Who’s Moving to the Suburbs? Lesbians, That’s Who!

February 28, 2012 by

Here at the Move to Suma, we’ve been keeping track of all the people who are moving to the suburbs, which is really just a thinly-veiled attempt to validate my own decision.  The more people who are moving to the suburbs, the better I feel.  So in the past year or so, we’ve commented on census studies showing that immigrants and African-Americans are increasingly migrating from the cities to the suburbs, and pointed out a few celebrities who are also making the move.

So now, we also want to welcome our newest addition — lesbians!

It used to be that gay, lesbian and bi-sexual people in the suburbs found the climate less than welcoming. LGBT people had to blend in to make it in suburban neighborhoods. Not so now. These days suburban living is viewed as a real option for LGBT people and they are moving to suburbs that are close to NYC as well as towns further out.

According to Gary Gates, a demographer from the Urban Institute who did a study for HRC after the 2000 census, gay male couples largely prefer urban environments (45%) to suburbs (41.3%) and lesbian couples settle more often in suburban locales (46%) than city centers (38.2%).

The post from Its Conceivable recounts the story of a lesbian couple with a one-year old daughter who moved to New Rochelle, a lovely suburb of Manhattan, where they’ve found a community of new York City “ex-pats.”

So what do we think of those stats, showing such a mixed preference among gays and lesbians for the cities versus the suburbs?  I mean, it certainly flies in the face of conventional wisdom that the LGBT community would prefer the traditional greater levels of tolerance and diversity of the cities.  But I think key to those stats is that they come from COUPLES, not singles.  That is, it’s sort of interesting that gay and lesbian couples, particularly, I imagine, couples with children, have the same impulse to move to the suburbs that straight couples do.  My guess is that gay and lesbian singles would have much stronger preferences for the city (which is, again, not so much different from straight people).

People are people, you know?  Gay, straight, as they get older they have the same sort of changes in their lives that sometimes compel changes in where they live.

As we’ve noted a few times in this space, it is interesting to see all these demographic studies that are showing how the suburbs are becoming more ethnic and diverse: immigrants, African-Americans, and now the LGBT community.  Most of these people come to the suburbs for the same reasons: more space, cheaper living, and an easier place to raise kids. It’s a universal need as you get older.  But the nice part is that as we start to see those changes in the suburbs, we might actually find the suburbs becoming more “livable” to exiles.  After all, one of the reasons a 17 year resident of Manhattan like me was willing to move to the suburbs was the opportunity to live somewhere like Nyack, which is relatively diverse and lefty and gay-friendly and all that.  It would be nice to think that the suburbs will eventually evolve to provide more neighborhoods like that, places where you don’t feel like you’re selling your soul when you leave the city.

So welcome to Kim and Philippa, the couple from the story, and welcome to everyone else joining me in the suburbs.

Filed Under: Living in the Suburbs, News, Who's Moving to the Suburbs? Tagged With: ,

Who’s Moving to the Suburbs? More Asian-Americans, That’s Who!

February 7, 2012 by

The Associated Press reported last week that Asian-Americans are increasingly moving to the suburbs from the inner cities::

America’s historic Chinatowns, home for a century to immigrants seeking social support and refuge from racism, are fading as rising living costs, jobs elsewhere and a desire for wider spaces lure Asian-Americans more than ever to the suburbs.

***

Nationwide, about 62% of Asian-Americans in the nation’s large metropolitan areas live in the suburbs, up from 54% in 1990 and the highest ever. Tied with Hispanics as the fastest-growing group, the nation’s 4.4 million Asians are more likely than other minorities to live in the suburbs; only whites, at 78%, are higher.

Since 2000, nearly three-fourths of Asian population growth in the U.S. occurred in suburbs, many of them in the South.

This all makes sense, right?  We’ve noted before the trend for immigrants in general moving from the cities to the suburbs, so it’s not surprising that Asian-Americans are following the same path.  Indeed, it’s kind of what happened in previous generations — my Italian grandparents settled in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, but their four sons all ended up scattering to the suburbs of Dutchess, Rockland, Long Island, and Staten Island.  That’s pretty much the American experience.  Immigrants are initially attracted to urban centers, particularly those with a high concentration of fellow ex-patriates, but as they have kids, or as their kids have kids, they eventually find their way to the open spaces.  So it’s no surprise that Asian-Americans are doing the same thing.

