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LA has its fair share of problems unemployment being the most striking.Thats not including the estimated 900,000 illegal aliens hiding away in LA County.
Will LA survive? Absolutely
Did LA's explosive growth prevent it from living up to its vast potential? You bet it did. Here is a city that is nestled between the Pacific Ocean and San Gabriel San Bernardino Mt ranges, post card perfect setting and glorious year round weather. LA should have been the protypical US world class city. Except for the immediate coastal communities its anything but.
If LA can have a 18% unemployment rate and a Million illegal aliens what do you think is going to happen to much more modest Dallas or Houston growing at 20%-30%. What is Dallas going to look like 50-75 -100 years from now as the boomtown infrastructure begins to deteriorate?
But that's the problem, people aren't looking at BOTH sides of the coin. People speculate that "so and so bust" will happen to Dallas or any other sunbelt city 50 years from now. But who's to say public transit in Sunbelt cities won't change for the better, ESPECIALLY because there making strides now. Everything is SPECULATION. All your city really needs is a diverse economy. And that'll take care of the rest.
Its all of the above. People who move here want more for their money and they want space. One thing Californians, Texans, and most sunbelters have in common is that they are not intimidated by distance.
So true. I was discussing this issue with a couple of people from the Northeast. We were talking about California and they said they wouldn't want to live out there because it isn't NEAR any big cities in other states the same way the Northeast cities are connected.
But that's the problem, people aren't looking at BOTH sides of the coin. People speculate that "so and so bust" will happen to Dallas or any other sunbelt city 50 years from now. But who's to say public transit in Sunbelt cities won't change for the better, ESPECIALLY because there making strides now. Everything is SPECULATION. All your city really needs is a diverse economy. And that'll take care of the rest.
And thats just it. Of the sunbelt cities, Im the least worried about Dallas and DFW as a whole because it does have the most diverse economy of the sunbelt cities. Im also not worried about Houston because of its massive energy precense. Given Atlanta's huge media and education presence, it will also be fine. Phoenix is the only sunbelt city I worry about, but at the end of the day and 50 years from now, I think it will be ok too.
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Lowell, MA (110,000) birthplace of the American Industrial Revolution, the first industrial city in America, founded 1653, industrialized 1826.
Brockton, MA (100,000)
Fall River, MA (100,000)
New Bedford, MA (100,000)--go read Moby Dick to see why this city is important.
btw, only Worcester has 30 sq mi, the rest aren't any bigger than 15 sq mi....that's how density is done.
All of these cities are practically on top of each other as is, you get any movement out into the suburbs, and boom, overlaping metro areas. Phoenix, Scottsdale, Tempe, Mesa (those 3 are suburbs, they are not urban centers in their own right--they are subordinate to a city, hence the name) in no way shape or form developed this way. People had to make a choice upon deciding to move to the area, "do we buy a house in Phoenix, or a condo in Tempe, or do we rent in Mesa?" That's pretty much how the conversation went. Telling me about what kind of economic activities happens there proves nothing, I mean they are pretty pointless...spas, and the Cardinals...fantastic. Hey, didn't that little housing crisis start in Phoenix...? So those millions of home bought or built weren't affordable to the people living there-excellent economic strategy, sunbelt cities.
I fail to see why you can even dare to compare Phoenix to anything on the East Coast.
I don't care how big Phoenix's urbanism is or isn't. The point of this thread is to assert the fact that sunbelt cities simply didn't exist in any significant form 30 years ago. The density of Phoenix is not the same density of Boston. Boston's inner core is only 150sq mi and has 2 million people. The city itseld has 13,000ppm. If Boston was the same area as Phoenix it would have 6.8 million people.
Great you have a city named in 1894. That proves my point, that nothing was there until a short while ago. And yeah, 1894 is a short while ago, when my little suburb was founded in the 1600's. When those cities you mentioned were founded they had a few hundred people each, so maybe the entire population of the Arizona Territory (yeah, I'll make the disticntion between that and state) was a few thousand. In 1900 Massachusetts had 2.9million people, Arizona had 122,000. Boston itself had 560,000 people. Today the difference between MA and AZ is 2,000 people. But MA is 1/12 the size of Arizona, or smaller than Maricopa County.
