Whence the Suburbs?
- Posted by ryan on September 15th, 2009 filed in Cities
Liberal bloggers appear to have gotten results, and Tyler Cowen has recently been blogging on metropolitan development. On the whole, his posts are pretty interesting reads, though urbanist readers won’t find much new there. Tyler has also generated some nice responses, including a couple from Mike Konczal.
At the heart of many of Tyler’s posts are questions about what drove the growth of the suburbs. This is a question that really must be framed appropriately to make sense.
If one refers to suburbs as development outside the traditional or center city, then suburbs have basically been around as long as cities. Some share of population growth has always been accommodated by development at the urban fringe. Development of new transportation technologies changed the pace and the form of suburban developments over time, as did the increase in population growth associated with industrial development. But outward growth is a natural part of urban development.
When we talk about the phenomenon of rapid suburban growth in America, we’re largely asking questions about why that growth took a particular form and why that growth coincided with decline in center cities. Obviously, new suburban growth forms were largely a function of the automobile, but that’s not the end of the story. Specific choices were made to accommodate the automobile in various ways, and those choices affected decisions at the margins, and given the importance of feedback loops in urban settings these choices were potentially quite powerful in certain circumstances.
Was the automobile so disruptive a technology that center cities would have experienced some decline no matter how governments chose to accommodate it? Probably, but it’s difficult to know given the many, many factors influencing metropolitan growth over the last half century.
Economic and income growth is one of those factors, and I think that suburbia would have arisen no matter what based in part on such growth. But other issues were key. Desegregation cannot be underestimated as a factor driving suburbanization. The phenomenon of tipping points is quite real. Discriminatory lending reinforced this process. If you wanted your kids to play with other middle-class white kids and go to school with other middle-class white kids, you moved to the suburbs.
Highway construction, particularly within center cities, had powerful impacts. The destructive effect of construction in cities on neighborhoods reduced the attractiveness of living in such neighborhoods (cut off from other parts of the city, overshadowed by noisy, polluting highways) while also reducing the cost of commuting in from the suburbs. As Tyler mentions, policy competition, including tax rate competition, was another factor driving sprawl. Given the minimal infrastructure load in suburbs and low levels of poverty and crime, residents could move just a few miles out and substantially lower their tax burdens.
Throughout these processes there were feedback loops. The government would have had to work hard to prevent urban decline given the social and economic changes taking place, and as it happened the government worked pretty hard to encourage growth in suburbs.
Suburbanization was partly about preferences, partly about technological change, partly about government policy choices (at local, state, and federal levels), and partly about complicated and unexpected interactions of the three. It was not the perfect expression of consumer demand, or the result of the untrammeled working of the free market.
Stepping back a bit, choices about where and how to live (and build) come down to a tension between a household desire for space and privacy and a desire for access to economic opportunities in production and consumption. Here again we see a world in which preferences vary across the population (and change within members of the population over time), where policy choices influence decisions at the margins, where household decisions are influenced by what other households are choosing, and where the net result is a complex and dynamic system which can behave in unpredictable ways.
In such a system, questions like “How much road should we build,” are really difficult to answer.
September 16th, 2009 at 3:11 am
Another factor not to overlook is the impact of various cognitive effects on tastes and choices, although it’s difficult to say how large that was.
After all, “consumer demand” is a real enough thing, but the set of supposedly consistent underlying tastes or preferences is decidedly imaginary. Not only are tastes ever changing, and themselves embedded in an ever changing cultural landscape, but consumers themselves often don’t have a good idea of how to apply their tastes to a particular situation, or which choice will maximize their happiness.
For example, we consistently misunderestimate things like “how much will I enjoy all that extra living space” or “how much will I miss my friends and social life in the city” or “how hard would it be to live without a car”. People even get simple empirical questions like “how dangerous are the suburbs for my children” completely wrong. We know conclusively that people have lots of (sometimes predictable) cognitive quirks and biases that render any attempts to equate “demand” with “happiness” (or even “preferences”) fundamentally incoherent.
Even if one could make a case for the idea that suburbia as it looks today is somehow a pure expression of “consumer demand” (and one can’t), that would still be a long way from establishing that it was ever a particularly good outcome in terms of happiness.
September 16th, 2009 at 7:53 am
Additionally, we’d also need to ask about case-specific political struggles that precipitated incorporation of suburbs in some eras, and their autonomous/interdependent development in other decades. In other words, part of the mystery of the types of suburban development/land use patterns that proliferated in this country has to do with the period in which cities stopped incorporating their surrounding suburbs. This is only partly explained by a simple cost-benefit analysis.