A hat tip to the 8asian.com blog, which commented on the AP piece and shared a more personal perspective on the trend.  Unsurprisingly, as with most people who move to the suburbs, it’s all about the kids:

I later asked my parents why we moved to the suburbs in the first place. Why did my mother have to endure such a terrible commute? Why did we pick up and leave such a familiar community and move far away from our friends and relatives? For me, it was an uncomfortable experience. Besides having to make new friends, there were just so many cultural differences between the city and the suburbs.

My parents told me that they did it for the schools. More than anything else, they were worried that my sister and I wouldn’t get a good enough education in the city. What if we didn’t do well enough to qualify for entry into one of the specialized public schools? The schools we were zoned for were terrible. And not only were the schools in Great Neck strong, the neighborhoods were also quiet and safe. There, my parents wouldn’t have to worry quite as much about our safety and well-being.

Basically, my parents decided to move for the benefit of their children.

To me, that’s really the reason why so many APA families have migrated to the suburbs. It’s not merely to achieve some vague sense of the American Dream – a nice house, a front yard, and a prettier neighborhood.

It does seem like every time I come across someone writing about the difficult decision to move to the suburbs, they talk about the kids.  It’s the same for hipster urban couples as it is for people recent immigrants living in Chinatown.

All that said, I still find the suburbs pretty white-bread.  My wife and son are Asian, and it’s not unusual to look around when we’re out at a restaurant or a movie and find that they’re pretty much the only minorities in the place. But I know that in other areas of the suburbs you’ll find pretty high concentrations of ethnic residents, like the huge Korean-American population in Palisades Park and Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey.

It’s a funny thing.  We call the suburbs “white,” but only because we’re largely talking about second- and third-generation immigrants who migrated in droves 50 years ago. After all, I’m “white,” but my Sicilian grandfather was certainly not “white” back 75 years ago when he changed his name from “Miserandino” to Rand. (chop off some letters on each side, and become an Anglo!).  We don’t think of Italian food as ethnic anymore, partly because of assimilation but also just because over time ethnicities weave themselves into the general fabric of society.

Now, when we talk about ethnic Americans, we’re talking about the Asian-American or Latino-American populations. But it might be that in 25 years we’ll be complaining about how the suburbs still lack diversity, but only because our understanding of diversity will have changed. As someone in a mixed-race family, I certainly would love to see an increase in ethnic diversity in my area, for all the obvious reasons.

Not the least of which is that hopefully, at some point, I’ll be able to get a decent bowl of soup without having to drive 25 miles into Manhattan.

Filed Under: Living in the Suburbs, News, Who's Moving to the Suburbs? Tagged With: , ,

Who’s Moving to the Suburbs? Jay Z and Beyonce, That’s Who!

January 15, 2012 by

Lots of cool people have moved to the suburbs, not just (ahem) me.  We had Amy Winehouse a few years ago, back when she was alive.  Then we got reports that more immigrants and African-Americans were moving into the suburbs. Then big-fat-and-now-thin-and-now-sorta-fat-again Jonah Hill.

You see?  It’s not just me, lots of people are fleeing the cities for the joys of picket fences and sports bars and no food delivery.

But now we have our biggest get yet:

MediaTakeOut.com got a SUPER WORLD EXCLUSIVE . . . Beyonce and Jay Z have CHANGED their primary residence . .. from NYC – to SCARSDALE, a suburb OUTSIDE of NYC.

We spoke to a person with FIRST HAND KNOWLEDGE who tell us that Jigga and Bey have been working FOR MONTHS, to finish a COMPLETE RENOVATION on a MEGA MANSION that the couple bought nearly 3 years ago.

According to our insider, the new mansion underwent a $2M RENO. The new house has a STATE OF THE ART security system and a tennis court and a full basketball court. They also made a separate GUEST HOUSE where Bey’s mom will use, when she comes to town.

So what about their $10M 8,000 Sq ft. Tribeca apartment? We’re told they’ll use it when their “in the city.”

Must be nice . . .

How about that, people?  Not so bad — maybe the biggest celebrity couple in the world, and they’re moving to SUMA.

Welcome to the suburbs, guys, love that music stuff that you do.

Filed Under: News, Who's Moving to the Suburbs? Tagged With: , , ,

Are the Fringe Suburbs Really Dying? The Brookings Institute Weighs in Again

December 1, 2011 by

We’ve written before about the “great debate” about whether the American love affair with the suburbs is dying. Basically, it’s a debate about where people SAY they want to live, and where they are actually choosing to live.  That is, people keep saying that they want to live in dense, diverse, urban environments, but Census data keeps showing migration from cities to the suburbs.

