Wednesday, May 01, 2013

Americans prefer suburbia

This morning I was in a hurry. I linked to a post by Joel Kotkin about the Triumph of Suburbia. I wanted tonight to excerpt some more of his piece.

Between 2000 and 2011, there has been a net increase of 9.3 million in the foreign born population, largely from Asia and Latin America, with these newcomers accounting for about two out of every five new residents of the nation’s 51 largest metropolitan areas.

And, guess what? They prefer suburbia! At the big box store where I work, I am seeing many more of these foreign born people.

Clearly, immigrants aren’t looking for the density and crowding of Mexico City, Seoul, Shanghai, or Mumbai. Since 2000, about two-thirds of Hispanic household growth was in detached housing. The share of Asian arrivals in detached housing is up 20 percent over the same span. Nearly half of all Hispanics and Asians now live in single-family homes.

Nowhere are these changes more marked than among Asians, who now make up the nation’s largest wave of new immigrants. Over the last decade, the Asian population in suburbs grew by about 2.8 million, or 53 percent, while that of core cities grew by 770,000, or 28 percent.

Kotkin writes that aging boomers are also showing a preference for suburbia and country, rather than the urban core of cities. The same is true for millennials.

Moreover, Kotkin writes that

As Americans have voted with their feet for the suburbs, employers have followed. The vast majority of the tech industry is located, along with the bulk of its workforce, in the suburbs.

Kotkin acknowledges that because of the Recession there has been a

rise in renting, declining home ownership and plunging birthrates.

Nevertheless,

rather than the “back to the cities” movement that’s been heralded for decades but never arrived, we’ve gone “back to the future,” as people age and arrive in America and opt for updated versions of the same lifestyle that have drawn previous generations to the much detested yet still-thriving peripheries of the metropolis.

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