Traffic calming and bicycle advocacy don't limit urban growth in any way I can imagine. As NYC has hit a physical limit on the number of cars it can accommodate (and is dumbly butting into it every morning) the only way to grow further is to convert more people to car-free living. Traffic calming, and more importantly traffic reduction, makes walking and biking safer and more pleasant, allowing more of whom you call Americans to subject themselves to it.

"Or when less desirable areas are developed to meet demand it's condemned as gentrification."

With you on that one. There's definitely a contradiction in demanding affordable housing while waging the unwinnable ideological war against gentrification; also, doing everything possible to thwart any construction project anywhere. I just don't see the same problem with livable streets thinking, as we long ago passed the point where auto-accommodation could facilitate growth in NYC. (This is probably the realization that converted our mayor six months ago.)

I compared New York City to Clark County, NV (Infoshare does not have data on Las Vegas as a city and anyway, it is more fair to look at the whole county since Vegas is so sprawled and since this debate is about the relative attraction of large cities vs. sprawled out suburbs).

Total Population Change 1990 to 2000
NYC: 7,322,562 to 8,008,278 (685,714 or 9.4%)
CCNV: 741,459 to 1,375,764 (634,306 or 85.5%)

Population Change by Place of Birth.

Born in Same State
NYC: 3,877,681 to 3,964,551 (76,870 or 2.0%)
CCNV: 143,072 to 262,593 (119,521 or 83.5%)

Born in Other States
NYC: 984,665 to 868,527 (-116,138 or -11.8%)
CCNV: 516,926 to 865,421 (348,495 or 67.4%)

Foreign-Born
NYC: 2,450,218 to 3,175,200 (724,982 or 29.6%)
CCNV: 81,461 to 247,751 (166,290 or 204.1%)

The great preponderance of surveys finds approximately one-third of the current U.S. market wants neighborhoods that are multiform, mixed use and walkable. Nearly all (90+ percent) of new residential development is conventional suburban sprawl or otherwise hostile to pedestrians. Ergo, a market failure is taking place, and a pretty massive one at that.

Furthermore, the market demand is projected to increase because of demographic factors and ongoing cultural trends. Changes in enviro-financial factors, like global warming and peak oil, might also accelerate this trend.

I worry about our cities a lot. All our industry is leaving. Most of it has already left. *Nobody* builds factories in cities anymore. And why would they? It's harder to get materials in and out, the taxes are higher, the real estate is outrageous. In Chicago it seems like there's just about as many people commuting out of the city as into it.

Another irony to this urbanism is that local involvement in zoning generally means anti-growth, and anti-growth means that those places that *are* willing to grow will. And there's always some suburb that is willing to grow -- usually the suburbs furthest out, exacerbating the sprawl. The local community activism to do traffic calming or bike advocacy is the same activism that keeps desirable areas from growing to meet demand. Or when less desirable areas are developed to meet demand it's condemned as gentrification.

All of which isn't to defend suburban development, but at least it shouldn't be baffling why people choose to live in the suburbs. It's not because of some GM conspiracy.

Personally I think progressives need to pay a little more attention to the efficiency and functional aspects of the city, not just culture and community. There's a lot of things that people care about where the suburbs come out ahead, it's not just all based on irrationality and fear. Not surprisingly the things *we* care most about are what urban areas are good at, because everyone here is probably pro-urban. We can't/shouldn't turn the city into the suburbs, but we should at least address some of these issues more honestly, in a more complete way, and not just focus on a conveniently limited set of attributes.

The municipality that added the most residents 1990-2000 was NEW YORK.

Las Vegas went from 258,295 to 478,434. An increase of 220,139 people or 85%.

New York went from 7,322,564 to 8,008,278. An increase of 685,714 or 9.4%.

New York's increase was four times greater than Las Vegas' in absolute terms. Las Vegas' jaw-dropping growth figures are percentages - when you start from nothing it's easy to have high percentage figures. The entire Las Vegas metro area was less than 1/5 the population of New York CITY as of the 2000 census.

Source: http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0884086.html

I think its Vegas, Nona.

Kotkin makes a very destructive and transparently false argument when he says: not everyone will move to downtowns, and therefore we should build more auto-dependent sprawl.