POLYCENTRISM AND POST-SUBURBIA
Between 1950 and 1970, the urbanized area of Washington DC grew from 181 to 523 square miles and Miami from 116 to 429, while the megalopolitan areas of New York, Chicago and Los Angeles expanded thousands of square miles. They call it sprawl. In 1960 suburban residents (31 percent) and central city (32 percent) residents were roughly equal; in 1970 suburbanites exceeded 37 percent of the nation’s population while the central city share remained 32 percent. Suburbs, however, kept on growing (Hobbs and Stoops, 2002, p. 33, Table 15). With 37.6 percent of the nation’s population in 1970, suburbs grew to 50 percent by 2000 (and an estimated 53 percent in 2014). Somewhere in there a point of no return had to have been broached. However, sprawled as they might be, suburbs existed and they weren’t going away. That was as true for former Big City metro areas as for western metros.
In the meantime, of course, Big Cities had, more often than not, been categorized as “Legacy Cities”—cities abandoned by their insensitive children to their fate. That dialogue continues into contemporary economic development. In this chapter, however, we leave that debate behind and argue the metropolitan hierarchy is polycentric, acknowledged as such, or, if not conceded to be polycentric, is de facto polycentric. Central cities no longer enjoy economic or political primacy, or a dominant position to control affairs of their metro areas. Central city metro relationships vary, but suburbs are autonomous: unincorporated areas mostly serviced by counties and service districts. For this history, the city–suburb war is over; it ended sometime—certainly by the end of the 1990s. In 1997 Teaford labeled the new metropolitan order “post-suburbia,” and that is our euphemism for a polycentric urban metro area.
Just what does this polycentric metro area look like to an economic developer? It is ironic that for more than a half-century we defined thousands of communities and jurisdictions with three words: “suburb,” “sameness” and “sprawl.” Yet, this history’s most difficult initial conceptual problem is finding some way to get our arms around the incredible diversity and variation found in post-suburban metropolitan areas. City size is important to an economic developer, but many non-central cities achieved sufficient scale to function in ways similar to former Big City economic development—if they choose to. Not all do.
Post-suburban jurisdictions come in many types/policy systems, with different ED/CD goals, different economic bases and vastly different internal composition and history. Post-suburbia has neighborhoods, and CBD, a work in progress for many, is not without its relevance. Not all post-suburban jurisdictions want growth—or at least define growth in their own terms.
This history asserts there is no single post-suburban policy system, no single post-suburban economic development strategy/EDO motif and no single set of ED goals common throughout the metro area. Indeed, a considerable number of postsuburban jurisdictions do not highly prioritize ED or CD. There is variation with metro areas and across regions. Moreover, as shall be argued in the next chapter, we have “Big Sorted” ourselves so well most metro areas consist of ideological, ethnic/racial and class enclaves. Post-suburbia can be highly politicized, and the economic bases of each component jurisdiction quite different—sometimes competing. Before we get too far ahead of ourselves, however, our first task is to recount post-1970/pre-2000 suburban evolution to lay foundations for contemporary economic development. Initially we focus on the edge city and “boomburbs,” and follow with brief descriptions of suburban city-building models such as the common interest development (CID/ Privatopia) and master-planned communities. The second task sketches the variation that may be the chief characteristic of post-suburbia.
POLYCENTRIC SUBURBANISM
Edge Cities and Boomburbs
The 1980s and 1990s could be described as the golden era of sprawl. In 1991 Joel Garreau published Edge City: Life on the New Frontier. He described a new urban landscape (job centers, more precisely) “in places that only thirty years before had been residential suburbs or even corn stubble” (Garreau, 1991, p. xx). Garreau had discovered a form of post-suburbia that became evident during the eighties. He defined an edge city or edge node as having more than 5 million square feet of leasable office space plus at least 600,000 square feet of leasable retail space—a place that has “more jobs than bedrooms” and is perceived by the locals as an identifiable place less than 30 years of age. His poster child for an edge city was Tyson’s Corner.
