Suburbs

The Two Americas

Joel Kotkin — Fri, 10 Oct 2025 20:28:38 -0400

The late Charlie Kirk may have been best known for his conservative politics, but those politics also resonated with traditional values, religious faith, and family life — one side of a critical divide in our society. Life and value choices, even more than ideology, increasingly define how people vote, what they believe, and where they live.

For years, the United States has been evolving into two different countries. One is dominated by often childless, urban renters, many of them college graduates or poor minorities. This America is concentrated in core cities and college towns.

The other America exists in an almost parallel universe—largely suburban, exurban, small town, and rural — but where family, faith, and children constitute the common threads of everyday life. This America was receptive to Kirk’s traditionalist message.

The first America has become a haven for a significant number of postmodernist progressives who largely reject the customary pillars of society such as religion, marriage, and family. Theirs is not a rebellion of peasants and laborers, as occurred from medieval times and on through the early progressive era, but instead an uprising mostly of the urban professional classes. Rather than the mundane concerns of traditional liberals or “sewer socialists,” the postmodernists focus more on environmental catastrophism, gender identity, and radical racial politics. AEI scholar Sam Abrams and I have been following this political trend for years, but new polling shows that it has intensified, particularly among younger single women.

Though economic pressures might eventually make the postmodernists’ cause a broader movement, today’s radical activists seem to respond more to their own inner cultural angst and troubled psychology. Modern progressivism sells best among people who reject traditional notions about families and gender. Today over 28 percent of all Gen Z women, notes Gallup, identify as LGBTQ — more than twice the rate for millennial women and almost three times that for Gen Z men. Over 5 percent of U.S. high school students struggle with gender identity, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Some have learned their gender politics at the feet of their teachers. As one USA Today correspondent wrote in 2017, “the number of women’s and gender studies degrees in the United States has increased by more than 300 percent since 1990, and in 2015, there were more than 2,000 degrees conferred.” Even certain nominally Catholic colleges reject the idea of the sex binary and encourage students to select their own pronouns.

Within this population, political anxiety can lead to violence, or at least acceptance of violence. Nearly 38 percent of respondents and over half of progressives would see the assassination of Donald Trump as “justified,” notes one study. It’s a mindset that predates the Kirk assassination. Many progressives — notably women — celebrated Luigi Mangione’s alleged premeditated murder of UnitedHealth CEO Brian Thompson. In California, a particularly strident center of such views, there’s even a pending proposition on health-care reform named after Mangione.

The postmodernists tend to be highly secular and are likely beneficiaries of America’s long-running “unchurching.” At least until recently, the country has witnessed a steady decline in Christian identification—most notably among mainstream Protestants. Only about 46 percent of Americans born in the 1990s currently identify as Christian. Younger Americans may still embrace of the notion of a spiritual power, but they are leaving religious institutions at a rate four times that of their counterparts three decades ago; almost 40 percent of people aged 18–29 have no religious affiliation.

Read the rest of this piece at: City Journal.

Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

Photo: composite of images by RDNE Stock project and Jackson Howes.

Revival: Americans Heading Back to the Hinterlands

Joel Kotkin and Wendell Cox — Sun, 14 Sep 2025 20:28:32 -0400

The famous New Yorker magazine cover showing much of civilization ending at the Hudson River, save for Chicago, D.C., and then the West Coast, had more than a grain of truth for much of the 20^thcentury. The term “flyover country” was not just a snobbish put-down but a reality as a handful of core cities – New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco – exerted oversized influence over America’s culture, politics, and economy, with rural communities and smaller cities playing a relatively marginal role in the national drama.

The early decades of the 21^stcentury have altered America’s geographic reality. Moribund small cities have come back to life. Two decades ago, downtown Fargo, North Dakota, was dull and somewhat derelict. Now it boasts loft apartments, a fine boutique hotel, and a panoply of cultural attractions, including art studios and dance venues. Since 2010, about 14,000 Americans have moved to its metropolitan area. That total is small, but it reflects the experiences of many other once withering communities that are attracting people from larger urban centers. The Fargo metro area added nearly double the number of net domestic migrants as the nearest large metro area, Minneapolis-St. Paul, which is 15 times larger.

