Policy Cut Chapter 14
But suburbs are much more than this simple numerical reality. Until recently (a decade or so) most analysis and commentary tended to view the mass of suburban jurisdictions as so many peas in a pod. Little meaningful internal differentiation was made regarding suburbs. One could make an assumption that one suburb is pretty much similar to another in form, function, culture and presumably economic development goals and expectations (and policy systems). Today, probably everybody, to some degree, would acknowledge suburbs differ among themselves in many important ways. The first differentiation we wish to tackle is the variation in suburbs across census regions. In this section we shall deal only with Northeastern and Midwestern suburbanization. These two regions also differed internally in terms of rate, timing and composition of their suburban process, but they did share a common feature: suburbs were based almost exclusively on emigration from an older, historical central city. Most suburban-bound population flows in the postwar period were from the older central city spilling over its periphery into areas beyond its boundaries—today’s first tier suburbs.
This would not be true of most suburbs west of the Mississippi; instant cities also meant instant suburbs which developed alongside, semi-independently and fueled by postwar direct migration from the East unfiltered by central city residence. The South was not characterized by large, first tier central cities (New Orleans was the major exception) and its dominant rural, second-third tier city character did not spin off a suburban exodus similar to that of its Northern “friends”. Southern suburbs grew as much from emigration from its rural hinterland than central city exodus. Northwestern coastal cities came closest to their Eastern forebears, but, although somewhat a hybrid, the lesser rates of black in-migration did not impart a race as well as class-based exodus to the suburban exodus. In the Northeast and Midwest, however, the pick-up in the Great Migration coincided with the postwar white working and middle class suburbanization. That combined with the role and history of the here-to-for dominant, big name central cities created a distinctive regional impact and carved out an image of suburbanization which was wrongfully extended to all the nation’s suburbs.
Dolores Hayden states that “the history (since 1820) of suburban construction can be understood “as the evolution of seven vernacular patterns. Building in borderlands began about 1820. Picturesque enclaves started about 1850 and street car build outs around 1870. Mail order and self-built suburbs arrived in 1900. Mass produced, urban scale ‘sitcom’ suburbs appeared around 1940. Edge nodes coalesced around 1960. Rural fringes intensified around 1980. All of these patterns survived in the metropolitan areas of 2003” (now 2013) [1]. Post-War II suburbanization was layered on top of four other patterns that had preceded it. By 1945, there were suburbs exceeding one hundred years of age. Kenneth Jackson (and the Census Bureau) noted by 1950 there were already 36 million people living in the nation’s suburbs and that by 1970 the number would exceed 70 million. During the two decades 1950-1970 the nation grew by more than 51 million—74% of which were in the suburbs. By 1970 more people lived in the suburbs than the central cities.[2]
So, like the poor, suburbs have always been amongst us. Bernadette Hanlon usefully breaks down twentieth century suburbanization into four distinct periods: suburban elitism (1920-1945), suburban homogeneity (1945-1970’s), suburban diversity (1970’s-1990’s), and the current period, suburban dichotomy (post 2000)[3]. Our concern at this point in our story is the first two periods. Hanlon categorizes suburbs on the basis of period of settlement, but she also reviews the distinctive evolution and configuration of suburbs in the four major regions of the nation: North, South, Midwest and West. She also develops a typology of the different types of “inner-ring” suburbs: Elite, Middle Class, Vulnerable, and Ethnic.[4].
Suburbs versus the central city came to be one of the defining perspectives of post 1960 economic development literature. These zero-sum dialogues from their postwar get go was seized upon by the American intelligentsia and literati and soon found expression in popular culture as well. The heritage of the postwar suburban homogeneity for economic developers is much more complicated. These suburbs are now the prototypical inner-ring suburbs of the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic and Midwest (and California) regions. They are the prototypical Rustbelt suburbs (about 33% of all inner-ring suburbs) many now characterized by their deindustrialized economic base. Still other early homogeneous period suburbs have evolved a still vibrant middle class lifestyles in a diverse, sometimes minority-majority population. Others are, in Hanlon’s terms, “vulnerable”. No doubt, these first post-war suburbs are home base for many an EDO today. Once again, we stress variability and suggest to the reader that suburbs, even those of a particular period of suburbanization, ought not to be viewed as a monolithic category.
Rather, we might recognize that (1) suburbs inherently differ in history, housing age and construction techniques/styles, demographics — and purpose (which are locally defined). (2) There is, accordingly, no reason to believe that all suburban jurisdictions will define economic development in a clone-like pattern; that suburban jurisdictions will likely want to achieve different end-states from any economic development activities they conduct. And (3) that suburban policy systems will differ in their cultures, participants, structures and presumably strategies and tools. Much of suburbia is, even to this day, unincorporated and possesses no municipal level jurisdictions from which to run an economic development program. But whatever they are and whatever they may or may not do, it is wise to remember that suburbs (and rural) constitute approximately two-thirds of most metropolitan areas’ population.
