Demographically, "Cities" Will *Always* Lose To "Suburbs". How We Compare Them Has To Change.
Sterling Heights, MI is one of many suburbs outside Detroit. Suburbs come in all shapes and sizes, with new ones emerging all the time. Is it right to compare older, denser cities with the kaleidoscope of suburbs?
I often check in on NewGeography.com, a website led by southern California-based urban studies professor and famed suburbanist Joel Kotkin. If you’ve checked out the site, you may have noticed I’ve had some posts from this blog featured there. I don’t agree with everything on the site, which definitely has a sprawl-development lean, but I am interested in suburban maturation as much as urban revitalization. Hey, I live in one of the suburbiest of suburbs, Naperville, IL.
Some recent headlines there really struck me as efforts to demonstrate the enduring and everlasting appeal of suburbs over cities. Check these out:
Kill Off The Old City So New Cities Can Be Born
Urban Sprawl, The Environmentally Friendly Answer To Expensive Housing
Remote And Hybrid Work Continues Appeal In The U.S. And Canada
To Reduce Costs, California Also Needs To Build New Suburbs
And those are just from the last ten days.
My takeaway from pieces like these? Cities were the past, suburbs are the present and future. Young people prefer them. The rise of the work-from-home phenomenon has boosted them. They are the answer to our housing affordability crisis. They are the solution for all that ails America.
Suburbs have won. Get over it. Resistance is futile.
Urbanists try to counter this by demonstrating the efficiency of city living, especially when served by effective public transit. Cities are places where people connect, where ideas are born, and today’s modern economy, based on knowledge and creativity, is firmly rooted. Cities have become the nation's economic engine. But none of that matters to suburbanists.
Why?
I had the most amazing revelation the other day. When it comes to the kind of places people choose to live, the places people prefer, and the places that are growing in absolute if not relative terms, cities will always lose out to suburbs. The way we define cities and suburbs in America – cities are fixed constants while suburbs are ever-expanding variables – simply isn't comparable. Unless our definitions change somehow, it will always be that way.
The 1970 Census was the first to show that more Americans have lived in suburbs than core cities. That gap has widened since. But how much have core cities expanded outward in the last 50 years, 100 years, or even more? Not much. How much has the amorphous “suburbia” expanded outward in the same period. A whole helluva lot. Once what we defined as suburbia surpassed cities in population, cities were never going to catch up to the suburbs, let alone pass them.
Comparing physically constrained cities with boundless suburbs is ridiculous.
Cities, by definition, are bounded. All of them, whether they’re the core cities that lend their name to entire metro areas, or the smaller incorporated communities that surround them. Some core cities haven’t had any border changes in more than a century. Washington, DC was established as a 100 square mile donation of land from Maryland and Virginia in 1790 and opened as the nation’s capital in 1801. The Virginia portion of the District, Arlington and Alexandria, were ceded back to Virginia in 1847 and DC’s borders have been unchanged since. Philadelphia’s had the same city boundaries since its consolidation with Philadelphia County in 1854. St. Louis separated from surrounding St. Louis County in 1877, also since unchanged. New York City’s five boroughs have been united and unchanged since 1898.
Move further across America and you’ll find more recent examples of when core cities stopped physically expanding. Except for the annexation that brought O’Hare International Airport into its boundaries, Chicago stopped growing outward in 1920; Detroit was done by 1926. Other cities were able to add territory well into the 1960s and 1970s, like Los Angeles. Cities like Charlotte, Las Vegas, Dallas, Houston and Phoenix are still able to gobble up parcels of land to expand further. Yet, each will come to an inevitable halt.
Suburbs, by definition, are boundless. Individual communities aren’t boundless; there’s no mono-named “Suburbia” encircling a core city. But the idea of suburbia, the developed area beyond the bounded core, is boundless.
Tens of thousands of communities nationwide rose up in unincorporated areas, outside of core cities and served by county government. Many were annexed by the core city they were closest to. Many others chose to incorporate to assert their own control over municipal services – and even more importantly, their residential destiny. In the early 20th century, small communities perfected the art of choosing their inhabitants. In doing so they prevented the continued outward expansion of core cities.
Here’s what I mean by “boundless” suburbia.