Some of this can be traced to considerably lower housing prices, which allows millennials to be on their own much earlier;only 5% of millennialsin the Great Plains states live at home, less than half the percentage in California, New York, and New Jersey. It’s also a result of a new wealth created by tech, manufacturing, and other industries seeking to reduce costs in less-regulated, less expensive areas where more people are willing to relocate.

Smaller Communities Rebound

Springfield, a metropolitan area of nearly 500,000 people in the southwest corner of Missouri, has blossomed in the past decade. Its economy, anchored by Southwest Missouri State University, is also home to several large firms, including Bass Pro Shops, O’Reilly Auto Parts, and accounting firm BKD. These businesses provide promising opportunities for millennials.

Between 2010 and 2023, a net 38,000 new residents moved into the area from elsewhere in the U.S. Rather than being rejected as outsiders by longtime residents, newcomers are welcome to join localboards and commissions.

“What Springfield attracts are people who are self-starters who want to fast-track their involvement in the community,” says millennial Matt Simpson, chief research and planning officer at Ozark Technical College, who was recently elected to the City Council. “People of my generation are motivated by the fact that you can have a say at an earlier age.”

Much of Springfield’s appeal lies not in culture or consumerism, where big cities are still hard to beat, but in the local habits and traditions found in numerous churches, charities, and civic groups.

Note: This is the second in a two-part series of the Great Dispersion of Americans across the country. Read part one here.

Read the rest of this piece at: Real Clear Investigations.

Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy firm located in the St. Louis metropolitan area. He is a Senior Fellow with Unleash Prosperity in Washington and the Frontier Centre for Public Policy in Winnipeg and a member of the Advisory Board of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University in Orange, California. He has served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers in Paris. His principal interests are economics, poverty alleviation, demographics, urban policy and transport. He is author of the annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey and author of Demographia World Urban Areas.

Photo: Diedrich via Wikimedia, under CC 4.0 License.

Exodus: Affordability Crisis Sends Americans Packing From Big Cities

Joel Kotkin and Wendell Cox — Fri, 12 Sep 2025 20:28:32 -0400

For much of the past century, in both the United States and elsewhere, the inexorable trend has been for people to move from rural areas and towns to ever larger cities, particularly those with vibrant downtown cores such as New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle, and dozens of other iconic American cities. Most visions of the future still view urban cores as the uncontested centers of production, consumption, and culture, with rural areas, small cities, and suburbs relegated to the backwaters of modernity.

A RealClearInvestigations analysis has found that we may be on the cusp of a new era. Urban cores have started to shrink, losing first to the suburbs, then to ever further exurbs, and now to small towns and even rural areas. For the first time since the 19th century, America’s growth pattern favors smaller metros – Fargo, North Dakota, as opposed to Portland, Oregon – many of which once seemed out of favor.

This transformation can be hard to detect because demographers often discuss metropolitan regions, which put city centers at their cores. But this method of classification masks the trend that much of the growth is at the edges of these areas. In virtually all the fastest-growing metros, it has been the further-out exurbs, themselves until recently rural areas, that have experienced most of the expansion. While Raleigh, North Carolina – a sleepy state capital for much of its history – continues to draw migrants from across the country, the most explosive growth is not occurring in the city center but the surrounding “countrypolitan” towns of Apex, Fuquay-Varina, and Zebulon that offer land and a relaxed rural environment along with access to modern amenities.

Between 2010 and 2020, the suburbs and exurbs of the major metropolitan areas gained 2 million net domestic migrants, while the urban core counties lost 2.7 million. The pandemic, which normalized remote work and encouraged people to keep their distance, turbocharged this movement to smaller, less crowded, less expensive housing markets. Through the first four years of this decade, the urban core counties of the major metropolitan areas (over 1,000,000 population) lost 3,259,000 net domestic migrants, three times the rate of loss in the last decade. In contrast, 2.3 million net domestic migrants moved outside the major metros.

Net Domestic Migration

This is a shift the media has underplayed or pinned almost entirely on the pandemic, leaving the impression that small towns and rural areas have little to offer other than a safe haven from illness and crime. In a pre-pandemic 2018 article asking “Can rural America be saved?” The New York Times reported that small cities and towns, particularly in the middle of the country, were “getting old” and facing “relentless economic decline.”

The data suggest the opposite: that Americans are heading back to the land. The steep costs of urban housing and an Amazon economy that allows anybody, anywhere to get almost anything, is rekindling our deep-seated desire for privacy, space, and home ownership.

