Section III: SUBURBS and the Mid-Century Landscape of the Economic Development Profession
Suburbs like the poor have always been with us: Background to American suburbia
Our focus in this section is not to provide a summary of the various literatures on suburbia, but rather to assess the impact of suburbia on American sub-state economic development. This being the first formal section devoted to that topic, the reader can expect other sections in chapters to follow.
To focus on suburbia, however, requires a bit of background as well as a discussion of several factors-myths which affect our description and point of view regarding suburbs (and economic development). In particular, we wish to tackle head-on the notion that all suburbs are alike (another a rose is not a rose argument) and that there is something called “suburban economic development” (which is doubtful in the extreme). Unwittingly, that discussion calls into attention the relationship of the suburb to the central city and yanks us into central place theory and the hierarchy of cities. We are not happy with this complexity, but we had best deal with it now and get it over with.
The suburb transformed the physical landscape of urban America during the last half of the twentieth century. According to McDonald “It can be argued that suburbanization is the most important economic and social trend of the second half of the twentieth century in America”.[1] Also suburbia, by adding numerous jurisdictions into the metropolitan policy mix, reshaped urban policy-making to the horror of many—the rise of suburbia is the real underlying basis of the fragmentation-inefficiency criticisms which have troubled much economic and political science-public policy academic literature over several generations. Accompanied by central city decline and racial change, not to mention the cultural intelligentsia’s distaste for the masses and their suburban preferences, advocates of suburbia have, perhaps until very recently, been on the defensive. If one is at all disposed to try an objective review of suburbia, not surprisingly that review will depart from much of the various literatures and media treatments prevalent over the last half-century. Be patient with us; we mean well.
In a previous chapter we touched on topics associated with suburbanization: the Northeastern central city’s reaction to neighborhood emigration and the blight that followed. The seeds of housing reform and urban renewal were sowed in the thirties and suspended in a kind of winter hibernation during the war years. In 1945 and following these seeds blossomed as we shall later describe. But where did central city residents go—that we really didn’t focus on. Now our task is to bring the reader up to speed on past suburbanization and later to also describe the postwar years, the years where the suburbs “broke away” from the central cities and gradually over the next several decades established their own controversial identity.
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 buildouts 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) [2]. 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.[3]
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)[4]. 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.[5]. Most of this discussion will occur in later chapters, but at this point we have in Hanlon a further rationale to distinguish between the variation in nature, timing, composition and economic development-related consequences of suburbs across the nation, but especially in the older, first tier and even older elite suburbs.
The modern suburb conventional wisdom asserts began in early nineteenth century England fueled by the wealthy fleeing London and its major industrial cities. It spread (or spontaneously developed) to the major cities of the United States, certainly by the Civil War. Previous to that most US major-port city emigration went to West or to what are now considered second and third tier cities or developed in “a weave of small patterns”[6] external to municipal boundaries. The New England town government also fostered considerable population decentralization—as it does to the present day. From the nineteenth century through World War II suburbanization by the flight of the wealthy and upper middle class created a distinctive suburban-type, the elite residential enclave. This type of Pre-World War II suburb was an expression of garden city-bourgeois utopias[7], and often became the refuge/enclaves of white, rich Progressive businessmen. Bernadette Hanlon estimates this type of suburb to be about 10-12% of all inner-ring suburbs today[8].
Suburbanization has always been totally dependent upon transportation modes common to the time periods of history. Railroads, as early as the 1840’s, ran commuter trains to “suburban concentrations”, and marketed the purchase of lots. The advent of the street car, especially the electric street car (1887), pushed out expansion from the major industrial cities. As industry grew, incomes and wages grew also and created the discretionary income which made suburbanization affordable, certainly to elites, but by 1890 and following to the middle class and even some working class. The sheer crush of immigrants in this period also pushed expansion beyond the city periphery. Previous to the skyscraper the city could not grow vertically in volumes sufficient to provide move up homes and periphery expansion bypassed this limitation. In this period, however, the central city possessed the power to annex and annexation allowed the central city to chase and capture population diffusion.
