More Demography

On November 27 we wrote debunking a story in The New York Times about the "death of suburbia." Happily, here is a Forbes column by our favorite demographer, Joel Kotkin, which makes the same points we made but makes them better and with much interesting data.

Kotkin is of course correct that "urban land owners, planners and pundits" want people to live near public transportation in dense clusters - mostly downtown. Unfortunately for the planners, actual Americans want to live in the suburbs, the exurbs, and in small towns or rural areas:

Aging boomers tended to move out of dense urban cores, and to a lesser extent, even the suburbs. If they moved anywhere, they were headed further out in metropolis towards the more rural area.