The New Demographics

The first phase of geographic reinvention began to take shape by 2000, as workers followed both U.S.- and foreign-based companies, which were increasingly expanding into lower-cost states in the Sun Belt and Midwest. Since then, the two most urbanized big states, California and New York, have each lost more than 4 million net domestic migrants. Two other trends – a drop in immigration and fertility rates, especially among people living in big cities – are making it hard for these states to restock their urban populations.

Note: This is the first in a two-part series of the Great Dispersion of Americans across the country.

Read the rest of this piece at: Real Clear Investigations.

Photo: Carlos Oliva via Pexels.

Cities and Suburbs: Get it Together

Pete Saunders — Fri, 22 Aug 2025 20:28:38 -0400

I’ve written some versions of this topic many times over the years. Now it’s time for the latest installment.

Every so often, there are people who want to cast “cities” (here I’m defining them as the core or foundational municipality of a larger metropolitan region) against “suburbs” (the non-core, usually smaller jurisdictions, that have an economic, social and cultural connection to a core city). Every so often, people want to use various metrics to demonstrate that either cities or the collective suburban areas are doing better or worse than the other.

Researchers of all types on either side of the city/suburb divide will cherry-pick data to prove a point about cities or suburbs. I could bore you with a long historical explanation of this divide, but the tl;dr version is that as cities were beset with economic and social issues in the mid-20^th century, and as “suburbs” had grown to a point where they had their own constituency and political representation at the same time, the line between the two was drawn. In the early 21^st century, many cities recovered and saw revitalization. However, those committed to suburbs were quick to suggest that not all is well with cities.

The Covid pandemic period had plenty of examples of this pushed forward by suburban advocates. Two examples stand out. When researchers saw a surge in city out-migration in 2021 and 2022, many were saying the pandemic was causing people to flee cities in favor of more spacious and pleasant suburbs, exurbs and rural areas. Suburbs offered more comfort and protection than the more-crowded cities. When downtown office buildings effectively shuttered because of the pandemic shutdown, and office workers finally took advantage of meaningful ways to work from home, many people were saying that office-centered downtowns that were reliant on office worker traffic were doomed; if a worker could work principally at home, one could live anywhere, potentially threatening the very existence of cities.

Of course, there were city advocates (I include myself) who pushed back on those narratives. For one, I maintained that cities had an “experiential advantage” over suburbs that would survive the pandemic. There are amenities and attractions that cities have that still bring people to cities, and there are people who will still choose to live in an amenity-rich environment.

On the other hand, there are city advocates who are priced out of expensive cities, and getting behind the YIMBY and/or abundance movements to increase the supply of housing in cities and suburbs. Many YIMBY activists have become deeply involved in zoning reform in large cities, promoting the elimination of exclusive single-family zoning districts and increased housing density in transit-accessible areas. To address the same issues in suburbia, many YIMBYs have taken to proposing statewide legislation at state legislatures, encouraging states to take a more direct role in shaping local land use and zoning policy.

Read the rest of this piece at The Corner Side Yard.

Pete Saunders is a writer and researcher whose work focuses on urbanism and public policy. Pete has been the editor/publisher of the Corner Side Yard, an urbanist blog, since 2012. Pete is also an urban affairs contributor to Forbes Magazine's online platform. Pete's writings have been published widely in traditional and internet media outlets, including the feature article in the December 2018 issue of Planning Magazine. Pete has more than twenty years' experience in planning, economic development, and community development, with stops in the public, private and non-profit sectors. He lives in Chicago.

Photo: Renee Silverman via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

Building the Future: Fixing the Global Housing Crisis

Joel Kotkin and Wendell Cox — Sat, 31 May 2025 20:28:38 -0400

This is the second of a two-part series on the global housing crisis. Read the first part here.

The affordable housing crisis in America and many other advanced countries keeps getting worse because it is largely dominated by the wrong voices talking about the wrong places.

For years the YIMBYs and NIMBYs have debated development in urban centers: While “Yes in My Back Yard” advocates seek to “build, build, build” ever more density in urban centers for environmental reasons, the “Not In My Back Yard” forces want to limit development often to preserve property values and the existing character of neighborhoods.

