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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.
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
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.
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.........
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.
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.