Exurbs: America's biggest housing trend you haven't heard of

Fleeing the hustle of the big city to the idyllic suburbs is a classic trope, but in recent years Americans have been shunning the suburbs in favor of another type of community: exurbs. Despite being a relatively unknown term, exurbs represented the fastest-growing neighborhoods in the United States last year, and now they look primed to become a housing movement that's here to stay.

What's an exurb?

It's a "largely residential community located outside of a major city and its suburban periphery that maintains a connection to the metropolis through jobs and services," according to the urban planning website Planetizen. Unlike rural areas, which typically aren't located near major cities, exurbs are "defined by their association with a nearby city's economy but have lower density and less walkability than many suburbs."

People in exurbs often travel to larger cities for work. Exurbs regularly "have at least 20% of their workers commuting to jobs in an urbanized area," said a Brookings Institution study from 2006. Many Americans now call the exurbs home; at least 31.2 million people in the U.S. live in exurbs, according to the American Communities Project.

Why are Americans flocking to them?

Exurbs, including "some as far away as 60 miles (97 kilometers) from a city's center, had some of the fastest-growing populations" in 2023, said The Associated Press, and this trend continued throughout 2024 and into 2025. This influx to the exurbs is likely an "after-effect of the Covid-19 pandemic," as "rising housing costs drove people further from cities and remote working allowed many to do their jobs from home at least part of the week."

Historically, exurbs have been concentrated in the southern U.S., with prominent sites like "Anna on the outskirts of the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area; Fort Mill, South Carolina, outside Charlotte, North Carolina; Lebanon outside Nashville; and Polk County's Haines City," said the AP. Anna, located more than 45 miles from Dallas, was the "fourth-fastest growing city in the U.S." in 2023, and its population continues to climb.

There has been a recent shift from the South, though; the northeast U.S. has recently become a hotbed of exurbs, as communities in "New Hampshire, Connecticut and Maryland accounted for seven of Zillow's 10 most popular markets in 2024, with Manchester, New Hampshire, taking the top spot," said Business Insider. Buyers are heading to these exurbs because they are "beyond the suburbs but still within commuting distance from major metros" like New York and Philadelphia.

These northeastern exurbs are attracting Americans because they "strike a balance between suburban amenities and being located just a hop, skip and a jump from the vibrant offerings and thriving job markets of large urban centers," Zillow said in a press release. With continued demographic shifts and remote work trends, people are finding "hidden-gem cities they might have previously overlooked when daily commutes were the norm," said Zillow's chief economist Skylar Olsen.

But many are still unfamiliar with exurbs as a concept. Exurbia is "one of American geography's most important but least studied precincts," said Washington Monthly magazine. And not all is utopian in an exurb; living in an exurb "not only creates and breeds physical isolation. It also engineers epistemic isolation." Despite these flaws, people are moving to exurbs "because they are priced out of the cities and the closest suburbs."