Nineteenth century suburbs, therefore, did exist and their formation did not escape the style and practice of city-building prevalent at that time in the West which we described in earlier chapters. Privatist to the core, the same cast of characters; speculators, boosters, railroads-street car operators and attraction marketing appear. Two examples, Samuel Eberly Gross of Chicago and Henry Whitney of Boston[9] will suffice to describe the mechanics of these suburban developments. Gross alone, by 1896, had subdivided and sold over 44,000 lots and built 7,500 houses outside Chicago. Gross put together speculative land purchase, provision of limited infrastructure, employment of contractors-builders, use of an early form of installment financing, alliance with rail and street car owners—and marketing and advertising which in today’s parlance promised the American Dream. He went bankrupt eventually—but not because of his real estate; his personal life is worth reading about.
Whitney is to us more instructive (and boring). Whitney (in the 1880’s) operated the West End Street Railway and owned the West End Land Company—the perfect set of vehicles to accomplish suburbanization. By 1886, Whitney owned most of Brookline (George Romney’s hometown—and residence of many a high-income Harvard-MIT professor). His market was the rich and wealthy. Frederick Law Olmsted prepared Brookline’s landscape plan. Order and security necessary to preserve property values was achieved and maintained by “restrictive covenants”—enforced against the Irish, of course, because at that time there were few blacks on hand in Boston. In any case, Whitney needed little
“The existing upper middle and upper class residents understood (restrictive covenants) as a consolidation of elite Brookline. Both they and aspirant new residents recognized it would be a social and ethnic rampart, secure against invasion by Boston’s poor Irish immigrants.[10]
largely contented himself with selling of land—to small-scale developers who actually built the homes, usually to order.
While these goings-on were occurring a second Bostonian suburbanization was simultaneously evolving on the other side of the tracks (so to speak) in Roxbury, West Roxbury and Dorchester.
Instead of elegant brick built houses and apartment blocks, there were modest wooden single family detached cottages along with two and three family houses. Instead of Olmsted’s elegant centerpiece boulevard there was a myriad pattern of small developments offering lots and residences of varying sizes and graded by price. Roughly 22,500 dwellings were built in these three suburbs between 1870 and 1900, yet no one developer was responsible for more than 3 per cent of them. There was no equivalent of Henry Whitney.[11]
Interestingly, restrictive covenants were also characteristic of these suburbs—but more sensitive to the class structure. This process was the origin of the present day “working class suburb”. The process of neighborhood succession, fueled by subsequent population growth, wreaked its inevitable havoc with home ownership as those with sufficient incomes would travel on the expanded street car line and move out to the new periphery to find new homes. It is worth note that this is the constituency that demanded state legislatures limit the power of the central city to annex. The suburban building “boom” of the 1920’s was a more upscale version of the working class suburb and could be thought of a “move up” housing for the more successful elements of working class neighborhoods and suburbs[12].
Still the more studied suburb-type of this period was the elite enclave. As natural magnets of Progressive wealth, established during the rise of early twentieth century planning, these early elite suburbs were planner-dominated; exclusivity and order, not growth, was prioritized. Economic developers need not apply. We suspect these now aged suburbs are still fairly vigorous and still preserving their exclusivity. Llewellyn Park (1857), New Jersey is an example, and it is still an unincorporated gated residential community; Glencoe Illinois 1869, (Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Sixteen Candles were filmed here) is another, and its village manager government includes no EDO and so is similar to Chevy Chase, Maryland (1918) whose town government also has no EDO. By the way, Brookline, Massachusetts does have a one person Division of Economic Development within its Department of Community and Economic Development. It has a five year economic development plan, operates a façade program, walking tours and kiosks, and liaisons with firms in zoning and planning. In short, economic development in these wealthy suburban enclaves was, and likely still is, planning-oriented and/or non-existent.
