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Americans’ Shift To The Suburbs Sped Up Last Year


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Americans’ Shift To The Suburbs Sped Up Last Year

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The suburbanization of America marches on. Population growth in big cities slowed for the fifth-straight year in 2016,1 according to new census data, while population growth accelerated in the more sprawling counties that surround them.

The Census Bureau on Thursday released population estimates for every one of the more than 3,000 counties in the U.S. I grouped those counties into six categories: urban centers of large metropolitan areas; their densely populated suburbs; their lightly populated suburbs; midsize metros; smaller metro areas; and rural counties, which are outside metro areas entirely.2

The fastest growth was in those lower-density suburbs. Those counties grew by 1.3 percent in 2016, the fastest rate since 2008, when the housing bust put an end to rapid homebuilding in these areas. In the South and West, growth in large-metro lower-density suburbs topped 2 percent in 2016, led by counties such as Kendall and Comal north of San Antonio; Hays near Austin; and Forsyth, north of Atlanta.3

Those figures run counter to the “urban revival” narrative that has been widely discussed in recent years. That revival is real, but it has mostly been for rich, educated people in particular hyperurban neighborhoods rather than a broad-based return to city living. To be sure, college-educated millennials — at least those without school-age kids — took to the city, and better-paying jobs have shifted there, too. But other groups — older adults, families with kids in school, and people of all ages with lower incomes — either can’t afford or don’t want an urban address.

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https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/americans-shift-to-the-suburbs-sped-up-last-year/

 

 

I'm just thinking how this affects the Houston area. I have certainly seen a revival in the inner-city. Most of my life, I've lived in the suburbs in Spring and Pearland, but for the last nearly 5 years, I've lived in the surrounding Heights area. My area in particular has simply exploded in renovations and new home construction. Pretty interesting to hear though that the boom is even bigger out in the suburbs... kind of opposite of what I thought was occurring in home development trends. 

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I'd be more interested in raw numbers. 

 

Percentages get thrown off by the different starting baselines and the fact that some cities are basically built out.

 

At the end of the day, 55,000 people moving to NY is more impressive to me than the 7.8% growth in Georgetown, Texas (the fastest growing city by % that same year).

 

 

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You can change the state using the buttons at the top:

https://factfinder.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/productview.xhtml?pid=PEP_2016_PEPTCOMP&prodType=table

 

 

Harris County had a net domestic migration of -16,000 last year, while the exurban counties of the MSA gained +45,000.

Travis County picked up 8,000 compared to +15,000 into Williamson and 8,000 into Hays.

The two core Metroplex counties compared to the outlying counties had +7,000 and +52,000, respectively.

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