So, that’s the story of New York City, today. It is an extremely popular first-stop for immigrants. It is also a popular destination for young, upwardly mobile Millennials who have graduated from top colleges and don’t yet have families with children. But since it’s expensive, chaotic, and mostly lawn-free, it’s not a great place for middle class families who dream of an affordable house, car, and yard.

In this regard, New York is a microcosm of the American city. Population growth in big cities has now shrunk for five consecutive years, according to Jed Kolko, an economist and writer. While well-educated Millennials without children have concentrated in a handful of expensive liberal cities, the rest of the country is slowly fanning out to the sunny suburbs.

It’s the revenge of the past, in a way. In the housing boom of the 1990s and 2000s, Americans moved south and west. Then the housing crash happened. For a few years, it seemed as if America might be experiencing a great rewinding, as the exurbs and ex-exurbs collapsed, and some families moved back to the largest, most prosperous cities.

But that rewind button was really a pause key. Gas prices spiked, and then came back down. Population growth in the densest urban areas—places like Manhattan and San Francisco—has been falling each year since 2010, and it’s the sparsest suburbs that are seeing the fastest growth. In the last few years, the winners have shifted from the southwest to the southeast. Out of the ten fastest-growing large metros in 2016, seven were in the Carolinas and Florida.

One can see glimpses of the rise of low-density suburbs even in non-housing data. On Monday, Ford’s car sales fell 24 percent in March, while F-Series pickups rose by double digits. GM’s latest sales growth was similarly driven by crossovers and trucks, not little cars. Maybe families want to live in denser areas but are being priced out, moving to the suburbs, and buying larger vehicles rather than a small car that can be parallel-parked on a crowded city block. Or maybe America suffers from a unique residential claustrophobia, where its residents naturally seek to fill out America’s bounty of land with ever-larger homes, trucks, and lawns.

America’s largest cities have so much going for them. They are rich, productive, and pulsating with culture and life. So what happened to the great urban revival? “America’s cities have domestic net out-migration because they’re not affordable,” said E. J. McMahon, the founder of the Empire Center for Public Policy. “For many, New York City is a temporary portal. The Baby Boomers retire to Florida. The middle-class Millennials move to Long Island for a house. The woman from Slovakia comes to Queens, lives in her second-cousin’s basement, gets her feet on the ground, and gets a better apartment in West Orange, New Jersey.”