ABSTRACT
For over 100 years, and particularly in the years since World War II, Americans have been suburbanizing. In 1910, just 7 percent of all Americans, or roughly 6.5 million people, lived in suburbs. By 2000, about 50 percent of Americans were suburbanites, and the suburban population had reached nearly 141 million (Hobbs and Stoops 2002). Today, not only do most Americans live in suburbia, they also rely on suburban retail establishments and recreational and cultural venues (Teaford 1990, Bradley 2001, Palen 2005). Nationally, more commuters head to suburban jobs than urban ones (Bowman 2008); in the country’s 100 largest metropolitan areas, there are 1.8 times as many jobs in the suburbs as in the central cities (Bajaj, Kingsley, and Pettit 2005).
