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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.
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.
That's hardly the entirety of the decision. Aside from the pros/cons of renting vs buying, if that apartment is 30 minutes closer to work, you just saved 250 hours a year of your personal time. What's that worth?
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
I actually believe if self-driving cars take off, drive times will go down. The programmers of the cars can do a lot to alleviate the bad behaviors people have gotten in to that just makes heavy traffic worse.
Such as:
-Tailgating in traffic jams, allowing no room for merging or changing lanes, causing everyone to have to slam on their brakes when someone does need to move lanes.
-Waiting until the absolute last second to merge when lanes are reduced.
-Essentially acting as a completely un-damped spring, speeding up and slowing down to stay exactly right behind the car in front, allowing all kinds of nasty resonances and standing waves.
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.
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.
Spend $4000 a month living in a shoe box apartment or put that into a mortgage on a decent sized house. Decisions, decisions.
Okay so you have identified one criteria, now:
Spend $4000 to live in an apartment, or spend $4000 on having to spend saturday mowing the lawn, watering the grass, washing up outside.
Spend $4000 to live in walking distance from all the action or 5min away with the metro or spend $4000 on being stuck out in the burbs battling traffic to get to work, having to drive somewhere to do something basic like get a meal.
Spend $4000 for a nice comfortable sized living space, or spend $4000 for a massive multi bedroom house that accumulates a shitload of dust, is hard to keep clean, causes high costs for heating, has a roof that will need replacing, etc.
I own 2 places. I rent out my house in the burbs and live in an inner city apartment. Or as my colleague put it: "People live in cities, people only work or sleep in suburbs."
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