“The suburbs might be growing faster right now, but don’t be glum about the prospects for urban growth and revitalization,” writes Joe Cortright for CityLab. “Earlier this week, The New York Times published an op-ed from Jed Kolko—’Seattle Climbs but Austin Sprawls, The Myth of the Return to Cities’—offering up another iteration of his long running argument that the urban rebound is overstated. His key point: in the aggregate, suburbs are growing faster than cities, and the density of most metropolitan areas continues to decrease.” “The article is surely refuting something of a straw man: not everyone is moving back to cities everywhere. And some big metro areas in the Sun Belt continue to sprawl rapidly. But even if they aren’t absolutely outperforming suburbs everywhere, cities are relatively much stronger than they were a decade (and especially several decades) ago, and are disproportionately attracting the best and the brightest. The chief reason they’re not doing even better—as Kolko concedes—is that we’re not building housing in city centers fast enough.” “There are several key reasons why no one should be glum about the continuing prospects for urban growth and revitalization. First…a more finely grained geographic analysis shows that the closer you get to the city center in most metros, the stronger has been the performance. While it’s true that the more outlying parts of some cities are losing population, their cores are becoming increasingly vibrant.” “Second, national aggregations conceal local patterns. To be sure, these data show a renewed growth in the sunbelt. And in the biggest Sun Belt metros, a big chunk of the growth is in their sprawling suburbs (Houston, Dallas). But the growth in these metros is not representative of what’s happening in many other places.” “Third, there’s a baseline issue here. City growth has decelerated from the past year or two. But city growth this decade looks far different than it did a decade ago… Taking this longer view, it’s apparent that growth rates in suburbs have declined sharply since the last decade, while growth rates in urban counties were up.” “Fourth, in many places, we’re bumping up against the (policy-induced) limits to meeting the market demand for urban living. In the early stages of growth, cities can add population by filling vacant housing. But as vacancy rates fall, the only way to accommodate more people is to add more housing, which is a process that (a) takes time, and (b) is too often unfortunately encumbered by NIMBY building restrictions.”
