Search

Surveyed African American and White Washington, D.C. residents regarding the advantages of urban versus suburban living and their overall preferences for the city versus suburbs. Though a broad transracial consensus prevailed about the pluses and minuses of city versus suburban life, some substantial differences emerged. The two groups weighed these factors differently in forming preferences about where to live. (SM)

Challenges conventional urban theory, which explains suburban decline in terms of who moves in and out, examining literature on the circulation of capital in the built environment. Analyzes the systematic withdrawal of capital from one New Jersey suburb, examining mortgage lending decisions to test the hypothesis that suburban decline cannot be explained solely in terms of the supposed deficiencies of new residents. (SM)

This document is a letter from the Urban Affairs Review, celebrating its 60th anniversary. It highlights an influential article by Elinor Ostrom from 1983, titled "The Social Stratification-Government Inequality Thesis Explored." Ostrom critically assesses the argument that the fragmentation of municipal space promotes inequality along economic and racial lines. She questions the merits of municipal consolidation as a solution to reduce inequality, noting that inequality, segregation, and discrimination can occur within central cities and suburbs. The letter also mentions debates about regionalism and the potential benefits of municipal consolidation, as well as alternative economic arrangements and the role of capitalism and racism in urban injustice. [Extracted from the article]

Suburban revitalization efforts can remain ineffective when they do not adequately address the historic harm done to minority, low-income communities via economic, housing, public finance, banking, and urban planning practices. To determine an alternative approach, I use a process tracing method to study the efforts of a Midwestern inner-ring, minority-majority suburban community, returning from the edge of collapse after decades of disinvestment and crises. The findings reveal a significant change in revitalization efforts following the election of the first Black and first woman mayor; driven by justice-centered partnerships and justice-centered language. In my analysis, I argue that though the policy efforts do not vary significantly from standard redevelopment practices, the administration's emphasis on resolving historic harm added an important restorative justice lens, making the effort more fruitful and far-reaching. I conclude with recommendations to enhance the study and application of restorative justice themes in urban research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Residents of cities face housing instability due to high housing costs. We conduct a randomized experiment evaluating the impacts of a flexible "shallow subsidy" among 668 qualified renters with recent housing instability. This local subsidy provides $7,200 a year directly to families earning less than 30 percent of the median family income, who choose how much assistance to use each month. Using administrative data, we track outcomes for the first year of program administration. After one year, the program has no statistically significant effect on homelessness, cash benefit receipt, or emergency rental assistance utilization, demonstrating no harm when compared to alternatives. However, the program leads to a 29 percentage point decrease in participants' use of other types of local government housing services, which they must weigh against the shallow subsidy. We show that the program can be administratively cost-saving, but is not always beneficial for a very low-income subset of applicants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Eviction has been studied almost exclusively as an urban phenomenon. The growing suburbanization of poverty in the United States, however, provides new cause to analyze the prevalence and correlates of displacement beyond cities. This study analyzes urban-suburban disparities in eviction rates across 71 large metropolitan areas. We show that eviction is a common experience in suburbs as well as cities. Urban eviction rates exceed suburban rates in most cases, but one in six metropolitan areas experienced higher eviction rates in the suburbs. Multilevel models show that key correlates of eviction—especially poverty and median rent—influence eviction patterns differently in urban and suburban contexts. We explore variations in urban-suburban disparities through case studies of Milwaukee, Seattle, and Miami. Metropolitan areas with larger shifts toward suburban poverty, more expensive urban rental markets, and more segregated suburbs experience more suburban evictions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and a seven-category neighborhood typology, this analysis examines the relationship between urban form and household spending. Results suggest that poor households living in urban areas have lower transportation expenditures than their counterparts in sprawling suburbs. Lower transportation costs, however, do not offset high housing prices, with poor households paying particularly high premiums for housing in the densest, most transit-rich neighborhoods. Households above the poverty threshold also benefit from reductions in transportation costs, especially in intensely urban areas. Nevertheless, these low transportation costs are not associated with lower overall expenditures; instead, they countervail high housing premiums, meaning that the most transit-rich neighborhoods do not offer cost savings relative to other neighborhood types. Findings highlight the need to expand the supply of both transit and housing in communities where poor households can leverage affordable transportation options to reduce their combined expenditure burden. