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PATCHWORK PLACES: REGIONAL AND HISTORICAL VARIATIONS IN SUBURBAN POVERTY IN THE UNITED STATES by Christa Rachel Lee-Chuvala B.A., Taylor University (1999) M.U.P., Harvard University (2005) Submitted to the Department of Urban Studies and Planning in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Urban and Regional Studies MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY September 2015 © 2015 Massachusetts Institute of Technology. All rights reserved. The author hereby grants to MIT permission to reproduce and to distribute publicly paper and electronic copies of this thesis document in whole or in part in any medium now known or hereafter created. Signature of author: …………………………………………………………………………….. Department of Urban Studies and Planning August 26, 2015 Certified by: ………………………………………………………………………………………. Amy Glasmeier Professor of Economic Geography and Regional Planning, Thesis Supervisor Accepted by: …………………………………………………………………………………….. Lawrence Vale Ford Professor of Urban Chair, Ph.D. Program in Urban Studies and Planning 2 Patchwork Places: Regional and Historical Variations in Suburban Poverty in the United States by Christa Lee-Chuvala Submitted to the Department of Urban Studies and Planning on August 26, 2015 in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Urban and Regional Studies. Abstract The majority share of metropolitan poverty in the United States has shifted from cities to suburbs through the effects of employment losses and the movement of lower-income populations. However, varied histories of suburban development, class and racial/ethnic divisions within and among suburbs, and widening suburban inequality all suggest that understanding suburban poverty requires moving beyond a simplified view of low- income suburbs as a uniform set. Suburbs are embedded in regions and have different degrees of connection to their associated metropolitan areas. These differences hint that symptoms of economic disadvantage in suburbs today are historically related to local patterns of social and economic development, prompting the central question of this dissertation: How have location and regional development histories shaped the economic trajectories of suburbs that could today be considered poor? The nature of the research question lent itself to a mixed-methods analysis of past and present suburban development. In the first part of this study I developed a five-category typology for more than 2000 low-income suburban Census Places. Mapping each category showed identifiable regional patterns suggesting a potential connection between major historical development processes and present-day spatial arrangements of poor suburbs. In the second part, I used the typology to select five case studies. Guided by a theoretical framework employing geological language of flows, deposits, and waves, I analyzed these individual locations whose narratives are engrained in regional and national processes of place formation but mediated by the expansive development cycles of the 20th century. My research demonstrates that poor suburbs are multilayered, contingent processes with links back to the selection of their spatial locations and the functions established in their earliest years of settlement. I argue that bound up in the socioeconomic status of individual suburbs are spatio- historical roots of those conditions. The variables contributing to change in suburbs do not simply move through time, but through space-time among a network of interdependent places. The economic development history of a suburb interweaves with its spatial location nested in different geographical scales to create its defining characteristics at any point in time. Strategies to address suburban poverty must therefore be contextualized and interscalar as well as backward and forward looking. Thesis Supervisor: Amy Glasmeier Professor of Economic Geography and Regional Planning 3 TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ................................................................................................. 7 LIST OF TABLES ........................................................................................................... 8 LIST OF FIGURES.......................................................................................................... 9 1 INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................... 10 SUBURBAN POVERTY AND ITS FORMS IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY ............ 10 THE DYNAMICS OF SUBURBAN POVERTY: A QUESTION OF SPACE AND TIME .... 16 TYPING AND TRACKING: DISSERTATION RESEARCH METHODS ............................. 19 UNDERSTANDING THE REGION IN REGIONAL COLLABORATION ............................. 21 DISSERTATION STRUCTURE ............................................................................................. 23 2 SUBURBAN POVERTY THROUGH U.S. HISTORY ............................................. 29 TRACING SUBURBAN POVERTY ....................................................................................... 31 Pre-industrial Suburbs and Nineteenth Century Borderlands ................................. 32 Railroad and Streetcar Suburbs ............................................................................. 35 Production-Based Suburbs .................................................................................... 38 Suburban Persistence ............................................................................................ 44 Suburban Diversity ................................................................................................. 47 CONCLUSIONS ...................................................................................................................... 50 3 THE DYNAMICS OF SUBURBAN POVERTY ...................................................... 56 DEFINING SUBURBS ............................................................................................................. 56 SUBURBS AS FLOWS ........................................................................................................... 59 Places as Flows ..................................................................................................... 59 Deposits Forming the Structure and History of Places ........................................... 63 Waves of Development .......................................................................................... 65 Types of Flows ....................................................................................................... 67 Types of Deposits .................................................................................................. 76 Flows and Power .................................................................................................... 83 DEFINING POVERTY ............................................................................................................. 84 Poverty as a Bundle of Flows ................................................................................. 87 CONCLUSIONS ...................................................................................................................... 89 4 A TYPOLOGY OF LOW-INCOME SUBURBS ...................................................... 99 CREATING DATASETS OF SUBURBAN PLACES .......................................................... 100 4 Unit of Analysis .................................................................................................... 100 Empirically Identifying Low-Income and Poor Suburbs ........................................ 101 Data Selection ...................................................................................................... 104 DATA DESCRIPTION ........................................................................................................... 105 SELECTING VARIABLES .................................................................................................... 108 TYPOLOGY METHODS ....................................................................................................... 110 Principal Components Analysis (PCA) ................................................................. 111 Cluster Analysis ................................................................................................... 115 Sensitivity Analysis: Using a Dataset of Poor Suburbs ........................................ 120 5 REGIONAL DISTRIBUTION OF LOW-INCOME SUBURBS .............................. 127 SPATIAL CLUSTERS OF SUBURBAN TYPES ................................................................. 127 CASE STUDIES .................................................................................................................... 138 Case Study Selection ........................................................................................... 139 Data Collection and Analysis ............................................................................... 140 Case-based Theory Building on the Concept of Suburban Poverty ..................... 143 6 THE SUBURBAN POVERTY PATCHWORK ...................................................... 146 SPILLOVER SUBURBS ........................................................................................................ 146 A Fragile Equilibrium in College Park, Georgia .................................................... 150 DEINDUSTRIALIZING SUBURBS ....................................................................................... 153 “If Armco goes, this village goes back 20 years:”

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