One of the blessings of growing older--perhaps the only one--is that age tends to widen one's frame of reference, as in one has seen it all before. Such has been the case during the past 18 months, for me at least, as energy prices soared, bringing out the planners and politicos and consultants to once again proclaim the death of the suburbs and now, exurbs. The press ran with this claptrap, lovingly, just as it did back in the 1970s as the hippie "back-to-the-land, man" movement adopted the blithely narcissistic worship of urban pseudo-sophistication--before, of course, it begat the McMansion.

Now, one can't really blame the planners, because they have been subjected to that great launderer of independent thought, the university. Any notion that is not in lockstep with a philosophy of diversity, rigid environmentalism and radical egalitarianism is heresy, intolerable "hate speech." Their enthusiasm for the cause has been, unfortunately, infectious among others, among them some home building consultants. Thus came about the urban infill movement.

Fortunately for big builders that are sitting on land in the suburbs and exurbs, the public does not seem to buying in.

The Pew Research Center late last month put out the results of a survey of 2,260 adults conducted last October that said, in effect, that not everyone, in fact, not even a plurality of Americans want to live in an urban environment. New York Times columnist David Brooks picked up on the survey last week, but I've seen little else reported about it. I am not surprised by either the results of the survey or the lack of coverage. It doesn't fit the agenda, you know.

According to the survey, a majority of people (54%) who live in a city would like to move out. Hmmmm. Conversely, 54% of people who live in a suburb would like to continue living in a suburb. Likewise, 56% of those who live in a small town would like to stay in a small town, and 61% of those who live in a rural area would like to remain rural.

This does not mean they want to stay where they are, however. Among the entire sample, 30% said they would most like to live in a small town, 25% in a suburb, 23% in a city and 21% in a rural area. By a three-to-one margin, people said they wanted to live where the pace of life is slow, not fast. They preferred warm-weather places to the cold by a two-to-one margin. And they preferred to live where there is a McDonalds as opposed to a Starbucks by 43% to 35%.

When asked which metro areas near which they would like to live, the respondents top-10 included, in ranked order, Denver, San Diego, Seattle, Orlando, Tampa, San Francisco, Phoenix, Portland, Sacramento and San Antonio. The bottom-10, also in ranked order from the bottom up, included Detroit, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Minneapolis, Kansas City, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Los Angeles, Baltimore and New York.

Now, let me see here. That Top-10 matches up pretty well with that supposedly worthless land the builders are holding.

Now, new urbanism proponents would no doubt argue that the public has simply not caught up to new realities. And they would point out, correctly, that young people, those all-important first-time home buyers, are far more city-friendly. According to the survey, of respondents 18-29, 40% said they wanted to live in a city, 22 in a suburb, 14% in a small town and 13% in a rural area.

Often, however, old realities trump new ones, especially when the reality is perceived as opposed to extant. The 30-49 age cohort turns those numbers upside down: 32% city, 42% suburb, 34% small town, 35% rural. This is precisely what occurred with the Baby Boom, and is now occurring with Gen X. Will the Millennials be different? Probably not. They are, after all, our children. A few years in the workforce usually dims the ideological blaze fanned by the professorial laundrymen of the university, and then there is that thing about age widening one's frame of reference.

The American Dream, it seems, lives on in the minds of a majority as a house with a lawn in a place where one knows and need not fear one's neighbors. It has not, thankfully, been rethought by Americans into conformity with the lyrics of John Lennon's "Imagine." Nor, I suspect, will it ever.