona to catch spring ball, but it only cost me about a week of vacation, mostly taken an hour at a time. By staying on Eastern time and taking my laptop and Skype headset I could start my day at 4:30 AM and be done by noon. That left the whole afternoon to catch a game and do whatever. As long as I got to bed by 9:30 or so it was very sustainable. Most of my co-workers had no idea where I was because it didn't matter.
yeah, need to get away from the destructive influence of black tar heroin etc. suburbs get the good stuff, percs and oxy plus soccer moms.
Adding an extra 40min round trip to an existing 30min round trip dropped our mortgage principle over 33%. This is incredibly important when you look at interest rates. 5% was standard when bought, and probably will be again soon if it isn't. Right now it's apparently 4%. Let's say you finance $360k. Over the life time of a 30 year mortgage, that is $208k of interest and you only get a fraction of that back in deductions. So really, spending a lot more to be close to a city is sending trashbags full of cash to the banks.
Only fools move to the suburbs.
My walk to work is around 40 minutes, or I get there in 20 on transit. Or I can bike it in 15 minutes.
In the suburbs around Seattle it's 1.5 to 3 hours. Sometimes it's 4 hours.
Choose wisely.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Now, I understand WHY a city is more expensive. Because stuff costs more, because there is more tax, more demand for less space, etc etc etc. But WHY are these underlying services more expensive?
Taxes:
Sure, there are more people to service and a few more services (pedestrian crossing signals) but there are a lot more people who pay for them. And many don't even live in the city but spend money there!
Space:
So the land has more demand. But why can't we go vertical as needed? Most cities have less than 10 buildings over 20 floors.
Restaurants/Movies/Clubs/etc
There are a lot more customers to provide for revenues. More economies of scale, should be cheaper.
Infrastructure
How is it that cabling/piping/ducting a building is more expensive than across 25 acres of a suburban neighborhood? Cities may have public transit, but less roads to maintain, less area to cleanup, less trash pickup points, etc.
What am I missing?
I live near Detroit (a bordering city, no less). While Detroit is unique in the magnitude of its problems, many urban cities in the USA likely have many of the same problems to a lesser degree. The simple problem with Detroit is the property taxes are sky high and you get practically nothing for them: barely any police and hideous schools. It ain't rocket science. That's a raw deal.
It's no surprise.
This is a sign of a shortage of higher density living in the urban core. There are multiple reasons for that, the power of the NIMBY lobby being one of them. But for the demographic of young single professionals at the early stages of their careers, vibrant and compact walkable neighborhoods are so much in demand that rents are being driven sky high and lower income people are being displaced to the suburbs where they are either saddled with longer commutes of forced to find jobs on the periphery.
Suburbs are great for when you get a little older and want to raise a family, but in the meantime the city is where it's at.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
It's almost as if cities acted like petri dishes.. so weird..
When the costs associated with tearing down the old and putting up something new is comparable to just buying up new land and building on that.. then urban decay will stop.
Since that isn't something that business would do on it's own as it isn't as profitable, it's up to government to regulate it.
I'd love to live in an urban area, or more urban anyway. The trouble is, decent apartments in urban and semi-urban areas cost 2-3 times as much money, and you get less out of it. In my city there's no actual benefit to urban living, but they still charge like you're in a proper big city. The only people who do it are people with so much money that it's irrelevant, and young people with money and no sense.
Yeah, I;m scared of all those Angry Irish at night in the Harlem.
One of the suspicious item I see in this analysis is the inclusion of "High-density suburbs". I've seen a bunch of these kinds of stories where the "suburbs" in question are comprised of high-rise apartments.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I'm moving out to the sticks. Where my doublewide is on 34 acres you can't see the fucking neighbors.
Pollution, thats right, cities by definition are polluted as hell in many cases there is so much bad stuff in the air, no wonder most of the high end building needs intake air filters lol, and then you wonder why people get weird sickness.
This is not advised by the sociologist and anthropologist experts, who, it goes without saying, are above the ordinary opinions of ordinary people like you and me. You see, when people are in the herd (like down town metros, etc) they think more about how they look to others, ettiquette, disguising their moral flaws and despair, etc. If people are separated and have their wide open spaces they could start reflecting on life, their values, and start measuring up to their inner ideals instead -which is (obviously) bad, bad and wrong.
yeah, need to get away from the destructive influence of black tar heroin etc. suburbs get the good stuff, percs and oxy plus soccer moms.
Actually those suburban soccer moms are on heroin too, but that is a step up from those soccer moms on meth...