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper compares and contrasts suburban and urban residents' attitudes and behavior toward development by comparing the frequency and motivation for mobilization of residents in the suburbs of Surrey, British Columbia, and Brampton, Ontario, with residents of their respective metropolitan urban cores. It finds that suburban residents engage less in planning politics than their urban counterparts and that they are more likely to oppose development than urban residents. However, while some variation exists in the concerns suburban and urban residents raise when they express their opposition to development, overall, the concerns of residents in suburbs and urban cores are largely the same. The data suggest that what differences exist between suburban and urban residents in the politics of urban development and planning likely arise due to the varying nature and prevalence of development encroaching on existing neighborhoods, rather than from underlying cultural differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We draw on forty-six in-depth interviews with residents of Cerritos, California, a middle-class majority Asian suburb in Los Angeles County to explore the meaning of resurgent ethnicity and the ways in which a racialized identity informs residential preferences and choice among second-generation Asian Americans. Findings suggest that second-generation Asian Americans are choosing to reside in a place that offers cultural and class-based amenities that reflects a multiethnic sensibility. They also make residential choices based on family ties to strengthen and maintain intergenerational relations and share mutual social and economic resources. For second-generation Asian Americans, this racially dominant but ethnically diverse spatial settlement also provides a sense of belonging, signifying the continuing significance of race among middle-class, acculturated racial minority groups. As U.S. ethnic populations continue to grow and continue the trend of suburbanization and segregation, understanding such places and their implications will become increasingly important. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We identify the factors correlated with the use of economic development incentives after the Great Recession of 2007–2009 to determine the presence of entrepreneurial development regimes. We utilize a unique dataset that combines information on incentives (tax increment financing districts and selected tax abatements and business assistance) with economic, fiscal, and political characteristics for all municipalities in the largest Metropolitan Statistical Areas of Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan. These three states bordering Lake Michigan share similar histories and settings, thus targeting the research focus on the key attributes of interest. Our empirical results demonstrate substantial dissimilarity between incentive types and across states, most likely due to policy structures and reforms at the state level that encourage different municipal development regimes. Whereas municipalities, particularly larger ones, continue to use tax abatements, exemptions, and credits to pursue employment growth, the municipalities gravitating toward tax increment financing tend to be suburbs with low unemployment rates and relatively highly educated residents, and not places with greater employment density or manufacturing employment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A long-standing problem in gentrification research is the increasingly diverse array of interests and agendas in the renewal of the inner city; their diversity has frustrated many scholars with respect to the collective characterization and comprehension of the phenomenon. Consequently, others have questioned the validity of the term "gentrification" itself. This article contends that gentrification is a phenomenon that merits being collectively identified. The relocation of the middle class to the urban core has been portrayed in terms of actors and agendas, places and processes. These criteria have long since been inadequate to collectively rationalize gentrification in anything other than strictly spatial terms. But when suburbia is perceived as a metanarrative, the collective character of gentrification becomes evident; for it is the process of the metanarrative's systemic erosion in the postmodern era that serves the long-standing desire to find an operant commonality to gentrification's apparent lack of coherence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although American suburbs are commonly understood as the result of growth machine efforts or are grouped in categories like edge cities or inner-ring suburbs, these approaches obscure the unique characters of individual suburbs. This study examines four consequential “character moments” in three Chicago suburbs, Naperville, West Chicago, and Wheaton, where the suburb’s character was open to public debate. These moments show character over time is critical for understanding suburbs, character moments are rare but often consequential, not all moments involve particular development projects and some may be prompted by perceived threats, and suburban character is more dynamic than typically posited. