A Nation of Villages

David Brooks on the triumph of suburbia:

It's true that cities have experienced a resurgence in the past 10 years, but the real action is still out here on the fringe. All the population growth of all the major U.S. cities in this decade still doesn't equal the growth of just two suburban California counties: San Bernardino and Riverside. The flow of people moving into cities is but a trickle compared with the torrent moving out to exurbia.

When you study this torrent, you realize it is actually several torrents running in the same direction. It's active seniors looking for communities tailored to their needs. It's young singles looking for town houses (there are more single-person households in suburbia now than two-parent families). It's rich people looking for country clubs and poor people looking for affordable housing. Most of all, it's immigrants who are skipping gateway cities and buying homes twice as quickly as earlier immigrant groups.

The next ten years should provide more of the same.