Let’s start with looking at development patterns in metropolitan Detroit. Take, for example, the Grosse Pointes, five affluent lakeshore communities immediately east of Detroit. The communities begin just six miles northeast of downtown Detroit, and were built up around the same time as the adjacent neighborhoods of Detroit’s East Side. By virtue of their incorporation as villages and cities between 1880 and 1927, they’ve retained their independence as “suburbs”. Several Detroit neighborhoods just west of the Pointes, like Jefferson-Chalmers and Morningside, were developed at precisely the same time as the Pointes but diverged significantly in economic and social terms.
About 20 miles north of the Grosse Pointes lies Sterling Heights. Sterling Heights started as Sterling Township in 1838 and had only 6,500 residents within its 36 square mile area in 1950. Growth took off in the ‘50s. The township was incorporated as a city in 1968, and in 1970 61,000 people called Sterling Heights home. Today Sterling Heights is the epitome of the Split-Level Period of the Auto Era in my Big Theory on American Urban Development.
To the north, east and west of Sterling Heights, you can find any number of communities that have developed much more recently. Places like Clinton Township, Shelby Township, Rochester Hills, Auburn Hills and others, saw their big growth spurt happen beginning in the ‘90s and into the new century. Some sought incorporation, others did not. Some have nearly completed the transition from agricultural fields to housing subdivisions, while others still retain some of their old rural feel.
What do these communities have in common? Very little, except for the term “suburb”. They are as distinct from each other as the city of Detroit is from them. However, they are all seen as similar because they’re not the core city.
This binary has got to go.
Metro Detroit has been demographically stagnant for 50 years. The metro area’s population in 1970? 4.4 million. In 2020? Also 4.4 million. The metro area’s size has been consistent over that period as well. The six counties that comprise metro Detroit (Lapeer, Livingston, Macomb, Oakland, St. Clair and Wayne) are just under 3,900 square miles in size. See here:
However, the U.S. Census’ definition of urban area, or contiguous census tract blocks that are "densely developed residential, commercial, and other nonresidential areas" (usually at a residential density of 1,000 people per square mile or more), gives a much better sense of how metro areas grow.
And guess what? Despite stagnant population growth, Detroit’s urban area did indeed “grow” – physically. Let’s examine the population and land area of Detroit’s contiguous developed areas over the same period:
So, Detroit’s contiguous urban area lost nearly 5% of its population since 1970, but the land area still expanded by nearly 50%? That’s absolutely crazy.
Detroit has been a constant 139 square miles in area since 1926. Detroit’s population loss has been well documented. In 1970 Detroit had 1.5 million residents; by 2020 it had just 639,000. But there’s a story to be told about amorphous suburban Detroit as well. Yes, Detroit’s non-core urban area population grew from 2.5 million in 1970 to 3.1 million in 2020, a gain of 24 percent. However, the developed urban area excluding Detroit’s fixed boundaries grew from 733 square miles in 1970 to 1,146 square miles in 2020, a gain of 56 percent.
We can say metro Detroit is an outlier, but we’d be wrong. I’ve picked out a handful of the fastest growing urban areas over the last 50 years, and it’s clear that the amount of urban land cover growth exceeding population growth is a common occurrence:
What’s more, in many urban areas (Austin, Charlotte, Phoenix) suburban expansion is taking place inside of still-expanding city boundaries. How are cities constrained by their boundaries for more than a century supposed to compare with cities that are still able to cobble up more undeveloped land to call their own?
Back to my earlier statement noting that 1970 was a demographic inflection point for suburbs. For the first thirty years since 1970, the only type of development was suburban development, inside or outside core city boundaries. The dawn of the 21st century saw things start to improve dramatically for many core cities, but it wasn’t enough to overtake what had already started in suburbia. It never would, it never could. We can’t say Americans “prefer” suburbia. It’s more like we’ve been force-fed suburbia for decades and only recently seen good alternatives.
You know, American cities did not start out as dense cities, such as we have them. They grew into it. Over time, cities adapted to rapidly growing population in the 19th and 20th centuries by adding more of everything the population demanded, making them denser. Also over time, many Americans chose less dense living than the city alternative, even going so far as to create new core cities that are effectively "suburbs" (in the less dense sense) themselves.
There are Americans who do prefer an alternative to the suburban model but have yet to see it implemented to a great extent, inside but especially outside of core city boundaries. So we accept the development we get.
Why? Because resistance is futile.