Meanwhile, housing prices have continued to rise to often unsustainable levels from San Francisco to Seoul, putting the dream of home ownership out of reach for many who are forced to pay much of their salaries in rent. Both YIMBYs and NIMBYs rely on heavy-handed regulation and other policies that discourage and complicate home ownership. Their effects have been particularly severe in California, Canada, Australia, Britain, and other places where policies aimed at funneling more people into dense urban areas by making it expensive to build in the suburbs and exurbs are negatively distorting the market.

There is now a growing pushback to this approach. Even some long-time advocates of forced densification and urban growth boundaries are recognizingthat “sprawl” is not only here to stay, but that it offers a cohesive and market-friendly way to spur greater construction and lower prices. Given enough freedom, the market can do much to address the housing problem.

In the future, the shift from urban centers to suburban and exurban growth will likely be accelerated through the rise of remote work and new transport systems such as autonomous vehicles. A recent study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City noted that demographic conditions, the rise of online work, and migration to less expensive regions create conditions for a family-friendly housing boom. The issue is how to meet this burgeoning demand and build a society where the opportunity for home ownership becomes ever greater.

Market-Based Solutions

Trying to force people to live in dense urban areas against their wishes contributes to the continued outflow of people to suburbs and exurbs, and from highly regulated to less regulated states. It is not enough to simply call for building more houses as a solution to the crisis when regulation-heavy “urban containment” policies have increased land-related costs and made housing affordability impossible in many regions.

Thanks to market forces, peripheral development has long been the way cities have grown virtually everywhere in the world. Contrary to the claim that density represents social and economic progress, wealthier countries are producing ever more decentralized cities. Even in places like Tokyo, London, Paris, and New York, the vast majority of population growth takes place in the periphery. As one report put it, “human settlement has always tended to sprawl out from key urban centres.”

Read the rest of this piece at: Real Clear Investigations.

Photo: Deane Bayas via Pexels.

A Look at Satellite Cities

Pete Saunders — Thu, 29 May 2025 15:29:38 -0400

Have you ever given much thought to satellite cities? Cities located close to major metropolitan areas that aren’t the primary city, yet have a strong identity and history of their own? Cities miles away from the central city core but with many strong urbanism elements and with outstanding cost of living affordability? Satellite cities are located near many large metros, but they’re rarely considered as places that people will consider as an affordable urbanism alternative.

I first noticed satellite cities when I moved to one, Muncie, IN, while in high school. Once we moved to Muncie, I saw that there were many other similarly sized communities in central Indiana, anywhere from 30 miles to 60 miles or so away from Indianapolis – Kokomo, Anderson, Muncie, Bloomington, Lafayette – that had long histories of their own, but had relationships with the Indiana’s capital and largest city. Each of these cities started out as agricultural trading centers for surrounding farmers and then became mid-tier industrial hubs in the 20^th century. Each also suffered from deep deindustrialization that set in during the 1980s. Recovery for them has been spotty; Bloomington (home of Indiana University) and Lafayette/West Lafayette (home of Purdue University) haven’t suffered the same decline as the others, thanks to the pull of flagship universities. Ball State has helped Muncie, but it hasn’t gotten the boost that Bloomington and Lafayette did.

Later, I started to notice similar relationships surrounding other large Midwestern metro areas. When our family moved to Chicago, I saw some similarly positioned cities surrounding Chicago – Waukegan, Elgin, Aurora and Joliet – in the same light. However, they were all doing somewhat better than their central Indiana cohorts. I saw the same surrounding other major Midwestern metros, all in various stages of decline or revitalization.

(Note: I find this to be almost exclusively a Midwestern phenomenon, with a few exceptions. Similar satellite cities exist in California, whose settlement owes a lot to the Midwest. California’s versions also seem to be further from the core cities. The East Coast may have once had satellite cities like the Midwest, but a case could be made that metro amalgamation began occurring there even before industrialization really took off, so the region’s cities began evolving into the more familiar Megalopolis. No similar cities appear to exist in the South.)

These are what I’ve called satellite cities. They are midsized cities that experienced a period of growth during an independent phase of development but soon found themselves being pulled toward the gravitational pull of the larger nearby metro area. Some have been fully captured by the larger metro’s pull, others haven’t fully made the transition.

Read the rest of this piece at The Corner Side Yard.

Photo: Muncie, Indiana downtown, source: downtownmuncie.org.