The Brookings Institution has been the loudest banger of the drum in favor of the argument that the suburbs are dying, that people don’t want to live in that sprawl anymore.  We see this again in a New York Times op-ed from Christian B. Leinberger, a senior fellow at Brookings, who contends  that planners need to recognize the need to develop walkable environments:

Simply put, there has been a profound structural shift — a reversal of what took place in the 1950s, when drivable suburbs boomed and flourished as center cities emptied and withered.

The shift is durable and lasting because of a major demographic event: the convergence of the two largest generations in American history, the baby boomers (born between 1946 and 1964) and the millennials (born between 1979 and 1996), which today represent half of the total population.

Many boomers are now empty nesters and approaching retirement. Generally this means that they will downsize their housing in the near future. Boomers want to live in a walkable urban downtown, a suburban town center or a small town, according to a recent survey by the National Association of Realtors.

The millennials are just now beginning to emerge from the nest — at least those who can afford to live on their own. This coming-of-age cohort also favors urban downtowns and suburban town centers — for lifestyle reasons and the convenience of not having to own cars.

Over all, only 12 percent of future homebuyers want the drivable suburban-fringe houses that are in such oversupply, according to the Realtors survey. This lack of demand all but guarantees continued price declines. Boomers selling their fringe housing will only add to the glut. Nothing the federal government can do will reverse this.

I don’t disagree with any of that, but neither do I buy that the fringe suburbs are dying.  I agree that we need to create more density in the suburbs — as someone who works in suburban real estate, I can attest that walkable village downtown areas command a premium on the market, precisely because people love the idea of living in the suburbs while still being able to get a cup of coffee without having to drive.

But I still think that there’s a whiff of “we want this to be true, so it is true” in these arguments. Certainly, census data does not support the idea that people are migrating to dense urban environments, and my experience of both working in the suburbs and now living in the suburbs suggests that there’s still a lot of interest in traditional suburban neighborhoods: big lots, picket fences, back yards, cul-de-sacs, the whole thing.  Would those people like to see more public transportation options, and more walkable downtowns?  Yes, of course.  The question is whether they’d be willing to pay for them.  That, I’m not so sure about.

Filed Under: News, Suburbs versus Cities Tagged With: , ,

An Increase in Poverty in the Suburbs: Are the Suburbs Becoming More Like the Cities?

November 3, 2011 by

The New York Times had a piece last week about the increase in suburban poverty since 2000:

The poor population in America’s suburbs — long a symbol of a stable and prosperous American middle class — rose by more than half after 2000, forcing suburban communities across the country to re-evaluate their identities and how they serve their populations.

The increase in the suburbs was 53 percent, compared with 26 percent in cities. The recession accelerated the pace: two-thirds of the new suburban poor were added from 2007 to 2010.

“The growth has been stunning,” said Elizabeth Kneebone, a senior researcher at the Brookings Institution, who conducted the analysis of census data. “For the first time, more than half of the metropolitan poor live in suburban areas.”

As a result, suburban municipalities — once concerned with policing, putting out fires and repairing roads — are confronting a new set of issues, namely how to help poor residents without the array of social programs that cities have, and how to get those residents to services without public transportation. Many suburbs are facing these challenges with the tightest budgets in years.

“The whole political class is just getting the memo that Ozzie and Harriet don’t live here anymore,” said Edward Hill, dean of the Levin College of Urban Affairs at Cleveland State University.

So why is this happening? I think it’s just because the suburbs are simply getting older. If you think about it, the very concept of the “suburbs” developed in the post-WWII era, part of the baby boom explosion in population that pushed so many people from the urban environments to the then-bucolic suburban enclaves.  But the areas that were developed at that time have started to show their age, with the children and grandchildren of those original suburbanites migrating to newer, larger, posher developments. So some of the older, less fashionable suburban areas are now affordable for people at the lower ends of the income spectrum, which is actually a good thing to the extent that it flies in the face of the typical complaint about the suburbs lacking economic and racial diversity. But it’s a bad thing insofar as most of these suburban areas are ill-equipped to provide the social services needed by the working poor.