Garreau thought of edge cities as a third wave of suburbanization, and claimed two-thirds of America’s office facilities were in edge cities (Garreau, 1991, pp. 5–7). Quoting Faulkner, Garreau gets to the nub of why edge cities exploded: “Man ain’t really evil, he just ain’t got any sense.” If economic developers had little influence over these population centers, it appears that planners had less (Lange, 2003). Many edge cities were wholly contained within a city, others in unincorporated areas—not “legally” cities at all. Scale and growth, commercial growth mostly, characterize edge cities: they describe an important factor in the evolution of post-suburban jurisdictional economic bases. Combine this with TIF mall/sales tax chasing described earlier and one can see that a Privatist-dominated planning motif characterized the development of post-suburbia jurisdictions during these years.
This pattern continued into our contemporary economic development period. Lang and LeFurgy (2007), and Lang and Simmons previously (2003), discovered that the fastest growing cities in the post-2000 period were mostly Sunbelt suburban “cities.” Such cities contrasted starkly with suburban metro stagnation, even decline, of several former hegemonic Big Cities. Former hegemonic Big City suburbs were still under a cloud in our Contemporary World—often held responsible for the decline of their loving parent. Not so in the West, and California in particular (with 84 adult/baby boomburbs). California had nearly half of the nation’s boomburbs, but the South had 41 baby and adult boomburbs. Chicago had one boomburb, as did Atlanta and Washington DC. There were none in the Northeast.
Boomburbs dramatically exploded after 1970. Cities with names like Glendale, AZ, Hialeah FL, Riverside CA, Naperville IL and Grand Prairie TX are just a few examples. Most prospered in the shadow of their more prestigious central cities, but they were true growth centers. These new urban centers rivaled older central cities: Mesa (2000) had 403,000 residents compared to Atlanta’s 421,000; in 2010 Mesa (463,000) “lapped” Atlanta’s 420,000. St. Louis by that time held 319,000. In 1970 Virginia Beach VA was about 175,000—by 2000 over 425,000 and Virginia’s largest city. This is undisputable polycentrism.
Boomburbs were defined as having populations of at least 100,000; not the core (central) city of their region; and having maintained double-digit rates of population growth for each census between 1970 and 2000. Unlike edge cities, which are as likely to be unincorporated as not, boomburbs are incorporated. Lang and LeFurgy (2007) listed 44 suburbs as boomburbs, and they were truly the growth gazelles of urban America. Another 86 baby boomburbs (50,000–100,000)—some of which are in the Midwest and South—were also identified. Many baby boomburbs were on the way to becoming adults. Between 1970 and 2000, boomburbs gained 6 million new residents.
Edward Glaeser (2000) suggested that “sun, sprawl, and skills drove the growth of the boomburb.” Boomburbs “typically develop along the interstate freeways”; are home to the “commercial elements of the new suburban metropolis—office parks, big-box retail stores, and most characteristically, strip malls”; and are “dominated by large-lot, single-family homes. Boomburbs … are extensions of the auto-dependent city typical of the Sunbelt” (Lang and LeFurgy, 2007, pp. 10–11). If so, boomburbs are yet another facet of growth associated with the rise of the Sunbelt and the new national and regional urban hierarchy being fashioned during these years. Their virtual absence in former hegemonic states demonstrates suburban regional variation.
Contemporary Suburban City-Building
Earlier chapters discussed “planned” city-building initiatives that ranged from company towns to private luxury “gated” communities (Menlo Park NJ), to CD city-building (Radburn), J.C. Nichol’s Privatist County Club, New Deal (Title VII) New Towns, war production/nuclear-related production centers, and Rouse’s post-1962 Columbia MD. Planned communities are nothing new to American ED. During the 1960s, however, “master-planned communities” (MPCs) (Platt, 2011) became a dominant feature of late twentieth-century (and contemporary) suburbanization. Privatist it may be, commercially driven, it has emerged alongside the traditional Levittown subdivision model; and, while found across all regions at the time of writing, it exploded in the rising Sunbelt.
