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Old 02-02-2014, 09:32 PM
nei nei won $500 in our forum's Most Engaging Poster Contest - Thirteenth Edition (Jan-Feb 2015). 

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Location: Western Massachusetts
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The Canadian census agency has a long article about defining "suburbs" with pros and cons for each method:

Canadian Social Trends: The city/suburb contrast: How can we measure it?
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Old 02-03-2014, 06:59 PM
 
Location: City of Angels
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I guess to put in my two cents. From an L.A. perspective the idea of "suburb" is kind of blurry. While I initially agreed with Katiana's definition of "not within the city limits" I changed my mind when I thought of West Hollywood, Santa Monica, Culver City... even Beverly Hills which are areas very much within the urban fabric of L.A. whereas there are areas that are technically L.A. that are "suburban" in nature like much of the SFV, San Pedro... heck some areas are straight up rural!

BTW, good schools are the main thing keeping my family in the 'burbs. The schools in the wealthier suburbs are worth pretending to be wealthy
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Old 02-03-2014, 09:39 PM
nei nei won $500 in our forum's Most Engaging Poster Contest - Thirteenth Edition (Jan-Feb 2015). 

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Location: Western Massachusetts
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I was hoping to hear an LA perspective. Does this post sound reasonable? Does school quality vary a lot depending on where you are in the City of Los Angeles or is it uniformly poor?

http://www.city-data.com/forum/32937675-post75.html
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Old 02-03-2014, 11:00 PM
 
Location: East coast
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Quote:
Originally Posted by nei View Post
I was hoping to hear an LA perspective. Does this post sound reasonable? Does school quality vary a lot depending on where you are in the City of Los Angeles or is it uniformly poor?

http://www.city-data.com/forum/32937675-post75.html
LOL, does this imply schools in LA are all poor? Or did you mean, are they more equal in quality, whether that means equally rich or equally poor?
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Old 02-03-2014, 11:10 PM
nei nei won $500 in our forum's Most Engaging Poster Contest - Thirteenth Edition (Jan-Feb 2015). 

Over $104,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum and additional contests are planned
 
Location: Western Massachusetts
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I should have said "poor quality"
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Old 02-04-2014, 07:44 AM
 
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Quote:
Originally Posted by nei View Post
Sydney and Melbourne is more extreme than Boston or DC. The City of Sydney has 169,000 people in a metro population of 4 million. From what I can tell, no uses Sydney to refer to just the City of Sydney, Sydney refers to anyplace in the metro. Suburb refers to a neighborhood in any municipality, not just the city itself. Sounds like the closest distinction you can get is inner suburbs vs outer suburbs there.
The number of municipalities in metro Sydney or Melbourne is on par with metro Boston or Philly or DC. The political units might not be exactly the same size in area or population but the average is fairly close.

For instance, the political divisions of the Delaware Valley - http://planphilly.com/uploads/media_....752.538.s.png

If someone were to say "Brisbane City" or "Sydney City" they mean the CBD. In Sydney that's almost the same thing as the municipality.

"suburb" in common australian usage does not refer to neighborhood (if someone means neighborhood then they say "neighbourhood") it generally refers to the post code you live in. In Melbourne and Sydney this is often coterminous with municipal boundaries. If someone asks me what suburb I live in I'm supposed to say "New Farm" or "West End" which are collections of neighborhoods within the city and which roughly correspond to post codes.

But more to my original point - it doesn't matter if the built environment is urban or suburban. If people in that area live in high rises, rowhouses, or detached houses on 1/2 acre lots . . . everything is a suburb. Even the downtown.

Quote:
The Australian political arrangement sounds rather logical: why should there be one really big municipality near the older center of the metro area and then lots of tiny ones elsewhere? Shouldn't they all have about the same setup? There's a potential for funding inequalities with a broken up city in the US, as the poorest districts of a city would have trouble funding themselves if separate. And whichever district that got the CBD would be flush with money, especially if it was a centralized metro. So there'd need to some revenue sharing.
Brisbane comes close to a reasonable set up with the municipalities being about the size of a county in the eastern US (Redlands, Logan, Ipswich, Gold Coast, etc) but Brisbane itself is too big at about the size of all 5 boroughs of NYC but with 1/6 the population. It should probably be at least two different cities divided along the river (esp. since there are so few river crossings to begin with).

