Kotkin One, Planners Zero

We have repeatedly quoted demographer Joel Kotkin to the effect that suburbs and exurbs are where people want to live, once they have children and thereafter. For some years he's been a voice in the wilderness, arguing against the wishes of urban planners who wanted us all to live in a high-rise alongside a light rail line, and who claimed we'd agreed.

Turns out he was correct, the urban planners were wrong. The Wall Street Journal reports as follows:

“The back-to-the-city trend has reversed,” said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution, citing last year’s census data.

Millennials, the generation now ages 23 to 38, are no longer as rooted as they were after the economic downturn. Many are belatedly getting married and heading to the suburbs, just as their parents and grandparents did.

What is different from the postwar boom of 1950s and 1960s is that growth is far more selective—limited to suburbs blessed by good weather and good jobs, largely in the Sunbelt, where they are growing more than twice as fast as their neighboring cities, Mr. Frey said.

The obvious corollary is that suburbs of Rust Belt cities are shrinking, right along with the cities of which they are satellites. The article doesn't focus on what's happening to really huge cities in the Sun Belt, the places they write about are satellites of largish cities. I wouldn't be surprised if some inner LA, Houston and Miami suburbs are losing population too. Hat tip to Drudge Report for the link.