Suburbs and Headlines

Traveling around the core business districts of both Dallas and Fort Worth, you see planning and construction for people and families living in the city - - either real or anticipated.  Apartments going up, parks being build, grocery stories moving in - - plans are being made for movement downtown.  This may happen at some point in time (the cost of transportation and the quality of city-center public schools will have a huge impact on this potential migration).  Or it may never happen in the numbers that make any economic sense.

But first let's look at the numbers behind some of the headlines associated with the growth of city living.  City X had a population of 432,427 people as of July 2011 and had a growth rate of 2.4% in 2010.  The surrounding suburbs had 4,926,778 people at the same point in time and a 1.3% annual growth rate for 2010.  From this, you get the following headline:

"City Grows Almost Twice Suburbs"

Sometimes the math does pencil, but the substance doesn't.  In our example, the total combined growth of City X and the suburbs was 73,361 people.  City X grew by 10,135 people and the suburbs grew by 63,226.  Thus, 86% of the growth was in the suburbs and 14% in City X.  Consider this revised headline:

"Suburbs Capture 86% of Local Growth"

In this case, City X is Atlanta.  Read the attached - - and follow all the links on the research.  Very interesting.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/07/02/the-suburbs-arent-dead-just-yet/