Suburbia and the Emerging Demographic Structure

Editor’s note: This article is reprinted with permission from the author’s Substack blog, “Place and People.” The original article appeared on May 20, 2025.

Since the birth of the New Urbanism movement in the 1980s, those in the urbanist community have held the suburbs in high contempt for the ecological and sociological havoc they wreak. The critiques are largely justified: A suburban geographical structure locks in car dependence, leading to less beautiful neighborhoods and increased carbon emissions.

Suburbs also tend to spur classism and racism, thereby destroying civic pride and a sense of camaraderie, and they gobble up wild places in their inexorable march outwards. Denser towns and cities are rightly held up as more responsible places to live.

But this oft-told argument misses a crucial complexity. Suburbs are not equally inefficient for all. In fact, they can be beneficial specifically to young families with children — something which has propped up a cultural link between suburbia and young families for more than 100 years. However, as America becomes older and Americans have fewer children, demand for suburban living will naturally drop.

A Great Place to Raise Kids!

Let’s start at the very beginning (a very good place to start, as Julie Andrews famously reminded us): How might we see the cultural and practical associations between suburbia and child raising?

I see three main ways the suburban built environment makes raising large families easier.

First, managing large families is made far easier through the automobile. Taking families on transit can be a logistical nightmare and also quite expensive. By way of an anecdote: Whenever my family moved around New York City (the most transit-rich city in the U.S.), it was always easier and cheaper to drive than use the subway, which would have cost us $12.50 for each leg of the journey. And the inherent wastefulness in cars diminishes with families compared to individuals. A car carrying one person is highly inefficient, but a car carrying three or four is far less so. Its competitive advantage in these cases — both in efficiency and practicality — provides a case in which car-centric infrastructure may be even, God forbid, efficient.

Second, the structure of long-term residence and homeownership is better for children than a more transitory renting schema. Especially when many other children are in the neighborhood (common in the 1960s and ’70s, but less so nowadays), having a more stable social “village” around a child as they grow up is literally better for their health. Cities are still largely marked by shorter-term renting, which — although great for young professionals who move regularly — is often maladaptive for children who require greater stability.

Images of idyllic suburbs may best be viewed in black and white. Photo by Unseen Histories on Unsplash

Third, suburbs make it easy to raise “free-range kids.” The size of most suburbs straddles the line between being small enough to know everybody yet large enough to feel expansive for young children; parents can feel secure letting their child just go wander for the day. Thus, parents deal with a reduced childrearing burden, and children are rewarded with greater independence.

Note, though, that the ideal suburb rarely occurs nowadays. Suburban-raised Baby Boomers were able to grow up as “free-range kids” because of the still relatively walkable nature of their suburban towns and the large number of children growing up alongside them. In this context, the defining feature for an effective suburb is a high enough density that children can walk to their friends’ houses or to the park and not be car-dependent and isolated.

As it happens, the vision of America as a suburban nation made sense in the middle decades of the 20th century during suburbia’s cultural apogee. The America of the 1950s to 1990s was a young nation, with an astoundingly high birthrate. Legions of post-war newlyweds with their kids naturally demanded plots of land and ranch-style houses on the crabgrass frontier; the benefits outlined above were too enticing.

Fertility rates; the gray bars represent recessions. Source: ResearchGate; the chart is accessible here.

Racism was, of course, a factor here. (See more on housing segregation.) To add complexity to this narrative, though: By the late 1960s, the racial covenants that propped up the monotonous whiteness of the suburbs had been outlawed, and while Black families still experienced discrimination, the suburbs did indeed begin to diversify. By the late 20th century, this trend had come into full force: Scholars note a “Black Flight” out of the cities, and by 1990, 36.6% of Black people in the United States lived in suburbia.

Different Demographics, Different Housing

America has dramatically changed in the 60 years since the fertility peak. Our people have simply become older (the median age in 2023 is 38.8) and less interested in child rearing. The average American household no longer consists of an ex-GI with his wife and 2.5 children. In its place we are increasingly a country of childfree professionals and empty-nesters.

Suburbia had its advantages before, but has become less adaptive to the current demographic climate.

Ages of people in the United States. Source: U.S. Census Bureau; the graphic is accessible here.

As the suburban-demanding demographic fades, then comparatively, the urban-demanding demographic must grow. More seniors every year demand village-style housing in Florida and Arizona. More young, childless professionals move to downtowns in search of networking and glamour (and, perhaps, a car-free life).

Indeed, we can see evidence for this shift in the rent geography of cities. Downtown Minneapolis is the most expensive part of the city — exactly what the demographic argument above predicts. This pattern is repeated in New York, Boston, Chicago and other cities. The demographic structure is leading to greater market demand for dense, urban living.

Source: Zumper

But it is important to remember that this is a feature of our particular historical moment. We may have a baby boom again and be in a place to sprawl and build suburb after suburb as we once did. As an avowed urbanist, I find it strange to make this argument, but there is a time and a place for everything.

Nevertheless, we can say conclusively that in the modern United States, the time of the crabgrass frontier has come to an end.