Since that's the period of the study, I assume you're invoking a "god of the gaps"-type argument to invite people to assume that afterwards it went the way your predispositions say it should have?
It does seem rather daft to challenge claims from book written seven years ago about the next five to ten years by using data from between 50 and 9 years go.
The gas price build up went from 2005 to 2008, and then came the housing crisis.
For this study to mean much, they at least have to go as far as 2015
“...a period that overlaps with notions of the resurgence of America’s urban centers and the decline of its suburbs.”
That sentence seems odd. NYC was about to go bankrupt during that period. Boston was losing population and employers into the 1990s. The current new urbanism renewal is mostly overstated and applies to a thin slice of demographics and locations but it’s also very recent—less than 20 years old for the most part.
What an odd time period to pick, since this is peak Suburbia-McMansion sprawl.
its the 4 most recent decades covered by census data. Although you're right to point out that suburbia had its primacy in this time period, the researcher can't be faulted for looking for the highest quality, most recent data.