The future of the suburbs (II)

The American Prairie project is planned on the outskirts of Cedar Rapids,
near Kirkwood Community College (source: cedar-rapids.org)

I think one thing we will see is that successful suburbs of the future will get that way by becoming more urban in their orientation, not less. More density, more mixed use, more diversity of housing stock, a reimagining of the auto-oriented, shopping-center-and-big-box model that’s dominated for decades.--Pete Saunders (2022)

What happens to suburban development in a world of economic uncertainty, environmental concern, and exotic contagion? However you define suburb, the area and population and importance of American suburbs surged between 1950 and 2000, and they now represent a great deal of American capital. Their resources alone mean they have the wherewithal to respond in interesting ways to our era's stressors, but the truthful bottom line is: We don't know. But stay tuned!

I first looked at this topic six years ago, in the wake of a widely-publicized return to the city, particularly among the young and/or affluent. Businesses, too, were relocating their headquarters to central cities in search of benefits from clusters of talent (Florida 2008). Energy was cheap, but economic inequality was widening and the future of careers was anxiety-producing. (But then, when is it not?). I surmised that suburbs that were located or had been primarily designed such that they were not entirely auto-dependent would prove resilient; "the future is murkier," I said then, "for edge cities, new traditional suburbs, and whatever the hell Bedford Park is."

Village of Bedford Park (pop. 580) near Chicago
(Source: Wikimedia commons)

Since I wrote that, the return to the city appears to have ebbed; it's early to judge, but it's certainly not proceeding at the pace of 2005-2015 (Frey 2022, Cortright 2020).  Meanwhile, American society has been shaken by a series of earthquakes. The governmental tantrum that was the Trump administration had impacts on immigration, social trust, and local-state-national relations. The police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis continues to ripple through the practice of public safety in complicated ways. The sudden arrival and slow receding of the COVID-19 pandemic led to a surge in remote work and, however unfairly, demonized population density (cf. Badger 2021). Dislocations created by the shutdown and restart have created even greater uncertainty around the economy than before. Burgeoning changes to the global climate have proliferated heat waves, droughts, floods, and other such disasters. "I've been thinking a lot about doom," a friend told me at a gathering last weekend.

Urban and suburban areas are both relevant, whatever's coming next. A Brookings Institution analysis of 2020 U.S. Census data found the largest metropolitan areas--56 metros have populations of more than a million--grew faster in the 2010s than their smaller relatives, while nonmetropolitan parts of the country shrank (Frey 2022, cf. also Brasuell 2022). In a decade of historically low national population growth, the largest metros actually grew nearly as much as they had in the previous decade (9.6% vs. 10.7%) [Frey's Fig. 1]. Individual experience varied, though: metros in the south and west mostly grew a lot faster, with those in the northeastern quarter growing more slowly [Frey's Fig. 2].

Cedar Rapids MSA grew 5.3 percent between 2010 and 2020,
below the nationwide average for small metros (7.1)
(Google Maps screen capture)

Within the metros, central cities grew faster than they had, while suburban growth slowed relative to the 2000-10 decade [Frey's Fig. 3]; "However," cautions Frey, "it should be kept in mind that the bulk of city growth occurred in the first part of the decade. In most metro areas, suburban growth began to re-emerge to some extent as the economy picked up in the latter half of the 2010s."  None of this leads "to a straightforward forecast about their future prospects," he concludes.

Lisbon, Iowa, 19 miles east of Cedar Rapids,
grew 13.4 percent between 2010 and 2020
(Wikimedia commons)

The pandemic has tilted the metropolitan scales back to the suburbs, according to crack urbanist writer Addison Del Maestro (2022). This is particularly pronounced in coastal cities, where high housing costs are worth less if you're not commuting anyway. But, as Del Maestro points out, "The demand for something like urban living is real." New suburban developments are often mixed-use and denser than what had been typical a few decades ago, and the suburbs are radically more diverse. Over 60 percent of immigrants live in suburbs, for instance (Del Maestro cites Bochsma and National Journal 2014). The result is "diverse and evolving places, still distinct from the big city but just as distinct from their own 'first drafts' a few decades ago." He cites "vibrant dining scenes... nightclubs, taller buildings, and walkable developments" in New Jersey, Virginia, Maryland, and Georgia. The Chinese cultural center of Greater Washington, D.C. used to be around 6th and H Streets NW; now it's Rockville, Maryland.