Why Cities Have Lost Their Appeal

Joel Kotkin — Fri, 16 May 2025 20:28:38 -0400

Over the past half century, media and academic sources repeatedly suggested that increasingly dense cities would dominate the future. Places such as London, San Francisco and Chicago would dominate an economy.

Today, this assessment seems grossly dated. Even in the pages of the urbanista New York Times there are widespread fears of an “urban doom loop.” But this, too, is a stretch. Great core cities will not go the way of post-imperial Rome, but their role is being recast as the urban frontier shifts increasingly to the periphery.

What we are seeing mirrors H.G. Wells’s vision. He predicted that most economic life, and most families, would shift to the suburbs and exurbs. The urban core would be reinvented: no longer the uncontested center of political and economic life but a vast theater of “concourse and rendezvous,” ideal for the childless wealthy, necessary for their servants and a beacon to the young and the culturally aware.

This would surely represent a major shift away from the idea of the dominant “transactional city,” filled with workers packed in ever-higher buildings, drawn from the vast array of bedroom satellites across a huge geographic area. Office occupancy has been declining since the turn of the century. Covid accelerated that trend.

Although they are no longer the epicenters of economic life, London, New York, Paris, Tokyo and Miami retain an irresistible allure to educated young people, globe-trotting elites and cultural creators. In New York, while the population has declined, the ranks of the ultra-rich have continued to increase. These favored cities have become less economic capitals and more stage props for luxury-brand groups.

Now, the bulk of new urban development takes place outside the core of the city, largely in the suburban and exurban periphery. In 1950, those living in city cores accounted for nearly 24 percent of the US population; today that share is less than 15 percent.

Suburban, and particularly exurban, metropolitan growth has accelerated in recent years. From 2010 to 2017, 91 percent of employment growth among major metropolitan areas was outside central business districts. The 50 highest-growth counties in the US, almost all suburban or exurban, had an employment increase of more than 2.5 times that of the others in 2019.

These changes are generally greeted with horror by our cultural, academic and media elites. But if some analysts still predict a return to urban growth and greater office occupancy, even devoted friends of urban density admit that the urban future will be increasingly shaped by sprawl.

The drivers here are demographic shifts and technological improvements. With the development of instantaneous communication, notes a report from Brown University, neither the size nor density of a city makes it more productive. Indeed, almost all the leading tech centers in the country are primarily suburban in nature.

In New York, while the population has declined, the ranks of the ultra-rich have continued to increase.

The rise of remote or hybrid work is accelerating this shift. According to a study by the University of Chicago, in high-end business services and technology, a third of the workforce can function remotely – as can employees in roughly 50 percent of jobs generated by Silicon Valley.

Demographics provide the most compelling evidence of peripheral ascendancy, which can be seen in the movement of educated young people, particularly as they hit their thirties, away from places such as New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Even before the pandemic, two-thirds of millennials favored the suburbs. The same thing is happening in other countries. Rather than signaling decay, the growth of suburban and exurban communities represents the cutting edge of 21st-century urbanism. These areas are becoming cities of a new sort, serving as domiciles but also places of employment, shopping and the arts.

This process is in its infancy. New exurban areas are being planned, notably by Elon Musk in Texas and Bill Gates in Arizona. Rather than an abandonment of the city, this is a continuing reinvention of it.

The rise of suburban and exurban living reflects a desire for safer, cleaner and less congested environments, and core cities will only be revitalized if they address the quality of life they provide. Donald Trump’s return has been greeted by many urban leaders with about as much enthusiasm as a reprise of the bubonic plague. But a second Trump presidency could also force mostly Democratic municipal leaders to address challenges on their own.

The right’s drive to close off America’s international borders may slow the movement of populations to urban centers. But it could also reduce threats to public order and social cohesiveness. In New York, warns its former governor and mayoral aspirant Andrew Cuomo, the “migrant crisis” has become “the tipping point” of “the urban death spiral.” The challenge for older cities lies not in notions about diversity but in making the streets safe and creating opportunities for business and culture.

A promising sign lies in the election of new, pro-business moderates in cities where crime has been a key issue. In Houston, more than 80 percent of voters listed it as their primary concern. In 2023 the public elected as mayor, by almost two to one, veteran state senator John Whitmire over left-wing firebrand Sheila Jackson Lee.

