With the end of the year less than a week away, everyone is putting out their reviews of the past year, and/or a look ahead to the coming year. So, why not?  I’ll do the same for some planning-related issues.

Two interesting pieces I just saw that kind of embodied this approach for me.

The first is a report from the Pew Research Center titled Americans Are Less Likely Than Before COVID-19 To Want To Live in Cities, More Likely To Prefer Suburbs.  After all the talk over the last several years about how our metropolitan urban centers are growing so steadily, driven by younger and tech-oriented workers, it seems that the pandemic may have altered that trajectory a bit.  Looks like the “suburbs” are back in.  And as I noted in an earlier post, that surely seems evident by the growth taking place in many of our outlying suburban communities.  From the report:

“About a year and a half into the pandemic, there is some evidence that Americans are less likely now than they were before to want to live in urban areas – and more likely to want to live in the suburbs, according to a new Pew Research Center survey.   About one-in-five U.S. adults now express a preference for living in a city, down from about a quarter in 2018. The share of Americans who would like to live in the suburbs has increased from 42% to 46% during this time, while preference for rural areas is virtually unchanged.”