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Dallas' suburbs also take the edge over Atlanta when it comes to transit connectivity.
Gwinnett and Cobb County still have yet to join MARTA, and while Atlanta has heavy rail, it doesn't really go into the suburbs (unless you count the airport, Decatur and Sandy Springs). DART's rail goes all of the way to Fort Worth (with stops in Irving & Richland Hills), Carrollton, Plano and Rowlett.
In fact, DART currently has additional rail under construction (set for completion in 2023) with the silver line from Plano to Addison to DFW airport.
I disagree that suburbs have historically been bedroom communities. That’s one type of suburb that we often, but not exclusively, associate with the post-WWII boom. Plenty of other suburbs have been job centers in their own right and functioned as edge cities with manufacturing jobs instead of white collar jobs. The term edge city excludes such places and includes only the newer places that developed absent most residential.
It’s confusing for several reasons, most importantly is that it doesn’t fit what most people would think when they hear it. Most would think that it means another city close to a larger city. Like Newark, or Long Beach, or Camden. It has to be defined or explained to be understood. And even then definition is somewhat complex and whether or not a place fits the definition is open to interpretation. You can say that for many things, but it’s even more complicated when you use a word like city to describe what most consider to be a suburb.
The places you have in mind I call "satellite cities" — places like Lowell, Lawrence, Lynn, Brockton and Waltham in Massachusetts*; Chester and increasingly Reading in Pennsylvania; Wilmington in Delaware; Stamford in Connecticut; Jersey City, Newark and even Camden in New Jersey; and so on.
All of these cities were employment and industrial centers in their own right when the nearby metropolis was much smaller. They got overrun by the suburban growth of the metropolitan center. Some of them had their own suburbs too: for instance, it's quite clear that Chester Township, Upland Borough, Parkside Borough and parts of Brookhaven and Ridley townships in Delaware County, Pa., housed people who worked in Chester's factories and shipyards. (Two other adjacent communities, Trainer and Marcus Hook boroughs, did qualify as "industrial suburbs" because they had oil refineries in them that drew workers from Chester and its surrounding area.)
The "edge cities" would not exist at all were it not for the suburban growth of the metropolitan center. These other cities already existed before that growth spread outward to them. This doesn't seem to me like either a trivial distinction or one that's difficult to grasp. Built-environment hint: Do brick factories(-turned-loft apartments) outnumber glass boxes, or vice versa? if the former, it's a satellite city; if the latter, an edge city.
The "suburbs" of the type I describe actually predate the auto. There were two types of them in the 19th century: "railroad suburbs" — communities that developed around stations on railroad lines where the railroads would "commute" (reduce) the fares for people who boarded and got off at these stations (it's from this practice where we get the word "commuter" meaning someone who travels some distance from work to home, another phenomenon that arose only with the growth of railroads) — and "streetcar suburbs," residential districts that developed along the trolley lines that emanated from the city center.
*Forgot to add the footnote: Massachusetts seems to be especially well-endowed with such cities because of the way the Industrial Revolution took off there.
Last edited by MarketStEl; 11-02-2020 at 01:13 PM..
DC--you can't beat the energy, walkability, safety, and cleanliness of the DC suburbs as a whole. Tyson's Corner alone has four metro stations that will connect directly to Dulles Airport. Tyson's will become one of the top ten business districts in the nation and house 100k people on only five or so square miles. Fairfax County has a violent crime rate as low as Singapore. Yes. Freaking Singapore, where canning and capital punishment are still used for drug smugglers.
Atlanta--you have a vast swathe of highly affluent Northern suburbs, including Sandy Springs, which is incredibly close to Atlanta and has a direct, grade separated, heavy rail link to Midtown, Downtown, and the airport. Further North you have Alpharetta, with the best high schools in all of Fulton County, and that chain of crazy good schools, crazy high paying high tech jobs, crazy good Korean food, crazy big backyards, and incredibly lush, forested rolling hills only continues through John's Creek, Suwanee, and a whole litany of cities.