California took an early lead (Rancho Bernardo, a San Diego “neighborhood”) and the most well-known, Irvine—a post-1960 partnership with the University of California and the Irvine Company.21 Coral Gables in Florida was also a 1961 pioneer. ULI formed its Community Builders Council, headed by Nichols back in 1944, and the FHA and HUD have worked with master-planned communities.22 A brief case study of one well-known MPC, the Woodlands outside of Houston, will be presented. A second discussion on a hybrid MPC EDO/tool, the homeowners’ association and CID housing—labeled Privatopia (McKenzie, 1994)—will follow. As late as 2015 a significant article questioned the proliferation and pervasiveness of these new cities (Semuels, 2015). The genuine unease of CD with MPCs strongly hints that we are dealing with a Privatist form of suburban city-building (Weiss and Watts, 1989). In the next chapter a CD-congruent form of city-building—“New Urbanism”—will be discussed.
The Woodlands
MPCs, reflecting their garden city roots, are a curious blend of capitalism (financing, marketing and construction) and socialism (community governance, primacy of planning and remarkable inclusivity). MPCs are not meant for CD’s low- and mod-income clientele—a good deal of the initiative rests upon high-income, even luxury clientele, all of which contributes to the common costs and facilities associated with the project. MPCs produced profits derived from a comprehensive plan. They fit nicely into the planning, city manager, low-tax, residentially oriented, large-lot subdivision nexus that followed the sixties “sit-com” suburban policy-system. MPCs offloaded government infrastructure costs to the “community builder, who offloaded them to homeowners’ associations upon project completion.
MPCs could be grandiose in their scale: the most famous, like Woodlands, constructed, literally, a community-jurisdiction—complete with recreation, entertainment, schools, parks and a city-center. They were the ultimate mixed-use project, with offices, hospitals, professional buildings and retail—resting on a remarkably complex residential base. Locations were chosen with access to transportation modes, and reinforced existing patterns of suburban expansion. Often their core non-residential anchor was the university branch campus—built on donated land. Corporate HQs were attraction candidates. Other forms of MPC (planned unit development/PUD-like in their scale) such as Silicon Valley, looked at from a real estate focus, were composed of MPC campuses home to rising technology firms. Woodlands follows the large-scale “community-level” variant of an MPC.
Woodlands was the dream of George Mitchell, founder/owner of a Texas oil and gas seismic and operations firm, Mitchell Energy and Development Corporation. The project was conceived and developed by its real estate division and an internal team that acted as developer (Morgan Jr. and King, 1987). An urban planner enthusiast, Mitchell wanted to recreate Howard’s Garden City using business methods and guided by profits. Identifying his location, he started design work and land assembly after 1964 the idea was to build a total community, with residents from working to luxury class, office buildings, amenities, city-center—the gamut of uses found in every community.
“Set among lakes and pine woods, the city sold a combination of small-town nostalgia and high-tech communication and infrastructure” (Abbott, 2008, p. 225)—and its own jurisdictional economic and tax base. Parks and trees, congestion-free internal roadways, no polluting uses, environmentally friendly, with a population cap of 180,000 so excessive growth would not destroy the community ambience. Homeowner associations and covenants, conditions and restrictions (CC&Rs) preserved property values and ensured future economic vitality. Individual neighborhoods with similarpriced but varying designed housing were the basic unit. Incorporation and a citymanager form of government (achieved in 1971) were contemplated from the beginning.
Mitchell found the sixties a difficult environment in which to forge partnerships and raise capital needed to design, plan, assemble land and lay infrastructure. He turned, almost in desperation, to the newly approved 1970 federal Housing Act—in which Texas Senator John Tower had played a role in passing. The Act permitted up to $50 million of HUD guarantee for a city-building initiative. So Mitchell rushed design and plans to apply for HUD guarantees. A partnership with the University of Houston to develop a branch campus on donated land was forged. Complicated negotiations with HUD followed.
MPC did not fit well into HUDs sense of a new town, but in September 1972 a final $50 million HUD guarantee was awarded. Almost five years of negotiation and implementation of projects followed. HUD and the Woodland Company were not always on the same page, and they parted company in 1976. In 1974 Woodland opened an office on site and sold its initial 60 townhouses. In 1975, with 643 residents and homeowner association, Woodlands by 1984 grew to 18,700—and in 2015 had 110,000 residents.