As one might expect, a generation after this postwar household dispersion to the suburbs had commenced, economists came up with a theoretical explanation. Alonso (1964) and Muth (1969)[5] expressed the central city-suburb location decision as essentially a trade of between “spacious”, i.e. land-consuming residence and access to employment (assumed to be downtown). The basic idea as summarized by McDonald is that:
…households choose to locate at the distance from downtown at which the additional cost of locating one mile further away is just balanced by the saving in housing costs-the marginal cost of distance equals the marginal benefit in housing costs…. The benefit of greater distance is the reduction in the price of housing… Why does the price of land decline with distance from downtown? This happens because commuting costs rise with distance from downtown. If one lives at a greater distance from downtown, one is willing to bid a lesser amount for the land because that land carries a higher commuting cost.
This is the infamous “bid/rent model which, internalized into Christaller’s central place theory, conventional microeconomic theory of efficient allocation of resources, and the question of equity in the distribution of income combined to form a dominant paradigm in urban economics for decades to follow[6].
Christaller’s central place theory “explained” the postwar evolution of the metropolitan urban landscape. In hindsight. Utilizing his framework, Berry (1967) developed a hierarchy of retail trade which he defined as “a distinct step (as in staircase) of centers providing distinct groups of goods and services to a distinct market area”[7]. This hierarchy, codified by ULI, became the instruction manual for the subsequent “Malling of America”
The hierarchy reflects not only the type of good, but the size of the establishment in which it is sold; e.g. supermarkets require a larger market area than grocery stores … establishments are sorted by the size of the center in which they are located, with large establishments selling comparison goods found in ‘higher order’ regional centers and small establishments selling convenience goods found in ‘lower order’ neighborhood or convenience centers.[8]
From this the Urban Land Institute[9] constructed four types of centers each with their own minimum population, radius and driving time:
the Super-Regional, a monopoly[10] which was broken after developers in the early fifties built regional “shopping centers” and then by the end of the fifties, super-regional “malls” across the nation.
Type of Center Minimum Population Needed Radius Miles Driving Time
Super-Regional 300,000 or more 12 30 minutes
Regional 150,000 or more 8 20
Community 40,000 to 150,000 3-5 10 to 20
Neighborhood 2,500 to 40,000 1.5 5 to 10
And there we have it: the theory behind the instruction manual for establishing new centers of retail in suburban (and central city) locations. The CBD is, of course,
[1] Dolores Hayden, Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth (New York, Vintage Books, 2003), p.4
[2] Kenneth Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier (New York, Oxford University Press, 1985) p. 283; this data is further confirmed by McDonald in his chapter “Suburbanization: 1950-1970”, op. cit. pp. 85-104.
[3] Bernadette Hanlon, Once the American Dream: Inner-Ring Suburbs of the Metropolitan United States (Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 2010), pp. 13-27.
[4] Hanlon, pp 114- 131
[5]William Alonso, Location and Land Use (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1964) and Richard Muth, Cities and Housing (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1969). Indirectly, through a foundation entitled Resources for the Future this work was funded by the Ford Foundation
[6] See McDonald, Urban Economics, op. cit. pp. 205-206. See his Chapter 12, “New Urban Scholarship” for a readable outlining of the historiography of urban economics in the last half of the twentieth century.
[7] Brian Berry, Geography of Market Centers and Retail Distribution (Englewood Cliffs, Prentice-Hall, 1967) p.20.
[8] Susan Handy, “A Cycle of Dependence: Automobiles, Accessibility, and the Evolution of the Transportation and Retail Hierarchies”, Reprinted from Berkeley Planning Journal (Vol. 89 (1993) by the University of California Transportation Center, University of California at Berkeley
[9] Urban Land Institute, Shopping Center Development Handbook, (2nd Ed) (Urban Land Institute, 1985)
[10] Homer Hoyt observed that in 1920 ninety per cent of retail sales were in the CBD. By 1937, Proudfoot looking at 37 cities found that the CBD made about 40% of total sales and neighborhood centers another 40%–retail had already decentralized previous to the Second World War but as Proudfoot described the CBD was still “the retail heart of the city”. Homer Hoyt, “The Changing Principles of Land Economics” Technical Bulletin No 60, Washington D.C., the Urban Land Institute; and Malcolm Proudfoot, Intra City Business Census Statistics for Philadelphia, PA, Washington D.C., U.S. Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce, 1937) p. 1 and p. 3
Ron W. Coan 