Brookings report on metropolitan trends

The title of the article from Smart Planet, "Brookings: five waves of change will reshape US cities in the 2010s," says "cities" but the report is really about metropolitan areas as a whole.

The report: The State of Metropolitan America

The trends:

Growth and outward expansion: “Between 2000 and 2009, [metro areas] grew by a combined 10.5 percent, versus 5.8 percent growth in the rest of the country. But they continued to spread out, too, as their less developed, outer areas grew at more than three times the rate of their cities and inner suburbs.”

Population diversification: “The United States population is today one-third nonwhite, and those groups accounted for 83 percent of national population growth from 2000 to 2008. Immigration continues to fuel our growth, too, and now nearly one-quarter of U.S. children have at least one immigrant parent…. Large metropolitan areas will get there first, as their under-18 population had already reached majority non-white status by 2008.”

Aging of the population: “Large metro areas are in some ways aging faster than the rest of the nation, experiencing a 45 percent increase in their 55-to-64 year-old population from 2000 to 2008. As a result, their single-person households are growing more rapidly as well, especially in suburban communities that were not designed with these populations in mind.”

Uneven higher educational attainment: “More than one-third of U.S. adults held a post-secondary degree in 2008, up from one-quarter in 1990, helping to propel our economic growth. But younger adults, especially in large metro areas, are not registering the same high levels of degree attainment as their predecessors. Moreover, the African American and Hispanic groups projected to make up a growing share of our future workforce now lag their white and Asian counterparts in large metro areas on bachelor’s degree attainment by more than 20 percentage points.”

Income polarization: “By 2008 high-wage workers in large metro areas out-earned their low-wage counterparts by a ratio of more than five to one, and the number of their residents living in poverty had risen 15 percent since 2000.”