The American Suburb Is Bouncing Back

Don’t believe the urban-living fundamentalists.

…When the mortgage crisis first hit, some urbanists, not surprisingly, were quick to blame the suburbs–instead of Wall Street–for the financial meltdown. With energy prices on the rise, they persuaded themselves and the ever-gullible mainstream media that the long-awaited “back to the city” jubilee was imminent.

In contrast, the suburbs and exurbs, crowed Brookings’ Chris Leinberger, were soon to become “the new slums.” As the middle classes trudged their way back to Boston and other suitably dense big cities, James Howard Kunstler–the “shock jock” of the new urbanist movement and a leading apostle of the “peak oil” thesis–happily proclaimed, “Let the gloating begin.”

Yet as George Guerrero could tell them, a dream is not a thing so easily destroyed. The American landscape continues to change, but perhaps not entirely in the ways so eagerly projected by urban boosters and their media claque.

For one thing, even with the higher energy prices of last year, there seems to be, in fact, no notable shift of population to the urban core. Instead, as demographer Wendell Cox has pointed out, the recession may have slowed migration, but the trend toward the suburbs and sprawling Sunbelt cities has not ended or reversed.

At the same time, the once-widely ballyhooed market for dense urban living has unraveled. The “gospel of urbanism” may be accepted as such by most of the mainstream press, most notably The New York Times and Atlantic Monthly, but on closer examination the new religion has limited numbers of converts. In many locales–from Massachusetts to Los Angeles–inner-city condominium projects are losing value at least as much or more than suburban single-family houses. In San Diego, for example, condo prices have dropped in some developments by 70% since 2007, twice the decline in the overall mark.

Forbes