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2 Twenty-First-Century Suburban Demography Increasing Diversity Yet Lingering Exclusion NANCY A. DENTON AND JOSEPH R. GIBBONS “ S uburbs” and “suburban” may be among the most often-used words with contested meanings. And they do get used: A Google search on “suburbs” finds 27,700,000 entries, while “suburban” yields 38,700,000. Everyone thinks they know what these words mean, despite little agreement on their formal definition. For many people, they evoke a mental image or “hidden frame”—for example, single-family detached houses with white picket fences—although the contents of that image may vary greatly based on where the people live or grew up, as well as their ages. The typical Levittown, New York, house looks quite different from the ones in Westlake, California, that Malvina Reynolds sang about as “little boxes” (Reynolds 1962); people who were suburban pioneers in the early part of the twentieth century had different mental images of suburbs from those who moved to the post–World War II suburbs; and those moving to the more densely settled suburbs of the early twenty-first century have still another image. Cities in the West, by virtue of annexation during the postwar years, have a lot of suburban-type housing within their limits, while those in the East most often do not (Bradbury, Downs, and Small 1982; Dreier, Mollenkopf, and Swanstrom 2004; Rusk 1993). Although not always mentioned, racial exclusivity is included in the mental image of suburbia for many (Jackson 1985; Massey and Denton 1993), even as suburbs are becoming increasingly diverse. Thus the “hidden frames” through which we view suburbs are varied, but at the same time, they are often consistent in their emphasis on single-family homes, families with children, and white people. However different the meaning of the term “suburb” is in different times and places, and to different people, empirical research provides some insight into how closely the varied images mirror reality. Quantitative research on places in the United States, including suburbs, often begins with the U.S. Census, which reveals, first and foremost, that the U.S. population at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century is overwhelmingly not urban and not rural: It is suburban. 14 Nancy A. Denton and Joseph R. Gibbons So how did the U.S. population come to be majority suburban? Part of the answer is definitional and rests on which places are considered cities and suburbs . As political entities with well-known boundaries, the population of cities is quite precisely defined: People know whether they live in a city. The percentage of the population living in central cities of metropolitan areas peaked at 32.8 in 1950 and has declined in every decade since (Hobbs and Stoops 2002). From 1950 to 2000, the total U.S. population grew by 86 percent, or 131 million people , and by 2010 it had grown almost another 10 percent, to a total population of 308.7 million. Population growth is taking place outside cities, because people in cities are moving away from them, immigrants now enter the United States through the suburbs, and those living outside cities are having children. The second definitional factor emerges from the concept of the “metropolitan .” To better describe the interconnections among cities and the areas around them, the Census delineated metropolitan areas starting in 1949. Based on building blocks of counties surrounding large cities, these metropolitan areas swept up large numbers of people so that by 2000, fully 80 percent of the U.S. population lived in them (Hobbs and Stoops 2002), and by 2010, 93.7 percent lived in the core-based metropolitan and micropolitan areas, and all but 10 percent of them in metropolitan areas (U.S. Bureau of the Census 2012).1 Because the most commonly used statistical definition of suburbs counts people living in metropolitan areas but not in their central or primary cities as suburbanites, if one accepts that definition, it is possible to definitively say that the United States is a suburban nation. A question remains, however: What does that term “suburban ” means? Who lives in suburbs, and what are the characteristics of suburbs? After a brief discussion of the history and meaning of the term “suburb,” this essay focuses on the demography of the suburban population of the United States in 2010. Our method compares demographic characteristics of suburbs to those of cities. How great is the contrast? Are the two types of places dramatically different? Are the suburbs...

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