The Suburbs Are Dead; Long Live the Suburbs

Sommer Mathis recaps and responds to a week that saw a "mini-flurry of weirdly misleading news about where Americans are living now and where they say they want to be living in the future."

To sum up the conversation: "'Generation Y Prefers Suburban Home Over City Condo' was the Wall Street Journal's take on some interesting but nevertheless flawed new survey results compiled by the National Association of Home Builders. And over at Vox.com, Matt Yglesias looks at the latest numbers from Trulia's Jed Kolko and declares that 'The death of the suburbs turns out to be a total myth.'"

Mathis takes particular interest in the flawed methodology of the survey that drives the Wall Street Journal coverage, and notes that many of the anecdotes shared in the article back up the dominant narrative that the survey (and, by extension, the article) had attempted to dispel. As a result, according to Mathis, the article still supported the idea that "millennials want to live in walkable neighborhoods, or at the very least, be able to access dense, urban-style areas easily." 

Mathis's larger point is that the evolving desires of the public cannot be reduced to a simple suburbs vs. cities formula: "So while the overall share of Americans living in 'urban' areas may well have decreased a bit over the past several years, that tells you exactly nothing about what sorts of 'non-urban' areas people are moving to, or would like to move to, for that matter."