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460 CHAPTER 14 Population and Urbanization

TABLE 14.3 The Shrinking and the Fastest-Growing Cities

The Shrinking Cities The Fastest-Growing Cities

1. –9.3% New Orleans, LA 1. +44.7% Raleigh, NC
2. –6.7% Youngstown, OH 2. +42.8% Las Vegas, NV
3. –3.7% Cleveland, OH 3. +42.5% Provo, UT
4. –3.7% Detroit, MI 4. +42.3% Cape Coral–Ft. Myers, FL
5. –3.3% Flint, MI 5. +42.0% Greeley, CO
6. –3.1% Buffalo–Niagara Falls, NY 6. +41.2% Austin, TX
7. –3.0% Pittsburgh, PA 7. +39.6% Myrtle Beach, SC
8. –1.9% Charleston, WV 8. +39.1% McAllen, TX
9. –1.4% Toledo, OH 9. +36.4% Kennewick, WA
10. –0.5% Utica-Rome, NY 10. +35.7% Fayetteville, AR
Note: Population change from 2000 to 2011, the latest years available.
Source: By the author. Based on Statistical Abstract of the United States 2013:Table 20.

cities, six are in the Northeast, two in the South, and two in the Midwest. New Orleans,
a special case, has not yet recovered from Hurricane Katrina.
Between Cities. As Americans migrate, edge cities have appeared—clusters of
buildings and services near the intersections of major highways. These areas of shop-
ping malls, hotels, office parks, and apartment complexes are not cities in the tradi-
tional sense. Rather than being political units with their own mayors or city managers,
they overlap political boundaries and include parts of several cities or towns. Yet, edge
cities—such as Tysons Corner near Washington, D.C., and those clustering along the
LBJ Freeway near Dallas, Texas—provide a sense of place to those who live or work
there.
Within the City. Another U.S. urban pattern is gentrification, the movement of
Read on MySocLab
Document: Death of a middle-class people into rundown areas of a city. What draws the middle class are the
Neighborhood low prices for large houses that, although deteriorated, can be restored. With gentrifica-
tion comes an improvement in the appearance of the neighborhood—freshly painted
buildings, well-groomed lawns, and the absence of boarded-up windows.
As a neighborhood improves, property prices go up, driving many of the poor out
of their neighborhood. This creates tensions between the poorer residents and the
newcomers (Anderson 1990, 2006). These social class tensions are often tinged with
racial–ethnic antagonisms, as the residents usually are minorities while the middle-
class newcomers usually are whites. Beneath this surface, though, is a more positive
factor. Sociologists have found that gentrification also draws middle-class minorities
to the neighborhood and improves their incomes (McKinnish et al. 2008).
Among the exceptions to the usual pattern of the gentrifiers being whites and the
earlier residents being minorities is Harlem in New York City. We examine this change in
edge city a large clustering of ser-
vice facilities and residential areas the Down-to-Earth Sociology box on the next page.
near highway intersections that From City to Suburb and Back.
provides a sense of place to people The term suburbanization refers to people moving
who live, shop, and work there from cities to suburbs, the communities located just outside a city. Suburbanization is
not new. The Mayan city of Caracol (in what is now Belize) had suburbs, perhaps even
gentrification middle-class peo- with specialized subcenters, the equivalent of today’s strip malls (Wilford 2000). The
ple moving into a rundown area of
a city, displacing the poor as they extent to which people have left U.S. cities in search of their dreams is remarkable. In
buy and restore homes 1920, only about 15 percent of Americans lived in the suburbs, while today, over half of
all Americans live in them (Palen 2012).
suburbanization the migration of
people from the city to the suburbs After the racial integration of U.S. schools in the 1950s and 1960s, suburbanization
sped up as whites fled the city. A few years later, around 1970, minorities also began
suburb a community adjacent to to move to the suburbs. This, too, has been extensive, and in some suburbs, minorities
a city
have become the majority. Whites are now returning to the city. In a remarkable switch,