On the tipping point, have you read William Easterly’s empirical test? He’s an NYU economist and his paper is on his website. He finds holes in Schelling’s model. Also, in October of ‘08 there was a piece in the American Sociological Review arguing that white flight actually had more to do with extra-local racial change (in surrounding census tracts) than immediate, local racial change (in people’s own census tracts). Just some things worth considering.
September 16th, 2009 at 9:46 am
Particularly because those of us who really like privacy prefer no road.
September 16th, 2009 at 11:52 am
Jacob Riis published “How the Other Half Lives” in 1890.
(http://www.amazon.com/How-Other-Half-Lives-Tenements/dp/0140436790)
Take a look at the images he includes in the book and you’ll recognize that the centers of cities were destroyed long before Henry Ford changed transportation patterns in America - long before Eisenhower built the interstates.
So I question a central thesis of this debate - that the development of roads and a reliance on automobiles and the move to the suburbs destroyed city centers. Cities were not bright and shiny places prior to the existence of the ‘burbs. For many residents, the city life before 1950 was a crowded, dirty, crime-ridden experience.
Cars and roads made access to suburbs easier. But the desire to escape crowded urban centers was there long before the technology.
And do not underestimate the issue of education when discussing the migration to suburbia. The way we fund schools has an enormous impact in the quality of the schools - and many many families have fled a nice city life precisely for the educational opportunities of the ‘burbs.
(An aside: Sinclair Lewis’ Main Street was written in 1920 - coining the phrase used to define American suburbia today.)
September 16th, 2009 at 1:31 pm
Quite a good analysis with a great deal to unpack.
In many ways the technological revolution has run its course as many metro areas have streched to a Malthusian traffic limit. That said, auto intensive suburbs aren’t going anywhere anytime soon, building stock and infrastructure are extremely durable goods and the economic case for plowing them under and building again is weak.
The main opportunities right now are to revitalize those cities already on the mend and to tilt development toward urban patterns in established suburbs with in-fill potential.
From an environmental standpoint, however, I am leaning to the conclusion that radically improving the efficiency of the rolling stock and electric power generation may be the more economically efficient ways to cut US GHG in the medium term at least.
Jack L- That is all quite plausible. But I am leery making policy under the supposition that technocrats know best in such a basic consumer choice as where to live.
September 17th, 2009 at 7:24 pm
Jack L- That is all quite plausible. But I am leery making policy under the supposition that technocrats know best in such a basic consumer choice as where to live.
I’m not necessarily suggesting that technocrats dictate people’s choices to them. Occasionally it may be possible to tweak things with “nudge” type approaches, but in general I think the question of how to deal with these issues in policy is quite difficult, though more solutions may suggest themselves as we learn more about them.
I think primarily it’s important for policy makers just to start to recognize that these type of constraints exist, and not to worship “consumer sovereignty” or whatever unquestioningly.
September 17th, 2009 at 8:56 pm
So I question a central thesis of this debate - that the development of roads and a reliance on automobiles and the move to the suburbs destroyed city centers. Cities were not bright and shiny places prior to the existence of the ‘burbs. For many residents, the city life before 1950 was a crowded, dirty, crime-ridden experience.
I think this is where you were going anyway, but just to be clear, the notion that this is all driven by cars is only a central thesis on one side of the debate.
To the other side, quality of life in city centers (e.g., crime, schools, cleanliness, infrastructure) is obviously the result of government decisions and institutions. So to the extent that poor conditions in center cities shaped perceptions and encouraged people to move out to suburbs, this is just yet another way that our landscape was shaped by public policy.
September 18th, 2009 at 8:20 pm
jack lecou,
For example, we consistently misunderestimate things like “how much will I enjoy all that extra living space” or “how much will I miss my friends and social life in the city” or “how hard would it be to live without a car”.
How do you KNOW we “consistently misunderestimate” (whatever that means) those things?
To the other side, quality of life in city centers (e.g., crime, schools, cleanliness, infrastructure) is obviously the result of government decisions and institutions.
Government decisions and institutions are the result of the political preferences of the people. It is rather implausible, to say the least, that government decisions and institutions would survive for decade after decade, election cycle after election cycle, in thousands of cities and counties all across the country, if they were inconsistent with the wishes of the people on important matters of public policy such as land use and transportation.