Boomburbs: The Rise of America's Accidental Cities

Foreword

Statistical work has painted a picture of the American urban frontier. New development is overwhelmingly in the Sunbelt and it is based around the car. The metropolitan areas of Las Vegas, Phoenix, Houston, Dallas, and Atlanta are particular centers for vast amounts of new building, but this building is more likely to be on the edge of the metropolitan area than in the older centers. America’s growing exurbs are full of both homes and jobs, as firms followed people to exurbs built around highways. While this statistical portrait is accurate, it is also dry and incomplete. It tells us nothing about the political conditions that made the Sunbelt such a center for new construction. It tells us little about what that new development is like or how the social character is being shaped within the space being built. Robert Lang and Jennifer LeFurgy have turned their strong analytic skills on the fastest growing areas in America: the boomburbs or booming areas that are not urban centers. This volume substantially enriches our understanding of the growth of these areas. I suspect that by understanding these places better, we are coming to better understand the very future of urban America itself. Lang and LeFurgy’s boomburbs are defined by three characteristics: current scale, rate of growth, and not being the centers of their region. Many of these places are as large and important as far more famous older cities. Mesa, Arizona, for example has almost 400,000 people. Arlington, Texas, has more than 300,000 inhabitants. Both of these places are much larger than Pittsburgh, yet while much of America knows something about the city Foreword vii of three rivers, few know anything about Arlington or Mesa. Some of the smaller boomburbs are just amazingly new. Coral Springs, Florida, had less than 1,500 residents in 1970. Today, it has more than 100,000. These are the great growing places of the country. Lang and LeFurgy do a remarkable job of dispelling myths that have occasionally grown up about these new places. While Americans tend to think of suburbs as prosperous white enclaves built to escape inner-city ethnic conflict, the boomburbs are remarkably ethnically heterogeneous. Only 54 percent of their population is white. On average, 29 percent is Hispanic. Some of these places also contain remarkable concentrations of Asian population, such as Daly City, California . Some boomburbs, like Naperville, Illinois, are indeed wealthy. Other boomburbs, like Hialeah, Florida, are substantially poorer than the nation as a whole. The one thing that they all have in common is heavy automobile use. The need to own multiple automobiles does tend to make them less welcoming to the very poor. The boomburbs also contradict the vision of bedroom suburbs. They are often major employment centers. While the highest human capital industries , such as finance, still tend to locate disproportionately in business centers , I was struck by the remarkable number of corporate headquarters that have located in boomburbs. Exxon/Mobil, for example, has its headquarters in Irving, Texas. Yahoo is in Sunnyvale, California. In 1900 business location was driven by proximity to transport hubs like rail yards and harbors . Today, businesses still locate near hubs, but they are increasingly airports . Several boomburbs, like Naperville and Irving, owe some of their growth to the proximity of a major airport. But in most cases, the biggest business of the boomburbs is building itself. A city doesn’t add 100,000 people without a lot of new construction and all of the boomburbs specialize in growth. Lang and LeFurgy teach us about the two necessary ingredients of high growth places: a vibrant construction sector and progrowth politics. The builders of the boomburbs are generally big operators who put up homes by the hundreds or even thousands . These homes are, like the original Levittown, mass-produced. Unlike Levittown, these mass-produced homes are often quite luxurious. These building assembly lines are turning out Lexuses, not Model Ts. The buildings are also often built on small lots. New Englanders, who are used to the highly zoned areas of the older suburbs, are often struck by the small yards of new homes in desert places such as unincorporated Las Vegas, which seem to be able to deliver infinite quantities of land. Those small lots help keep the price of new construction down, and, clearly, people aren’t demanding all that much space. viii FOREWORD Many of...