America's Oldest Cities

One of the most important turning points in the social history of the United States occurred at the beginning of the 1940s. This is not about Pearl Harbor or the Second World War, but  rather about the economic, housing and transportation advances that have produced more affluence for more people than ever before in the world.

After being delayed by World War II, people began moving from the overcrowded cities to spacious (for that time) houses in the suburbs. They increasingly traveled to work and other destinations by car. These trends were at least two decades old at the time, but had been put on hold by the Great Depression. The prewar city (metropolitan area) was considerably denser, more oriented to mass transit and largely monocentric. By 2010, all major metropolitan areas had developed an urban form that was overwhelmingly suburban and polycentric, with the rise of edge cities and the even greater dispersion of edgeless cities. On average, areas outside the traditional downtowns (central business districts) accounted for 90 percent of metropolitan employment in 2000, ranging from a high of more than 95 percent in metropolitan areas like Phoenix, San Jose and Tampa-St. Petersburg to a low of 80 percent in New York.

Rating Metropolitan Areas by Pre-War Residential Development

Although dense urban cores persist in most metropolitan areas, their size and significance varies greatly. This can be illustrated by data from the 2007- 2011 American Community Survey, which makes it possible to rank metropolitan areas by their shares of pre-World War II residential development.

This article uses the percentage of dwelling units, both owner and renter occupied constructed before 1940 to rate the ages of the nation's 51 major metropolitan areas (those with more than 1 million population in 2010).  Overall, America’s major metropolitan areas are overwhelmingly postwar in their urban development, with approximately 14% of residences built before 1940. By comparison the 1940 populations of today's major metropolitan counties were just 35 percent of their 2010 populations.

Oldest Metropolitan Areas

The nation's oldest metropolitan areas, not surprisingly, are concentrated in the Northeast and the upper Midwest. Overall population growth has been modest in these regions compared especially to the South and the West.

The next five oldest metropolitan areas are Pittsburgh, at 27.2%, Milwaukee and 23.3%, Cleveland 22.7% Chicago and 21.3% and Philadelphia at 21.2%. Among these, the oldest historical core municipalities are Cleveland, at 51.9% and Pittsburgh at 50.3%. Pittsburgh has the highest suburban pre-1940 housing stock, at 23.5%, the third highest in the nation after Boston and Providence (Figure 1).

Youngest Metropolitan Areas

The nation's youngest major metropolitan areas are concentrated in the South and West, comprising 28 of the 51.

Tampa St. Petersburg, Houston, Riverside-San Bernardino, Raleigh and Dallas-Fort Worth round out the 10 youngest major metropolitan areas. Each of these has a pre-1940 housing stock between 2.7% and 3.1% (Figure 2).

Data for all metropolitan areas is provided in the table.

Notes:
Calculated from American Community Survey 2007-2011
HCM: Historical core municipality category: (1) Pre-War & Non-Suburban, (2) Pre-War & Suburban, (3) Post-War Suburban. There is one HCM per metropolitan area, except in in San Francisco-Oakland (San Francisco and Oakland) and Minneapolis-St. Paul (Minneapolis & St. Paul). Otherwise, the HCM is the first named municipality in the metropolitan area name, except in Virginia Beach-Norfolk, where it is Norfolk and Riverside-San Bernardino, where it is San Bernardino.

Not All Core Cities are the Same

This analysis indicates the substantial differences between not only the nation's metropolitan areas, but even more the differences between the core municipalities. For example, the core cities of Phoenix and Philadelphia have approximately the same population. Yet they could not be more different. Philadelphia has a long history, including a time as the nation's largest city around the period of the Revolutionary War. Phoenix, in contrast, is a product of the post-World War II boom. By 2010, Phoenix had become the nation's 6th largest municipality. Its 65,000 population in 1940 would rank it around 600th today. Figure 3 shows the average, maximum and minimum pre-war housing stock percentages by metropolitan area, historical core municipality and suburbs.

Categorizing Core Municipalities

In Suburbanized Core Cities, we classified the nation's core municipalities into three categories, based upon the extent of their pre-automobile development (This was described further in a paper co-authored with Peter Gordon of the University of California, Cities in Western Europe and America: Do Policy Differences Matter?).

The categories included "Pre-War Non-Suburban," which are core municipalities that were of high density in 1940 and have expanded their boundaries little since that time. Philadelphia, Baltimore and Providence are examples of these. The second category was "Post-War and Suburban," which includes municipalities that had a dense core of more than 100,000 residents in 1940, but contain large swaths of post-War suburban development (such as Los Angeles, Milwaukee and Atlanta). The third category was Post-War Suburban, which includes core cities that had little or no dense urban core in 1940 (such as Phoenix, Austin and San Jose).

Figure 4 illustrates the huge differentials in the pre-1940 housing stock between the metropolitan areas as classified by their historical core municipalities.

Commonalities

Even so, metropolitan areas are much more similar than their historical core municipalities. The bottom line is one different than one tends to hear in the urban-core-oriented press. In most of America the detached house predominates and virtually all development since 1940 has been suburban, both inside and outside the historical core municipalities.

Wendell Cox is a Visiting Professor, Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, Paris and the author of “War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life.”

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Photograph: Boston (by author)