Planners’ preference for urban density should not supersede Americans’ preferences for suburban or exurban living.
Planners' preference for urban density should not supersede Americans' preferences for suburban or exurban living.
A mericans, with little help from government, are reinventing themselves and boosting their prospects by settling in less expensive, less regulated regions where rents and house prices are more affordable.
Much of this is taking place in “red states,” leading some to link this movement to a conservative ideological agenda. But this is not primarily a political movement. It is a reflection of a largely apolitical grassroots and market-driven trend.
America’s Geographic Pattern
American history has been defined by its vastness. Colonial America provided an outlet for Britons hemmed in by scarce land, enclosures, and aristocratic domination. The early America republic was largely shaped by an epic expansion to the West, driven both by immigrants and by domestic migration from the more heavily settled, class-bound coastal areas.
Through the 19th century, millions migrated further into the interior of the continent, even to the so-called “great American desert” that Daniel Webster, among others, considered inhospitable to human habitation. Ultimately, the path of manifest destiny extended to the Pacific coast, shifting political power, economic, technological, and cultural influence from its historical northeastern base.
Today’s American geographic trends favor the South, the intermountain West, and the desert Southwest. In the past decade, five southern states — Texas, Florida, North Carolina, Georgia, and South Carolina, along with Arizona in the west — exceeded the growth in all of the other (44) states and the District of Columbia, according to the Census, notes demographer Wendell Cox. This pattern has accelerated since 2020, with southern states gaining 1.7 million, while the other three Census regions (Northeast, Midwest, and West) all had net domestic migration losses. In 2023, southern states accounted for 87 percent of all U.S. population growth.
Over recent decades the settled areas of the northeast and the West Coast have become ever more expensive and highly regulated, driving both businesses and people away. Recently the net losers include green “utopia” Oregon, and California, blessed by nature but also now the most heavily regulated state and among the highest taxed. Those running California managed to create a situation where housing prices have soared, even as the state has lost population.
The Triumph of Suburbia
The emergence of the New America is not just a move to red states but includes population shifts within blue states. In California, San Francisco and Los Angeles may be experiencing declines, but outlying areas such as the San Joaquin Valley and the Inland Empire continue to grow, a trend expected to continue for the next several decades.
This outbound trend well predates the pandemic. In 1950, the core cities accounted for nearly 24 percent of the U.S. population; today the share is under 15 percent. Meanwhile, suburbs and exurbs grew from housing 13 percent of the metropolitan population in 1940 to 86 percent in 2017. In the last decade, suburbs and exurbs gained 2 million net domestic migrants, while the urban core counties lost 2.7 million. Suburban dominance has accelerated since 2020 with a loss of 2 million from big cities.
America today is overwhelmingly a post-urban nation heavily concentrated in suburbs, exurbs, and even small towns. Across the entire nation, 92 percent of the population lives in counties with typical suburban population densities. In contrast, the urban cores, with population densities of at least 7,500 per square mile, accounted for barely 4 percent of the population, mostly located in and around New York City.
These trends reflect deep-seated preferences. Recent research by Jessica Trounstine at the University of California at Merced found that “preferences for single-family development are ubiquitous.” This applies across the demographic spectrum, she reports. Not surprisingly, many of the fastest growing metro areas are highly dispersed, such as Austin, Raleigh, Jacksonville, Orlando, and Nashville.
The Political War against the New Geography
These trends horrify many academics, city planners, big-city developers, and environmentalists. Opposition to car-oriented suburban development, notes historian Robert Bruegmann, reminded him of the Duke of Wellington’s complaint that trains would “only encourage the common people to move around needlessly.”
Despite what appear to be well-established public preferences, many planners and pundits back the densification of existing communities while hindering, and even prohibiting, development on the periphery (the “urban fringe”), where costs tend to be lower. Mainstream journalists tend to ignore these preferences as well. When assessing the best places “to live and work,” CNBC placed some of the fastest growing states, such as Texas and Tennessee, at the bottom due to their lack of “inclusion,” transit, and other progressive priorities.
Attacks on suburbs and exurbs gained strength after the 2008 global economic crisis, when elite media such as the New York Times and the Atlantic insisted that America’s suburbs were collapsing. The exurbs, one prominent urbanist suggested, would become “the next slum.”
Even when the suburbs were again clearly flourishing, the intelligentsia, urban developers, the mainstream media, and many political leaders continued their jihad against suburbs — this time based largely on climate concerns. Our most well-known climate zealot, former vice president Al Gore, has raged against “sprawl” for over 30 years.
For many environmental advocates, reducing greenhouse gases means increasing urban density. The Urban Land Institute, which represents many large urban developers, claims this is the most “important step for climate mitigation.” People in the English-speaking world, tuts the Financial Times, need to resign themselves to dense apartment living.
Suburbs are even blamed in media outlets such as the New York Times for the decline of cities, with the new enemy being suburban “NIMBYs” who want to preserve their way of life. Other writers, including one writing in the Nation, accuse suburbs of being incubators of homophobia, misogyny, and racism, and centers of incipient fascism.
The Economy Shifts to the New America
Today, for the first time in U.S. history, Florida, Texas, Georgia, the Carolinas, and Tennessee now account for more of the national GDP than the Northeast. In 2020 and 2021 alone, reported Bloomberg’s Michael Sasso and Alexandre Tanzi, increasingly well-heeled transplants brought with about $100 billion in new income to the Southeast, while the Northeast lost $60 billion. The decision by Jeff Bezos, closely identified with progressive causes, to move his residence to Florida could easily save him many billions.