Some of us just want to be left alone. We don't want to be cheek to jowl with our neighbors. We want a nice little quiet place to escape to, a place to do our thing without being bothered. I'm out in the country and I love it. I'm still in a subdivision, but they're large lots so you have some privacy. I can work out in my back yard and tend to my little garden. The hand full of problems I've had with neighbors (such as one who kept letting her dog poop in my yard and not clean it up) were quickly handled by the HOA. I don't know what HOA's others belong to, but my fees are only $500 a year and most of that is for road maintenance.
There are some advantages to city life for sure. I'd love to be closer to those nice farmers markets and little coffee and book shops, but it's not worth the expense and hassle to me. I couldn't afford a place a quarter of the size of my house in the big city. I'm quite happy being out in the country and being left alone.
Did you know that your children are more likely to die violently in a rural area than in the city? And people in rural areas are also more likely to die from heart disease and cancer, among other diseases and injuries.
A suburb is a cross between an urban and a rural area, so it isn't clear at all that a suburb is a "much healthier environment" than a city.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
Sure, you can improve commute time with self driving cars, but why would you invest so much energy into this? My commute is 0 minutes - I work from home. 0 wasted time and I can move/live anywhere. If I were to imagine the next step - it would be VR/AR headset to see all coworkers in a virtual space that would cost way less than new car with AI.
and I have some of the best dark skies in the country. Most people have never seen a dark sky, and underestimate its value.
Well, in general, you do see less violence in the suburbs than the densely populated urban areas, and the school systems are often much better away from the inner cities.
You can't blame people for wanting to try to raise their families in a much healthier environment.
Of course you can. They will call you racist, xenophobic, and probably a few other things for simply wanting decent conditions to raise your family. White flight is blaming white people for making a very rational move to exit violence where they will be blamed and not protected.
It is the standard American dream and a healthy thing for people to have a little space of their own. Anyone that is against this is probably pushing an agenda.
I read the opposite is true, at least for Chicagoland. In order for companies to innovate, they need to hire Millennials. Millennials only want to live in the city. So companies in the suburbs are moving into Chicago. Then they can hire Millennials, innovate, and make profit!
If Millennials are really moving back out to the suburbs, these companies will find themselves having to move back out from the suburbs from the city, so they can hire cool and hip Millennials.
Yeah, I'll bet you live in a vibrant 80% black neighborhood and send your kids to 80% black schools.
Violent Crime and murder should not be conflated with car wrecks, which is what they do.
Two entirely different things.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Any port in a storm...
I was looking for somewhere to comment on population density, I guess it goes here.
Anyway, yes, cities continue to lose population, but I think that's less of any of the factors mentioned than merely changes in population density. In most renewing urban areas, old housing gets replaced by new housing that houses fewer people. While some of this is due to cost (the single mom and 4 kids can't afford the new lofts), I think the core cause is just the plain reconfiguration. Where I live, in a metro area of about half a million, there are some ungodly amount of new apartments and condos coming on line in the next two years- something like 2500 units. You'd think then that the urban population would be ready to explode, comparatively, but those maybe-lived-in-by-3-people units are overwhelmed by the fact that a 8-story women's shelter was converted, 3 15+-story 'transient hotels' are being converted, a 10-story YMCA was demolished, several old apartment buildings in the flood plain were torn down- and that's to say nothing of the old brick 2- to 3-story buildings that once were divided apartments but have now become 1 floor of hipster retail with the owners living on their own above.
or to the movies, the ballet, the opera, plays, musicals, clubs, concerts, parks, dog parks, botanic gardens, thousands of different restaurants, or just take a nice walk over the Brooklyn Bridge, or ride the ferry to Governor's island.
But yeah, blowing up a tree with a stick of dynamite sounds cool, too. To each his own.
". They will call you racist, xenophobic, and probably a few other things for simply wanting decent conditions to raise your family. White flight is blaming white people for making a very rational move to exit violence where they will be blamed and not protected."
And now, while there is still an ongoing shift of population going to the burbs, young people moving back to inner-city neighborhoods and fixing them up is also held to be racist and xenophobic for some reason. That's why nobody listens to academic SJWs any more.
Yeah, I;m scared of all those Angry Irish at night in the Harlem.
Don't know about Harlem, but I'm scared of all those Angry Irish around Sheriff Street...
And people in rural areas are also more likely to die from heart disease and cancer [cdc.gov], among other diseases and injuries.