And there's more:

• Bensley, a first-ring suburb of Richmond, Virginia, is adding an "agri-hood," mixing affordable housing and urban agriculture (Gordon 2022)
• Berkeley Heights, New Jersey, an hour's drive from New York, is adding residences and amenity services to a 1980s office park, while 40 miles to the south Holmdel has seen the conversion of Bell Labs' campus into a "metroburb" (Berg 2021)
• Columbia, Maryland has moved its downtown towards smaller establishments and more residences, with improved transit service, over the last ten years

Of course, it's not hard to imagine how retrofits can fail. (For a satirical example that strikes uncomfortably close to the truth, see Oleary 2022.) Cedar Rapids has done some great things in its core, but the suburban areas are stuck in the 1980s and 90s. Ten years ago, the city opened its coffers to help turn Westdale Mall into... a bunch of strip malls. Development around the Highway 100 extension may some day produce walkable  multi-functional neighborhoods, but so far its biggest accomplishment has been... a bunch of strip malls. The casual approach to suburban development taken by Cedar Rapids, and indeed pretty much all of Iowa, is not going to be viable in the future. 

Fleet Farm on Cross Pointe Blvd NE, Black Friday 2021

Even where suburban retrofit is seriously attempted, Daniel Herriges at Strong Towns notes that a lot of such projects "get the density and the height, without much action at all. Some of the form, none of the function" (Herriges 2020). They're building what is perceived to be fashionable right now, but neither the developers nor the municipalities "actually understand or care about the purpose."

"What would you even walk to?" Herriges asks about a Florida development he profiles. Outside the attractive-looking apartments, auto-dependent suburbia persists, as much as it ever did. "The main street onto which the Harrison [apartment complex] empties is a six-lane divided stroad.... The adjoining businesses are all entirely auto-oriented, many with drive-thrus." Residents don't get the community/ health/lifestyle benefits of true urbanism, municipalities don't get the financial benefits, and the planet doesn't get the environmental benefits if everybody still has to drive.

I grew up in a western suburb of Chicago. Significantly, it had been its own town until the metro area grew to engulf it. There was (and still is) commuter train service to downtown Chicago, and I could walk less than a mile to school all the way through 12th grade. We could walk to a small grocery store three blocks away, and there was a large city park four blocks away, albeit both required crossing a state highway that gave our parents palpitations. That development approach might have proven sustainable, but decades have passed, and it doesn't speak to the experience of suburban life today even in that town. My town more than doubled in population between 1960 and 1990; the town to our south grew sevenfold in that same period. Both towns accommodated the growth through annexation, building and widening streets, and weirdly-laid-out subdivisions. The good bones remain in the cores, but most of both towns is predominantly auto-dependent. This is the present of the suburbs with which the future must work.

The future of at least some suburbs includes much more diversity and density and multimodal transportation. Small projects can start this process (cf. Steuteville 2022). One challenge for suburban areas, as opposed to traditional city design, is connectivity; it's difficult to plot transit on an area not built for it. Another issue is timing: will suburban municipalities act proactively or will they wait until their hands are forced, until it's too late to respond effectively to challenges? Potentially radical change to the world of work (Korinek and Juelfs 2022, sec. 2) would present challenges to places at all levels of median family income. But, no question, sustainable suburban development is in everyone's interest. What makes any part stronger and more resilient makes the whole metro stronger.

Ellen Dunham Jones TED Talk (2010):

SEE ALSO:

Emily Badger, "Lonely Last Days in the Suburban Office Park," New York Times, 5 July 2022

Addison Del Maestro, "Oak Tree Road and the Second Life Cycle Blues," Strong Towns, 21 July 2022

Richard Florida, Who's Your City? How the Creative Economy is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life (Basic, 2008)

Grant Nordby, "'Better Together?' Urbanism Lessons from the Pandemic," Wits' End, 27 November 2021

Robert Steuteville, "Eleven Ways to Retrofit Suburbs," Public Square: A CNU Journal, 13 June 2019

Galina Tachieva, Sprawl Repair Manual (Island, 2010)

Jane Williamson and Ellen Dunham Jones, Case Studies in Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Strategies for Urgent Challenges (Wiley, 2020)

The urbanest places in Cedar Rapids?

Marion, Iowa has some charming aspects but is predominantly suburban

"Don't you dare call Marion a suburb," warns Lyz Lenz in last Sunday's Gazette, with the cautionary air of someone who may have at some time in the recent past committed this very faux pas. We at Holy Mountain are not afraid of such indiscretions (neither is Lyz, actually) because we're driven by data, at least such data as we can summon up the energy to compile.

In a post from last summer, I explored three classifications of urban and suburban places as identified by researchers at Harvard University's Joint Center for Housing Studies: 

1. census-convenient: the boundaries of the central city of a metropolitan area; 
2. suburbanisms: proportion of behavioral aspects including owner-occupied housing, single-family housing, and car commuting; and 
3. aspects of housing typology including density and median age. 

