Joel Kotkin, writing in the Wall Street Journal (The War Against Suburbia -- which may be restricted to subsribers), after pointing out that "despite widespread media exposure about a massive 'return to the city,' demographic data suggest that the tide continues to go out toward suburbia, which now accounts for two-thirds of the population in our large metropolitan areas," goes on to note:
These facts do not seem to penetrate the consciousness of the great metropolitan newspapers anymore than the minds of their favored interlocutors in the planning profession and academia. Newspapers from Boston and San Francisco to Los Angeles are routinely filled with anecdotal accounts of former suburbanites streaking into hip lofts and high-rises in the central core. Typical was a risible story that ran in last Sunday's New York Times, titled "Goodbye, Suburbia." The piece tracked the hegira back to the city by sophisticated urbanites who left their McMansions to return to Tribeca (rhymes with "Mecca"). Suburbia, one returnee sniffed, is "just a giant echoing space."
Such reports confirm the cognoscente's notion that the cure for the single-family house lies in the requisite lifting of consciousness, not to mention a couple of spare million in the bank. Yet demographic data suggest the vast majority of all growth in greater New York comes not from migration from the suburbs, but from abroad. Among domestic migrants, far more leave for the "giant echoing spaces" than come back to the city. As a whole, greater New York -- easily the most alluring traditional urban center -- is steadily becoming more, not less, suburban. Since 2000, notes analyst Wendell Cox, New York City has gained less than 95,000 people while the suburban rings have added over 270,000. Growth in "deathlike" places like Suffolk County, in Long Island, Orange County, N.Y., and Morris County, N.J., has been well over three times faster than the city.
No comment.
A lot of this, I think, is wishful thinking: the rabbit warren of the Great American City is considered the proper model for all things urban, and obeisance must be paid.
ReplyDeleteHere on the prairie, I live in a city which is undergoing the same sort of downtown renaissance; the difference is that the city is growing as fast as the suburbs - about 0.7 percent per year. I attribute this in part to the absurd size of the city's incorporated area (about 607 square miles), meaning it's possible to be a long way from downtown and still be part of the city. (I once said that we're all in this together, whether we live on 9th Street, 99th Street, or 199th Street, which is just about the northern border.) We get no such fawning articles, though, because nobody even knows we're here.
What city might that be? I am one of the only people I know who, while not a native midwesterner, loves the midwest and has actually gone there just to vacation. You sound like you're farther west than I've gotten, though.
ReplyDelete