City-Suburb Relationships – Where The Midwest Is Worst

Social and economic divides can be masked in other regions, because of their development patterns. But in the Midwest, the divides are as clear as can be.

Source: gettyimages.com

(Note: I’ll say this right off the bat. I shouldn’t be going 2 weeks without delivering any content at all. But I must admit life gets in the way sometimes. Work, personal and family matters, you know the drill. I’m trying to find the right groove for publishing new content here. Sometimes I hit my goals, sometimes I don’t. If there’s ever a content gap that goes beyond two days, I’m definitely aware of it, and I’m working to close it. -Pete)

Does anyone really think about the relationship a city has to its surrounding metro area? It means a lot more than you might think.

I saw something on X/Twitter last week that brought this to mind. A fellow Midwesterner kicked off a thread with an interesting question: what major American city has the worst relationship with its suburbs? Early on, I noticed a theme in the responses before I weighed in. Milwaukee, St. Louis, Detroit, Cleveland led the lists. There were occasional replies like Baltimore, Newark, Atlanta, even Jackson, MS. Of course, New York, Los Angeles and Chicago were mentioned, but there will always be people who want to call out the largest cities. But for every one of those, another Midwestern city would be mentioned.

My reply: “I've always said Midwest metros have the widest city/suburb divide of any region in the nation. Pick any of them.”

This has been true for decades. It came to light during the 1960’s as urban unrest kicked off dramatic “White flight” from cities to the suburbs. The decline of manufacturing jobs in the ‘70s in the Midwest led to economic problems that accelerated the outflow. The lure of Sun Belt metros in the ‘80s and ‘90s offered Midwesterners an escape from the economic torment. The rise of creative class coastal cities in the 2000’s and 2010’s, many of them former industrial hubs transformed into highly educated talent magnets, was yet another accelerator. Those left behind often had legitimate reasons for not relocating, but never quite got rid of the resentment.

Who controls the metro narrative?

There are all sorts of perception biases at work when people discuss opinions on metro areas. It starts with some basic thoughts on one’s working definitions of “city” and “suburb” and develops from there. This includes perceptions on the type of infrastructure that define a place. More dense spaces built before auto domination are associated with for being “city”, while clusters of mostly single-use districts connected by freeways get the nod for being “suburb”.

There’s an inter-metro perspective, or comparisons between metros. Broadly speaking, cities are noted as relatively unique places that differ in character across the country. Meanwhile, suburbs are viewed as places that share a consistent character across the country at best, and perhaps a certain monotony at worst. It’s usually a given that core cities lend whatever perception that exists about them to its entire metro area, true or not. Whatever image one has of someone from New York or Los Angeles, for example, is usually fairly similar whether the New Yorker lives on the Upper East Side or on Long Island, or the Angeleno lives in Santa Monica or Irvine, despite the fact that there are great differences between them.

But there’s also the intra-metro perspective, or how people who live in the region regard it as a whole. At this level, people are more attune to subtle differences in development patterns. Older core cities acquired their distinctive character by being, well, older. They were built in a way that was different from the development that followed theirs. At the same time there are younger core cities that haven’t experienced a development contrast like older cities with newer surrounding areas. In the context of 400 years of American history, cities that came into prominence in the last 50 years have varying levels of what others in older cities might just consider newer development.

When the lifespan of a metro area spans across development eras, this conflict becomes more noticeable. 

City/suburb ire in the Midwest

So why did the classic Rust Belt legacy cities develop contemptuous relationships with their surrounding suburbs? Here are three explanations.

The Rust Belt response to the Great Migration. I wrote on this back in 2017:

“I think most all Northeastern and Midwestern cities -- from Boston to Washington, and westward to the Twin Cities and St. Louis -- patented a policy of exclusion toward blacks for much of its history.    The Great Migration was the first and greatest threat to the policy of exclusion, prompting legal, extralegal, and violent battles in virtually all of the cities within this area at some point in the 20th century.

Whereas southern states were explicit in their exploitation of slave labor to fuel the plantation economy from the settlement of this country, I think morally ambivalent northern states and their largest cities chose to avoid the thorny idea of slavery and black people in their midst.  They first sought to exclude blacks, and when they no longer could do that, they sought to marginalize them.”

This is probably best described by activist and comedian Dick Gregory’s quote, “In the South, they don't mind how close I get, as long as I don't get too big. In the North, they don't mind how big I get, as long as I don't get too close.”

Economic Frustration, Competition and Resentment. The bad city/suburb relationships in Midwestern cities has its roots in events from the ‘60s and ‘70s. Urban riots, largely related to frustrations around Black economic progress in large northern cities, gave a sense of growing lawlessness to many. The decline of well-paying yet low-skilled manufacturing jobs during the same period fomented job competition. Unions were able to retain jobs for White working-class laborers; less so for Black workers.

Suburbanization’s timing. Let’s face it. As a development type, the suburban model has dominated in America since 1950. America is a suburban nation, in the strictest sense of the phrase. Take a look at the 56 largest metro areas, or those with more than one million people, and their respective core cities. Together the metros comprised 190 million people in 2023, up just one million over the 189 million reported in 2020. The core cities contributed 51.2 million to the 2023 total, down from 51.8 million in 2020. Suburban jurisdictions outside of core cities saw their population rise from 137.3 million in 2020 to 139.1 million in 2023. From that standpoint, about 73 percent of Americans in the largest metros live in “the suburbs”, outside of core cities.

In my "Big Theory" of urban development, I noted that American cities established their development forms in distinct eras – an early era from about 1795-1860, an industrial era from 1870-1935, and an auto era from 1945-2010. Holdovers from previous eras, like narrow streets, small lot sizes, a lack of building setbacks, or development organized around public transit, for example, get carried over into later eras. How well the holdovers are integrated into the new development framework, however, matters. The holdovers are either utilized to maximize the charm of a city, or seen as an obstacle to future metro growth.

Unfortunately, our naming conventions haven’t kept pace with the development we see. There are metros whose core cities (Jacksonville, San Antonio, Oklahoma City) encompass most of the metro area’s population, with virtually all of it built during the last 50-75 years; any views of city/suburban differences there are indistinguishable. Then are metros whose core cities (Atlanta, Miami, Orlando) hold very small portions of the metro area’s population, and contribute less to the region’s branding than their suburbs. The city of Miami holds just 7% of the metro’s population. Atlanta contains 8% of its metro residents, Orlando just 11%. In these cases, the core city is little more than a metonym – a short-hand term to describe something much larger than the actual place it refers to.

This works in the opposite direction as well. There are “suburbs” – independent jurisdictions separate from the core city – that have development patterns that mirror the core city it surrounds. Boston, New York and Washington, DC, for example, have dense and walkable communities well outside each city’s corporate boundaries.

East Coast metros were established in the colonial and early industrial periods, and city/suburb distinctions were less apparent. Sun Belt metros burst onto the scene in the suburban-oriented auto era, making their differences less apparent as well.

But Midwestern cities? They’re completely unique in America in that their economic decline came at the same time that a new development pattern exploded and rigid segregation patterns hardened. Nowhere else is the line drawn as clearly between city and suburb as it is in the Midwest.