The balkanization in places like Sydney does have some serious consequences - especially when it comes to transportation. It manifests itself in smaller ways like when you're standing on a street corner with giant towers on one side of the street and detached, single family across the street just because it's in a different town.

Revenue sharing is something different entirely. There are no local police forces or sherriff's departments in Australia. If I walk 5 minutes down the road to the cop shop it's the Queensland State Police. They have police stations in just about every "suburb" but it's all state police. Municipalities don't have to worry about it. Sewer & Water? That's Queensland Urban Utilities. Schools? That's the state again. The only thing the municipalities have to fund are trash collection, parks & libraries, local street maintenance and transit. That's pretty much the same in all the states. There's a very high level of municipal services here - to the point that I emailed the "fire ant hotline" after being bitten on a soccer field, they called me that afternoon, and had a truck out the next day - and property taxes are half what they are in suburban Philly.
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Old 02-04-2014, 01:28 PM
 
Location: City of Angels
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Quote:
Originally Posted by nei View Post
I was hoping to hear an LA perspective. Does this post sound reasonable? Does school quality vary a lot depending on where you are in the City of Los Angeles or is it uniformly poor?

http://www.city-data.com/forum/32937675-post75.html

Well, to be completely honest I haven't done extensive research, so someone who knows better is more than welcome to prove me wrong. But, I've been passively looking online for apartments or houses in the "hipper" LA areas and it seems all the schools are rated mid or low like 4-6 out of 10 whereas the schools in Redondo/Manhattan/Torrance are all in the 8-10 range.

I'm sure that when the time comes (my daughter is only 17 months old) we'd be able to get her into a magnet or gifted program or whatever, but I commuted 45 minutes one way to school when I was in high school and am no longer a fan of that lifestyle these days.

That being said, I don't think that "good" schools makes an area suburban or that urban areas *can't* or *won't* have "good" schools, in fact I truly hope that they will in the very near future as LA continues to reinvent itself.
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Old 02-04-2014, 01:51 PM
 
Location: Foot of the Rockies
90,316 posts, read 120,244,119 times
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Originally Posted by nei View Post
The Canadian census agency has a long article about defining "suburbs" with pros and cons for each method:

Canadian Social Trends: The city/suburb contrast: How can we measure it?
This is a good article. It seems most people on this board like this definition (from the article):

"Suburbs as zones outside the city's central core"


However, here is what the census bureau says in conclusion about this definition:

"This method of distinguishing between the suburbs and the inner city composed of the city centre and the adjacent older neighbourhoods, however appealing it might be, will not be used in this series of articles. There are simply too many difficulties associated with establishing formal rules for defining the central business district and the adjacent older neighbourhoods in CMAs that differ in history, size and geography.11" to which I say, "Amen!"

Here's what they say about my preferred defintion:

"Administrative or political boundaries: the central municipality and the suburban municipalities"

"Yet, despite these limitations (particularly from the perspective of comparing CMAs), the distinction between central and suburban municipalities remains, for some purposes, the most pertinent and useful way to present various statistics. It is important for decision-makers and policy-makers to have a variety of demographic and socio-economic information about the population of their own municipality as well as adjacent municipalities.

On the other hand, the approach based on the administrative or political boundaries of the central municipality is probably not the most appropriate for studying certain social, demographic and economic differences between suburban and urban neighbourhoods.
"

Plus much more.

Conclusion:

"In the series of articles on life in metropolitan areas, we will rely on the well-known geographic concepts of census metropolitan area and census tract as well as three major distinctions: central and peripheral neighbourhoods, high-density and low-density neighbourhoods, and central and suburban municipalities."
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Old 02-04-2014, 03:09 PM
nei nei won $500 in our forum's Most Engaging Poster Contest - Thirteenth Edition (Jan-Feb 2015). 