DFW--Plano and Frisco are the stars in the game. Frisco is growing as fast as Dubai as Californians snatch up real estate there like it's the Oklahoma land rush, lured by the incredible diversity there, the awesome Chinese, Indian, and Korean cuisine and supermarkets there, as well as highly ranked schools. At the Legacy and Frisco Station, forests of high rise offices and high rise condos are popping up. The Legacy even has a food hall and the Toyota North America HQ. And it's all connected by an awesome network of big, wide freeways and tollways. Freeways that have carpool lanes, express lanes which get you out of traffic. Tollways that tend to have very little traffic. Frontage roads with high speed limits. You can get around everywhere fast. Best yet, Plano and Frisco aren't even that far from Downtown Dallas, and Plano has direct light rail access to Downtown Dallas. Coming up, the Cotton Belt Line will directly connect Plano to DFW airport. But those DFW freeways are massive and awe inspiring works of art. They have streetlights on most every stretch of freeway, the pavement is flawless, the stack interchanges are massive, the signage well marked and the entire system logical and easy to use. The freeway system in DFW is hands down the best maintained freeway system in the world I've seen outside of Singapore.
Houston
Chicago
Philly
Boston
Las Vegas
St Louis
I don't like inner suburbs too much, to me inner suburbs are often just extensions of the inner city. The outer suburbs are where the growth, the dynamism, the jobs are. So the city with the best edge cities wins.
And again Las Vegas has no edge city suburbs that can be differentiated from those in the middle of the valley. Lots of suburban neighborhoods but virtually none that are different than the rest.
As an example high suburban quality tracts such as the Area off Ranch and Alta is not differentiable from the high end in south Henderson or the top places in Summerlin. And in the SW there is Spanish Trails and Spanish Hills that rival any of the above. So we simply have suburban areas dropped throughout the urban areas. To a large degree the only thing that separates the high end suburban areas is views. Golf courses, Strip, City and Mountains.
And thinking about it I don't think we have many urban neighborhoods. To a pretty good level it is all suburban bordered by commercial.
I don't like inner suburbs too much, to me inner suburbs are often just extensions of the inner city. The outer suburbs are where the growth, the dynamism, the jobs are. So the city with the best edge cities wins.
That’s very circumstantial. Inner ring suburbs are often some of the more dynamic and active places in the metro and sometimes benefit from not having big city school issues. Places like Silver Spring Bethesda Alpine Edgewater Hoboken Arlington Cambridge Somerville. Often they gentrify it’s add amenities pretty quickly.
In some places outer ring suburbs are too low density and exurban in character. This often lead to them being homogenous. See Chicago/Philly/Boston.
And again Las Vegas has no edge city suburbs that can be differentiated from those in the middle of the valley. Lots of suburban neighborhoods but virtually none that are different than the rest.
As an example high suburban quality tracts such as the Area off Ranch and Alta is not differentiable from the high end in south Henderson or the top places in Summerlin. And in the SW there is Spanish Trails and Spanish Hills that rival any of the above. So we simply have suburban areas dropped throughout the urban areas. To a large degree the only thing that separates the high end suburban areas is views. Golf courses, Strip, City and Mountains.
And thinking about it I don't think we have many urban neighborhoods. To a pretty good level it is all suburban bordered by commercial.
Honestly Vegas feels somewhat urban to me in part simply because they’re sooo many homes so close to each other like 5-8 feet apart. It’s basically large modern rowhomes-that’s how close and uniform they often are. The small lots throughout (I’m assuming necessary for public infrastructure expansion) make it feel like a very dense suburb, that and the diversity and late night hours/shopping center give it a dense suburban somewhat urban vibe throughout. More so than I would have thought-in a weird way.
Honestly Vegas feels somewhat urban to me in part simply because they’re sooo many homes so close to each other like 5-8 feet apart. It’s basically large modern rowhomes-that’s how close and uniform they often are. The small lots throughout (I’m assuming necessary for public infrastructure expansion) make it feel like a very dense suburb, that and the diversity and late night hours/shopping center give it a dense suburban somewhat urban vibe throughout. More so than I would have thought-in a weird way.
Perhaps what we need is a definition of "urban". Clearly multi story apartments and condos are urban. But is there a line where single family lots become urban over the density? I was a side participant in the Nassau NY suburban boom after the war. The size of the lots did not appear to be an issue.
Las Vegas is a complicated mix of lot sizes everywhere. Everything from square miles of 1/2 acre or bigger to 10 to the acre tracts. But the central city mix is very much the same as the outlying areas.
So no other than the commercial areas like the strip it is difficult to pin down urban. And where you do find obvious urban it is surrounded by obvious suburban.
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