Essentially, what I think is happening is that these original suburbs are going through the same transformation that urban areas went through in the 1950s.  The infrastructure is getting older, some of the people living there are getting older, and some of the people who traditionally lived there are choosing to move to newer, sometimes more upscale, environments. But the census isn’t going to have that granular level of detail to show how people are moving from one part of the suburbs to another, so all it’s showing is population growth in the suburbs generally, and population growth in the poorer demographics.

Arguably, then, the suburbs of today are starting to demographically reflect the outer regions of the city (think: the Bronx, or uptown Manhattan) from 50 years ago.  And they’re bringing both the same challenges that those urban areas had (poverty, crime) as well as some of the benefits of both economic and ethnic diversity.

Filed Under: News, Suburbs versus Cities Tagged With: ,

The Grass is Always Greener: Why People Who Live in the Suburbs Want to Live in the City, and People Who Live in the City (Surprisingly) Want to Live in the Suburbs

October 28, 2011 by

Greg Hanscom put up an interesting take on Grist.org on the discrepancy between where people say they want to live (dense cities) and where they actually seem to be ending up living (sprawling suburbs).  He points to polling data that came from the real estate advising firm RCLCO showing that 88% of Millenials and even their Baby Boomer parents express a desire to live in denser and less car-dependent settings, which is in conflict with census data showing population growth in the suburbs and declines in the cities.

His take:

  • Lots of Millenials would LOVE to move to the cities, but to do that they need of them jobs that no one seems to be able to get these days. So they’re camping out at their parents’ place in the suburbs, “watching It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia reruns and dreaming of big city living.”
  • Although crime is down in the big cities, but not enough to diminish frightening images of the city as violent places.
  • And although young people like to live in the cities, they pack up for the suburbs as soon as they have kids.

Finally, he makes a brilliant point that maybe this is all about something deep in the American psyche that makes us consistently pine for that which we don’t have, almost a “grass is always greener” perspective that affects all of us.  He points out that according to a 2009 Pew poll, 46% of the public “would rather live in a different type of community from the one they’re living in now — a sentiment that is most prevalent among city dwellers.”

It’s a brilliant post, and I think he’s right on all counts.  Without question young people want to live in the cities — why wouldn’t someone who is 25 prefer to live in a place with abundant nightlife opportunities, ethnic diversity, culture, and public transportation that allows you to drink your face off and still get home safely?  And, conversely, it’s also abundantly clear that people tend to gravitate toward the larger living spaces afforded in the suburbs once they start filling up their 600 square foot apartment with a bunch of screaming children.

Moreover, I think there’s something to the “grass is greener” affect.  Most people who live in the city tend to settle down into a torpid state where they take all that great city stuff for granted.  Like me, they stop going out so much, particularly as they get older, and spend more time in their home and surrounding neighborhood.  And then they increasingly realize that, boy, it really sucks to spend 90% of your time in a two-room apartment, so they pine away for the larger, greener pastures of the suburbs.  Then, of course, you have people like me who move to the suburbs for a lot of good reasons, but look around one night at the Cheescake Factory and think that they’ve made a terrible, terrible mistake.  Essentially, we all want what we don’t have, particularly if we used to have it.  It must be something deeply wired into our brains to keep us constantly on the move, always looking for something better, that helped us get through the caveman days.  But it really does make it difficult to appreciate what you have.

So I have no problem admitting that I’m one of those people: I moved to the suburbs, but I really do miss living in the city, and I’m certainly happy that I got my 17 years of urban living in before I exiled myself.

I’ll also say this: if you’re reading this, and you live in the city, go do something. Go to the park, or a club, or a great restaurant, or stare at paintings.  That’s why you’re living in the city, why you’re sacrificing all that money and comfort.  So go do it.  Before it’s too late.

Filed Under: Advice, Living in Manhattan, Living in the Suburbs, News, Suburbs versus Cities Tagged With: , , , ,

On the News that Newburgh is the “Murder Capital of New York”: Thoughts on Gentrification, and Living in a Suburban Mini-City

October 3, 2011 by

I always find it interesting when people, usually liberals like me, complain about “gentrification,” particularly the yuppification of working class neighborhoods.  We bemoan how the migration of upscale residents force rents and home prices up, forcing the original residents out of their homes and changing the character of the neighborhoods — often the very character that attracted the affluent invaders in the first place.  Of course, what’s always funny is that the people who complain about gentrification are the very people who would never DREAM of actually moving into those areas before they gentrify.

