Pulling Back From the Exurbs The view from a helicopter over the outer edges of Las Vegas in about 2004, at the height of the housing bubble, was of sprawl overtaking desert as fast as builders could throw up framing and lay on the stucco and roofing tiles. People were flooding in. The Clark County School District was hiring 2,000 teachers a year. Came the recession, and down went the boom. Las Vegas was the third-fastest-growing metro area in the country between 2000 and 2010. Between 2010 and 2011, it fell to 151st place. When the housing market collapsed, so did growth, particularly where growth had been fastest, in the outer suburbs, or exurbs. New Census Bureau data show that the tentative economic recovery has not - or at least not yet - led to a revival of exurban growth. As a demographer, William Frey of the Brookings Institution, told The Times recently, exurbs were once the "cutting edge" of growth, but no more. "That growth has really come to a standstill," he said, "and is maybe being given up for dead at this point." His analysis of data found that the country's outer suburbs grew by only 0.4 percent in the fiscal year ended in July, down from 1 percent the same period before. It peaked, in 2006, above 2 percent. For generations, Americans have migrated ever outward from city centers, pulled by affordable housing to places where long commutes were possible because of cheap gasoline. The costs of such migration - in traffic congestion, environmental degradation and increasing addiction to fossil fuels - were played down or ignored. Recent trends point to a correction, driven in part by the recession, which has made it harder for families to move. The Census Bureau also recently reported that America's urban population increased by 12.1 percent from 2000 to 2010, faster than the nation's overall growth rate of 9.7 percent. The exurban tide may be receding.