Mitchell sold off his corporate interests in Woodlawn, making a tidy sum to be sure. He then financed and experimented with new forms of oil and gas extraction. Today he is better known as the “father of fracking”.
Privatopia
MPCs as a new town or a planned unit development within an existing jurisdiction— frequently associated with condos and townhouse/attached developments—latched onto common interest developments (CID and homeowner associations popularized in Nichols’s Kansas City post-WWI Country Club (see Chapter 9). These tools allowed MPCs to move beyond luxury housing into working/middle-class affordable units. CID included common space owned by the community (community center, pools, parks, trails, bike paths), residential infrastructure (parking, sidewalks, water, septic systems) and common services (snowplowing and garbage pickup). Homeowner associations were the developer’s “exit” strategy, handing off both subsequent management/ operation and legal title. As a former eight-year resident of one, I am well aware of the issues outlined by McKenzie (1994) in his critique of RCAs (residential community associations as ULI calls them). Whatever their faults, CIDs and homeowner associations took over post-suburbia.
When MPCs started in the early sixties there were about 500 homeowner associations in existence. By 1970 there were 10,000, by 1975 20,000, by 1980 about 55,000 and by 1992 150,000 (McKenzie, 1994, p. 11). The trade association HOA-USA (since 2011) asserts that in 2015 there were about “351000 homeowner associations in the United States … 40 million households, or 53 percent of owner occupied households.”23 McKenzie claimed that in 1990 there were 11.6 million CID housing units or 11 percent of America’s housing. Growth prompted new housing (overwhelmingly suburban) and new housing employed these tools. Converting older privately owned housing units to CID, not uncommon in former Big Cities, is very controversial, media-saturated and highly regulated. Most homeowner associations and CID therefore centered in fast-growing (often retirement/vacation-prone) states like California, Florida, Hawaii and Arizona—but are also employed in numbers in New York, New Jersey, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Maryland and Virginia. The ACIR in a 1989 study (May, A-112) reported that 36 percent were found in the West, 33 percent in the South, 10 percent in the Midwest and 21 percent in the North.
It is hard to ignore the impact of homeowner associations/CID on policy-making and suburban economic or community development. Their presence and their activity level a primary force in those suburban jurisdictions where they exist in number: “With the advent of the townhouse and condominium a powerful new tool came on line” (Abbott, 2008, p. 221). Commonly referred to as “private governments,” as a vehicle of democratic governance they are “imperfect” and they may, counter-intuitively, be a factor in the notorious “Bowling Alone“ culture so prominent in suburbia. As an exit strategy for a developer (i.e. community-builder), however, they are excellent. Homeowner associations, for example, become “recourse”—i.e. are responsible for— payment of P&I from infrastructure bonds, assuming service obligations commonly associated with governments. These entities, grossly understudied, cannot be ignored as a major factor in contemporary post-suburban policy-making.
Diversity Is Our Middle Name
Minorities in 2000 accounted for more than half of suburban residents in McAllen (TX), El Paso, Honolulu, Albuquerque, Fresno and Los Angeles, and more than 40 percent in San Francisco/Oakland/San Jose, Stockton, San Antonio, and San Diego. There were big gains in the minority share of suburbia in Las Vegas, Houston. Dallas and Bakersfield. (Abbott, 2008, p. 228)
Despite the longstanding criticism suburbs are “white,” middle-class (i.e. rich) refugees escaping from central city African-Americans, a major post-suburban trend has been notable increase in racial and ethnic diversity. In 1970 blacks, Latinos and Asians were less than 10 percent of non-central city metro population; by 2000 they were 28 percent. For half of the 100 largest metros, such minorities were responsible for the “bulk of population gains.”24 “Between 1970 and 2000, the number of black suburbanites rose from 3.5 million to 12 million … 38 percent of all African-Americans lived in suburbs.” Latinos also moved to post-suburbia. In 2000 “more than half (54 percent) of the nation’s 35 million Latinos lived in suburbs [and] 58 percent of Asian-Americans (almost 6 million) lived in suburbs … [as well as] 52 percent of foreign-born residents” (Nicolaides and Wiese, 2006, pp. 409–10). Post-suburbia is ethnically and racially complex.
