“The fastest population growth right now is in the lowest-density neighborhoods, the suburb-iest suburbs,” Kolko said.
So why has the “city-loving millennials” story gained so much traction? Kolko has a theory: As American cities have become safer and more expensive, they have become increasingly dominated by the affluent and well-educated — exactly the people who drive the media narrative.I am typically of the mindset that we can't directly measure the true desire of where people want to live. By looking at housing prices and migration statistics the best we can do is get 'effective demand'. This has some worth: people make trade-offs with their spending decisions, after all. But hidden subsidies that encourage suburban living badly distort the informative value of these types of data. Pairing it up with survey question data is a great addition, and strongly reinforces the idea that huge numbers of people in fact to prefer in some abstract sense the suburban lifestyle.
The full article is here.