Cities grow more than suburbs, first time in 100 years

[Kngkyle]

Cities grow more than suburbs, first time in 100 years
'I will never live in the suburbs,' says young Denver resident who grew up in the suburb of Littleton, Colo., an attitude apparently shared by many of her peers

WASHINGTON — For the first time in a century, most of America's largest cities are growing at a faster rate than their surrounding suburbs as young adults seeking a foothold in the weak job market shun home-buying and stay put in bustling urban centers.

...

New Orleans, which saw its population shrivel in the mid-2000s due to Hurricane Katrina, saw the biggest rebound in city growth relative to suburbs in the last year, 3.7 percent vs. 0.6 percent. Atlanta, Denver, Washington, D.C., and Charlotte, N.C., also showed wide disparities in city growth compared to suburbs.

Other big cities showing faster growth compared to the previous decade include Boston, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, Minneapolis and Seattle.

...

"The recession hit suburban markets hard. What we're seeing now is young adults moving out from their parents' homes and starting to find jobs," Shepard said. "There's a bigger focus on building residences near transportation hubs, such as a train or subway station, because fewer people want to travel by car for an hour and a half for work anymore."

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In recent years, the share of 16- to 39-year-olds with driver's licenses has declined markedly. The suburb also is no longer a refuge from poverty, now surpassing cities in numbers of poor people.

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http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/47992439.../#.T-xtVJLE1eg

[MNMike]

Minneapolis stayed exactly the same last census, mostly due to the foreclosure crisis mostly on the north side...if not for that we would have gained at least 15k(many neighborhoods, including downtown, grew by leaps and bounds) . The census before that we gained 14k. I expect by the next census we will be up quite a bit. The number of new housing permits in Minneapolis the past couple years blows every other city in the metro area out of the water. Not even close...tons of multi family construction going on. Also, keep in mind that the city of Minneapolis has been fully developed since the 1950s(54 square miles), and hasn't annexed any land since the 20s, so the only opportunnity for growth is redevelopment and adding density. The housing crisis peaked right around census 2010. The esitmate for 2010 was actually pretty close for Minneapolis, it came within 3k of the actual number(I know a lot of cities estimates were WAY off for 2010). The new estimate shows Minneapolis up 5k the past 2 years, which seems right to me. I think we can probably double that the next few years and baring unforseen circumstances easily add 20k+ between census 2010 and 2020, which would put us over 400k for the first time in four decades. We bottomed out in 1980 and have been stable since then. The peak for Minneapolis was 521k in 1950...thankfully we have never taken such a dive as so many other "northern" cities.

[Crawford]

Keep in mind that this data is not comparable to the 2010 decennial counts. Totally different methodology.

These are annual estimates. They are not the official counts. So you can't say that City X grew Y amount since the last Census.

So really the premise/headline is false. There isn't any evidence that cities are growing faster than suburbs, though we'll have to wait to 2020 to really see.

[Dralcoffin]

Originally Posted by Crawford

Keep in mind that this data is not comparable to the 2010 decennial counts. Totally different methodology.

These are annual estimates. They are not the official counts. So you can't say that City X grew Y amount since the last Census.

So really the premise/headline is false. There isn't any evidence that cities are growing faster than suburbs, though we'll have to wait to 2020 to really see.

I agree with this; just as the Census tends to under count cities, these estimates seem to overestimate cities.

[MNMike]

Well, really there is some "evidence" for specific cases. If you look at number of housing permits issued, and that shows a pattern for a couple of years...In MSP, Minneapolis has been on top for new housing permits for a few years in a row, and is clearly the front runner in this metro.

But yes, estimates are always a bit shaky. The 1990 "estimate" for Minneapolis was 353k...the real number was 382k. Often times estimates have undercounted Minneapolis for whatever reason, which is opposite of many places. Aside from last census, when the estimate was over by 3k. Of course, that said, you can hardly declare unequivocally "cities are growing faster!" from a few year long sampling...you can just look at patterns. If they do appear to be, could just be a blip. Either way, always interesting to look at the numbers.

[mhays]

Originally Posted by Crawford

Keep in mind that this data is not comparable to the 2010 decennial counts. Totally different methodology.

These are annual estimates. They are not the official counts. So you can't say that City X grew Y amount since the last Census.

So really the premise/headline is false. There isn't any evidence that cities are growing faster than suburbs, though we'll have to wait to 2020 to really see.

