LITTLE ROCK — All across the United States, residential areas that sprouted on the edge of large metropolitan areas are seeing their growth fizzle, according to new census estimates for 2011 released Thursday.
Gas prices are discouraging long commutes. Young singles prefer city apartments. Two years after the recession technically ended, and despite some signs of economic recovery, the numbers indicate a reversal of urbanites’ decades-long exodus to roomy homes in distant towns.
Indeed, Americans are shunning any moves at all — just 11.6 percent of the nation’s population moved to new homes, the lowest since the government began tracking such information in 1948. That means fewer Americans are migrating to residential hot spots in the suburbs or Sun Belt metro areas such as Las Vegas, Phoenix and Atlanta, upending several of the population trends of the 2000s.
Metropolitan areas showing renewed growth or slower losses last year included Los Angeles, Miami, Seattle and Detroit, where steep population drops in the downturn have largely bottomed out.
The national trend of slowing growth in bedroom communities hasn’t occurred in Arkansas, said Michael Pakko, chief economist for the Institute of Economic Advancement at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.
“In some sense we’re still in the urbanization process that other areas are already done with,” he said.
The findings are based on census estimates that used local records of births and deaths, Internal Revenue Service records of people moving within the United States, and census statistics on immigrants. The estimates are for counties and metropolitan areas, which include cities and surrounding suburbs.
The latest census data come amid an overall U.S. growth rate in 2011 of 0.9 percent, the lowest since the mid-1940s, because of fewer births and less immigration after the recent recession.
In Arkansas, the growth rate was slightly lower at 0.8 percent from 2,915,918 residents in the 2010 Census to 2,937,979 in July 2011, according to the estimates.
The estimates mirrored the state’s growth pattern of the past decade with urban centers drawing residents while rural areas continued to decline.
“It’s a similar story to what we’ve talked about before,” Pakko said. “We’re seeing the ongoing trend of urbanization in Arkansas — seeing the metropolitan counties growing and the more rural areas losing population.”
People moving between counties and into the state fueled gains in Arkansas’ fastest-growing and more urban counties. Benton County added more than 3,500 residents through migration, while Faulkner County added more than 1,800 and Saline County more than 1,700.
Benton and Faulkner counties also were among the nation’s 100 fastest-growing last year.
Benton County, home to Bentonville and Rogers, grew 2.8 percent between 2010 and 2011, ranking 70th. Faulkner County, home to Conway, grew 2.7 percent, ranking 73rd.
Elsewhere, Charlton County, Ga., led the nation last year as the fastest-growing county, followed by St. Bernard Parish, La., both increasing more than 10 percent. That was in contrast to the 2010 Census, when St. Bernard Parish ranked last in percentage growth, due primarily to the effects of Hurricane Katrina.
Texas had four of the nation’s fastest-growing large metropolitan areas: Austin, San Antonio, Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston.
Meanwhile, the annual rate of growth in American cities and surrounding urban areas has surpassed that of the suburban outer ring for the first time in at least 20 years, spanning the most recent era of sprawling development.
For instance, in Kendall County, Ill., about 50 miles southwest of Chicago, the population had more than doubled to 116,000 over the past decade, making it the nation’s fastest-growing county from 2000 to 2010. By late in the decade, however, the county’s growth had begun to wane amid recession and rising gasoline costs. In 2011, Kendall County’s growth stalled at 1 percent, dropping its rate rank to 236th.
Demographic changes also play a role: They include young singles increasingly delaying marriage and children, and thus more apt to rent, and a graying population that in its golden years may prefer closer-in, walkable urban centers. Economists believe the effects of an outlying suburban bust will be long term.
“Suburban housing prices may not recover in our lifetime,” said Yale University economist Robert Shiller, a co-creator of a Standard & Poor’s housing index. Shiller is perhaps best known for identifying the risks of a U.S. housing bubble before it actually burst in 2006-07. Examining the current market, he believes that America is now at a turning point, shifting away from faraway suburbs to cities amid persistently high gasoline prices.
The development of suburbs since 1950 is “unusual,” enabled only by the rise of the automobile and the nation’s highway system, Shiller said.
Information for this article was contributed by Hope Yen of The Associated Press and by Chad Day of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 04/06/2012