The Antiplanner’s Library: Boomburbs

Quick: Rank the following cities from largest to smallest populations: Cleveland, OH; Kansas City, MO; Mesa, AZ; and Oakland, CA. Which did you list first? Many people will be surprised to learn that Mesa is not only bigger than the other three cities on this list, but bigger than Miami, Minneapolis, Cincinnati, and Pittsburgh.

And that, in essence, is the message of this book by urban planners Robert Lang and Jennifer LeFurgy: some fast-growing suburbs are now bigger than many central cities. But really, when you think about the fact that the suburbs have been growing faster than central cities for nearly 60 years, is that so surprising?

The authors have narrowly defined boomburbs to include only incorporated cities of 100,000 people or more that have grown by more than 10 percent per decade in each of the last three decades. Fast-growing unincorporated areas (which Lang calls “reluctant cities”) need not apply. Nor should cities that grew by 200 percent in the last decade but less than 10 percent in the decade before (45), which the authors say would be a zoomburb but not a boomburb.

Lang and LeFurgy are proud to offer “an objective, non-polarizing view” of boomburbs, but they betray their biases in several places.

• Big houses on small lots are “McMansions,” meaning that they are “rather faux” (115) (In fact, McMansions are a predictable result of high land prices.)
• Frank Lloyd Wright, they think (without any evidence) would be upset that the suburbs have “swallowed his beloved Taliesin West” (37).
• The authors are all giddy that the mayors of all but one boomburb would like to have light rail in their city (18, 150).
• They also seem to look favorably on the fact that many boomburbs are growing denser and some are “growing up, not out.”

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Despite the narrowness of their definition, it isn’t clear that they have really defined anything special. The authors admit that one of the boomburbs, Salem, Oregon, is an “outlier” because it is much older than any of the others, is the only capital city, and unlike most of the rest had a substantial population before 1940.

But, other than growing fast, how much do the other boomburbs have in common? Some have median incomes well above the national average; some well below. Some have average family sizes well above the national average; some well below. Some “New Brooklyns” have very high shares of immigrants; others are well below the national average.

The authors say they took several years to write the book. Yet most of the book is merely a dry presentation of census data, and the rest seems to be based on surfing expeditions to city web sites and interviews with a few mayors. While that’s a good start, the Antiplanner is left unsatisfied. What is missing is an analysis of the various policies boomburbs and their neighbors may adopt.

The authors hardly mention, for example, subsidies such as tax-increment financing and regulation such as urban-growth boundaries. Yet such subsidies and regulation have had a profound effect on many cities; the growth of at least some boomburbs, for example, was stimulated by regulation that stifled growth in other nearby cities. The authors do note significant differences between boomburbs of the South with those of the West, but don’t try to assess whether those differences are caused by variations in state annexation laws, local tax structures, or other policies.

Demography and policy analysis are two different fields and it may be too much for the policy analyst to expect the demographer to do both. But I can’t help feeling that Lang and his colleagues think that naming something explains it. Edgeless cities, reluctant cities, the reluctant metropolis, and zoomburbs are just of few of the terms that have been either coined by Lang or used in this book. Just having or using these terms is pretty meaningless if you don’t know the context: what forces created these cities, and are the results good or bad for the residents?