The hopefully obvious points being made thus far are that (1) there are different regional patterns of suburbanization; (2) there are different types of suburbs; and (3) economic development holds no special priority common to all suburbs. Many suburbs for a variety of reasons will not need or want to establish formal economic development programs or EDOs. Other types of suburbs responding to different needs and populations will demand varying types of economic development populations. On top of this, we have yet to even mention the impact of politics and political culture depending on which of our two ships is dominant in the area. The reader is cautioned from the get-go that he or she is not likely to find a common pattern of economic development in our nation’s suburbs. We also wish the reader to note the Privatist city-building did extend to Eastern states pre-World War II suburbanization and that many of the elements and practices of postwar suburbanization were not at all new or pioneering. In fact, the “breakout” phenomenon we describe in the next section (aside from Levittown) was very much a continuation of patterns already set in motion.
Breakout: the Postwar Suburban Exodus
Symbolically the suburban homogeneity period started on May 7th 1947 with the opening day sale of the first post War suburban development, Levittown NY. By May 9th, the developers had sold over 1000 housing units, a variant of Wright’s rambler, built by non-union labor, with restrictive covenants, and included for the first time kitchen appliances. The subdivision added 30 units daily to sell 4000 units by 1948. Ultimately, Levittown sold over 17,000 homes (1951). As William Bendix[13] would have said, “what a revolting development this is”[14]. There were two subsequent Levittowns in Pennsylvania in the 1950’s and later in New Jersey. The business model was copied throughout the East by the early 60’s. Levittown was a planned community and it kicked off of a mass-based suburban exodus that gathered steam with each and every year.
The ticky-tacky Levittown (“little boxes” coined in a 1962 song by Malvina Reynolds and made famous by a subsequent Pete Seeger 1963 song) provided grist for many an academic and writers of fiction (Updike, for example). The stereotype acquired the visual images of Leave it to Beaver, Father Knows Best and Ozzie & Harriet and was saddled with the label of the American Dream. Like all TV and Hollywood visions, these shows were somewhat inaccurate characterization of families in the postwar era, but these shows became the avatar for all suburbs then, and forever after. That mental inflexibility proved to be a first class mistake[15].
More damaging, perhaps, was the linkage of Northern suburbanization with racial change in the central cities. Income segregation and racial segregation were quickly seen two sides of the same coin and as inherent aspects of suburbanization. That the federal government played a role in all that, restrictive covenants and FHA, compounded further the analysis of the period’s suburbanization and led to polarization rather than partnership between neighboring jurisdictions and communities. The latter trend would be much more evident in the sixties, but it existed in the fifties as well.AHA
The first postwar suburban developments were not only certainly aided by the federal government, and highways, but also (and arguably mostly) by the immediate post-war housing crisis. The return of the soldiers, the very quick household formation which followed, left the greatest generation and their new-born baby boomers sleeping (or not) in the bedrooms of their less than delighted grandparents. Deluded by the 1944 veteran benefit mortgages, thousands of former World War II veterans got into their newly-purchased car and fled the central cities (and their parents). A new mass (multi-class) lifestyle was born and a new version of the American Dream had commenced—to the relief of all three generations.
Alongside all this was the creation of an innovative suburban business model which was able to largely accommodate demands generated by the post-war housing crisis. The new suburban-FIRE complex threw off substantial profits, created new occupations and redefined the BLS-FIRE sector classification. A new “developer-based” suburban real estate industry would evolve from the late 1940’s. This new sector both reflected and created consumer demand and achieved corporate profitability by understanding the American family’s post war dream and by recognizing the link between housing, employment and the car. Borrowing from Levittown, which was based loosely on Wright’s “Rambler” and his decentralized garden city, and using Ford’s assembly line technique, the developer community seized upon the long-standing American tradition of moving to the city periphery, now with a car not a street car.
By separating housing finance from housing construction, the developer-industry complex formed in the early twentieth century and was able to build cheap, ticky-tacky small Capes just outside the boundaries of the Progressive central city which had, by that time, lost its earlier power to annex due to unfriendly state legislatures dominated through gerrymandering by rural and embryonic suburban communities. The loss of central city annexation authority was a critical factor in the postwar Northern suburbanization experience[16]— and annexation power (along with other factors earlier discussed), at least in the fifties, further differentiated Western from Eastern cities.
