Population trends. (Lee's Summit: real estate market, loft, neighborhoods)

[northbound74]

Two interesting articles about the population shift taking place and why urban areas will never simply die out and go away as some seem to want:

The End of White Flight - WSJ.com

Suburbs lose young whites to cities - U.S. news - Census 2010 - msnbc.com

Perhaps the different ethnicities are just trading places, but this shows that not everyone is packing it up for the suburbs anymore.

[lifelongMOgal]

Just before the real estate market really fell hard and when gas went to $4/gal we noticed a trend of people who had moved out to the burbs moving back to be closer to work. Frankly, I think it is one of the trends that has helped the loft market keep downtown KCMO alive.

[imperialmog]

Originally Posted by lifelongMOgal

Just before the real estate market really fell hard and when gas went to $4/gal we noticed a trend of people who had moved out to the burbs moving back to be closer to work. Frankly, I think it is one of the trends that has helped the loft market keep downtown KCMO alive.

But isn't the parallel development that the work moved to the suburbs as well? Then again I think a trend is developing that urban and suburban areas start resembling each other more.

[TabulaRasa]

We're a young couple, and we did both. When we first relocated, we chose to live in KCMO proper, and enjoyed that. But when we bought, we didn't have any real motivation to buy somewhere where the public schools are such a mess, and for the vintage housing stock we were looking for (arts and crafts bungalows), we found better prices in Lee's Summit than in, say, Waldo/Brookside and other neighborhoods with an abundance of this type of home, with the bonus of having reputable public schools. Another factor for us is that neither of our jobs is in the core (although the job I had when I first moved here was right downtown)...I work near the triangle, and SO's job is in JoCo. My commute to my work from LS is basically identical in length to what it was when we rented in Waldo, and I'm closer to work in south KC than I was when we lived on the Plaza. SO works Olathe, so it's far from pretty much everywhere on the MO side, and we didn't have any real interest in living in Kansas.

What's been interesting to me is that where we are in LS (near the historic downtown), we have a much more foot traffic-heavy culture than we experienced when we lived in the city proper, in Waldo. We used to walk in Waldo, both on the Trolley Track Trail, and to various restaurants, shops, bars, etc., but we were pretty much the only ones ever doing that (except during events like the Crawldo). This is my first foray ever into suburbia, and I definitely came in with my preconceived notions about suburbs/suburban dwellers, but Downtown LS can actually be more bustling than various urban neighborhoods, to my surprise.