See, it's not just Detroit...

Apparently the trend across our country is for people moving out of major urban areas to suburbs or "exurbs" --suburbs on the fringes of the metro area. Now, in the New Fallujah area, we've been doing this for years! Clearly, Detroit has always been a very trend-setting region...

In all seriousness, this population migration makes perfect sense to me. Aside from the economic reasons of seeking more affordable housing in the 'burbs, I see it as just getting back to our roots. We were an agricultural society, we moved into the cities over 100 years ago because that's where the jobs were. City living was never very glamorous or comfortable for the majority of people living there. Now that we have transportation that allows us to commute to those jobs in the city, it's not necessary to actually live there.

I lived in a city during my college years, and I can definitely tell you that I'd rather deal with birds and squirrels than rats and roaches any day. It's nice to hear the birds singing, smell the fresh cut grass, plant some flowers, run through a sprinkler, or drive up to the gas station or ATM at midnight and not worry about getting shot.

The other population shift, namely from the midwest and northeast to the south and southwest is a little more disturbing to me, for the mere reason that I hate to see Michigan's economy flailing and it's population diminishing. But it's natural for different areas of the country to experience booms and busts; there's not much we can do about that (except kick Granholm out this November and hope for more friendly tax laws to attract more business here). From a national standpoint, though, I do love seeing the population of the red states grow. Believe me, Georgia having more electoral college delegates than NY or Mass. would be great for the Republican party. Which is of course, why Bush and Rove masterminded this population shift...