Why do you believe that the census is more accurate? It's provides the baseline numbers that are used for apportionment, federal spending, etc., but it's also a flawed system that misses a lot of people. With the little info I'm aware of, the count and the estimates sound equally inaccurate.

[mhays]

Count Seattle in the Minneapolis camp of most construction happening in-town. The apartment boom that started in 2010 was initially almost entirely within the city, and is still mostly within the city, a little over 10,000 units underway. There's one major condo project underway, a project that just started also in town. Houses aren't counted as publicly, but that's not a big number, and even there in-town (mostly townhouses and four-packs) is a big chunk.

[min-chi-cbus]

Originally Posted by mhays

Count Seattle in the Minneapolis camp of most construction happening in-town. The apartment boom that started in 2010 was initially almost entirely within the city, and is still mostly within the city, a little over 10,000 units underway. There's one major condo project underway, a project that just started also in town. Houses aren't counted as publicly, but that's not a big number, and even there in-town (mostly townhouses and four-packs) is a big chunk.

10,000 units underway?! That's a completely different level than Minneapolis, which may have 2,000-3,000 units underway, with another 5,000 proposed/approved. 10K underway would indicate to me that another 10-20K are in the pipeline which makes Seattle's growth essentially astronomical!

[J. Will]

You can't just look at new housing permits. If most of that new housing is in established areas, there was likely lots of housing torn down for it, so you have to look at net housing gain. If, like Toronto, most of the new towers are replacing parking lots or empty land, that's a different story.

[mhays]

Originally Posted by min-chi-cbus

10,000 units underway?! That's a completely different level than Minneapolis, which may have 2,000-3,000 units underway, with another 5,000 proposed/approved. 10K underway would indicate to me that another 10-20K are in the pipeline which makes Seattle's growth essentially astronomical!

I mean 10,000 aparments underway metrowide, with maybe 7,000 or 7,500 within the city limits. Other housing construction is pretty limited. Total housing construction within the city limits might be 8,000 or 8,500 I'd guess. One condo project just started and there's a moderate amount of four-packs etc. I'd call it a boom, certainly. It's roughly equal to the most we've ever had being built in-town in my lifetime, around 2006. Nowhere near astronomical though...numbers like ours are just a typical day for Vancouver for example, and nothing compared to some other places.

Pipelines are just signs of optimism (and moderate investment) and I don't believe projects them until they happen. But yes I'd say there are somewhere in the 10-15K+ range in the entitlement stages or with land use approval right now within the city limits, counting the active stuff. It's hard to count actually, though I read about every single project coming. Every tally is out of date. Developers are proposing new projects at the rate of sometimes hundreds of units per week. We'll see if the actual starts keep coming.

One info source is the City's land use bulletin, which reports on design review (multiple times for anything large), land use applications, and conditional land use approval. Mondays are a short issue and Thursdays are a longer one. Yesterday's reported on about 930 housing units planned. http://web1.seattle.gov/dpd/luib/Bul...t.aspx?BID=730.

[Jelly Roll]

Originally Posted by mhays

I mean 10,000 aparments underway metrowide, with maybe 7,000 or 7,500 within the city limits. Other housing construction is pretty limited. Total housing construction within the city limits might be 8,000 or 8,500 I'd guess. One condo project just started and there's a moderate amount of four-packs etc. I'd call it a boom, certainly. It's roughly equal to the most we've ever had being built in-town in my lifetime, around 2006. Nowhere near astronomical though...numbers like ours are just a typical day for Vancouver for example, and nothing compared to some other places.

Pipelines are just signs of optimism (and moderate investment) and I don't believe projects them until they happen. But yes I'd say there are somewhere in the 10-15K+ range in the entitlement stages or with land use approval right now within the city limits, counting the active stuff. It's hard to count actually, though I read about every single project coming. Every tally is out of date. Developers are proposing new projects at the rate of sometimes hundreds of units per week. We'll see if the actual starts keep coming.

One info source is the City's land use bulletin, which reports on design review (multiple times for anything large), land use applications, and conditional land use approval. Mondays are a short issue and Thursdays are a longer one. Yesterday's reported on about 930 housing units planned. http://web1.seattle.gov/dpd/luib/Bul...t.aspx?BID=730.