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)[17] 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[18].
But suburbanization was not simply a suburb-bound residential exodus. Jobs and employment were suburbanized as well—but suburban employment growth was a bit more complicated. Jobs or people? Which comes first in economic growth? This is the economic development equivalent of chicken and the egg. Once set in motion, the two feed off each other, but which comes first is said to be vital to economic development strategy. We do not pretend to know the answer. Moreover, in real life it matters little and even if the answer were known it is not likely that in the “fog of war” anybody living at the time would have been able to see clearly enough to sustain a policy strategy. But we can follow the data and discern that through the early 1960’s suburban employment growth did not precisely mirror the people-exodus.
Several important works of the time, in particular Hoover and Vernon’s Anatomy of a Metropolis (1959)[19] set economists off in a direction they are still traveling. Hoover and Vernon found that by 1956 inner ring suburban employment almost equaled the non-Manhattan central city employment. Sectors mattered. Manhattan held wholesale trade, finance and office jobs in general (65%-69%); manufacturing was spread more or less consistently across Manhattan, the rest of New York City and the inner ring (but not outer ring) suburbs. Retail and consumer services moved heavily to inner ring but Manhattan (and the Central Business District) still maintained a definitive edge. Job to work studies definitive demonstrated the majority of employment work and lived in the same ring. There was virtually no reverse commutes. This suggested that as sectors moved to the inner ring, population would follow.
A later study by Meyer, Kain, and Wohl (1965)[20] of thirty-nine metropolitan areas estimated that between 1948 and 1958 central city population grew by .2% while the suburbs grew 9.8% per annum (from a much lower base). Central city manufacturing employment fell by .6% and suburban manufacturing employment grew 15% PER YEAR. John F. McDonald worked with the Meyer, Kain and Wohl data and in a subsequent article disclosed his findings that:
The change in location pattern was the result of deaths of firms in the central city, births of firms in the suburbs, employment declines in firms in the city, and growth of firms in the suburbs. Only a relatively small amount of the net change can be explained by the direct relocation of firms from the central city to the suburbs.[21]
What seemed to be driving the key manufacturing trend was that changes in product demand and manufacturing-logistical technologies was incrementally accommodated by firms through expanding production in the suburbs by creating new single-story-spread-out facilities on the cheap, highway accessible land while their land-locked central city facilities produced as much as best they could for as long as profitability could be maintained. This was obviously not sustainable if in some way the central city facility could not find a way to adjust to production and logistical change. As suburban facilities increased production, employment and population growth was sure to follow. Through the fifties and early sixties, the hard truths were evident but hope for recovery still existed (in our view many manufacturing industries were transitioning from State 3 to Stage 4 as well); the bottom would fall out in 1968, according to McDonald[22], when the riots prompted a rush to exit the central city. That is a story for another chapter, however.
One story that we can resume is that of “industrial” parks. One may imagine the postwar period as yet another example of “golden years” for that economic development tool. During the 1940’s and 1950’s industrial parks were chiefly just that—locations for manufacturing firms. The ULI Handbook asserts that “Following World War II, the pace of change quickened and the modern industrial park, as an outgrowth of earlier industrial districts, emerged as the major new trend in industrial development”.[23] They produce a representative list, geographically dispersed of major industrial parks created in this period. What else is one to do; industrial parks, both private (the overwhelming majority) and public went up by the hundreds across the nation—in the suburbs for the most part. As discussed, industrial parks are extremely compatible with planning, zoning and land use by planners (who usually were relied upon in the early suburbs) and so these became arguably the principal element in any unconscious or conscious economic development strategy by suburbs of this period. Industrial parks, however, were in evolution, and in the 1970 and 1980’s, as the national economy was shifting from manufacturing to a service and technology-based economy, the occupants of these business parks changed radically. And that too is a story for another chapter.