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A key aspect of the U.S. subprime crisis was the accumulation of vacant, foreclosed properties in many neighborhoods and localities. This article describes zip-code-level patterns of foreclosed homes, or what are typically called "real estate owned" (REO) properties, at the peak of the subprime crisis in late 2008 and estimates a model of REO accumulation from 2006 to 2008. Three key findings emerge. First, during the peak of the subprime foreclosure crisis in late 2008, large central cities, on average, experienced higher levels of REO per mortgageable property than suburban areas. This contradicts some suggestions that the crisis was primarily centered in suburban or exurban communities. Second, the suburbanization of REO varied across two key types of metropolitan areas, with boom-bust regions experiencing more suburbanization than weak- or mixed-market metros. Finally, determinants of zip-code-level REO accumulation included high-risk lending activity and the age of housing stock. After controlling for these and other variables, neither the central city versus suburban location of a zip code nor the proportion of residents commuting over 30 minutes was significantly associated with REO growth. The intrametropolitan location of a zip code appears to have been a less important factor in REO growth than the fact that a large amount of development in newer communities was financed during the subprime boom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article challenges public choice and regime theory interpretations of constraints on local politics, developing instead the institutional logic behind coalitions of local institutional actors designing redistributive policies addressing immigrant newcomers in increasingly diverse suburban jurisdictions. Employing qualitative data from a data set consisting of over 100 in-depth interviews among state and local elected and appointed officials, and community-based leaders in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area, the authors find that elected officials, bureaucrats, and nonprofits partner to gain additional leverage to overcome suburban NIMBY problems such as those associated with day labor workers. These partnerships develop for at least three reasons: (1) they give community-based organizations (CBOs) access to resources available in the public sector; (2) for public agencies, these alliances lower the transaction costs associated with overcoming language and cultural barriers between newcomers and existing residents; and (3) these partnerships allow local bureaucrats to minimize outlays of their scarce resources to deal with the problems associated with the demographic shifts taking place in suburbia by essentially outsourcing much of the effort to nonprofit organizations while still allowing local bureaucrats and the elected officials who control their budgets to take credit for the programs these organizations initiate, maintain, and staff. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using Montreal as a case study, the authors investigate whether overlapping labor markets explain economic links between the suburbs and the central city. Despite interconnection between labor markets, they find only weak evidence of commuting ties between particular suburbs and the city center. However, economic functions—but also some services and amenities—are distributed unevenly across the metropolitan area. The authors suggest that other connections, such as those generated by occasional consumption activities, interfirm exchanges, and other weak ties could be explored to more fully understand the economic ties between constituent parts of metropolitan areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The social and economic decline of first-tier suburbs has emerged as an important issue in metropolitan America, yet little is known about the political and policy responses to this problem. An analysis of Baltimore County demonstrates that the local government was able to implement revitalization projects from 1995 to 2005 since it had jurisdiction over its first-tier suburbs. Characteristics such as a large population in both first-tier and outer suburbs, an affluent tax base, and the lack of municipalities allowed Baltimore County to redistribute funds for these projects. I argue that if policymakers and planners are serious about confronting suburban decline, then either a regional growth boundary or a regional zoning tool is necessary to slow the pressures of urban decentralization. The political realities suggest that the will to maintain local autonomy is stronger than the will to eliminate the real barriers to revitalizing first-tier suburbs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many "boomburbs"--large, fast-growing suburbs--are nearing their "buildout," the point at which development has reached a city's borders or has exhausted large-scale greenfield options. Boomburbs will soon face a decision: Do they stop booming once they reach their current limits or develop a new growth model that more intensively uses existing land? Or will they annex more space for continuing greenfield development? The authors surveyed 140 boomburb governments about their buildout plans. The respondents provided information on several variables, including future density, the amount of space left to build on, and the mixture of land uses that will fill this space. The answers varied widely, with some places looking to become far more urbanized, while others rush to build even lower-density development. Yet most boomburbs expect to grow denser as they build out. The article concludes with a discussion on two policy implications of buildout: annexation and governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores regionalism and urban decline. It discusses the debate among those who attempt to uplift inner-city neighborhoods and those who believe that change is only attainable at the regional and municipal level of politics. It also mentions the availability of extra local policies, such as mortgage interest deductions, as a contributing factor to developing outlying suburbs. It references David Imbroscio's essay on regional politics affecting individual action. The author argues that regionalism has had a negative track record in regards to promoting equality.

