Just add people: Joel Kotkin is right that population growth can transform America's cities and suburbs for the better. He's wrong to think it'll happen automatically.

• Author: Teixeira, Ruy
• Position: 'The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050' - Book review

The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050

by Joel Kotkin

Penguin Press, 320 pp.

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How good will our future be? According to Joel Kotkin in his new book, The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050, pretty darn good. The key to that great future lies right in the subtitle of his book. In Kotkin's view, the addition of zoo million people by mid-century, combined with our flexible, entrepreneurial culture, wide-open spaces, and abundant resources, will produce strong, healthy growth, in contrast to our antinatalist, immigrant-unfriendly, culturally closed, demographically stagnating competitors. This includes not just Europe, for which Kotkin reserves particular contempt, but even China, which has grown so strongly in recent decades.

In short, Kotkin is bullish on America. If America were a stock, he'd suggest you buy it. And he has a number of more specific predictions for our glorious future. American growth, he says, will continue to be overwhelmingly concentrated in suburbia, since Americans are not about to give up their love affair with lowdensity living and the automobile. But that's okay, since suburbia itself will evolve toward an "archipelago of villages," more self-sufficient and urbanlike, chock-full of cultural amenities and a veritable paradise for the increasingly common telecommuter. Kotkin also coins the phrase "greenurbia" (he's very big on coining phrases) to describe how the new suburbia will be environmentally sustainable, living in harmony with the natural world and providing a healthful atmosphere for raising families.

As for cities, we'll continue to have them, of course, but the successful ones will be like Phoenix, Dallas, Charlotte, and Atlanta--"aspirational cities," spread out (though it will be "smart sprawl"), not much of a downtown, but plenty of relatively cheap space for the middle class to settle down in. And then there will be some "superstar cities"--Boston, San Francisco, Manhattan, perhaps Seattle and Portland--that will become too expensive for the middle class but will attract affluent Americans, young people (especially college students), and recent immigrants.

Rural parts of the country, says Kotkin, will fare surprisingly well. Indeed, he predicts a resurgence of the American heartland, as the middle class moves out of urban areas in search of affordable housing and a family-friendly environment. This renaissance, notes Kotkin, is unlikely to extend to truly remote and isolated...