The advantages of a city with the benefits of the suburbs

From America in 1950: U.S. releases gold mine of Census data after 72-year waiting period by Daniel Uria.  

The Census data shows that of the nation's 10 largest cities in 1950, only New York City and Los Angeles went on to have larger populations in 2020. The other eight -- Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, Baltimore, Cleveland, St Louis, Washington, D.C., and Boston -- all saw their populations fall in the following seven decades.

Marginal Revolution has some interesting discussion as one would expect.

It would always be a challenge to pick the topic about which is more nonsense spoken about but "cities" would have to be among the top contenders.  They excite much discussion and a disproportionate amount of guff.

The key items which I believe are widely accepted include:

Cities are engines of economic growth through competition

Cities anchor deep networks and specializations

Cities consume more people than they produce (they grow through inbound migration rather than organically)

Cities are frequently the basis for innovation

Cities are a magnet for immigrant groups

Cities are a source of much crime (violent and white collar)  

Cities represent efficient use of resources (possible acceptance) 

But from those basic facts, people veer in all sorts of directions, some believing that the future will have most of us living very densified lives in megalopolises and others believing that dense cities are a dead end.

From the chattering classes, most economic policies are predicated on the importance of cities and the need to protect them and grow them.  Richard Florida is one such thinker who has had lots of bullish ideas for cities but whose forecasts almost invariably founder on practical realities.

This is the context into which this Census is released.  Read narrowly, this data suggests that cities are not the future.  If 80% of the biggest cities have shrunk in the past seventy years, then how much can the future be tethered to cities?

I think the data is a good reality check but also subject to . . . .  challenges in interpretation.

The core issue is that there is no single broadly shared definition of a city.  We have the jurisdictional definition, a demographic/economic definition, and then we have an ill-defined colloquial meaning of a city.  

In this instance, the Census is using the jurisdictional definition.  For example, Atlanta is 500,000 people in the borders of the City of Atlanta jurisdiction.  The surrounding counties and other cities (suburbs and exurbs) are an additional 6 million people.  The reason Los Angeles (and to some extent New York) have shown growth is that they are unusually geographically large jurisdictions.  

In almost all the above listed ten, the Statistical Metropolitan Statistical Area's have actually grown in the past seven decades even though the city cores have languished or shrunk.  

I think the future of cities, broadly defined, remains bright regardless of trends within jurisdictional areas.  At one point, growth in the suburbs and exurbs of SMSA Atlanta were very dependent on growth in Atlanta proper.  Now, the suburbs and exurbs can and do grow independent of the City proper.  

The challenge comes when people want to generate policies and ideas for cities in the jurisdictional sense.  The often confuse cause and effect, neglect costs and focus only on benefits, and frequently confuse trends in an SMSA for trends within a jurisdiction and vice versa.  

For example, in Atlanta, we have grown dramatically from 1950 to 2020, from 331k to 498k.  That ignores, though, that the City population shrank from 1970 to 2010, from 495k to 410k.  We had strong growth from 1950 to 1970, then shrank a lot, and then had strong growth again after 2010.  We have never topped 500,000.  

City planners, based solely on that one decade of growth from 2010 to 2020, confidently extrapolate into a city of 700,000 or 800,000 in the near future, if not more.  

And based on that projection, then confidently declare that we must densify, we must raise taxes, we must work our greenspaces harder, we must build bike lanes, we must get people to use public transit, we must ___________ (fill in the most recent urban fad).  

This is pure political gamesmanship, positioning, and pursuit of economic interests by vested parties.  

People choose.  They generally choose security and economic appreciation, and good schools.  And they generally move to suburbs and exurbs for those things.  Meanwhile, urban planning ideologues pursue policies in the City jurisdictional boundaries which make life less safe, more unpleasant, more expensive, and less efficient.  In the process they reinforce the cycle of living near cities for all the competitive, specialization, and network benefits but living outside cities for all the things they make life worthwhile.