Think high gas prices will spur a back-to-the-city movement as people vie to get closer to work? Think again, says Joel Kotkin, the dean of debunkers of that and other geographic pseudo-trends.
The problem for many cities is that they lack the jobs for people to move close to. Since the 1970s, the suburbs have been the home for most high-tech jobs and now the majority of office space. By 2000, only 22% of people worked within three miles of a city center in the nation’s 100 largest metro areas.And from 2001 to 2006, job growth in suburbia expanded at six times the rate of that in urban cores, according to an analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics [data] by the Praxis Strategy Group, a consulting firm with which I work.
Read the rest of Suburbia’s not dead yet.