I understand the concerns about gentrification to the extent that they focus on the needs of displaced residents who find themselves priced out of neighborhoods that they’ve called home for a long time.  And I certainly think that more should be done to ensure that people have affordable places to live in areas where they’d like to live.

But let’s be real — most of the places that get gentrified were not such particularly nice places to live to begin with.  You want to complain about how Manhattan exiles are changing the character of Williamsburg?  Fine, but tell me when you’d even heard of Williamsburg before they started building upscale condos there.  You want to complain about Times Square — okay, but then tell me about all the times you used to actually go there when it was porn shops and abandoned buildings. Yes, it’s terrible that places like Soho and Tribeca pushed out all the artists who lived there, back when you never went south of 14th street.  So just shut up.

Moreover, most of the places where these pretentious romanticizers live now were themselves gentrified; it’s just that the process took place so long ago that they don’t remember what the neighborhoods were like in the old days.  Take, for example, the Upper West Side, one of the most upscale neighborhoods in the country, and where I lived happily for about 15 years.  People don’t remember, for example that West Side Story was actually set in the lower UWS. And it’s not like the gentrification process was 50 years ago.  When I bought on 82d Street in 1994, the general sense was that the Upper West Side was great, but you didn’t want to buy north of 86th street. My next-door neighbor told me that she bought her whole brownstone in the early 1970s for about $25,000, when no one wanted to live there.  She said she remembers hearing gunshots every night.  She did pretty good with that investment, but the larger point is that everyone who lives on the Upper West Side, complaining about the changing character of Brooklyn, lives in a gentrified neighborhood. It’s just that they probably moved in long after gentrification took place, once it was “safe.”  So unless they want to claim that the statute of limitations has passed on bemoaning the gentrification of the UWS, they need to shut up.

I’ve seen the same thing in Nyack, where I live now.  When I was growing up in Rockland, Nyack was just starting to emerge from decades of neglect, epitomized by racial unrest, decaying infrastructure, poverty, all of that.  You want to say things were better than, before all the antique stores and restaurants moved in?  Okay.  For who?

Indeed, Nyack is now one of those places that gives you some of the benefits that people normally attribute to urban living — diversity, ethnicity, walkable downtowns — while still providing the benefits of a suburban lifestyle.  That is, it’s one of those places that people who move from the city say they want.  And you see this sort of thing in pockets throughout the Manhattan suburbs, places like White Plains, which is a mini-city with a growing downtown area that has gone through its own renewal.

I got to thinking about the history in Nyack when reading Patrick Radden Keefe’s riveting article in New York Magazine about the crime problems in Newburgh, a small city in Orange County about 20 miles north of me:

Beautifully situated on a picturesque bend in the Hudson about a 90 minutes’ drive north of New York City, Newburgh does not look, from a distance, like a community mired in High Noon levels of lawlessness. But in actuality, it has less in common with bohemian Beacon, just across the river (“Williamsburg on the Hudson,” as the Times recently anointed it), than it does with, say, West Baltimore. Despite its small size and bucolic setting, Newburgh occupies one of the most dangerous four-mile stretches in the northeastern United States. “There are reports of shootouts in the town streets, strings of robberies, and gang assaults with machetes,” an alarmed Chuck Schumer said in a Senate hearing last year, describing the situation in Newburgh as “shocking.” With a higher rate of violent crime per capita than the South Bronx or Brownsville, little Newburgh, population 29,000, is the murder capital of New York State.

The article goes on to recount the steps being taken by James Gagliano, the head of the Hudson Valley Safe Streets Task Force, to clean up the city, and the difficulties of revitalizing an impoverished community. What’s interesting to me is that someone could have written that same article about Nyack in the 1960s and early 1970s, before the area started to turn around.  I know Newburgh very well.  My real estate company has an office in the area, and I’ve been to the city to talk about the investment potential there a few times.  It’s one of those great old Hudson River cities, and it always seems to me that the city has the potential for recovering just the same way that Nyack did.

As we say in the real estate business, it has “good bones”: great architecture, beautiful old buildings, great access to the Hudson, close to what might become the fourth major metropolitan airport at Stewart, and convenient to the Thruway.  And there are parts of it right now that are terrific.  I have friends who live in Newburgh, whom I’ve visited a few times, and they have a whole community of young, interesting, vibrant people who circulate through the city.  It’s just that, like a lot of emerging areas, there are good parts and bad parts.

