Anyone following national and local news media the past decade would expect that population growth has shifted in recent years from the suburban periphery to the inner city. The suburbs, intoned The Atlantic a few years back, were where “the American dream goes to die.”
In reality, the census estimates released this month reveal a very different story, both here in Southern California and nationwide. Rather than becoming more urban, the country continues to become more suburban, with less-dense areas and regions gaining more population than their inner-city cousins.
Indeed, rather than exiting to the city, people are actually doing the exact opposite: heading to both the suburbs and the sprawling cities of the Sun Belt. Overall, suburban populations are growing faster in all but a handful of metropolitan areas. The perceived “historic shift” toward the urban core — based, in part, on two years of slightly higher core growth in the wake of the housing bust — has now reverted to its traditional path of dispersion.
The new numbers tell us something that was already evident to anyone who bothered to follow the recent U.S. Census Bureau reports, which once again follow well-established pathways. Since 2012, suburban and exurban counties have again grown faster than the urban ones; and this does not even account for the fact that suburbs and exurbs already constitute a much larger part of the U.S. population — seven times the population of urban cores in metropolitan areas over 1,000,000 population.
To be sure, urban cores, especially those close to downtown areas (central business districts), are doing better than before the 1990s. But only seven added more domestic migrants than the corresponding suburbs. Overall, the cores continue to lose net domestic migration, while the suburbs continue to gain, something that has been the case even in the worst year for suburban growth (2010-2011) and continued in 2014-2015. Core counties last year lost a net of 185,000 domestic migrants, while the suburban counties gained 187,000. Rather than a reversal of suburbanizing trends, we now see something of an acceleration.
This yearning for less-dense, and usually less-expensive, areas can be seen clearly in regional migration patterns. The new numbers, like those of the previous 15 years, show a distinct movement of people to less-dense, more “sprawling,” Sun Belt cities. Among America’s 53 largest metropolitan areas, nine of the ten fastest growing are in the Sun Belt: Austin, Orlando, Raleigh, Houston, Las Vegas, San Antonio, Dallas-Ft. Worth, Nashville and Tampa-St. Petersburg. The only outlier is Denver, which has become a destination for people and companies fleeing still much higher-priced areas, particularly from coastal California.
Last year, for example, Houston, Dallas-Fort Worth, Atlanta and Phoenix each gained more people than either New York or Los Angeles, which are three to four times larger. At the same time, urban icons New York and Chicago led the nation in both the numbers and percentage of people leaving for other regions. Even New York City’s population growth, so widely celebrated in the media, has slowed markedly. It is not only well below the national average, but is now half the rate it enjoyed in 2011.
California results
Despite the strenuous attempts of California’s powerful regulators to stem “sprawl” and force people back into dense core cities, the people here continue to move farther out. Last year, for example, Los Angeles County, by far the region’s population leader, experienced 0.60 percent growth, well below the national average. Overall, the county added barely 60,000 people to its total of over 10 million. In contrast, much smaller Orange County grew by roughly 0.80 percent, which is close to the national average of 0.79 percent. But the big winner was “sprawl” city itself — Riverside-San Bernardino — which added 50,000 new residents, for a 1.14 percent increase, roughly equal to booming San Jose and well above the state average.
Rather than signal a break with historic patterns, the new numbers reinforce them. Since 2000, the overall population growth rate in Los Angeles County has been 6.8 percent, less than half the state and national averages. In contrast, Orange County has expanded by 11.4 percent and the Inland Empire by almost 38 percent. Besides becoming more concentrated, Southern California’s population continually has moved further to the periphery.
Unless California’s density-obsessed planners manage to shut down all peripheral development — not inconceivable under the current political and economic circumstances — the outward movement is likely to continue. This is due to the natural tendency of the groups that will most shape the future, notably, immigrants and millennials, to look for places to live in either less-dense and -congested areas, as well as those with relatively less-expensive housing.
Last year, for example, between 2013 and 2014, the foreign-born population in the Inland Empire grew three times faster than in Los Angeles. Since 2000, the foreign-born in L.A. County grew by barely 2 percent while increasing 12.1 percent in Orange County and 59.1 percent in the Inland Empire. Immigrants are clearly headed to the suburbs.
How about millennials, the other big contributor to population growth? Between 2000 and 2014, the millennial population (aged 25 to 34) expanded by only 14 percent in Los Angeles County, well below the national average of 23 percent, while increasing 61 percent in the Inland Empire. Orange County, however, actually did worse than L.A. in terms of millennial growth, with a meager 11 percent increase.
If this trend continues, and the county’s housing prices remain extraordinarily high, the O.C. may face a severe shortage of younger workers in the years ahead. Clearly, cost is becoming a determining factor in millennial migration. New studies of college-educated millennials since 2010 shows a distinct shift away from places like San Francisco, Washington and New York, and to less-expensive, less-dense places like the Nashville, Orlando, Phoenix, Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston, as well as the Inland Empire, and even to recovering Rust Belt towns like Cleveland and Pittsburgh.
Planners versus preferences
One of the core beliefs of our planning elites — and some allied business interests as well — is that more people are attracted to dense, urban areas than to the suburbs. Yet, these ideas clearly contradict current movements, particularly in terms of migration. Last year, over 60,000 more domestic migrants left Los Angeles than came, while Orange County lost a more modest 10,000 residents. Once again, the Inland Empire — widely decried as the heartland of “sprawl” — expanded by 7,000, a modest uptick, but quite vibrant compared to the demographic trends in the rest of the region.
These trends reinforce longer-term ones, although all in the context of slower overall growth. Between 2000 and 2015, Los Angeles County lost roughly 1.4 million domestic migrants while Orange County declined by 250,000. In contrast, the Inland Empire gained half a million, many from the coastal counties. As growth slows throughout California, it is increasingly clear that the population that remains here increasingly will seek to live on the periphery.
Whether these trends reflect true preferences or simply matters of cost is impossible to quantify. However, what matters from a demographic perspective is not theoretical preferences, but what people actually do, regardless of the reason. The Census numbers do tell us definitively that the vision being proffered by the state and its planning henchmen does not jibe with what people are actually choosing. Clearly, the current regime of enforced densification is not in concert with peoples’ preferences and needs. Unless reversed, Southern California faces a future of increased stagnation as residents seek more reasonable alternatives elsewhere.
Joel Kotkin is the R.C. Hobbs Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University in Orange and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism (www.opportunityurbanism.org). Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, a St. Louis-based public policy firm, and was appointed to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission.