Bernadette Hanlon (2010) suggests a major dynamic of considerable effect on post-suburban jurisdictions is the decline in inner-ring suburbs that developed between 1980 and 2000. Among her conclusions are: (1) regions differ remarkably in the composition and economic viability of their inner rings (midwestern inner rings declining most severely); and (2) inner-ring decline is closely tied to the age of its housing stock. Not a surprise—older housing attracts poorer residents, especially minorities. Shades of the Age of UR. Obsolescence and time played a huge role in the decline of the central city, and it appears to have moved into post-suburbia. The likelihood that physical ED strategies as well as counter-industry profit cycle business assistance programs will become relevant to post-suburbia as it ages seems quite reasonable. Moreover, Hanlon provides strong evidence as to how suburbs among regions differ. Western suburbs are not clones of eastern counterparts, and now southern and midwestern styles of inner-ring are far from identical to the northeastern and mid-Atlantic ones.
Myron Orfield (2002) also early on observed that “fragmentation lies at the heart of America’s new suburban reality.” His cluster analysis of 4000 plus suburbs in the 25 largest metro areas revealed distinct types of suburban communities. As a community developer at heart, Orfield focuses on those “types” which are at risk. The first are those jurisdictions whose schools attract a disproportionate number of poor children. Rising numbers of poor children create a spiral in which more affluent households send children to alternatives and newcomer households select another jurisdiction—resulting in lower housing prices and higher rates of children in/near poverty in the school system. Poverty being associated with race and ethnicity (African-American and Hispanic), those who already suffer from housing discrimination, there appears a pattern very similar to inner-city neighborhood succession.
A second at-risk suburban type (overlapping Hanlon’s inner-ring housing) is the low tax capacity, older resident, also low rates of minorities and children in school. They tend to be inner-ring suburbs—we suspect post-WWII era ethnic sit-com suburbs. Orfield asserts that their main streets and commercial districts cannot attract new firms and businesses—meaning both their tax base and the jurisdictional economic base is vulnerable. A third at-risk type exists on the metro fringe—“making the transition from rural or farm land to suburban development”—with low fiscal resources, tax base and high needs from infrastructure and schools especially. Government capacity, above and beyond fiscal resources, is also likely an issue. More stable suburban types are (1) “bedroom-developing” and (2) “affluent job centers” with extraordinary tax bases and low poverty. The two differ regarding school infrastructure, with the former requiring costly expansion of their school systems. The job centers, the Arlingtons of America, are the classic edge city: great office centers, HQs, high property values—but tons of congestion. Here is a workable starting classification of the various suburban “types.” Orfield’s post-suburban diversity was officially recognized in 2010 when the “suburbanization of poverty” hit the Policy World. The breakthrough was Brookings’s The Suburbanization of Poverty by Kneebone and Garr (2010).
Wrapping Up Post-Suburbia
If there are many different types of suburbs, and we can get over our obsession with sprawl, what can we conclude? While suburbs are not Big Cities writ small, they do share commonalities. They can age, become obsolescent and have neighborhoods with distinct housing markets and policy systems with varying priorities, not to mention political cultures. They are not inevitably demographically monolithic: mobile population, national economy, state business climates, global comparative advantage competitive hierarchies as well as industry profit life cycles affect suburban jurisdictional economic bases.
While heavily oriented to the service sector, suburbs are home to corporate HQs, technology, industrial and office parks. Virtually all the centers of economics and culture found in the central city probably exist somewhere in post-suburbia. A goodly number, however, are not very interested in competitive urban hierarchies, and many not interested in the metro hierarchy; they much prefer to be home where residents can live their life, raise their family and be left alone without all this tomfoolery called politics and economic development. As Teaford (1997, pp. 6–8) asserts, post-suburban policy systems reflected a “tenuous balance between their view of themselves as a small village, but one with the amenities and vibrancy of a larger city.”
