What Happened to the American Boomtown?
What Happened to the American Boomtown?
Dec. 6, 2017 By Emily Badger Read More: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/06/u...-boomtown.html Quote:
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Austin?
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US population as a whole isn't growing as fast as it used to, so one would naturally expect that its cities also wouldn't be growing as fast as they used to.
Also, people don't move as much as they used to, thanks partly to an aging population. |
Austin was my first thought, as well. If you look at a two-decade-plus period, there aren't many cities that are experiencing the same explosive growth that Chicago did from 1850 to 1870.
For example, here's Austin since 1990: 1990 - 465,622 2000 - 656,562 2010 - 790,390 Est. 2016 - 947,890 Some of the fastest current growth (percentage-wise) is taking place in suburbs. Three examples: Frisco, TX (suburb of Dallas) 1990 - 6,138 2000 - 33,714 2010 - 116,989 Est. 2016 - 163,656 McKinney City, TX (suburb of Dallas) 1990 - 21,283 2000 - 54,369 2010 - 131,117 Est. 2016 - 172,298 Meridian, Idaho (suburb of Boise) 1990 - 9,596 2000 - 34,919 2010 - 75,092 Est. 2016 - 95,623 |
All that matters is explosive growth that occurred before 1940.
Cities that did that became centers whose built environment will never be replicated. Explosive growth now? Ho hum, easily forgettable places. |
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I have never heard of Meridian until now. It makes sense that Boise, like other western cities, would have a boomburb, but with Idaho's smaller population, and Nampa being the long boomburb in that area, I figured that was it. |
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Aaron (Glowrock) |
That's like saying with the exception of most of her facial features, that certain supermodel is ugly. And yes, geography does play a role, which is why Miami is in no way forgettable. Neither is Vegas. At this point, most cities, even those more established in the north and east, have some boring suburban sprawl on the outer edges.
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We're dealing with an original article that used municipal populations as its main data point, and even that counted annexations as growth. Why is this even worthy of reading?
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The Strip is a theme park, and Miami Beach is a pre-war city. Most of these cities' metropolitan areas are undistinguished sprawl. |
Right, so I'd rather spend all my days in Buffalo or Baltimore because they have older bones. Older and more dense doesn't necessarily equal better, granted the city up the road is like a giant suburb with skyscrapers.
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America has very few world class cities for a wealthy country of 320 million people, and that's why most of them are getting super expensive. |
World class is subjective.
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In addition to national population growth, consider all the various barriers in place today that make building homes and infrastructure excruciatingly slow and expensive: zoning laws, NIMBYs and their lawyers, and environmental concerns were non-factors 100-150 years ago. (Case in point, the land for the Empire State Building was purchased in August 1929 and the tower opened in May 1931). Could you imagine Chicago growing as quickly as it did if NIMBYs wielded the power they do today? A couple other thoughts: 1) For the most part, mass transit was for-profit and projects were privately funded, which made things move much faster. 2) Today's American boomtowns (Houston, Atlanta, Austin, etc.) are mostly growing out in the form of sprawl. Their cores aren't dramatically changing in the way that Chicago's did. For example, Phoenix has grown by leaps and bounds, but that growth isn't reflective in its skyline or its core. So yea, the sunbelt is booming, but it's harder to "see". |
dallas, et al already boomed once or even twice before the current one, chicago was only 40 years old or whatever in 1890, structurally even younger thanks to the fire. so of course the cores arent going to change as rapidly as chicago. dallas had a real, built out downtown by world war II 70 years ago...
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per the charts clearly los angeles and houston are booming. the metros of all the cities are another story -- not sure how they apply being the topic is boomtowns.
cities like austin and its northern twin columbus, for example, are clearly booming as well. maybe not as much as during some eras, but they have gone from sleepy in the 1980s to a-boomin on the more recent upswing. even if you just look around in-state, sometimes it seems like half of ohio is moving to columbus, has moved there or is talking about it. :shrug: |
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Most people outside of ssp simply do not care if their city is classified by outsiders as a world city. |
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