When candidates run for municipal office, do they rely on campaign contributions from suburbanites? This research note explores this question by analyzing fund-raising networks in four central cities: New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle. The majority of campaign contributions to mayoral and city council candidates come from within their city. While the fund-raising networks of central-city candidates extend into the suburbs, they only do so partially. In particular, they only connect to a handful of wealthy suburbs that are geographically close to the central city. Regional fund-raising networks are limited, indicating that the flow of political money does not mirror the economic and policy interdependence that has been documented by new regionalists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reductions in federal urban assistance and devolution have made cities increasingly reliant on their state governments at a time when cities have lost political strength in state legislatures. This article identifies three types of coalitions that historically supported cities: party-imposed coalitions, interest-based coalitions, and governor-brokered coalitions. It shows how institutional, demographic, and economic changes have made these legislative coalitions less reliable. The article then considers prospects for constructing new city-suburban legislative coalitions. It argues that institutional constraints have limited the scope of preferences expressed by city and suburban legislators. The article concludes that prospects for city-suburban coalitions will depend on new issue definitions, institutional rules, and organizations that help city and suburban legislators redefine their policy preferences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study presents a framework for assessing the financial condition and fiscal health of municipal governments, develops indices for some dimensions of the framework, and applies the indices to 264 suburban municipalities in the Chicago metropolitan region. The framework is based on a systems view of local government financial condition. It shows that fiscal health is a complex and multidimensional concept with varying time frames. Furthermore, the dimensions are related but often in indirect or nonlinear ways, indicating they must be measured separately rather than combined into a comprehensive indicator of fiscal health. Indices developed here for targeted dimensions of the framework are assessed and compared to alternative indicators of fiscal health developed by others in the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

City-county consolidation is advanced as a good government reform to promote efficiency, equity, and accountability and, more recently, to reduce growing disparities between central cities and suburbs. Whether these objectives are realized is more doubtful than the fact that local reorganization embodies a real change in power relations. Altering boundaries changes the kinds of issues that are relevant to decision makers as well as the relative power of different populations. The authors analyze the recent city-county consolidation of Louisville and Jefferson County, Kentucky. The authors review how this came about and then focus on three critical realignments associated with merging the city and its surrounding county. These consist of shifts in territorial boundaries, management reforms, and political rules. The case highlights the power dimension of city-county consolidation, often overlooked by advocates of public choice as well as those favoring metropolitan consolidation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the degree to which the relative growth of suburban electoral districts in Canada's largest urban regions (Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver) has lead to a loss of potential political influence within government on behalf of Canadian inner cities and/or to more support for fight-wing political parties. The study finds that although inner cities and suburbs have increasingly diverged in their voting behavior in both federal and provincial elections, the growth of suburban electoral districts has not directly translated into a loss of representation and influence for inner cities. Instead, representation and influence within government are highly dependent upon the party that is in power. At the federal level, the dominance of the Liberal Party has meant that inner cities have tended to wield greater, and the suburbs less, influence, whereas at the level of Ontario provincial politics, the suburbs have indeed been overrepresented and found to wield greater influence within government to the detriment of the inner cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many critics argue that America's suburbs foster depression and mental distress, but researchers have not sufficiently tested whether the characteristics that actually distinguish metropolitan places (both cities and suburbs) correspond to any differences in psychological well-being. Looking beyond inaccurate city-suburb dichotomies, the author examines the relationship between six characteristics of metropolitan places (population size, density, racial composition, affluence, age, and land use) and a variety of indicators of mental health, including depression, lite satisfaction, self-efficacy, and esteem. Findings from multilevel data constructed from the Americans' Changing Lives Survey and the census indicate that two characteristics of metropolitan places relate to psychological health: population density and affluence. Residents of denser places are more likely to report depressed mood and dissatisfaction with their neighborhoods; those in more affluent places are more likely to be depressed, be less satisfied with life, and feel lower levels of self-efficacy and esteem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urban scholars have long noted the importance of the convention business in the economic development of the downtown areas in U.S. cities. This article examines the decentralization of the convention business to Atlanta's suburbs since 1980. The process of decentralization has resulted in a competition for meetings that pits one suburban convention submarket against another and against downtown in a multicentered metropolitan region. The spread of Atlanta's convention business to the suburbs has implications for both scholars and practitioners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors study the representation of the U.S. suburb projected by movies and trace the development of these suburban images from the early movies of a century ago through the 1990s, noting how films have influenced and reflected public discourse on suburbs. Suburbs have evolved, becoming more varied and complex, more self-sufficient and more interdependent, the dominant mode of U.S. residential living, and the most widely embraced path to the "good life." Yet postwar intellectuals have long dismissed the bourgeois utopia as inauthentic consumption centers and conformity factories. Moviemakers have taken these critiques to heart, initially with friendly satires and later with aggressive, often vicious attacks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The new regionalism tends to emphasize the commonalities of central cities and their suburbs. Los Angeles County has surprisingly minor