Don't even get me started about what's located in greater Phoenix, again, it has little to no bearing here in the Northeast. Your entire rant about Scottsdale is totally pointless, you're proving exactly how much a sunbelt city Phoenix is...it's a weekend getaway for wealthy Los Angelinos and others in the moutain west. I know one person who's been to Phoenix--my father. He's like "It's great if you love desert."
Don't come on here and blame Boston, or other Northeastern cities for urban sprawl. I said all of these neighboring cities grew into each other and were eventually absorbed into a single metro area.
What is screwed up by stupid sprawl, I promise, promise, promise, is made up for with a world class transportation system. www.mbta.com Not one of those 7.6 million people is more than a 10 min bus ride to a train station. I know Phoenix doesn't have anything near that. You could anywhere you want in that sprawling mess, without touching car.
In Phoenix (and other places), you have what were effectively bumps in the road until about 30-50 years ago. Today, they are just largers bumps in the road.
Elitism and apathy at it's worst.
So you're basing this on one person you know who's been to Phoenix and you fail to see how I can even dare to compare Phoenix to any other city on the east coast? While it's true that cities weren't born in a day and many of them have had their fair shares of ups and downs, you seem to believe that if a city elsewhere isn't a carbon copy of one on the east coast, that somehow makes it lesser?
I still fail to see how any of this has anything to do with the fact that the Boston urban area still sprawls heavily, even with your history and neighboring cities growing into each other over a much longer period nonetheless. Once you're past route 128, there is plenty of sprawl with homes on larger lots than you'll typically find in the suburbs of Phoenix or other Sunbelt cities. Are there more jobs in the inner city or in the perimeter of Boston these days?
Providence is nearly 53 miles south from Boston.
Worcester - 44 miles west
Lowell - over 30 miles northwest
Manchester - over 52 miles northwest
Fall River - almost 55 miles south
New Bedford - over 60 miles south
These cities (as well as Cambridge, Brockton) only take up a fraction of the population in the Boston metro area who are not actually living in Boston. So where is everyone else living?
There is some confusion as to what I mean. This is not necessarily sunbelt vs the world. Some cities have populations that aren't growing, but couldn't be classified as stagnant or declining because of their metro area. Look at it like this: if living in your city proper is more expensive than living in the burbs, than you live in a boomtown ie. SF, NYC; conversely, if u live in a metro where it is cheaper to live in the city limits than the burbs, than you live in a stagnant/declining city ie. Philly, detroit, Bmore. It has almost nothing to do with geography.
the exceptions are cities that take up alot of land (300 sq mi +). Examples like houston and phx, because they are so vast that their "real" (Not the watered down cesus stuff) metro/UA lies mostly within the city limits. Because their urban form is relativley newer, its a little more difficult to classify them.
There is some confusion as to what I mean. This is not necessarily sunbelt vs the world. Some cities have populations that aren't growing, but couldn't be classified as stagnant or declining because of their metro area. Look at it like this: if living in your city proper is more expensive than living in the burbs, than you live in a boomtown ie. SF, NYC; conversely, if u live in a metro where it is cheaper to live in the city limits than the burbs, than you live in a stagnant/declining city ie. Philly, detroit, Bmore. It has almost nothing to do with geography.
Hmm.. I'd like to see the evidence that it's cheaper to live in those cities than in their suburbs, in terms of square footage of real estate.
Actually, it is the CSA of Atlanta that is 8,376 sq miles, but I think for this topic it would be better to look at the UA which is 2204 sq miles and where the majority of the people in Atlanta and it's suburbs live. The recent estimates show there are little over 5 million people living in that area, which puts the suburbs in to a similar area as that of Boston's (2756 sq miles) and Philadelphia's (2182 sq miles) urban areas. In fact, Atlanta has more in common development wise with those cities than it does with Houston or Dallas.