There is one last tale to tell concerning suburbanization in this period: the challenge/revolution of suburban retail and the auto unleashed upon the central business district during this period. This opportunities sparked by this phenomenon became fertile ground for a major “revolution” in economic development practice: a relatively new form of public financing which allowed suburban communities to compete for the lucrative retail tax base spiraling by leaps and bounds in the post-1950’s. This was, of course, tax increment financing (TIF). The real glory days of TIF, its golden years, lay in the future—not in this period. But it was during this period that TIF began its diffusion, especially in the West and Midwest. Accordingly, we will discuss TIF in a later chapter also. At this point, however, it is necessary to describe the transformation in retail that confronted the hither-to dominant CBD as the metropolitan shopping district. We are, of course, moving to describe the birth of the “mall” and regional/super shopping facilities.
Christaller’s central place theory was instrumental in explaining the postwar evolution of the retail sector. In hindsight (1967) Berry, for example, looked at the postwar suburban experience and 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”[24].
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. In addition, 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.[25]
From this the Urban Land Institute[26] constructed four types of centers each with their own minimum population, radius and driving time:
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, the traditional Super-Regional, a monopoly[27] which was broken after developers in the early fifties launched regional “shopping centers” and then by the end of the fifties, super-regional “malls” across the nation. The automobile, of course, made this all possible.
The first shopping centers were in construction immediately following the war (and there are several candidates for who was “the” first) and by 1957 ULI was publishing “extensive guidelines on the development of shopping centers, many of which contained two department stores”. The number of planned retail centers (all sizes) grew from an estimated under 1,000 in 1950 to over 25,000 in 1984 (40% of all retail sales in the nation).[28] In the latter years, many of these retail centers will be financed in part by TIF and certainly by the late 1950’s the CBD was under considerable competitive pressure. It is worth note that the “anchor” for the larger suburban retail centers was the department store and the “grocery store” was the anchor for the smaller centers. Finally, the ubiquitous role of the car in this retail revolution is expressed in a “cycle of dependence”[29] which resulted. The car was the how one got to the center, suburban land use design and transportation infrastructure accordingly reflected the needs of the car which inevitably meant that future users of these retail centers would, unless some acceptable alternative was created, be compelled to travel by auto. Both the cycle of dependence and its chief offspring, congestion became built-in attributes of the suburban lifestyle.
The Postwar Suburbs and Economic Development
Post-World War II suburbs were still so new in the fifties and while they were growing in population and jobs, they usually lacked identity, often were still unincorporated, and (in the sixties) what was to become exurbs and edge cities still farms. Nevertheless, the post-War II suburbanization was a page-turner and the evolution and development of suburbs during the 1950’s began to seriously and negatively intrude upon the economic development literature, and presumably profession throughout the 1960’s. From the perspective of early suburban geographies, economic development was something that seemingly occurred naturally without need for public policy intervention or economic development bureaucracies. First on the list of priorities was to incorporate and/or establish or reorganize the jurisdiction’s core governance and establish those bureaucracies, like planning, school systems, roads, pipes and sewers etc. At some point, however, for reasons that are not yet well understood or documented, some jurisdictions formed EDOs and pursued economic development.
There is little reason to believe that economic development, as opposed to planning for instance, was universally a highly prioritized policy area in these early suburbs. The EDOs existing and formed in these growing jurisdictions, while largely unknown to us today probably were likely to be chambers and whether they were active participants in the jurisdiction’s economic development policy system is unstudied. Early Public Agency suburban entities were often as likely to be some poor soul within the planning department or the city manager himself, rather than a full-blown department. In some states, as we shall learn, the states themselves will empower sub-state jurisdictions to form Quasi EDOs and to participate in a state endorsed set of economic development programs and goals.
Suburbs: Wrap Up and Handoff
Suburbanism, as it played out in the sixties and even the seventies appeared to be, and increasingly became defined as, the opposite of Progressivism. This is in several ways quite ironic because in most suburban jurisdictions progressive institutions and practices were not only adopted but seemingly personified what suburbs wanted to be. Key progressive structures such as planning, zoning, purchasing, budgeting, council-manager, county executive, and at large, non partisan elections dominated the suburban landscape as did the desire for well-run school systems and the provision of city-building infrastructure. By definition, however, suburbs were less dense and they were built because of, and for, the car—these appear to be two original sins which time has not erased.