Keefe captures this potential of the city, and the historical legacy, really well:

One of Newburgh’s crueler ironies is the way today’s depressed urban landscape is overlaid on a rich architectural foundation full of vestiges of bygone wealth. In the nineteenth century, the city flourished as a hub for river-borne commerce. Thomas Edison built one of the nation’s earliest power plants there in 1884. But eventually the factories relocated, the ferry was discontinued after the construction of the Newburgh-Beacon Bridge, and Broadway emptied out after malls opened outside town. In the sixties, the city undertook a disastrous experiment in urban renewal, demolishing the historic waterfront but failing to replace it with anything.

It feels almost spooky to walk today among the Gilded Age mansions of long-dead industrialists on Montgomery Street, some of them boarded up, others carved into low-income apartments. Abandoned buildings abound, many of them gone to rot. “We’re not unique,” Nicholas Valentine, a local tailor who serves as Newburgh’s mayor, tells me. “It’s happened to many communities up and down the Hudson. Poughkeepsie. Peekskill. Things die.”

Yes, things die.  But they’re sometimes reborn.  It’s good to see that the authorities are taking such an aggressive approach to cleaning up Newburgh.  It’s one of those places that I would love to see recover, and not just for business reasons.  I just see how a place like Nyack has become a real jewel of the region, and think that Newburgh could do the same thing.  Then again, I’ve been saying it for ten years, and it hasn’t quite happened yet.

But I do feel there’s a very good chance that 20 years ago people will be complaining about  how the “character” of Newburgh has changed, how homes are so expensive.  They’ll romanticize the past, and talk about how gentrification has destroyed the essential authentic nature of the city.  And none of those people, none of them, would move there today.  So, again, shut up.

Filed Under: Living in the Suburbs, News Tagged With: , , , ,

In the News: Are Young People Going to Abandon Cities for the Suburbs?

August 6, 2011 by

We’ve previously discussed the debate concerning the future of the suburbs: specifically, whether young people are turning toward, or away, from suburban life in favor of a more urban experience.  On the one side, the Brookings Institute put out a white paper positing that traditional “white flight” from the cities to the suburbs was evolving into “bright flight” from the suburbs to the city — young people fleeing the suburbs to become part of the urban core. On the other side, we’ve seen pushback from some analysts pointing to Census data that actually supports the opposite argument, that young people are actually choosing to migrate to the suburbs.

Here’s Joel Kotkin in a piece that he published on his NewGeography site, which which was republished in Forbes, entitled  “Why America’s Young and Restless Will Abandon Cities for Suburbs”:

Some demographers claim that “white flight” from the city is declining, replaced by a “bright flight” to the urban core from the suburbs. “Suburbs lose young whites to cities,” crowed one Associated Press headline last year.

Yet evidence from the last Census show the opposite: a marked acceleration of movement not into cities but toward suburban and exurban locations. The simple, usually inexorable effects of maturation may be one reason for this surprising result. Simply put, when 20-somethings get older, they do things like marry, start businesses, settle down and maybe start having kids.

An analysis of the past decade’s Census data by demographer Wendell Cox shows this. Cox looked at where 25- to 34-year-olds were living in 2000 and compared this to where they were living by 2010, now aged 35 to 44. The results were surprising: In the past 10 years, this cohort’s presence grew 12% in suburban areas while dropping 22.7% in the core cities. Overall, this demographic expanded by roughly 1.8 million in the suburbs while losing 1.3 million in the core cities.

***

These findings should inform the actions of those who run cities. Cities may still appeal to the “young and restless,” but they can’t hold millennials captive forever. Even relatively successful cities have turned into giant college towns and “post-graduate” havens — temporary way stations before people migrate somewhere else. This process redefines cities from enduring places to temporary resorts.

This is a really interesting debate, so we’ll continue to track it.  I think part of the divide depends on what you mean by “young people.”  The “bright flight” argument, to the extent that it points out the obvious tendency of unmarried, childless people in their 20s to move to cities, seems self-evident.  But the responding point, that those same people start to move to the suburbs in their 30s, seems equally self-evident.  That is, is anything really changing?

Put it this way: you could not have kept me in the suburbs when I was in my 20s if you pulled a gun on me.  For most of the last 20 years, in fact, I lived in cities even though I inexplicably kept getting jobs in the suburbs: I lived in Manhattan when I had a clerkship in Uniondale, Long Island; I lived in San Francisco when I was in graduate school in Palo Alto; and I lived in Manhattan for over 10 years while I taught in Brooklyn (technically, okay, not a suburb) and then started working in the Hudson Valley.

