Based on surveys asking people whether they thought the lived in urban, suburban, or rural ares, Trulia economist Jed Kolko has defined the borderline between urban and suburban as 2,213 households per square mile (slightly less than 3.5 per acre), while the line between suburban and rural is 102 households per square mile (about 1 household every 6.3 acres). Based on this, Kolko concluded that less than half of many cities are truly urban.
Specifically, as shown in an article in Slate, 100 percent of New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Detroit, Washington, Boston, and Baltimore are urban. But less than half of Phoenix, San Antonio, Indianapolis, Columbus, Fort Worth, Charlotte, El Paso, Louisville, and Tucson are more than 70 percent suburban. Only 3 percent of Seattle, but 43 percent of Portland, are suburban.
Kolko isn’t the first to define urban and suburban using demographic rather than political criteria. The Antiplanner’s faithful ally, Wendell Cox, did a similar analysis last year. Looking at urban areas rather than cities, he defined areas as pre-auto, early auto, late auto, and exurban. The pre-auto areas included all areas with a median home construction date before 1945, areas with more than 7,500 people per square mile, and areas where non-auto commute shares exceeded 20 percent. The early auto areas were those remaining areas with median home construction dates before 1979; late auto had median home construction dates after 1980; and exurban was all land in the metropolitan statistical area but outside the urbanized area.
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For example, the exurban share of major metropolitan areas ranges from under 2 percent to more than 50 percent; these percentages are arbitrary based on how big the counties in each state happen to be. So I feel more comfortable using percentages based solely on the urbanized areas, which are economic entities rather than political ones.
By this definitions, 56 percent of the New York urban area, 39 percent of Boston, and close to 30 percent of Chicago, Philadelphia, and San Francisco are pre-auto. Not surprisingly, many Sunbelt urban areas have zero or nearly zero pre-auto areas. Overall, 83 percent of the nation’s 52 largest urbanized areas are post-auto, which probably corresponds to Kolko’s definition of suburban.
The significance of both Kolko’s and Cox’s numbers is simple. The greatest share of most metropolitan areas and of many cities is designed for people who drive. It is futile to try to redesign those areas to look like the portions that were designed for people who walk or ride transit, both because there is too much to rebuild and because it doesn’t really change people’s travel habits anyway.
Not all of them, at least not over a reasonable time frame. But there are plenty of areas where the main impediment is government mandated auto oriented development patterns. That an exurb forty miles from the original urban core is not walkable is no excuse to mandate parking one mile from the core. Or to dedicate an overwhelming majority of public land to auto transit and storage. Or to restrict development because new residents or businesses might increase competition for ‘free’ parking. Or to cut funding for transit in dense areas because by some accounting the residents of that exurb forty miles out can travel a mile by car cheaper than it would be to serve them with transit. Or to not accommodate bikes near in because the residents of that exurb don’t want to bike forty miles each way to get downtown.