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 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 is 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.
The
[1] John F. McDonald, Urban America: Growth, Crisis and Rebirth, op. cit. p. 85.
[2] Dolores Hayden, Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth (New York, Vintage Books, 2003), p.4
[3] 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.
[4] Bernadette Hanlon, Once the American Dream: Inner-Ring Suburbs of the Metropolitan United States (Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 2010), pp. 13-27.
[5] Hanlon, pp 114- 131
[6] Sam Bass Warner, The Street Car Suburbs: The Patterns of Growth in Boston 1870-1900 (2nd Ed) (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1978) p. 67.
[7] Rybczynski, Makeshift Metropolis; Thomas J. Vicino, John Rennie Short, and Bernadette Hanlon, Cities and Suburbs: New Metropolitan Realities in the United States (Routledge, 2009); Dolores Hayden, Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth 1820-2000, NY, Pantheon Books, 2003); and Kenneth Jackson, The Crabgrass Frontier: the suburbanization of the United States (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1985).
[8] IBID. p. 114. Table 8.1
[9] We draw our detail from Stephen V. Ward, Selling Places: the Marketing and Promotion of Towns and Cities 1850-2000 (New York, Routledge, 1998). See especially his chapter “Mass Transit and Healthy Homes”.
[10] Stephen V. Ward, Selling Places, op. cit. p.86.Ward, by the way is basing much of his description from that provided by Sam Bass Warner in Street Car Suburbs.
[11] Stephen V. Ward. Selling Places, op. cit. p.86. Again Ward draws from Bass’s Street Car Suburbs.
[12] Another example is Queens New York Led by its borough chamber of commerce it produced a sort of “real estate guide” a catalog of houses and associated industry complex advertising which extolled the advantages of living in Queens. This was in place previous to 1914 (see Ward, Selling Places, op. cit. p. 93).
[13] William Bendix was a postwar TV comedian whom the Curmudgeon loved. In respect for him, we include one of his trademark statements.
[14]Levittown, by the way, is today a hamlet of nearly 52,000 residents within the town of Hempstead and has no EDO (but the Town has a Planning & ED Department and two nested quasi EDOs.)
[15] See Alonso and Muth p. 92
[16] See McDonald p.90
[17]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
[18] 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.
[19] Edgar Hoover and Raymond Vernon, Anatomy of a Metropolis: The Changing Distribution of People and Jobs within the New York Metropolitan Region (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1959) and Raymond Vernon, Metropolis 1985(Garden City, New York, Doubleday Anchor, 1963).
[20] John Meyer, John Kain, and Martin Wohl, The Urban Transportation Problem (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1965)
[21] John F. McDonald, Employment, Location and Industrial Land Use in Metropolitan Chicago (Champaign, Illinois, Stipes Publishing, 1984). McDonald nicely summarizes this book in his Urban America: Growth, Crisis and Rebirth, op. cit. pp. 95-97.
[22] McDonald, Urban America, op. cit. p. 97.
[23] Michael D. Beyard, Business and Industrial Park Development Handbook (Washington D.C., The Urban Land Institute, 1988) p. 18.
[24] Brian Berry, Geography of Market Centers and Retail Distribution (Englewood Cliffs, Prentice-Hall, 1967) p.20.
[25] 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
[26] Urban Land Institute, Shopping Center Development Handbook, (2nd Ed) (Washington D.C., Urban Land Institute, 1985)
[27] 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
[28] Handy, op. cit. p. 13. She cites from the 1985 ULI Shopping Center Handbook and J. Ross McKeever, “Shopping Centers RE-Studied: Emerging Patterns and Practical Experiences”, Technical Studies Bulletin No. 30 and 31, Urban Land Institute.
[29] Handy, op. cit. p. 18ff.
Ron W. Coan 