A follow-up to yesterday's post, "Boston's reasserted dominance of New England, in three charts":
The Wall Street Journal's Neil Shah reports on the national trend of cities growing faster than suburbs in the past few years. Among the 51 biggest metro areas in the US, central cities grew by 1.12 percent between 2010 and 2012, outpacing the average 0.80 percent in suburban areas. But that's not cause to celebrate, says demographer Kenneth Johnson of the University of New Hampshire, who tells Shah that fewer people “are moving out of the big urban cores because the recession [and sluggish recovery have] tended to freeze people in place.”
Johnson's explanation is consistent with the recent drop in the US homeownership rate. It's still debatable how many people are remaining big-city renters out of choice and how many are "frozen" in cities like Boston because they can't afford to buy a house in the suburbs.
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