differences between central city and suburb--leading one to wonder why municipal alliances across jurisdictional lines have not been more prominent. The author tackles this anomaly by breaking L.A. County into 58 different areas and tracking demographic and economic change between 1970 and 1990. The analysis suggests that there are important differences in the ethnic and economic dynamics of various subregions. As a result, "smart-growth" politics may have less salience in Los Angeles than would an alternative regionalism rooted in community-based movements and organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author probes for differences among central cities, suburbs, and rural communities in the perceived importance of various motivations for development decisions, drawing on a mail survey of city managers/administrators in California. Central-city respondents are more inclined to "look outward" in making land-use decisions, attributing greater importance to certain regional economic and development challenges, whereas suburbs are somewhat more inclined to "turn inward" and focus on localistic concerns. Multivariate analysis is employed to examine whether the distinctive land-use motivations of central cities and suburbs reflect differences in composition (internal characteristics such as demographics and fiscal health) or differences in position (central cities' status as the economic and political hubs of metropolitan areas and suburbs' more specialized roles). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Earlier research on the impact of national economic restructuring on central-city economies suffered from several problems, including excessive aggregation of the data and reliance on absolute change in economic activity to measure growth. When these factors are corrected, one sees that central cities frequently attracted more new firms than other locations (absolute growth), but their growth rate was below that in suburbs and nonmetropolitan areas (relative growth) as well as the national rate. These below-average rates occurred in many of the 13 economic sectors studied, including low-skill and high-skill services, in which central cities were expected to perform well. The few bright spots — central cities in the South and West, which initially outperformed all other locations in those regions — have faded as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does economic restructuring provide opportunities for remaking old industrial centers into regional industrial systems? Such regions possess institutions that allow firms and support organizations to adjust to market shifts. The case of Detroit's Downriver suburbs is used to explore this question in a metropolitan setting. Downriver regionalism supported several market interventions, showing that restructuring can create opportunities for economic regionalism. However, regionalism did not produce industrial adjustment mechanisms and eventually succumbed to interlocal competition for investment. The author concludes that prospects for regional systems are diminished by metropolitan fragmentation and national policies promoting capital mobility as the primary mechanism for economic adjustment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors test the hypothesis that there is significant spatial mismatch between property taxation and capital investment in inner, middle, and suburban parts of the city of Phoenix. They empirically test a hedonic model of assessed valuation of homes and find that a typical suburban house within Phoenix city limits bears a lower tax burden than the same house in the inner city. Their study also demonstrates that suburban areas receive 40% to 100% more per household in specific capital improvement monies than the average household in the city. The results suggest a cross-subsidization of suburban growth by inner-city dollars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The postwar trend in migration from central cities to the suburbs continues. In recent decades, this wave of migration has included increasing numbers of Asians, Hispanics, and blacks. The authors focus on the spatial overlap of race, ethnicity, and class in a large sample of suburban communities. Specifically, they examine differences in the characteristics of suburbs to which blacks, Hispanics, and Asians have gained residential access. By introducing controls for levels of community affluence, they address the controversial argument that levels of racially defined inequality diminish as the social class of members of minority groups increases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents an analysis of patterns of metropolitan suburbanization for 15 large metropolitan areas. Migration patterns; Support for the notion of a complementary relationship between central cities and suburbs; Argument for more aggressive intervention in support of central cities and greater cooperation between central cities and suburbs in matters of regional development policies.

Based on recent findings that changes in average suburban incomes are positively associated with changes in average central-city incomes, some have concluded that disparities between central cities and their suburbs cause decline in metropolitan economic growth. The authors argue that causality runs in the other direction — metropolitan-wide growth narrows disparities. The authors argue that cities and suburbs are interdependent, that there can be healthy individual suburbs and weak central cities, and that there can be healthy suburbs in the aggregate and extremely poor central cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides comments on the arguments presented by Edward Hill, Harold L. Wolman and Coit Cook Ford III on the issue of suburban dependency, published in the November 1995 issue of "Urban Affairs Review." The article claims that the thesis of suburban dependency on urban areas is flawed. Suburbs and central cities are interdependent, the author claims. The author points to the importance of the metropolitan region as a variable. The article discusses the efforts of Hill, Wolman, and Ford to correct their hypothesis.

A review of federal expenditures between 1983 and 1992 is presented in this study of per capita spending in central cities and their metropolitan suburbs. The Census Bureau provides data for 41 of the nation's metropolitan areas, of which 7 central cities are defined as county units of government and analyzed in greater detail. In constant dollars, central cities led suburbs in per capita receipt of federal funds; however, suburbs generally received an increase in their relative shares. In central cities, grants-in-aid increased but changed to entitlements directed to individuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the authors' response to H.V. Savitch's comments about their study on suburban dependency, published in the November 1995 issue of "Urban Affairs Review." The authors state that they found Savitch's critique polemical. The authors assert that most of Savitch's points are addressed in their original article. They state that the central-city performance and suburban economic performance are interdependent. The authors also provide their interpretations of Savitch's co-authored article "Ties that bind: Central cities, suburbs, and the new metropolitan region," Economic Development Quarterly 7 (4): 341-57.