The suburbs from 2010 to 2017 accounted for over 80 percent of all job growth. The majority of American jobs are located in lower density areas, an edge that has steadily gotten bigger. Growth has been most extraordinary in the 50 highest-growth counties, mostly located on the fringes of major sunbelt metros, which enjoyed an increase in employment more than 2.5 times that of other counties in 2019.
Overall the biggest economic winners have been Nashville, Austin, Jacksonville, Dallas-Fort Worth, and Raleigh. With the exception of Salt Lake City, the top ten job markets are all in the southeastern quadrant. In 2023 four of the five biggest increases in GDP were Austin, Jacksonville, Raleigh, and Dallas-Fort Worth.
These also increasingly serve as prime locations for Fortune 500 companies, with Houston, Dallas, and Atlanta all in the top ten. Texas is now home to more Fortune 500 companies than either New York or California. At the same time, sunbelt states, including Georgia, Louisiana, Florida, and Texas, lead the country in having the most small businesses per capita.
The primacy of the periphery and the sunbelt encompasses the whole range of economic activity, including not just manufacturing, but also business services. This holds increasingly in tech and finance, the traditional bastions of the coastal metros. According to a report in Bloomberg, New York has lost 160 Wall Street firms since 2019, taking with them roughly 1 trillion dollars in capital. Since 2019 Austin, Salt Lake City, Jacksonville, Dallas-Fort Worth, and Nashville have led tech growth. By contrast, the San Francisco Chronicle estimates the Bay Area has lost 100,000 tech positions over the past few years. Smaller but similar losses have occurred in both Seattle and Portland.
The Likely Shape of the New America
Core cities will continue to attract the wealthy and the educated young. Upscale residential neighborhoods in Brooklyn, Boston, Los Angeles, or San Francisco remain attractive to select populations. Even Portland, which has been losing population amidst a very obvious breakdown of social order, will still have its fans.
Yet the urban nexus of human capital first described by Jean Gottman in 1983 as the “transactional city” is becoming somewhat anachronistic. Office occupancy has been declining since the turn of the century, while construction of new space has also fallen. In 2019, before the pandemic, construction was one-third the rate of 1985 and half that of 2000.
Even traditional big-city boosters, including the New York Times, now bleakly warn of an “urban doom loop.” The impressive blocks of skyscrapers have gone from heralds of a glorious future to something more resembling the factory towns of the industrial revolution. This is true not just in the Northeast but also in the core cities of Texas.
More critical than the threat of a pending commercial-property meltdown may be migration patterns, as young educated graduates, particularly young families, move from New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, to Dallas, Houston, and Phoenix. Fast-growing counties, often home to planned peripheral communities, are drawing much of their growth from people earning over $75,000, especially those between the ages of 30 and 44. Four of the top ten cities gaining interstate Millennial migrants, in the recent Smart Asset survey, are in the Lone Star and Sunshine States.
These regions and their peripheries are also attracting more immigrants and minorities, and for good reasons. Adjusting for cost of living, African Americans and Latinos do far better there than in urban California, New York, Massachusetts, and Illinois. The biggest total growth in the number of the foreign born in the last decade was not in New York, Chicago, or Los Angeles, but in Miami, Houston, and Dallas-Fort Worth. Indeed in recent years, blacks and now Hispanics have become more likely to leave California than whites.
Even in blue states, the majority of ethnic minorities live in suburbs, who have accounted for virtually all the suburban growth over the past decade. William Frey of the Brookings Institution notes that in 1990 roughly 20 percent of suburbanites were non-white. That rose to 30 percent in 2000 and 45 percent in 2020.
The Politics of the New America
These patterns are certain to bolster the political power of now predominately red states and regions. The reallocation after the 2020 census already shifted congressional seats to Texas, Florida, North Carolina, Arizona, and other sunbelt states from places such as New York, Illinois, and, for the first time, California. If current trends continue, by 2030 California could lose another four seats, New York three, and Illinois two while Texas gains three, Florida two, and a host of other southern states will gain one.
Conservatives may be tempted to look at these realities and see a political bonanza. But roughly two-thirds of people moving from California, notes a recent Stanford study, did not consider politics as their primary reason to move. Indeed the movement of largely socially liberal Millennials and minorities to suburbs and even exurbs may make them something more akin to swing areas. In 2020, for example, Joe Biden won in large part by edging out Trump’s support in suburbs in swing states. Democrats have made gains particularly in more diverse suburbs, even in states such as Texas. It’s also likely that many conservative positions on issues such as abortion and guns, as well as the Trump persona, are not particularly well-liked, particularly among suburban women.
The Democrats could thrive in the New America but only if they call off their urban-centric policy-makers. Suburbanites tend to be happy to live on the periphery, as Pew surveys suggest. Some leftist Democrats want the suburbs to be densified. Yet three out of four Californians, according to a poll by former Obama campaign pollster David Binder, opposed legislation that banned single-family zoning. In San Diego, green attempts to impose a fee on vehicle miles traveled had to be shelved last year due to fierce public resistance.
Ultimately, the emergence of the New America should be seen not as a partisan choice, but as a way to preserve the country’s now deteriorating historic legend as a place of opportunity. It also remains one way the U.S. can avoid demographic disaster. On its current track, America is due to start losing population by as early as mid-century. As cities become the abode of the childless with decreasing birthrates, it is lower-cost and less-dense suburban and exurban communities that show the highest fertility rates.
Ultimately the question comes down to what kind of society we want. Policies to force people back into denser urban areas will ensure a decline of population and ever greater dependence on undocumented workers who are willing, for now, to accept crowded conditions. In contrast the New America suggests an alternative shaped by popular desires for a better life. Rather than seek to hamstring this movement, policy-makers should embrace it as the way America can avoid its sometimes seemingly inexorable decline and the loss of its historic position as opportunity’s greatest home.