In Assessing New Suburban Forms, Politics Matter

Although more than a quarter century has passed since the Census Bureau declared that a majority of Americans reside in suburbs, scholars have only recently explored the profound implications of this dramatic shift in demography. Building on the work of Peter Muller and Kenneth Jackson, among others, Joel Garreau provided in 1991 the most graphic and lasting depiction of this new phenomenon as “edge cities,” places located on the margins of metropolitan areas that qualify for urban designation because they provide more jobs than places to live. Jon Teaford’s Post-Suburbia adds considerably to Garreau’s description, both by detailing the timing and dimensions of this transformation and by taking up the central, and as yet undeveloped, issue of governance.

Employing an approach he has used so effectively in other urban studies, Teaford utilizes comparative information in order to describe emerging national trends. For his data, he chooses six strategic suburban areas: Suffolk and Nassau counties in New York; Oakland County, Michigan; DuPage County, Illinois; St. Louis County, Missouri; and Orange County, California. From their origins as places of refuge from big-city environments, these areas grew quickly before, during, and after World War II to assume distinctly urban qualities. As early as 1960, Teaford reports, more than a million people resided in Nassau County; with more than 4,000 people per square mile it was as densely populated as many cities. In only the few years between 1950 and 1957 more than fifty-five square miles of land were platted in Oakland County, an area twice the size of Manhattan. Such growth was accompanied by economic changes. By 1958, Oakland’s suburban townships employed more production workers than the city of Pontiac. In that year, of the six counties considered, only DuPage had less than 30,000 manufacturing jobs, while the others ranged from 31,000 to 79,000 industrial workers. By 1963 both Nassau and Orange counties provided more than 95,000 such jobs.

Some counties were initially reluctant to embrace new employment opportunities. But following the disastrous experience of Levittown, New York, where the costs of providing new services at breakneck speed had to be borne primarily by property taxes, even the most exclusively residential suburban areas acknowledged the advantages of recruiting new industries in order to boost local revenues. In the expansive Cold War era, growth concentrated in knowledge industries like electronics, which did not carry with them the nuisances associated with older smokestack production and thus proved acceptable to suburban constituencies. The location of new giant companies, including Grumman Aircraft and McDonnell Aircraft, located in Suffolk and St. Louis counties respectively, marked a trend that enriched suburban areas, even as they bypassed traditionally core urban areas. In addition to these plums, growing suburban counties sought prime commercial facilities, most notably the new regional shopping malls. One big project would attract others and, by the mid-1960s, Teaford reports, Clayton, Missouri had became the nation’s first full-fledged edge city as white-collar workers steamed into its new corporate office towers. By 1968, it had supplanted the St. Louis central business district.

Traditionally social scientists have focused on what these locational decisions have done to harm central cities. Teaford chooses instead to assess these effects in terms of the suburban areas themselves. An element central to his story, then, is the intense jurisdictional battles that stemmed from competition among townships and unincorporated areas to secure taxing control over business, either through incorporation or annexation. The result was the acceleration of a pattern of fragmentation that had developed in the 1930s. In only the few years between 1945 and 1950, for instance, St. Louis County incorporated forty-two new municipalities. Even when the number of townships remained stable, special districts proliferated, from 199 to 268 in Nassau County between 1945 and 1955, and from 246 to 407 in Suffolk between 1950 and 1960. While critics deplored the inefficiencies that followed from so...