If traditional cities seek to find their future niche, they will need to enact a political revolution. It will not alter the fundamental dispersion of urban life – but even the old cities can find a comfortable place in the new metropolis if they can find ways to make urban life work.

This piece first appeared at: The Spectator.

Photo: Trey Ratcliff, via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

The YIMBY Movement's Twists and Turns

Pete Saunders — Thu, 15 May 2025 20:28:38 -0400

In recent weeks it seems that the progression of the YIMBY movement is reaching some limits on its growth, causing it to make some unexpected twists in the logic of its supporters.

A month ago, New York Times reporter Conor Dougherty wrote a pretty compelling story in favor of sprawl, or the continued outward expansion of our metropolitan areas. In his article, Dougherty marvels at how the Dallas metroplex has been able to accommodate explosive growth while remaining affordable. While touring the Dallas metro area by air with an exec from Hillwood, a development company owned by Ross Perot, Jr., Dougherty sees how Dallas does it:

“The Dallas area has grown by about three million people over the past two decades, and, he predicted, it would continue to push outward for many decades more — 40 miles from downtown, then 50, until the metroplex bulges across the state line into Oklahoma, surpassing the population of the Chicago region and continuing to expand from there. “I told my kids, ‘All you got to do is fill in this map, and you’ll have a pretty good business,’” Perot said.

The executive took me around one of the firm’s projects, quaintly named Pecan Square, which has a faux downtown complete with parks and pickleball courts; a co-working space on the square has been built with exposed ductwork, to give it an industrial vibe. Once finished, Pecan Square will have 3,100 homes, starting around $415,000 for a three-bedroom.”

Relatedly, there’s growing support for the use of publicly-owned land for the development of housing, particularly affordable housing, to reduce costs. Strangely, this idea has found common ground between many YIMBYs and the Trump administration. Who would’ve thought that:

“Federal officials have estimated that 400,000 acres of federal land could potentially be made available for housing development, said Jon Raby, the acting director of the Bureau of Land Management. The estimate, which will continue to be refined, was determined after officials looked at land within 10 miles of cities and towns with a population of 5,000 or more,” he said.

The effort could be most impactful in states like California, New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona, Wyoming, Oregon, Idaho and Colorado, Mr. Raby said. Officials said the lands vary widely and range from deserts and grasslands to mountains and forests. The lands are generally uneconomical or difficult to manage because of their scattered or isolated nature and ‘must meet specific public interest objectives.’ ”

Many supporters of YIMBYism, like I assume Dougherty is, have focused for years on reforming zoning legislation to increase housing production, especially in high-cost housing cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York. And they’ve had some high-profile successes, such as the elimination of purely single-family home zoning districts in Minneapolis a few years ago, allowing the construction of 2-4 unit dwellings where none could be built before. California YIMBYs have made great strides statewide in passing legislation making it faster and easier for homeowners to produce accessory dwelling units (ADUs) in single-family zoning districts. YIMBYs have also been successful at implementing transit-oriented development near transit stations in cities like Portland, Denver and Arlington, VA, just outside of Washington, DC.

Read the rest of this piece at The Corner Side Yard.

Photo: aerial view of Dallas suburbs by Alfred Twu, via Wikimedia under CC 1.0 License.

Do Blacks Deserve to Have Money Wasted on Them Too?

Randal OToole — Sun, 11 May 2025 20:28:38 -0400

Critics of plans to build more light-rail lines in Charlotte, North Carolina say that proposed new lines will fail to serve the neighborhoods of blacks who “need it most.” Blacks are more likely than whites to ride transit, they say, so black neighborhoods need to have light rail too.

They are wrong about black’s use of transit. According to the 2023 American Community Survey, 1.5 percent of both black and white workers who lived in Charlotte took transit to work. In 2019, blacks had been more likely to ride transit — 4.5 percent vs. 2.5 percent — but since then the rise of remote working has allowed most former black Charlotte transit riders to work at home.

History also shows that Charlotte’s light rail has significantly harmed its transit system. In 2005, before Charlotte’s first light-rail line opened, 3.3 percent of workers living in Charlotte took transit to work. By 2019, when Charlotte had 19 miles of light rail plus a 4-mile streetcar line, transit share had fallen to 1.8 percent.