But over time, I not only found myself losing friends to the suburbs, but realizing that the things that were keeping me in the city were things that were becoming less a vital part of my life, and that I could have an easier life (particularly for me, who actually did a reverse commute) if I just gave in and move to the suburbs.

Which means I went through the exact process described by Kotkin: urban in my 20s, then moving to the suburbs as I got older.

To paraphrase an old quote from Winston Churchill: “If you’re not living in the city at twenty you have no heart, if you’re not living in the suburbs at forty you have no brain.”

Filed Under: News, Suburbs versus Cities Tagged With: , ,

Does Living in the Suburbs Make You Healthier? Maybe for Some People….

June 20, 2011 by

The Wall Street Journal reported last week that suburbanites are actually healthier than people who live in either the city or in rural areas.

For many urban dwellers, the country conjures up images of clean air, fresh food and physical activities. But these days, Americans residing in major cities live longer, healthier lives overall than their country cousins—a reversal from decades past.

***

To be sure, city dwellers live with more air pollution and violent crime. They also have higher rates of sexually transmitted diseases and low-birth-weight babies and are more likely to drink excessively. But overall, urbanites tend to rate their own health more highly and are less likely to die prematurely than rural Americans, according to the county rankings report.

In many measures, residents of suburban areas are the best off. They generally rate their own health the highest and have the fewest premature deaths than either their urban or rural counterparts. Suburbanites also have the fewest low-birth-weight babies, homicides and sexually transmitted diseases.

The emphasis is mine, gloriously mine!  How about that?  Live in the city, and you’re more likely to drink excessively (very true, in my experience), and you’re less healthy from all the air pollution.

Move to the suburbs, though and you reduce your chances, according to the article,  having low-weight babies, getting murdered, and getting the pox.  That’s a pretty good tradeoff off for lousy Thai food, amirite???

Not that moving the suburbs has helped me at all, frankly.  That is, I have not gotten a sexually transmitted disease or been murdered or had a low-weight baby, so that’s good.  But it’s not like I’m exercising more than I did when I lived in the city, which is to say that I did virtually no exercise back then and I’ve continued that rigorous campaign now in the suburbs.  The only change is that I haven’t joined a gym yet, so my lack of exercising is free, a nice change from the city, where not-exercising at my local Crunch cost me like $75 a month.  I’ve put that $75 savings into more cigarettes and booze.

But just from reading that article, I feel healthier already….

Filed Under: Humor, Living in the Suburbs, My Life in the Suburbs, News, Suburbs versus Cities Tagged With: , ,

Who’s Moving to the Suburbs? More African-Americans, That’s Who!

May 29, 2011 by

Since I moved to the suburbs and started this blog, I’ve been trying to validate my decision by pointing out all the OTHER people who are ALSO moving to the suburbs.  For example, we’ve seen how Amy Winehouse moved to the suburbs, and then the Crips and the Bloods (that was a big day for us), and then immigrants in general.  We’ve also discussed the debate about whether people in general are still moving out to the suburbs, or whether they’re starting to go the other way.

But today, we have a report on a big “get” for our side: African-Americans:

Kendall Taylor grew up on this city’s tough South Side and is a pastor at Lodebar Church and Ministries in his old neighborhood. But he lives 35 miles away, in Plainfield, Ill.

“I didn’t want my children to grow up in the same environment I did,” says Taylor, 38, who bought a house in Plainfield with his wife Karen, 38, in 2007. They have one son, Jeremiah, who is 15. Taylor’s mom, sisters, nieces and nephews still live in Chicago. The youngsters, he says, “all want to come and live with me” in the quiet, but fast-growing suburb of about 40,000.

Taylor’s decision to live outside Chicago makes him part of a shift tracked by the 2010 Census that surprised many demographers and urban planners: He is among hundreds of thousands of blacks who moved away from cities with long histories as centers of African-American life, including Chicago, Oakland, Washington, New Orleans and Detroit.

(From USA Today) (emphasis added).

That’s right! The cool people, the ones who set the cultural trends for all the white people to follow.  They’re all moving out here, those traditionally lily-white suburbs that everyone in the city makes fun of.  Talk about validation!

This is sooo much better than Amy Winehouse.

Filed Under: News, Suburbs versus Cities, Who's Moving to the Suburbs? Tagged With: , ,
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