ABSTRACT
The blossoming of the suburbs could have been complementary to growth in the central cities, during a period in which the population base of the US was increasing significantly, and its economy was the strongest in the world. There is no real reason to consider the city-suburb relationship a “zero-sum game” in which gains on one side necessarily entail losses on the other. But, for most American metropolitan areas, that was exactly the case between 1950 and 1990. A tenuous balance was maintained for a while, but, after 1970, the expansion of the suburbs ringing the city was fueled by an exodus from the center. This phenomenon became widely known as “hollowing out.” Cities, especially the great manufacturing centers, became regarded as artifacts of the Industrial Revolution whose time had passed. The exceptions were the ever-increasing, low-density, automobile-oriented urban areas typical of the South and West regions of the country. A divide was discerned between Sunbelt and Rustbelt.
