How Diverse Are US Suburbs?

Abstract

American suburbs are popularly perceived as demographically homogeneous compared with central cities. Social scientists have long challenged this perception; indeed, some cite recent evidence on suburban diversity to assert that the suburb—city distinction has become irrelevant. Here, several conceptual, methodological and theoretical improvements are introduced to improve the adjudication of claims about the extent and nature of suburban diversity. The analysis examines patterns and potential antecedents of population composition at both the suburban ring and place levels for 65 large US metropolitan areas. It is shown that rings and their constituent places are much more diverse than traditionally imagined. However, important differences still exist between suburbs and central cities on specific dimensions. It is also found that suburban diversity varies with metropolitan population size and suburban size, density, dominance and distance from the central city.

Neighborhood Change in Metropolitan America, 1990 to 2010

“…Recent studies have identified that the dichotomy of black, poor cities and white wealthy suburbs has been, slowly, and now more rapidly, and steadily, changing. Many scholars have found that suburbs are becoming more diversified in certain dimensions (Hall and Lee, 2010;Lang, 2003b;.…”

“…Bigger metropolitan areas have more internal differentiation and are traditionally much more diverse than smaller ones (Pendall and Carruthers, 2003). Certain dimensions of suburban diversity are found to increase with the size of their constituent metropolitan areas (Hall and Lee, 2009). Thus, larger metropolitan areas are expected to have greater levels of suburban diversity.…”

“…A few have probed the levels of diversity quantitatively in suburbs or metropolitan areas (Hall and Lee, 2009;Lee et al, 2012), but these studies are mainly focused on several aspects of population composition, such as income, education, and/or race, rather than neighborhood composition. Particularly, the analyses are usually based on simple city-suburban categories without considering the changes of diversity within suburbs.…”

“…Older metro areas are more likely to have mixed population and housing types (Pendall and Carruthers, 2003). As a metropolitan area matures, suburbia is expected to become more diverse (Hall and Lee, 2009 Metropolitan size (Ln(Metro_Pop)) reflects the population composition of metropolitan areas (Boustan, 2007). Bigger metropolitan areas have more internal differentiation and are traditionally much more diverse than smaller ones (Pendall and Carruthers, 2003).…”

“…Traditional metropolitan models assume that suburbs and central cities are simple dichotomous categories (Farley, 1964;Hall and Lee, 2009;. In these models, suburbs are essentially homogenous, dominated by white middle-class homeowners with children.…”