Small Cities USA: Growth, Diversity, and Inequality

NOTES

165 1. INTRODUCTION 1. Aggregate population calculated using 2007 Community Population Survey data accessed via the State of the Cities Data Set (www.socds.huduser.org). 2. I recognize that local economies have always had some connections to larger markets and systems, but I agree with scholars who argue that there has been a shift in the nature of these relations during the twentieth century. 3. While little research has been done since the 1970s on how small cities fit in networks of cities, scholars working in the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s did extensive work in the area. These scholars investigated why some places become regional centers. Scholars such as James Vance (1971) noted that certain places prospered and became centers of a hinterland because they were wholesaling centers. These scholars focused on very small places and centered their research on the economic networks that characterized the 1960s. But with the rise of global commerce, just-in-time production and stocking, and “mega marts” such as Walmart, the economic geography of the United States has vastly changed. Thus, I focus more on the scholarship of scholars such as Saskia Sassen who are investigating how recent shifts have affected economic networks in the United States and around the world. 4. From 1970 through 1982, Fortune magazine constructed lists of industrial corporations . Starting in 1983, the magazine began to construct lists of service firms as well as industrial firms. In 1993, thirty metro areas had hosted Fortune 500 companies at any time. This trend continued through the 1980s and into the 1990s: in 1990, thirty-three MSAs had Fortune 500 firms, and in 1994, the last year in which Fortune separated service firms from industrial firms, twenty-nine MSAs were listed. In 1995 and subsequent years, Fortune combined all firms regardless of type, yielding lower numbers than in previous years. I compiled a database from all Fortune 500 lists from 1970, 1980, 1983, 1990, 1994, and 2000. Refer to the appendix for additional details concerning these data. 5. Refer to the appendix for details on tabulation of census data across time. Note that the State of the Cities Data Systems created by the Department of Housing and Urban Development provides data using constant geographic definitions across time. NOTES 166 NOTES TO PAGES 16–44 6. Not only do these criteria exclude large suburbs in large metro areas, they also exclude “multi-nucleated” smaller metro regions (e.g., the Raleigh-Durham region in North Carolina or the Thousand Oaks–Ventura–Oxnard region in California). These multicity regions are interesting and need further research but present fundamentally different stories concerning historical development than do the small cities studied here. Thus, sixteen cities that could have been included using my criterion were excluded. This explains why table 1.1 lists ninety-six cities but only eighty cities are included in the study. 2. THE DIVERGENT FATES OF SMALL CITIES 1. The first group, which I label the “slow growers,” includes cities that have shrunk or grown very slowly over the thirty-year period; it contains all of the cities in the first quartile of the distribution of total population change. Thirtyyear growth rates in this group ranged from negative 8 percent to positive 17 percent. I refer to the second group as the “medium growers,” which are the cities that grew moderately over the thirty-year period; this group contains all of the cities in the second quartile of the distribution of total population change. Thirty-year growth rates ranged from18 percent to 45 percent. The third group, which I call the “fast growers,” includes cities that have grown fairly robustly over the thirty-year period; it contains all of the cities in the third quartile of the distribution of total population change. The fast growers had thirty-year population growth rates ranging from 45 percent to 66 percent. The final group I identify as the “explosive growers,” which are those cities that grew tremendously over the thirty-year period. This last group contains all of the cities in the fourth quartile of the distribution of total population change, and the thirty-year growth rates for this quartile ranged from 67 percent to 413 percent. 2. All data are at the metropolitan statistical area (MSA) level of aggregation based on U.S. Census Bureau 1990 constant geographic definitions unless otherwise noted. See the appendix for a discussion of use of data at this level. 3. County Business Patterns Data from 1974, 1980...