Post-Suburbia: Government and Politics in the Edge Cities

by Jon C. Teaford

The years shortly after the end of World War II saw the beginnings of a new kind of community that blended the characteristics of suburbia with those of the central city. Over the decades these "edge cities" have become permanent features of the regional landscape. In Post-Suburbia, historian Jon Teaford charts the emergence of these areas and explains why and how they developed. Teaford begins by describing the adaptation of traditional units of government to the ideals and demands of the changing world along the metropolitan fringe. He shows how these post-suburban municipalities had to fashion a government that perpetuated the ideals of small-scale village life and yet, at the same time, provided for a large tax base to pay for needed municipal services. To tell this story, Teaford follows six counties that were among the pioneers of the post-suburban Suffolk and Nassau counties in New York; Oakland County, Michigan; DuPage County, Illinois; Saint Louis County, Missouri; and Orange County, California. Although county governments took on new coordinating functions, Teaford concludes, the many municipalities along the metropolitan fringe continued to retain their independence and authority. Underlying this balance of power was the persistent adherence to the long-standing suburban tradition of grassroots rule. Despite changes in the economy and appearance of the metropolitan fringe, this ideology retained its appeal among post-suburban voters, who rebelled at the prospect of thorough centralization of authority. Thus the fringe may have appeared post-suburban, but traditional suburban attitudes continued to influence the course of governmental development.

224 pages, Hardcover

First published November 12, 1996

About the author

Jon C. Teaford is Professor Emeritus in the department of history at Purdue University.

Reviews

[Thomas Ray]

Library-of-Congress JS411 T43 1997 Memorial Library

other books by Jon Teaford:
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[Frank Stein · Rating 4 out of 5]

To my mind, Jon Teaford is the greatest single historian on American local government and politics. From examining the surprising policy successes of Gilded Age cities to looking at the creative ways mayors responded to the post-World War II urban crisis, he is one of the few historians that is willing to look at many cities at once and come up with innovative conclusions, as opposed to delving into a single city and assuming that a "case study" will somehow prove illustrative of the whole.

In this book, Teaford takes on the underappreciated history of "post-surburbia," also known as technoburbs or, more commonly, edge cities. By looking at the history of Nassau and Suffolk Counties on Long Island in New York, Oakland County North of Detroit, DuPage County outside of Chicago, Saint Louis County in Missouri, and Orange County in California, he shows how these areas went from small bedroom communities to some of the largest local governments, with four of those five surpassing a million people by 1990, including Orange County at 2.4 million, and with DuPage and Saint Louis close to a million. But more than residential enclaves, as early as 1960 most of these counties had the majority of residents reporting working inside the county (the exceptions were the smaller DuPage and Saint Louis). By the 1990s jobs were growing much faster than residences, and some, like Nassau, actually had more commuters going in than out. They managed to maintain their fundamental suburban character while also becoming proper cities in all but name.

The most fundamental part of the story here is the battle between local municipal governments, often mere "villages" or "towns" and the county. Throughout this period the counties grew in power, but their regular attempts to either displace the local governments or merge them into county or even metro-wide agencies failed utterly. Counties in this period did manage to change their governing structure. As early as 1936 Nassau County chair, and Republican power broker, Russell Sprague, with the help of noted municipal expert Thomas Reed, helped create a new county executive with power to present a budget and a veto, full charge of welfare, health and asessment an the creation of a system of county judges, as well as a new master county planning commission with power to veto changes near a border. In the coming years other counties would adopt many of these changes. After several battles with Governor Harriman, Suffolk County in 1958 was able to garner an elected chief executive, centralized public health in the county, allow the creation of a countywide police force and give the county approval over zoning changes within 500 feet of a boundary. Over the years counties assumed new powers in areas such as back-office police functions (such as laboratories), arterial roads, sewer lines, solid waste disposal, and so forth, but generally they left most police, zoning, and other functions to the local governments. In the 1970s and onwards, however, truly empire-building county executives, such Lawrence Roos and Gene McNary in Saint Louis and Jack Knuepfer in DuPage, were repeatedly shot down as they attempted to assume most power inside their offices. By the 1980s a new anti-growth movement was often eager to challenge both the counties and the proliferation of shopping malls and office blocks, due especially to increased concerns about traffic.

Too much of the book is taken up with debates on localism versus centralization in every era and in every place, where the same tropes get trotted out: for the centralizers, efficiency and fear of "fragmentation," as well as the claim that without county power metropolitan centralization will happen; for the localists, the love of tradition and personal government and fear of big bureaucracy and taxes. But this is a look at a surprisingly important but neglected topic, one that is unfortunately now three decades old but the best out there.