For more than 50 years, suburbs throughout the United States have prospered, while many of the large cities they surround have stagnated. Hence, many people perceive that cities and suburbs tend to grow at each other’s expense—and thus compete for residents and jobs. While there is some truth in this perception, it misses the fact that a metro area’s cities and suburbs also depend on each other for economic growth. Cities and their suburbs share a multitude of resources, such as airports, highways, mass transit, cultural amenities, entertainment venues, air quality, potential employers, and many more. These shared resources may be even more important than the differences between cities and suburbs in determining where people live and jobs locate. Rappaport examines the main forces that have influenced the growth of cities and suburbs over the past century. He finds that, while cities and suburbs do sometimes grow at each other’s expense, more often they grow or decline together. Thus, while it may make sense for cities and their suburbs to compete along some dimensions, there are also strong incentives for the two to cooperate to make their metro areas attractive and productive places to live and work.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Article provided by Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City in its journal Economic Review.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Edward L. Glaeser & Matthew E. Kahn & Jordan Rappaport, 2000.
"Why Do the Poor Live in Cities?,"
NBER Working Papers
7636, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
[Downloadable!] (restricted)
Other versions:
Edward L. Glaeser & Bruce Sacerdote & Jose A. Scheinkman, 1995.
"Crime and Social Interactions,"
NBER Working Papers
5026, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
[Downloadable!] (restricted)
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)
Did you know? You can include your works in the database easily by uploading them on the Munich Personal RePEc Archive (MPRA) if you do not have access to an institutional RePEc archive.