Over $104,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum and additional contests are planned
 
Location: Western Massachusetts
46,009 posts, read 53,194,339 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Katiana View Post
This is a good article. It seems most people on this board like this definition (from the article):

"Suburbs as zones outside the city's central core"


However, here is what the census bureau says in conclusion about this definition:

"This method of distinguishing between the suburbs and the inner city composed of the city centre and the adjacent older neighbourhoods, however appealing it might be, will not be used in this series of articles. There are simply too many difficulties associated with establishing formal rules for defining the central business district and the adjacent older neighbourhoods in CMAs that differ in history, size and geography.11" to which I say, "Amen!"
Perhaps it may not work between cities, but within a metro it should be less of a problem. They also like this definition which you'd disagree with:

Using the proportion of all occupied dwellings in a neighbourhood that are single houses, semi-detached houses and mobile homes to measure density avoids the methodological pitfall associated with the simple estimate of population per square kilometre. The measure of density based on predominant housing type is not influenced by the proportion of the CT that is truly residential. Moreover, in Canada and North America generally, the presence of single and semi-detached houses in a neighbourhood is an important factor in differentiating between residential suburbs and more urban areas.

Here's what they say about my preferred defintion:

Quote:
"Administrative or political boundaries: the central municipality and the suburban municipalities"

"Yet, despite these limitations (particularly from the perspective of comparing CMAs), the distinction between central and suburban municipalities remains, for some purposes, the most pertinent and useful way to present various statistics. It is important for decision-makers and policy-makers to have a variety of demographic and socio-economic information about the population of their own municipality as well as adjacent municipalities.

On the other hand, the approach based on the administrative or political boundaries of the central municipality is probably not the most appropriate for studying certain social, demographic and economic differences between suburban and urban neighbourhoods.
"
And then there are the two big negatives:

While the difference in the percentages provides some idea of the extent of administrative fragmentation in these metropolitan areas, it tells us very little about the types of neighbourhoods in which Calgary and Winnipeg residents live compared with Vancouver residents. In addition, comparing the central municipalities of the various CMAs can lead to serious misinterpretations if we fail to take into account how each one is divided.

A second major disadvantage of the approach based on the central municipality's administrative boundaries, in terms of sociological and geographic analysis of CMA populations, is that boundaries can change abruptly at any time, especially during municipal mergers or reorganizations. Neighbourhoods and localities that had long been considered suburbs can suddenly become part of the central municipality, even though there has been no substantive change in their areas' nature or their social and economic ties to the centre.
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Old 02-04-2014, 03:21 PM
nei nei won $500 in our forum's Most Engaging Poster Contest - Thirteenth Edition (Jan-Feb 2015). 

Over $104,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum and additional contests are planned
 
Location: Western Massachusetts
46,009 posts, read 53,194,339 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Katiana View Post

When the Denver Public Library decided they would only serve Denver residents, they asked you for ID at the door. If you had an out of city address, you were denied entry. Didn't matter if you lived in a one-story ranch house with a three car garage in the city limits, or the same outside the city limits, the location of the house made all the difference. (This situation has been rectified by the Colorado legislature.)
Yes, the city proper provides its own services, but so does every other muncipality, with their own library system. What makes the services of the biggest city of the metro area so "special" and different from the rest that it's enough to divide a metro into city vs suburbs just by the biggest municipality?

Quote:
Although some say they never heard of this definition until this forum, it seems that is not entirely correct. Many people will say they prefer some other definition, yet they talk derogatorily about "suburban schools", claim there is no public transit in the suburbs , that there are no cultural facilities in the suburbs, etc. Just what do they mean by "the suburbs" then?
Perhaps they are using the NYC/Philly definition, not sure why that wouldn't work with most posts. Many of the old cities outside the biggest cities suffer school issues, while some of the schools in the "big city" are decent.

But why do you pick examples that obviously silly? Any statement about "no public transit" and "no cultural facilities" is easily disproven, since a place having none of those whatsoever is unlikely. Perhaps it's hyperbole and the poster meant "less" or the poster just isn't thinking. Discussing those sort of posts aren't going to lead much interesting discussion, I ignore them. Plenty of posters don't, I don't understand why people respond that much or focus their attention on posts like that.
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