Charlotte’s first light-rail line opened in 2007. Between 2006 and 2019 total transit ridership in Charlotte grew by 15 percent and transit passenger-miles grew by 18 percent. While that sounds good, in the same time period the Charlotte urban area’s population grew by 70 percent and driving grew by 64 percent.

What’s most painful is that transit passenger-miles were gaining market share before Charlotte built light rail. Between 1996 and 2006, the region’s driving grew by 109 percent but transit passenger-miles grew by 138 percent. Transit ridership grew by only 80 percent, but the average transit trip was longer as people as average trip lengths increased from under 4 miles to more than 5 miles. Even 80 percent ridership growth in the 10 years before light rail is stunning when compared with the 15 percent growth in the 13 years after 2006.

Thus, Charlotte is just one more example of light-rail failure. Charlotte residents should support more rail transit only if they want to pay high taxes to make transit even more irrelevant than it is today.

This piece first appeared at The Antiplanner.

Randal O'Toole, the Antiplanner, is a policy analyst with nearly 50 years of experience reviewing transportation and land-use plans and the author of The Best-Laid Plans: How Government Planning Harms Your Quality of Life, Your Pocketbook, and Your Future.

Photo: Charlotte rail, screenshot from WCNC video (embedded above).

Moving Away from Density to Less Dense Detached Housing Areas

Wendell Cox — Wed, 16 Oct 2024 20:28:08 -0400

Further evidence of the continued dispersion of the US population is revealed by an examination of net domestic migration data and types of residences according to the American Community Survey, compared to the annual Census Bureau population estimates from 2020 through 2023.

Despite efforts of urban planners to outlaw single family zoning (detached houses) in some areas and pack families into cramped apartments, demographic date suggests people who move head to counties with more detached housing, not less.

The counties gaining net domestic in-migration had a population weighted average detached housing rate of 69.2%. The counties that had net domestic out-migration had an average detached housing rate of 45.6%. The counties to which people moved had an average detached housing rate 52.6% higher than the counties from which people moved (Figure 1). This is yet another general indication of the increasing suburbanization and exurbanization of the nation. Suburban, exurban and rural areas tend to have higher percentages of detached housing, while urban core locations tend to have large multifamily, especially apartment shares.

The Census Bureau net domestic migration data, indicates that 4.9 million people moved across county borders over the past three years. This means that as a result, the population of the counties with net domestic migration gains increased 9.8 million relative to the counties that lost net domestic migrants. (Figure 2)

Background

In the United States, net domestic migration is reported at the county level each year. A single net figure (“ins” minus “outs”) is provided for each of the more than 3,100 counties. This article compares the single-family (detached) occupied housing share in the counties with positive net domestic migration to the counties that lost net domestic migrants.

Detached housing accounts for 61.4% of residences (per the American Community Survey 2018-2023), and are most common in suburban, exurban and rural areas where population densities are below those of high-density urban cores.

There were 15 states in which the in-migration county detached housing share exceeds that of outmigration counties by the largest margin (Figure 3). This is notable even in highly urbanized, blue states.,Moving New Yorkers are attracted to counties that have an average 256% higher share of detached housing. Movers from Pennsylvania, Idaho and New Jersey were destined to states with a100% or more detached housing share, Movers from Massachusetts, Virginia, Hawaii, Illinois, Rhode Island, Wisconsin, Maryland and Florida have been destined to areas with 50% to 100% greater detached housing share as. Alaska, California and Vermont rounded out the top 15, each above a 40% gain in detached housing share.

There were three states in which the opposite trend was shown, where movers new counties had a lower share of detached housing than where they moved from (Figure 4). These included North Dakota, South Dakota and Iowa. Even so, South Dakota and Iowa had a detached share of housing higher than the national average (61.4%), but below the former residence counties. North Dakota, however, had a lower detached housing share than the national rate. The overall trend remains: people are more likely to move to areas where single family homes predominate.

The table below provides data for the major metropolitan areas.

Similar Research

Other recently released research indicates that internal migration favors counties with lower urban population densities.

Americans Accelerate Move Away From Density showed that among all of the nation’s more than 3,100 counties and county equivalents, those that received net domestic migration between 2020 and 2023, urban densities were 82% lower (1,776 per square mile) than the counties from which there was a net domestic migration loss (9,920 per square mile).

