Lesson Plans in Urban Economics

Abstract

During the past two hundred years, America has changed from a rural to a predominantly urban society. Today, over ninety percent of all Americans live in metropolitan areas, including middle-sized towns and villages. At the time of the first national census in 1790, four million people were counted. By 1990 our population has reached 250 million. (Only once, during the Great Depression, has population growth slowed markedly.) Recently, the gain has averaged just less than one percent per year. At the time of that first census, only five percent of the population lived in urban areas of twenty-five hundred or more. However, by the 1920 census, America had become a nation in which the majority of the people lived in urban areas. People were now concentrated on relatively small portions of land. Indeed, even the sprawling suburbs are densely populated compared to rural districts. Today over sixty percent of the population lives in urban areas which are defined as cities of over fifty thousand with surrounding dependent counties. Thus, in recent years the balance of population growth in the United States has gradually shifted from the city to the suburbs. Various factors account for this change. Attracted by the educational and cultural opportunities of the city, the convenience and excitement of urban living, and above all, by the better-paying jobs that cities provide, migrants from rural areas and immigrants from overseas developed burgeoning urban areas. Inevitably, however, growth brought problems. Urban sprawl, gray areas, poverty and decay in the inner core, racial and ethnic tensions, ghettos, crime and danger in the streets, pollution, traffic jams and wearying commuting, the rat race, unand under employment, fragmented and financially strapped local govern ments, and a loss of feeling of community, are but a few of the ills that emanate from the growth of metropolitan areas. A metropolitan area contains the core of a city which spills its population beyond its boundaries into adjacent counties. The metropolitan area is readily distinguishable from the surrounding open country and enjoys close internal and social ties with the central city. Two-thirds of the nation's people, seventy percent of its industrial jobs, and one-half of its real wealth are found in these urban concentrations. As population flows outward from the core, the tendency to settle in discrete neighborhoods continues. On the surface the metropolis exhibits a common culture imposed by the mass-media and journey-to-work patterns. However, every metropolitan resident knows about the slums, the better districts of the city, exclusive suburbs, eye-sore industrial sections, and the picture book communities. A little further investigation reveals that these communities owe their development in great part to land-use regulations, levels of income and education, ethnic and racial origin, and occupation. In other words, groups with similar characteristics and values tend to congregate in one neighbor hood. They also tend to put considerable distance between themselves and others?especially when there are great differ ences.