William Schneider (1992) asserts that locating in a suburb means self-identifying the household as middle class—whether or not objectively it “is.” If so, “the word that best describes the political identity of the middle class is “taxpayer.” Rates of homeownership are higher in suburbs, and the homeowner directly feels the impact of property taxes: “These people resent it when politicians take their money and use it to solve other people’s problems especially when they don’t believe that government can actually solve these problems.” Being tax sensitive, they value efficiency, honesty and services that they use or value. Schneider further argues that the location decision “to move to the suburbs is to express a preference for the private over the public.”
The resulting suburban neighborhood is “an agglomeration of homes, shops and offices connected to one another by car.” Choosing a suburban location means people consciously “want to be confined to their houses and their cars. They want a secure and controlled environment … Automobiles … give people a sense of security and control. With a car you can go anywhere you want, anytime you want in the comfort of your own private space” (Schneider (1992, pp. 33–44). Suburban residents with children extend this mentality to schools. They think of the local public school as their “private” school. Crime violates their personal security and living space. When anything hits these policy lightning rods, residents get involved. Taxes, schools, crime and traffic are their hot buttons. Otherwise, they largely stay away. Residential post-suburbs, arguably, might revolve around these preferences, a cultural paradigm might emerge and heterogeneity might threaten it—and so on.
Post-suburbia includes a lot more variety (demographic diversity, cultural values, policy systems, etc.) than Schneider’s 1990s’ residential suburb describes. Nevertheless, if residents make economic choices in residential decisions, they also make cultural, value and lifestyle choices. When people move or migrate they carry with them values and policy preferences that affect their new jurisdictional policy system. That reinforces post-suburban and central city jurisdictional differences. The reality that time alters these preferences and tempers values adds further complexity to the jurisdictional policy system. Time hints that a “new” generation may someday make different residential decisions, or that new “peoples” may be residents adds still more prospect for change.
If we concentrate on the mesas (or Long Beach, Arlington, San Jose and Santa Ana) that are as large as most of the more well-known and established Big Cities—that have truly won the game of competing in the urban hierarchy—we can see opportunities for a larger city-style of ED/CD. Large suburbs can, and do, pursue their own ED/CD dreams, directly competing (sometimes cooperating) with their nearby “central city.” Legally and emotionally autonomous compared to former Big City post-suburbia, South/West suburbs possess functioning jurisdictional economic bases that can reasonably “make it” on their own. They have their own tax base whose scale is sufficient to replicate Big Cities. They compete for sports teams and stadiums. They develop their own policy system whose elites and policy actors are not dependent on metropolitan elites and policy actors. Eastern, former Big City suburbs, with exceptions here and there, did not reach that scale; and while polycentric (de facto) in the sense they have successfully resisted domination of the central city, they often achieve their dreams through counties. The counties of Nassau, Suffolk and Westchester (Oakland in Michigan and others too numerous to name) preserve, protect and defend the autonomy of their suburbs,
Finally, our fascination with boomburbs and large MPCs obscures an important reality of post-suburban living and life style; we lose sight of the literally thousands of smaller suburbs. Smaller suburbs are “the edgeless city”—launching pads for further suburban expansion, and home for tens of millions. Smaller suburbs are “the ordinary landscape we don’t really notice—small office parks, scattered factories and warehouses, and highway-side strips where insurance agents, COPAs, and yoga studios, sit next to take-and-bake pizza [yuck]” (Abbott, 2008, p. 228).
These small jurisdictions are downtowns (often small-scale strip development) for neighborhoods that used to be called subdivisions. These small shopping centers reached by car take soccer moms to martial arts lessons on the way from school. Spasms of homeowner association townhouses and apartment (“If you lived here you’d be home now”) complexes line the main drags, with gas stations, emergency care centers, doctors’ and dentists’ offices. Economic development, or community development, exhibits a different quality here. Schools, congestion, “bowling alone”—and taxes—dominate the agenda. Each jurisdiction possesses its own distinctive demographic, social, ethnic and jurisdictional economic base distinct from its neighboring suburban jurisdiction. They have distinctive housing markets.
We know little about these policy systems. They are simply coded in aggregate databases as a suburb. Much more needs to be done to understand post-suburban economic and community development.
Ron W. Coan 