I think your population figures may be off. This says Atlanta's urban area is at 3.5 million (as of 2000), with MSA pop at 5.3 million (as of 2008), and CSA at 5.72 (2008). I know that Atlanta has grown like crazy, so it may have grown to 5m since then...if you can provide some statistics I will happily concede that point. However, the Atlanta MSA is8,379 square miles. From what I've heard on other sites, the Atlanta CSA is greater than 10,000 square miles...but with the exception of the Bay Area I believe all of them are.
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The other big difference is the amount of time it took all three cities to reach their current levels. Philly and Boston did it over the course of 400 years. Atlanta went from a small to medium sized city in it's first 130 years (from 0 in 1837 to 1 million in 1960), and then multipled by 6 times in the last 40 years (from 1 million in 1960 to close to 6 million in 2010). While that type of growth is rather jarring, it has resulted in a metropolitan area very similar in scope to major cities in the northeast.
Yea, the growth which was enabled by the development of the automobile is pretty amazing.
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This is what johnatl was alluding to in his post. The City of Atlanta's population grew by about 120,000 over the last 10 years, but the city limits has remained the same size. In other words, the city grew by densification and not by annexation (annexation itself is damn near impossible in Georgia :P )
I definitely agree that Atlanta has been densifying...I was just trying to figure out what everyone thought about the future developments of these cities. John mentioned that all these cities are densifying, while LANative referred to cheap housing costs as a factor in fueling future growth. My point was that you can't have both. The denser you become, the more expensive the housing will be. As a result, city costs will rise as infrastructure requires more improvements, more schools are needed, hospitals, blah, blah, blah. This eventually leads to higher personal and commercial taxes (which are huge factors in the growth of Sunbelt cities). So either the growth of these cities will slow down as prices rise and more sustainable development begins to be created...or these metros will continue to push further away from the central city and prices will remain cheaper than in other cities in the Northeast and West Coast.
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While transit is Metro Atlanta's overall achilles heel, the transit system that we do have is actually quite good. In terms of passanger trips, MARTA averages about half a million trips per day and is the 7th most used rail system in the country (higher than LA's, Baltimore's, and Miami's subways system and significantly so for the last two). When you combine the various modes of public transportation, it is the 9th most used.
I will definitely give credit where it is due: Atlanta has been doing a great job in comparison to other Sunbelt cities in terms of rail improvements.
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Not necessarily. I think the housing market collapsed reset the rules for how that works.
I wholeheartedly disagree. The prices may have been knocked down, but the model of economics will remain. When there is a high demand for a scarce resourse (in this case, land), prices will rise. Sprawl keeps prices down because it turns a limited resource into a relatively unlimited resource.
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Then there is the fact that the City of Atlanta isn't wall to wall development in it's city limits. The central part of the city where most people live, about 40 square miles or so, has an average residential density of about 10 to 15,000. The rest of the city's land area varies from scattered pockets of low and high density areas to more even built up areas. There is still an incredible amount of land to build on, and I think it'll quite some time before that densification begins to effect housing costs.
From what I could find, there is only one zipcode in the city of Atlanta which tops 10,000 ppsm...but that's not the point. You don't need to get to that level before housing prices begin to rise.
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I've never been one to look at those population predictions in a flattering way. I think most of the sunbelt cities will continue at much larger rates than cities in other areas of the country for a long time to come, but I think most of them will start to level off around present levels. However for Dallas, Houston, and Atlanta I don't think that a population for all three in the 8 to 10 million range isn't out of the question over the next few decades.
I suppose...but there are so many variables which can affect growth in the long term.
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Originally Posted by AZLiam
I don't want you to be confused. Perhaps we should be speaking about URBAN AREAS rather than MSA's. Dallas, Houston, Phoenix, etc..btw, are no worse offenders of urban area sprawl than Boston is.
Apparently you haven't been reading any of the conversation we've been having. I was in no way throwing dirt on Sunbelt cities. I was just talking about the different forms of development which may happen in the future.
Why even bring up Boston?
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