Suburbanization in the US largely occurred to solve various urban problems; however, it has also caused many issues, such as the decline of central urban areas, the waste of land resources, and the deterioration of ecological environments in the suburbs. Therefore, the study of suburbanization has received considerable attention in academia. Scholars have argued that suburbanization leads to ec...

The standard model used in studies of urban decentralization is the monocentric model with its implication of an exponential density gradient. Exponential density gradients have been estimated for the cities of many countries. The exponential, however, does not easily facilitate the study of jurisdictional e ects on suburbanization. This led Edwin Mills in 1991 to propose a new function for mea...

In the standard urban model, employment is concentrated in the Central Business District (CBD) and the locational choice of households is modeled solely on access to the employment center. Now, technology has facilitated the emergence of new office environments where work is done at unconventional locations that were earlier in the CBD. While the urban density function is not really new, in thi...

In the United States, 69 percent of the population lived in what the government statisticians call metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) in 1970, 75 percent in 1980 and 77 percent in 1990. But while a greater proportion of the population is living in urban areas broadly defined, a smaller proportion is living and working in the central cities. In the 1950s, 57 percent of MSA residents and 70 pe...

In the mountains north of New York City a number of cities and towns are being absorbed by the suburbs of one of the largest cities on the planet. The existence of independent communities has created some confusion in terms of classification in the past. Since 1970, Orange County has variously been classified as part of the Newburgh-Middletown Metropolitan Area, the Poughkeepsie-Newburgh Metrop...

We present theory and evidence highlighting the role of natural amenities in neighborhood dynamics, suburbanization, and variation across cities in the persistence of the spatial distribution of income. Our model generates three predictions that we confirm using a novel database of consistent-boundary neighborhoods in U.S. metropolitan areas, 1880–2010, and spatial data for natural features suc...

Central cities historically have been viewed as “ports of entry” welcoming new immigrants to the United States. Beginning in the 1970s, new immigrants began to settle in areas outside traditional ports of entry as economic opportunities moved to the suburbs and new suburban immigrant enclaves emerged. By the end of the 20th century, foreign-born suburbanites outnumbered foreign-born central cit...

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: The ability to place dollar estimates on the values and benefits provided by parks is becoming increasingly vital to public park providers as competition for local, state, and national resources continues to intensify. One way of calculating at least a portion of this value is the hedonic pricing method, a technique that enables the estimation of the impact of one or more par...

Analysis of hydrologic, geomorphic, and suburbanization data from a small instrumented drainage basin near Iowa City, Iowa, indicates that channel networks are radically altered when suburban development overtakes a drainage basin. Changes in channel networks are such that the network becomes much more efficient in collecting water quickly, so that lag time and kurtosis of storm hydrographs are...