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Status:
"Pickleball-Free American"
(set 4 days ago)
Location: St Simons Island, GA
23,464 posts, read 44,090,617 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by HighPlainsDrifter73
I sure don't understand this. The suburban/exurban area where I live does not suffer from bad schools, crime or urban density. Things are spread out with lots of open spaces, roads are wide, crime is low and schools are top notch. This is some type of a generalization that you are making that does not hold up in almost any case. People leave the city and move to the suburbs to escape the negative points you indicate. You wouldn't have the suburbs overloaded with people if they were like you described.
Of course this is not the case with all suburbs, but some formerly safe suburbs have indeed seen this development. It's difficult for me to believe that NO Chicago suburb has seen this happen.
Really depends upon the specific urban region and specific part of any city vs specific suburbs
Many major regions like Silicon Valley and LA have no well-defined "city" or CBD as a pre-eminent economic epicenter....most high-income jobs are sprawled across many suburban areas in suburban office parks, near houses of many executives in nearby suburbs
SV and LA generally lack competent or safe public schools in any of the suburbs or in "city" of SF or LA, so most use private schools anyway
Suspect suburbs are far cheaper than cities if one compares equivalent size/quality new house on same size lot in similarly upscale areas, e.g., compare Manhattan's Upper East Side vs Greenwich CT or Chic's Gold Coast vs Lake Forest or SF's Pacific Hts vs Woodside....suburbs are still often preferred by frugal families; cities are perhaps great for affluent yuppies and ultra-wealthy families
And given increased city taxes, relatively high housing costs, cutbacks in police, possibly increased street crime in any poor economy (think NYC of '70s), suspect suburbs everywhere will be even more highly preferred over old-fashioned central cities by most middle and upper-income taxpayers and residents in coming yrs
its not non sense, it vary's for cities, in miami its true. many of its southern suburbs, and all of north have bad schools, high crime and poverty.
I think in the South, it is different because suburbanization kind of ran into towns and communities that were already having issues with poverty, low performing schools and so on. So, it doesn't surprise me about Miami Gardens and similar types of communities.
Also, in the Northeast, it is different due to migration patterns and history.
Of course this is not the case with all suburbs, but some formerly safe suburbs have indeed seen this development. It's difficult for me to believe that NO Chicago suburb has seen this happen.
Of course, there are almost 250 different Chicago suburbs, and there are a couple dozen that are really suffering. Mostly southern burbs and some near-west burbs.
Harvey, Dolton, Robbins. Many areas of these suburbs are actually WORSE than inner-city Chicago, because while the crime and run-down areas might be the same, at least Chicago is large enough to fund a police force and sanitation services. These suburbs only have around 30,000 people, and they just don't have the tax base to provide any level of services.
That said though, a majority of the 6 million people who live in the suburbs here are in safe areas with low density and decent schools.
Just look at DuPage county. There are roughly 1,000,000 people living in DuPage county, and the county is basically a built-out urban area.
Back not too long ago the entire county actually went well over a year without a single killing.
I always noticed in Pennsylvania that you have atleast three styles of suburbs;
1] your very nice, old, streetcar suburbs built in the 20s ending at WW2. Some are still very nice with glorious old houses(Oakmont & Edgewood PA), some went bad and are run down(Wilkensburg, PA)
2) Then you have your 1950s-1970s, higher density suburbs. These use to be the "white picket fence places". Many of these are filled with middle class people. You get your typical problems. Kids with drugs, ok schools, a few break ins, maybe a murder once or twice a year.(Monroeville, Pa or King of Prussia, PA) They are still walkable enough, but nowhere close to the pre-WW2 suburbs, and have a limited character.
Then in the 80s to now society thought it would be wise to try to create some new even uglier version of the old American Dream to escape the disaster they built before. The exurbs. It is now your latest extreme sprawl suburbs. Most of these don't even have a real town center. If they do, then they have what use to be a old street of the rural community they ate up, and they call it something stupid like, "Ye Olde Wexford". They are built in Townships and consist of subdivisions and not actual neighborhoods(Cranberry Township, PA) Their "downtown" is a long linear strip of road consisting of stripmalls and parkinglots. Walking is impossible and the only way to access the stores or restaurants is by driving. These suburbs are yet the worst we came up with. In 10 years problems will be hitting these "crimeless" great places, and we will move out another 10 miles to more rural land to develop our newest and yet uglier suburbs.
I think in the South, it is different because suburbanization kind of ran into towns and communities that were already having issues with poverty, low performing schools and so on. So, it doesn't surprise me about Miami Gardens and similar types of communities.
Also, in the Northeast, it is different due to migration patterns and history.
This is true. Miami has had substantial poverty in its suburbs for decades, e.g., Brownsville, Opa Locka, Perrine, Hialeah, Richmond Heights, even South Miami.
To respond to the original question:
-- just as their predecessors had done after II when they lived in the central cities, the middle, moderate and upper income people have picked up stakes for greener pastures in the hinterlands.
-- this created a vacuum in the suburbs from which they departed.
-- as the central city is redeveloped and housing is torn down or gentrified, the impoverished folks wre pushed out and filled the vacuum left by the those who moved out.
The majority of suburbs are the other way around. If you looked across the country, Im betting somewhere around 90% of suburbs are still much nicer than the central cities in the area, especially the inner cities of those central cities.
A lot of larger cities have a few suburbs that are bordering a ghetto area of the central city, and they are bad though (think South of Chicago, East of Cleveland, etc.). That doesnt change the fact that most of the Chicago and Cleveland suburbs are still very nice though.
Again you should note, that just because the suburbs of Albuquerque are still safe or relatively safe and have less crime problems, this is not the case everywhere.
Gwinnett County is a suburban area Northeast of Atlanta. Over 750,000 people in that County alone. At one time (when I moved here in the mid-1980s), the suburb of "Norcross" was a highly desirable area to buy a home in. This is that same area today: Mexican drug cartels thrive in suburban Atlanta - CNN.com
So while there are still plenty of cities and town in America where the inner city is the place where the "bad zones" are and the suburbs are still nice safe Utopias, there are others that have experienced a flip-flop, where some of the inner city areas are safer than some of the suburbs.
the police have forced some of the gangs out of our city to the smaller towns outside of ABQ, some of those towns already have a high crime rate and have lots of history behind it, its not like your typical suburb,these are more like small towns in the metro area. Rent is also more affordable in those areas too.
Remember the good old days when the suburbs were a place you would move to to escape bad schools, crime, grime and urban density? Well those days are gone.
It seems like the suburbs have more urban density, less trees, more crime, poorer schools and more ethnic diversity than the inner cities.
Is there any old fashioned suburbs any more and where are they?
Gentrification has a lot to do with this. Poor being priced out of the city, particularly on the East Coast and the Mid-Atlantic states. When the poor move into the suburbs, and they can't afford the large properties that the middle class that are still there can afford, large apartment complexes are built, thus the density. In some cases, such as Detroit, Cleveland and Chicago, the suburbs already had high rises before the poor came in, and were very dense, as a reaction to what was going on inside of the city. Lakewood, for example, is probably denser than Cleveland in most areas.
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