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Title: The Metropolitan Fringe: Suburbanization in the United States Before World War II

Citation Type: Dissertation/Thesis

Publication Year: 1998

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Abstract: The growth of American suburbs since World War II has been well documented by scholars and the popular press, but suburban growth began well before the middle of the twentieth century. Early suburban growth has received less attention than more recent developments in part because of the lack of standard metropolitan classifications. Since 1950 the Census Bureau has published a great deal of metropolitan data using comparable metropolitan classifications, but consistent measures were not available in earlier decades. In this dissertation I devise standard metropolitan definitions for census years before World War II and use these definitions to examine changes in the early metropolitan population of the United States. After a review of Census Bureau methodology for defining metropolitan boundaries, I describe the rules I used to establish a metropolitan definition comparable with the measure that the census Bureau has used since 1950, as well as a more detailed metropolitan definition more appropriate for examining early metropolitan growth with historical census data. The primary data source used in this study is the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series, which consists of a series of samples from federal censuses spanning the period from 1850 to 1990. With this data I examine changes in the residential occupational status of cities and suburbs. In the nineteenth century the areas of highest status were in cities. The status decline of central cities relative to the suburbs was a slow process, particularly for small metropolitan areas. As late as 1940 central cities were of higher status than the metropolitan fringe in the majority of metropolitan areas. In the early decades of the twentieth century, only in the oldest and largest metropolitan areas were the urban cores of lower status than outlying areas. Much of this status redistribution, however, was occurring within the political boundaries of central cities. In addition, although those with high-status occupations were migrating to suburbs, cities of all sizes continued to attract high-status in-migrants in the years preceding World War II. Also, regardless of residential occupational status, homeownership was more common in suburbs than in central cities.

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Authors: Gardner, Todd

Institution: University of Minnesota

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Degree: Doctor of Philosophy

Publisher Location: Minneapolis, MN

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Data Collections: IPUMS USA

Topics: Housing and Segregation, Labor Force and Occupational Structure, Migration and Immigration

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