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This article addresses the following point of contention: 40 years, the average person will live closer to her neighbors and farther from the ground than she does today.In 40 years most Americans will likely not live closer to their neighbors and farther from the ground than they do today, at least not materially so. American cities (which are all areas outside rural areas) will continue to disperse, as they did in the decade of the 2000s, when nearly 95 percent of major metropolitan growth was more than 10 miles from downtown areas (Cox, 2012c). Even the share of the Millennial generation (young adults ages 18 to 31) living in lower density areas increased (Kotkin, 2013b) (both contrary to popular lore and refuted by reality).To be sure, the resurgence of the micro-urban cores, including their population growth, has been encouraging. The actual footprint of occupying disused commercial buildings and abandoned land, however, is small compared with the growth that continues in the suburbs. This micro-urban core growth reflects something rarely considered by urban planners: the vast preference-roughly 80 percent-of most Americans for single-family houses (Beldon, Russonello, and Stewart, 2011). As Pew Research (2009) and others report, suburbanites are surprisingly satisfied with their environment, and considerably more so than urban dwellers. Nor is this preference merely that of older people; both Millennials, particularly as they enter their 30s (Winograd and Hais, 2010), and immigrants (Kotkin, 2012), the two key demographically expanding groups, also seem to prefer suburbs as their long-term residence.This outward movement, however, is not simply an American trend. As Shmolo Angel (2012) points out in his recently released A Planet of Cities, dispersion continues in nearly all global metropolitan areas; with the exception of extremely land-constrained places like Hong Kong and Singapore, virtually all the world's largest cities are becoming less dense (Cox, 2013a).This continuing dispersal is being driven by the very reason people moved to cities, the desire for a better life for themselves and their families. This higher standard of living, in turn, is facilitated by the near universality of personal mobility (the automobile) in most of the higher income world. Personal mobility has become so pervasive that no metropolitan planning organization anywhere in the world has seriously proposed a transit system that could largely replace the automobile.Nearly all the higher income world cities rely principally on the automobile, and citizens in the two or three cities that do not rely on the automobile pay for it in much longer travel times. For example, transit carries most urban travel in Tokyo and Hong Kong, yet travelers in those cities have one-way work trips of more than 45 minutes, more than 1.5 times that of automobileoriented and much less dense Los Angeles.The pervasiveness of automobile use may appear to contradict the current theology in urban planning that imagines car drivers can or will be dragooned into transit and walking by increasing urban population densities. In fact, despite rising gas prices and the massive expansion of new rail lines, the percentage of people commuting to work by transit is less than it was 30 years ago. At the same time, the vast majority of urban growth in the country, even since the recession, has been in the more dispersed and least transit-oriented areas (Kotkin, 2013a).This is not to say that appropriate places for transit-oriented development will not exist, but that transit works primarily in cities where downtowns play an outsized role in the local economy. In terms of transit, proximity to downtown is far more important than density (Ewing and Cervero, 2010). It is not surprising that more than one-half of the transit commuting (Cox, 2013b) in the United States is to only six municipalities (legacy cities) with the largest share of downtown employment, including New York, which alone accounts for 35 percent of transit commuting destinations (25 percent in Manhattan alone). …
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