One can see glimpses of the rise of low-density suburbs even in non-housing data. On Monday, Ford’s car sales fell 24 percent in March, while F-Series pickups rose by double digits. GM’s latest sales growth was similarly driven by crossovers and trucks, not little cars. Maybe families want to live in denser areas but are being priced out, moving to the suburbs, and buying larger vehicles rather than a small car that can be parallel-parked on a crowded city block. Or maybe America suffers from a unique residential claustrophobia, where its residents naturally seek to fill out America’s bounty of land with ever-larger homes, trucks, and lawns.
America’s largest cities have so much going for them. They are rich, productive, and pulsating with culture and life. So what happened to the great urban revival? “America’s cities have domestic net out-migration because they’re not affordable,” said E. J. McMahon, the founder of the Empire Center for Public Policy. “For many, New York City is a temporary portal. The Baby Boomers retire to Florida. The middle-class Millennials move to Long Island for a house. The woman from Slovakia comes to Queens, lives in her second-cousin’s basement, gets her feet on the ground, and gets a better apartment in West Orange, New Jersey.”
It leads a great hollowing out of the city. “There are lots of new immigrants and rich people in New York, but there are fewer dead-center families,” McMahon said.
It was hard to hear this and not think of the political consequences of dense cities becoming a home for everybody-but-the-native-born-middle-class. Urban agglomeration—the theory that wealthy and productive areas naturally attract more wealth and productivity—has a dark side within America’s variety of representative democracy. It makes cities critical contributors to GDP and national tax revenue, yet nearly pointless in national voting, since the city becomes a mass of redundant liberals. Hillary Clinton won Brooklyn by 461,000 votes; that’s about seven times larger than the critical margin by which she lost Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, combined. Rural areas are naturally punished by an economy that prizes density and proximity to large urban metros; yet, they’re rewarded, by design, in representation.
Urban planners and economists focused on creativity and networks have been singing the praises of the city-living since the Great Recession (or, perhaps, since forever). But local housing policy, limited family finances, and American geographical abundance—not to mention the pro-rural laws of U.S. representative government—are powerful centrifugal forces that push Americans ever-outward into suburbs with lawns, trucks, and cul de sacs. The last decade was a dream. It’s 2006, again.
Article Appeared @https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/04/why-is-everyone-leaving-the-city/521844/