More on the Flight from Density: Within Major Metropolitan Areas found a similar trend between 2020 and 2023 within major metropolitan areas. Counties within major metropolitan areas that gaining net domestic migrants had an average urban density 81% below (2,147 per square mile) that of major metro counties with net domestic migration losses (11,486 per square mile).

What This Means

At the fundamental level, this simply indicates that the trend toward suburbanization has only deepened. The United States has been suburbanizing for a century or more, with significant acceleration occurring following World War II. As the data above indicates, further acceleration has occurred over the last three years.

Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy firm located in the St. Louis metropolitan area. He is a Senior Fellow with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy in Winnipeg and a member of the Advisory Board of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University in Orange, California. He has served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers in Paris. His principal interests are economics, poverty alleviation, demographics, urban policy and transport. He is co-author of the annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey and author of Demographia World Urban Areas.

Mayor Tom Bradley appointed him to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission (1977-1985) and Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich appointed him to the Amtrak Reform Council, to complete the unexpired term of New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman (1999-2002). He is author of War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life and Toward More Prosperous Cities: A Framing Essay on Urban Areas, Transport, Planning and the Dimensions of Sustainability.

Photo: The Villages, Florida in the fastest growing CBSA (metropolitan and micropolitan areas) in the nation out of more than 900, between 2020 and 2023 (over 16%). Source: Wikimedia under CC 4.0 License.

Table 1 (Back to reference)

Net Domestic Migration: Gaining & Losing Counties 2023
State/DC	In	Out	Ins Divided by Outs	Rank
Alabama	69.7%	67.8%	2.8%	42
Alaska	82.7%	57.2%	44.7%	13
Arizona	66.7%	61.0%	9.3%	34
Arkansas	71.8%	69.9%	2.7%	44
California	73.0%	51.0%	43.1%	14
Colorado	72.9%	53.1%	37.4%	17
Connecticut	65.2%	56.2%	16.0%	30
Delaware	64.4%
District of Columbia		11.5%
Florida	62.7%	41.5%	50.9%	12
Georgia	76.8%	58.8%	30.6%	18
Hawaii	77.3%	46.5%	66.5%	7
Idaho	75.7%	36.7%	106.1%	3
Illinois	76.4%	47.9%	59.3%	8
Indiana	77.9%	62.9%	23.8%	22
Iowa	70.9%	72.5%	-2.1%	45
Kansas	79.0%	66.1%	19.6%	25
Kentucky	71.8%	62.9%	14.1%	32
Louisiana	72.3%	63.0%	14.8%	31
Maine	70.7%
Maryland	66.1%	43.6%	51.7%	11
Massachusetts	65.9%	35.6%	85.1%	5
Michigan	79.4%	67.6%	17.5%	28
Minnesota	76.8%	55.4%	38.6%	16
Mississippi	73.6%	67.4%	9.3%	35
Missouri	74.0%	60.5%	22.3%	23
Montana	71.7%	69.4%	3.4%	40
Nebraska	79.0%	69.8%	13.2%	33
Nevada	60.6%	58.0%	4.5%	38
New Hampshire	67.0%
New Jersey	71.5%	35.1%	103.4%	4
New Mexico	69.5%	67.0%	3.7%	39
New York	64.4%	18.1%	255.9%	1
North Carolina	69.4%	64.6%	7.5%	36
North Dakota	46.0%	54.5%	-15.6%	47
Ohio	76.0%	60.1%	26.6%	20
Oklahoma	76.7%	73.2%	4.9%	37
Oregon	70.0%	55.8%	25.6%	21
Pennsylvania	65.4%	27.8%	135.6%	2
Rhode Island	71.4%	46.6%	53.2%	9
South Carolina	64.2%	62.4%	2.8%	43
South Dakota	64.5%	70.7%	-8.7%	46
Tennessee	72.0%	60.3%	19.4%	26
Texas	71.3%	59.1%	20.6%	24
Utah	71.9%	61.4%	17.1%	29
Vermont	73.1%	51.2%	42.7%	15
Virginia	78.0%	44.9%	73.8%	6
Washington	69.7%	54.8%	27.0%	19
West Virginia	72.0%	69.8%	3.2%	41
Wisconsin	75.7%	49.8%	52.0%	10
Wyoming	72.5%	61.1%	18.8%	27
All Counties	69.6%	45.6%	52.6%
Derived from ACS data.