> New York suburbs are not the only ones getting somewhat grayer. In three Maryland suburbs outside Washington, Chevy Chase lost 34 percent of its 25- to 34-year-olds, Bethesda 19.2 percent and Potomac 27 percent. The declines were comparable for Kenilworth, Winnetka and Glencoe outside Chicago...
These are all very expensive suburbs. They are "graying" because it takes more time to accumulate the money to live there. The same is happening to my town. A better comparison would be suburbs that younger people can afford vs. cities. I'd bet you find the same trend, but these examples are not informative.
The title is somewhat misleading. The suburbs are not dying; in fact they are growing [1][2][3][4] and this article makes no claim to the contrary.
The article is saying that suburbs are becoming more like urban areas.
I like the author's evidence that housing prices are falling:
> In that same city in 2012, a typical McMansion would be valued at $477,000, about 274% more than the area's other homes. Today, a McMansion would be valued at $611,000, or 190% above the rest of the market.
Perhaps I missed it in the article, but by what objective measure are suburbs as a whole failing? The article just seems to be recounting a collection of horror stories.
I’ve got family all over the country. From what I’ve seen, older inner ring blue collar suburbs that have experienced their own white flight have declined. However, the ones with high quality schools have thrived and it’s not uncommon to find situations where two identical houses are 50% apart in asking price because one is in the good school district and the other is in the bad district.
"This shows that at almost every age level, the country continued to de-urbanize from 2000 to 2013. Various trend pieces about empty nesters moving to the big city simply aren't reflected in the data."
My experience is that people are overall more willing to trade space for urban convenience than they used to be, but still not so willing/able to trade both space and affordability for it. In places where the suburbs are also stupidly expensive - NY and CA - you don't see it as much. Everywhere else in the US - where property in the suburbs gets dramatically cheaper once you're five, ten, fifteen miles outside the city center - that's hard to resist.
> I've lived in cities - they typically failed to provide better services than lower density suburbs
I think this is an almost uniquely American phenomenon. In most places in the world, the suburbs are where you grudgingly live when you can't afford housing in the city.
Northeastern suburbs tend to be much older than suburbs in the rest of the country...
Your anecdote seems hardly enough to refute the article. How much do you know about newer suburban developments outside Atlanta, or Dallas, or Phoenix?
“...The millennial generation [is] moving out of the cities, forming households, having children, looking for better schools and that's going to drive rate demand in the suburbs.”
Not by choice, by necessity.
Anecdotal - my friends are moving out of cities. Not because they romanticize or even want a suburban house, but because they can't afford to be within an hour of a city and not be burdened by more debt. The only other option is to move outside the city influence and into the rural areas, which for many is worse than the suburbs.
EDIT - after reading through it all, it's clear this is a bunch of out of touch CEOs who are generalizing some weird psuedo-data trends. Unless every person I know happens to be well outside of the "millennials" presented here.
Except now the closer in suburbs(and urban housing) are for the rich. I live in DC, and pretty much everywhere in town is pricey, and the close suburbs that would be somewhat convenient(bethesda, arlington being the exemplars) to "town" are extraordinarily expensive. The (outer, not as nice, inconvenient) suburbs are the new hotbeds of poverty, and I've only been here for ~8 years but even in that time a lot of affordable neighborhoods have priced longtime residents(who don't own) out.
>The suburbs are dying, and this is reflected in real estate values. Follow the Chicago Tribune's architecture columnist, Dennis Rodkin, on Twitter. Every day this guy features a new home sale in the suburbs where it's sold for less than what it sold for 20, even 30 years ago.
Looking through some of these, I'm not surprised.
However, I think its not just taxes and Illinois corruption to blame for the 'death spiral' of far flung suburbs. The housing market in the US is changing in general. Buyers want shorter commutes, urban lifestyles. Living in some of the places Rodkin looks at - Lake Forest, Burr Ridge, Vernon Hills are 1+ hour commutes by train to the loop which a lot of buyers don't want.
The thing is that a lot of suburban areas are much younger than high-density areas. So they have borrowed for capital projects such as infrastructure and new buildings. They aren't paying the true costs of maintaining those things yet.
Cities on the other hand have to pay for the upkeep on their existing infrastructure, as well as replacing that infrastructure.
Replacing infrastructure is much more expensive than building it out in the first place. A lot of suburbs will fail when it comes time to replace their infrastructure. It just hasn't happened yet because in the United States you can keep building out forever. Furthermore people move away from areas burdened by the costs of replacing infrastructure.
The entire rust belt is being brutalized by the fact that formerly suburban areas have collapsed. The urban areas were already brutalized in the 50s, 60s and 70s by white flight.
Yeah, in my city, people my age (late 20s, early 30s) aren't moving to the suburbs because they want to, but because they're forced to by the insanely high cost of living in the urban area compared to the wages offered here. From what I gather, this is true in pretty much every city in the US that I know people in.
Kevin Drum's rebuttal, citing census data and Brookings estimates:
"there never really was much of a back-to-the-city trend in the first place... With only tiny variances, the suburbs have been gaining population for 70 years relative to cities (and rural areas)..."
Millenials' preferences appear roughly similar to the preferences of other generations.
It's almost as if millenials don't love avocado toast so much as they love defying sweeping stereotypes about cohorts divided by arbitrary birth years.
> In my metro (DFW), the neighborhoods of houses built in the 60s/70s/80s are dwindling because nobody will buy them. There are neighborhoods of perfectly fine ~200k houses just sitting on the market for months because "ewww, I don't want to live in Grand Prairie/Garland/Irving". Then those same people pine over the newly built $500k mcmansions in Frisco or the $2m mansions in Highland Park and lament about how they'll never be able to afford being a homeowner. Do you see the disconnect?
An alternative hypothesis would be that suburban development patterns don't work generally. I don't know anything about the DFW area specifically, but it's possible people don't want to live in those cheaper areas because they are poorly laid out and the infrastructure maintenance is higher than the revenue the area can generate. This may manifest itself in different ways (poorer schools, sidewalks, amenities), but one way or another, these neighborhoods are signaling decline.
Many first and second generation suburbs are in death spirals because of this problem. Buyers who can afford it chase newer development because the areas have an optimistic future and no obvious maintenance problem. Unfortunately, many of those areas will be in the same spot 30 years down the line.
> But these days, millennials seem to think that they are automatically entitled to live downtown in a 4 bedroom, newly renovated/constructed house with full amenities next to the main park and hip shopping center and zero crime while on an entry level salary.
I'm not saying there aren't some entitled people, but I haven't encountered this attitude very often - it seems like there are plenty of other reasonable explanations for what is driving consumer choices without stereotyping.
Young adults don't spend time in their houses. I'd rather have a 2 bedroom apartment within walking distance of several restaurants and bars than a house in the suburbs, even if they were the same rent.
The suburbs are made for single families - a shrinking demographic, even among homeowners.
These are all very expensive suburbs. They are "graying" because it takes more time to accumulate the money to live there. The same is happening to my town. A better comparison would be suburbs that younger people can afford vs. cities. I'd bet you find the same trend, but these examples are not informative.
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