Come now, it's hardly that difficult: obviously this is a case of causation vs. correlation; moving to the country clearly doesn't have to turn you into a country-ass hick who dips his snickers bars in TBHQ-saturated pork fat...
Hmmmm. That's kinda interesting. For anyone paying attention, three people (or at least one person and two cowards who may be people) all said essentially the same thing but in different ways with different tones and highlighting different details. -1 Troll, -1, +4 informative. Salesmanship, diplomatic tact, and a dose of political correctness makes all the world of a difference.
1. Did you factor in that your home is a heavily leveraged investment? Yes you are paying more interest in the city, but you also have a more valuable asset; an asset that appreciates. You get to keep the appreciation and can pay the bank interest in inflated dollars.
2. Did you calculate the cost of owning a car (maintenance, insurance, speeding tickets, registration, gas)? because not needing to own a car (or cars) in the city helps to offset some of the increased living expense.
3. What about the cost of commuting, both in time and money?
Do the math. People in cities pay more to live in a smaller location--but 20 years down the road they typically have a higher net worth because the increased expense is towards an appreciating asset, rather than spent on consumables (gas) or depreciating assets (cars, jet skis, motorcycles, and [in some cases] over-built houses for the area). People who live in cities are also healthier (due to more walking and less time sitting in traffic).
This is one of my 2 pet peeves about attitudes towards country folk. The other is "everybody knows your business" meme but that's a rant left for another day.
Standardization means country folk get the same elementary education as city folk. In many places that extends to senior school too. Country folk are less interested in book-based learning but don't think living in a city makes someone better educated.
A farm is a million-dollar business; so it has business issues like HR, revenues, expenses, asset management, plus contracts and legal. All the stuff city folk do.
When in a field, knowing how to handle an angry bull or a stray snake is more important then knowing how to read a street sign. Guess which one is found on intelligence tests. It's really a test for city-dwelling, middle-class aptitude.
Farms have a lot of transient employees who don't have any ties to the community. That makes dealing with troublesome personalities, a regular HR issue. Country folk may not understand city-folk blabber, but they do understand mind games, high-pressure tactics and other con-artist tricks.
Yes, country folk do have their pet ideologies, which are sacrosanct and not available for discussion but it's usually easy to avoid such topics.
Dead is dead.
"When in a field, knowing how to handle an angry bull or a stray snake is more important then knowing how to read a street sign. Guess which one is found on intelligence tests."
Uh, obviously not the difference between then and than.
No matter what else is said, this is white flight, plain and simple. If you are white, and you move to the suburbs, you ARE racist. No question about it.
Did you know that your children are more likely to die violently in a rural area than in the city? And people in rural areas are also more likely to die from heart disease and cancer, among other diseases and injuries.
A suburb is a cross between an urban and a rural area, so it isn't clear at all that a suburb is a "much healthier environment" than a city.
What people mean by a "healthier environment" is the fact they can have a large house, big car, pet and other things that are difficult to own in high density areas. Basically they want some idealised 1950's white picket fence fantasy whilst forgetting that they're working 80 hours a week and commuting for another 20 to have enough money just to make the payments on their fantasy whilst trying to avoid the inevitable divorce of their loveless marriage which would make their already unbalanced crotchspawns even more fucked up.
Middle aged men like fancy cars because it's much easier to realise the rest of your life has gone to shit when you're doing 0 to 60 in 5 seconds.
Could also have something to do with real estate getting more expensive in high density urban environments.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
People who live in cities are likely to get better medical care. Importantly, they get better emergency care because they live closer to hospitals. In the case of heart disease that's crucial; if you are treated right away for a heart attack you are far less likely to die.
The downmodding was likely for the unnecessary use of the N-word. If the AC had instead said something like "motivated by racial separatism" it wouldn't have been treated the same way.
Are the victims less dead?
Is the issue "protecting the loved ones" or evading social responsibility?
By any reasonable standard, the burbs are only less black, not safer
Seems to be a recurring theme of Suburban flight.
Well, be of good cheer.
The $2.50 gas is going UP, UP UP. Parking is going UP,UP, UP!
Watch for tax rebates for more driving, followed by more suburban deaths.
Err...exactly what social responsibility do I have to live up to, when it comes to my decision on where to live, where best to raise my kids, where best to invest my housing dollars for best resale?
This "social responsibility" is some kind of new concept you just came up with.....?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Are the victims less dead?
just answer the question
afterward I will instruct you on how your choice is NOT about safety, and therefore only the nefarious motivation can be demonstrated.