Media darling Murph is rocking the SE Michigan blogosphere with his guest gig at Metromode. But I’ve got to offer an amendment to his latest column on places-vs.-industries.

My parents’ generation wanted nothing more than stable jobs that let them get out of the cities and buy their own homes in quiet subdivisions. My generation doesn’t want that. We want to get back into the cities, where we can meet interesting people doing interesting things. We want dense urban neighborhoods and pedestrian-friendly, fine-grained downtowns where lots of different things are happening. We know we’re going to be switching jobs and even careers, and we want messy places where there’s enough going on that we can figure out what comes next for us.

I don’t think it’s as simple as a generational shift, though it is popularly characterized this way. The movement to mass suburbia that Murph’s and my parents undertook (and the current move back to cities) was not simply the choice of the next generation, characterizing it that way takes away some of the strength of efforts to facilitate and improve urban living. After all, if one generation rejected cities and the next embraced them, who’s to know what the next generation will choose? The century-long movement to the suburbs that we are only now starting to see reversing was the product of a land-use regime grounded in the fundamentals of capitalism combined with the excesses of industrial capitalism of the late 19th and early 20th century. It is only now, in an increasingly post-industrial set of economic circumstances, that urban living has lost many of its most noxious side-effects (like being downwind from a factory). In addition, the abundance of cheap land in many cities over the last two decades has prompted real estate developers to make the smart bottom-line choice to buy low and sell high. It’s not simply that demand has shifted (as Murph knows, there has been much unmet demand for urbanism for quite some time), it’s that the conservative producers have not been creating a supply. While there is something to the creative class angle, the post-industrial economy and the slow death of major employers like GM means that there are fewer major companies dictating where people work and influencing where they live. I’d love to believe that there is a concurrent story about the diversification of the American economy allowing people to sensibly live (with moderate to short commutes) where they wanted to live in the first place. I note as an aside that the Ford Model T plant in Highland Park was located there because real estate developer Robert Oakman told Henry Ford he could get the land in a largely undeveloped area outside of Detroit for a song. The workers followed.

I suspect Murph already knows most of this, but was constrained for words. In addition, most urbanists and planners usually respond, “Yes, but” whatever the underlying economic motivation of developers, urban living is better overall than suburban living, so they go along.