Center City Philadelphia and just Center City Philadelphia has 4,000 apartment units (most in a 4 block radius) that are supposed to come on line by 2014. Most have funding in place and have already broken ground or are about to. That does not count that hundreds/thousands of units throughout the city that are houses or apartments outside the Center City area. The city gained roughly 12,000 people in the last year and will probably gain much more at a faster pace over the next decade. Development in North Philly around Temple University has been so influential that newspaper articles have been written almost weekly about it. This is at the same time the school is build a 26 floor floor dorm with two 9 floor buildings to supplement it that hold over 1,000 students and this will barely hold 10% of the off campus students that currently can not get housing.

Basically, I would not be surprised if Philly adds 100k to 500k residents in the next 10 years. The housing is supper cheap and the young people want to live there and as more people move in and the city gets safer/schools get better the population will ballon.

[Yankee]

This would be terrific news if it were true. I mean didn't Chicago lose 200,000 people?

And how can you quantify faster growth, suburbs usually have way more people than their respective core cities. Los Angeles MSA excluding the city of LA for sure grew more than LA which grew by like 100K. Even if LA grew at a faster rate than any individual surburb, which I'm not sure it did, it's still not a fair way to calculate it. You need to look at absolute number of people, because the surrounding area is just so huge. When we see literally the MSA grow by 2 million people over 10 years and half of that happens in LA, and suburbs are actually losing population to the core cities, then I'll say, okay people are seriously moving back into the cities. LA is a bad example, but the same goes for any other city on the list.

[Dralcoffin]

For Chicago and probably Philly too, what's holding their populations back is the continued black exodus out of our big northern cities. Even New York City's black population is dropping, I believe. Philly's continued increase is very encouraging, but the Census' methodology doesn't quite work for Chicago. The Census generates these numbers by using housing unit changes to estimate the population for a county, and then applies the county's growth rate to every municipality in that county evenly; so Schaumburg, Chicago, and Calumet City all have the same growth rate. Growth in Cook County probably does mean growth in the city of Chicago, as the county is built out, places like Schaumburg probably aren't densifying, and the downtown core and North Side continue to boom, but people leaving the West and South Sides for inner ring suburbs still in Cook County wouldn't be reflected in Chicago's numbers.

I'm holding out hope that eight years from now, the poorer areas of Chicago are stabilized enough that the growth in the better-off parts of the city isn't canceled out and these estimates are borne out. These estimates will be in the right ballpark, but unless the city is a county like Philly (slight gain) or St. Louis (slight drop), I don't trust the growth rates.

[pesto]

I guess I don't understand the methodology: what counts as a large city and what is a suburb? Are Pasadena, Santa Monica, WeHo suburbs? A little odd, because they have high density, transit and thriving walkable cores.

Simlarly, districts of LA (NoHo, WLA) have switched from being more suburban to being more urban and, for example, the Sunset district of SF is quite suburban (sfh's, low-rise, no transit, broad streets with uncontrolled parking, etc.). Do these just not register on this analysis?

More generally, does a move from an older, dense suburb of, say, Chicago, to a sparwling subdivision of Phoenix or Houston count as "city growth"?

[WesternGulf]

Originally Posted by pesto

Simlarly, districts of LA (NoHo, WLA) have switched from being more suburban to being more urban and, for example, the Sunset district of SF is quite suburban (sfh's, low-rise, no transit, broad streets with uncontrolled parking, etc.). Do these just not register on this analysis?

Calling the Sunset suburban with no transit is a stretch. It is served by the N Judah and the L Taraval trains which many more urban neighborhoods in SF I am sure would love to have. Also, the density in a lot of areas in the Sunset probably surpass a lot of the other "more urban districts" described in your post.

Overhead of the Sunset


http://www.flickr.com/photos/csaulit...-35907091@N00/

[simms3_redux]

I'm calling BS for a number of reasons.

1) Cities are usually a small fraction of total MSA population, and total MSAs are mostly suburbs. Let's do some math.

City of Atlanta supposedly grew 0.6% faster than the rest of the MSA last year (an extreme case). First I need to point out that the City of Atlanta is 132 sq. miles and the metro is over 8,000 sq. miles. Secondly, the City is less than 8% of the metro population.

