Smart Growth advocates and new urbanists are constantly declaring the death of the suburbs. This is mostly wishful thinking on their part. The latest attempt is an op-ed in The New York Times, reprinted in The News & Observer, by Christopher B. Leinberger, senior fellow at the liberal Brookings Institution and professor at the University of Michigan. His op-ed, "Bye to the 'burbs, back to the city" offers little in the way of hard evidence to support his case.

Leinberger does cite his analysis of the Zillow real estate database:

In the late 1990s, high-end outer suburbs contained most of the expensive housing in the United States, as measured by price per square foot, according to data I analyzed from the Zillow real estate database. Today, the most expensive housing is in the high-density, pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods of the center city and inner suburbs.

Yes, some people during the housing bubble wanted to live downtown and were willing to pay top dollar for their crowded urban condos. He fails to mention what happened to those condos after the crash.

According to Joel Kotkin's Forbes article "Is suburbia doomed? Not so fast," condo prices dropped 50 percent or more. It is abundantly clear in downtown Raleigh, where bargain hunters could find condos previously selling for $500,000 to $1 million for half that price. Furthermore, several condo projects on the drawing boards were cancelled, and some already constructed condos became rental units.

Leinberger also argues that, according to a National Association of Realtors survey, only 12 percent of the future homebuyers want to live in the suburbs. Yes, this might be what people say they want, but what do they actually do? Kotkin cites 2010 Census data. In the 51 largest cities, Census data show that during the last decade, single-family households grew 80 percent, far more than either multifamily or attached homes.

Additionally, Leinberger's argument that the suburbs are dead flies in the face of actual Census data. Kotkin notes that:

Rather than flee to density, the Census showed a population shift from more dense to less dense places. The top ten population gainers among metropolitan areas -- growing by 20%, twice the national average, or more -- are the low-density Las Vegas, Raleigh, Austin, Charlotte, Riverside-San Bernardino, Orlando, Phoenix, Houston, San Antonio and Atlanta. By contrast, many of the densest metropolitan areas -- including San Francisco, Los Angeles [yes, LA is the densest American urbanized area with about 7,000 people per square mile], Philadelphia, Boston and New York -- grew at rates half the national average or less.

Why are the suburbs dead and the urban core the wave of the future, according to Leinberger? Because the post-war Baby Boomers now retiring and the twentysomethings called Millennials like dense urban living. Well, some do, but most do not.

Concerning Boomers, according to the Census data that Kotkin cites:

If they moved anywhere, they were headed further out in metropolis towards the more rural area. Among cities the biggest beneficiaries have been low-density cities in the Southwest and southern locales such as Charlotte, Raleigh and Austin [not downtown Charlotte and Raleigh].

Kotkin also cites a study that shows that when Millennials enter their 30s, they prefer homeownership largely in the suburbs. Millennials "are as interested in homeownership as previous generations. This works strongly in favor of suburbs since they tend to be more affordable and, for the most part, offer safer streets, better parks and schools."

But facts don't even faze planners, because the war on the suburbs is in Kotkin's view "theology." Planners who rely on facts are heretics no longer fit to be professional planners.

The individual desire for "privacy, mobility and choice" that the suburbs provide is, according to Robert Brugemann, author of Sprawl: A Compact History, at least as old as medieval townspeople escaping the city walls.

Political humorist P.J. O'Rourke provides a more passionate view of the reason most people prefer the suburbs and their cars, not crowded urban high-rises and time-consuming transit that does not go where you want to go.

Pointy-headed busybodies of the environmentalist, new urbanist, utopian communitarian ilk blamed the victim. They claimed the car had forced us to live in widely scattered settlements in the great wasteland of big-box stores and the Olive Garden. If we would all just get on our Schwinns or hop a trolley, they said, America could become an archipelago of cozy gulags on the Portland, Ore., model with everyone nestled together in the most sustainably carbon-neutral, diverse and ecologically unimpactful way.

But cars didn't shape our existence; cars let us escape with our lives. We're way the heck out here in Valley Bottom Heights and Trout Antler Estates because we were at war with the cities. We fought rotten public schools, idiot municipal bureaucracies, corrupt political machines, rampant criminality and the pointy-headed busybodies. Cars gave us our dragoons and hussars, lent us speed and mobility, let us scout the terrain and probe the enemy's lines. And thanks to our cars, when we lost the cities we weren't forced to surrender, we were able to retreat.

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