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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.
Trying to get away from n1ggers
In a surprise announcement today, Indiana Governor and Vice President-elect Mike Pence said that gay conversion therapy saved his marriage. The controversial Republican, who was elected the 50th governor of the Hoosier State, has been a long-time proponent of a “Biblical view” on homosexuality and as a member of Congress stated that the legislative branch “should oppose any effort to recognize homosexuals as a ‘discrete and insular minority’ entitled to the protection of anti-discrimination laws similar to those extended to women and ethnic minorities.”
“It[gay conversion therapy] was instrumental in helping me overcoming certain urges,” said the Vice President elect in an interview with Fox News. “With God’s help, and the work of many of his therapists, I was able to seek the straight path when I was a younger man. If it wasn’t for that, I would have never been able to marry.”
Conversion therapy is psychological treatment or spiritual counseling designed to change a person’s sexual orientation from homosexual or bisexual to heterosexual. Such treatments are controversial and are a form of pseudoscience. However many orthodox and fundamentalist Christians believe that it does work, citing numerous examples of success. In more ancient times prior to 1981, conversion therapies in the United States and Western Europe included ice-pick lobotomies, chemical castration and various hormonal treatments. Efforts were largely concentrated on men, as female homosexuality was generally viewed as “hot.” This split along gender lines was due American’s general stupidity.
Many of Mike Pence’s classmates at Indiana University said the young Pence struggled with “identity issues.”
“Oh Mike was always a well-groomed sharp dresser,” said University of Chicago Professor James Badwater who was a dorm roommate of Mr. Pence in 1983. “He was private and kept to himself. He had a large collection of Men’s fitness magazines and listened to Wham! continually. He got into the conversion thing the next year, and then immediately married Karen [Mike Pence’s wife] the following year. It’s going to be great to have our first gay Vice President.”
It’s unclear how this news will impact the Donald Trump administration, if at all, however many GOP insiders maintain that this demonstrates the incoming administration’s commitment to diversity and the “widening” of the party’s platform to be more inclusive of what have traditionally been party outsiders.
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.
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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.
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.
I posted this timely article as a public service and as a way to celebrate diversity at the highest level of our government. Too bad the moderators around here are stuck with outdated modes of thinking when it come to sexuality in the 21st century.
You can try to flee from blacks, but Obama has made it mandatory that all communities must be multicultural, and therefore no matter what you do, you will be forced to live in a neighborhood with blacks! HAHAHAHAHAHA! I hope the blacks hunt down and kill as many white people as they possibly can. It's OK to say things like that, because in the USA, that is NOT hate speech! =)
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).