Let's say overall the MSA grew by 10,000 people. Doing the math (GoalSeek in Excel), I determined that the City added 3,116 people, or grew by 0.74%, and the suburbs added 6,884 people, and grew by 0.14%. No matter how you slice and dice it and no matter how many people were added to the Atlanta MSA, the suburbs still added 2.21x more people, even if the rate was 0.6% slower.

The math also shows that if city and suburb grow at same rate, then suburb would add 11.5x more people. The math also shows that if the city and suburbs together added the same contribution to 10,000 new residents, the City would have to grow at 1.19% and the suburbs would only have to grow at .1031%.

Therefore, the study is a crock. Rate means nothing when there are still 10+ new residents in the suburbs to every 1 new resident in the city.

And as an obvious statement, the study also focuses on young adults (well the Atlantic's take on this). Young adults, especially those in the Creative Class or educated have ALWAYS flocked to cities because that is where the jobs have ALWAYS been. The only difference is that back in the 70s and before there were only like 5 cities you could go to: NYC, Boston, Chicago, LA and San Francisco. Now there are like 25 cities and counting you could go to to find the same jobs you could normally only find in the top 5 before.

[destroycreate]

Originally Posted by WesternGulf

Calling the Sunset suburban with no transit is a stretch. It is served by the N Judah and the L Taraval trains which many more urban neighborhoods in SF I am sure would love to have. Also, the density in a lot of areas in the Sunset probably surpass a lot of the other "more urban districts" described in your post.

Overhead of the Sunset


http://www.flickr.com/photos/csaulit...-35907091@N00/

Agreed. The Sunset is far from being suburban. Two metro lines run through it and it's extremely dense by American standards.

[TarHeelJ]

Originally Posted by destroycreate

Agreed. The Sunset is far from being suburban. Two metro lines run through it and it's extremely dense by American standards.

I'm confident that it's densely built by any standards, though the population may not be as dense due to the low rise buildings.

[mhays]

Originally Posted by Jelly Roll

Center City Philadelphia and just Center City Philadelphia has 4,000 apartment units (most in a 4 block radius) that are supposed to come on line by 2014. Most have funding in place and have already broken ground or are about to. That does not count that hundreds/thousands of units throughout the city that are houses or apartments outside the Center City area. The city gained roughly 12,000 people in the last year and will probably gain much more at a faster pace over the next decade. Development in North Philly around Temple University has been so influential that newspaper articles have been written almost weekly about it. This is at the same time the school is build a 26 floor floor dorm with two 9 floor buildings to supplement it that hold over 1,000 students and this will barely hold 10% of the off campus students that currently can not get housing.

Basically, I would not be surprised if Philly adds 100k to 500k residents in the next 10 years. The housing is supper cheap and the young people want to live there and as more people move in and the city gets safer/schools get better the population will ballon.

The 12,000 was probably about filling existing units. That's easy (and great for the city). But new construction is much harder -- because all projects are difficult and because getting land is difficult and expensive. I wouldn't be surprised if Philly managed to fill vacant units and build a lot of new stuff in this decade, but I'd say the 100,000 figure is plausible and the 500,000 figure is completely implausible.

As for the 4,000, like I say, "piplelines" are optimism. I don't put much stock (as a general contractor) in the sum total of what people want to build. In fact, for everything to get built by 2014 would seem unlikely if a bunch of projects haven't started yet.

As for funding, there's almost no such thing as "in place" until near the end. When they claim that, it means partners are on board, but most deals aren't worked out until the final weeks/days before groundbreaking, and sometimes well after that. And everyone can still back out until the deals exist.

[mhays]

Originally Posted by pesto

I guess I don't understand the methodology: what counts as a large city and what is a suburb? Are Pasadena, Santa Monica, WeHo suburbs? A little odd, because they have high density, transit and thriving walkable cores.

Simlarly, districts of LA (NoHo, WLA) have switched from being more suburban to being more urban and, for example, the Sunset district of SF is quite suburban (sfh's, low-rise, no transit, broad streets with uncontrolled parking, etc.). Do these just not register on this analysis?

More generally, does a move from an older, dense suburb of, say, Chicago, to a sparwling subdivision of Phoenix or Houston count as "city growth"?

Good question. What counts as a suburb in terms of not being in the core city isn't the same as what counts functionally. Often the "urban" zone in the middle of a city is much bigger than the central municipality, or much smaller depending on the city and your standards.

Likewise, much of the growth of "suburbs" is densification, not outward. Densifying isn't "suburban" growth necessarily.