page_title: Suburbanization
section_title: United States
hierarchical_section_title: Suburbanization / United States
caption_attribution_description: English: View of housing development near John Tierney farm, Sixty Second Street and Penn Avenue South, Richfield, Minnesota.
context_page_description: Suburbanization is a population shift from central urban areas into suburbs, resulting in the formation of urban sprawl. As a consequence of the movement of households and businesses out of the city centers, low-density, peripheral urban areas grow.
  Many residents of metropolitan regions work within the central urban area, and choose to live in satellite communities called suburbs and commute to work via automobile or mass transit. Others have taken advantage of technological advances to work from their homes. These processes often occur in more economically developed countries, especially in the United States, which is believed to be the first country in which the majority of the population lives in the suburbs, rather than in the cities or in rural areas. Proponents of containing urban sprawl argue that sprawl leads to urban decay and a concentration of lower income residents in the inner city.
context_section_description: In the United States, suburbanization began to occur in mass amounts after World War II, when soldiers returned home from war and wanted to live in houses outside of the city. During this time America had a prosperous postwar economy, there was more leisure time available and an increased priority in creating a family unit. Throughout the years, the desire to separate work life and home life has increased, causing an increase in suburban populations. Suburbs are built for particular groups of people and around certain industries like restaurants, shopping, and entertainment which allows suburban residents to travel less and interact more in the suburban area. Suburbs in the United States have also evolved by increases in technology, which allows residents to work from home rather than commute.
  Recent developments in communication technology, such as the spread of broadband services, the growth of e-mail and the advent of practical home video conferencing, have enabled more people to work from home rather than commuting. Although this can occur either in the city or in the suburbs, the effect is generally decentralizing, which works against the largest advantage of the centre city, which is easier access to information and supplies due to centralization.  Similarly, the rise of efficient package expresses delivery systems, such as FedEx and UPS, which take advantage of computerization and the availability of an efficient air transportation system, also eliminates some of the advantages that were once to be had from having a business located in the city. Industrial, warehousing, and factory land uses have also moved to suburban areas. Cheap telecommunications remove the need for company headquarters to be within quick courier distance of the warehouses and ports. Urban areas suffer from traffic congestion, which creates costs in extra driver costs for the company which can be reduced if they were in a suburban area near a highway. As with residential, lower property taxes and low land prices encourage selling industrial land for profitable brownfield redevelopment.
  Suburban areas also offer more land to use as a buffer between industrial and residential and retail space to avoid NIMBY sentiments and gentrification pressure from the local community when residential and retail is adjacent to industrial space in an urban area. Suburban municipalities can offer tax breaks, specialized zoning, and regulatory incentives to attract industrial land users to their area, such as City of Industry, California. The overall effect of these developments is that businesses as well, and not just individuals, now see an advantage to locating in the suburbs, where the cost of buying land, renting space, and running their operations, is cheaper than in the city. This continuing dispersal from a single city center has led to other recent phenomena in American suburbs, the advent of edge cities and exurbs, arising out of clusters of office buildings built in suburban commercial centers on shopping malls and higher density developments.  With more and more jobs for suburbanites being located in these areas rather than in the main city core that the suburbs grew out of, traffic patterns, which for decades centered on people commuting into the center city to work in the morning and then returning home in the evening, have become more complex, with the volume of intra-suburban traffic increasing tremendously. By 2000, half of the US population lived in suburban areas.
caption: View of a housing development near a farm in Richfield, Minnesota, a suburb of Minneapolis, 1954.
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