Other posts have referred to a City Observatory report defining the urban core as a three mile radius around the city center, and looked at parts of Cedar Rapids that have been designated Opportunity Zones. 

Now City Lab reports on a new paper by Shawn Bucholtz, Emily Molfino, and Jed Kolko that presents a multivariate model for predicting resident perceptions of whether their neighborhood is urban, suburban, or rural. The authors correlate survey results with characteristics of the places, producing the Urbanization Perceptions Small Areas Index (UPSAI). The model includes each of the three classifications above, as well as population density, household income, racial makeup (!), age distribution, and density of businesses and jobs. People's perception of whether their neighborhood is urban is affected by higher population and housing density, more black and Hispanic residents and fewer whites, lower incomes, more young and fewer older people, older housing, less car commuting, and greater density of businesses and jobs. Generally, rural areas feature the opposite profile, with suburban in between--except for household income, where rural is in between, but including housing age where the median age of housing is lowest in rural areas (Bucholtz, Molfino, and Kolko 2020: Table 8.5). They classify 19 census tracts in Linn County as urban, all in the City of Cedar Rapids itself, and (gulp!) none in Marion.

Now we have five definitions of urban vs. suburban in play, using a wide variety of factors, plus the 2018 nomination by local officials of seven tracts to be federal Opportunity Zones. Here are a few census tracts that stand out on a number of urban factors:

New bars/restaurants in the College District

Tract 18: Including much of the core Mound View neighborhood, this extends from 16th Street to 29th Street NE, from 1st Avenue as far as the railroad right-of-way. It includes Arthur School, built in 1914 and the oldest elementary school in Cedar Rapids, as well as Franklin Middle School, built in 1923. It played host to the Imagine Mound View event in 2017. The Mound View portion is also known as the College District, lying as it does between Coe College and Mt. Mercy University. It leads all tracts in the metro by far on population density (6,967/sq mi) and housing density (3,931/sq mi), and is one of five tracts whose average date of housing construction is 1939. It qualifies on all five definitions of urban. 

Coventry Lofts on 1st Avenue

Tract 19: Running from 16th St NE through downtown to the Cedar River, it includes portions of the core neighborhoods of Mound View and Wellington Heights. The downtown area has seen a resurgence of investment since the 2008 flood, including a Doubletree Hotel in the rebuilt U.S. Cellular Center (which the city still owns). It includes Coe College, which pays for my food and shelter; the northern half of the MedQuarter; and a number of historic Third Avenue churches. It is the most urban on all three of the suburbanisms categories, with 17.6 percent of housing being owner-occupied, 22.6 percent of housing single-family detached, and 44.2 percent of workers driving to work by themselves. It is one of five tracts whose average date of housing construction is 1939. It qualifies on all five definitions of urban, and was designated an Opportunity Zone in 2018. The UPSAI study rates this the most-likely tract to be considered urban by its residents (100% likely).

Condos on 1st St SW

Tract 22: Across the river from #19 is #22, which is bounded on the north by E Avenue NW and on the west and south by railroad rights-of-way. It too has seen a lot of new construction since the flood, and includes the area known as Kingston Village, so named because back in the day this was the separate town of Kingston. It includes McGrath Amphitheater, part of what will be a long greenway along the river; Mays Island which used to host the city government and still has the jail; and the intended site of our casino which will soon be developed into a destination called First and First. It has the highest percentage (29.9) of black non-Hispanic residents of any census tract, the lowest percentage (8.8) of those aged 62 and up, and the second-lowest percentage (62.0) of whites. It is one of five tracts whose average date of housing construction is 1939. It qualifies on all five definitions of urban, and was designated an Opportunity Zone in 2018. The UPSAI study rates this the third-most-likely tract to be considered urban by its residents (99.18% likely).

Roosevelt Middle School and Creative Corridor Business Academy.
Barack Obama spoke here in 2007

Tract 23: The UPSAI study rates this the second-most-likely tract to be considered urban by its residents (99.4% likely). It includes a couple blocks of the southwest side, but most of it is northwest, bounded by 1st Avenue, Edgewood Road, E Avenue, and the western border of #22. It includes Haskell Park, a pocket park named for the state senator who was instrumental in promoting construction of the Iowa portion of the Lincoln Highway, which ran down Johnson Avenue NW. It also includes some charming blocks east of the Johnson Avenue Hy-Vee. It's not particularly outstanding on any of the defining factors, but has unusually high population density (4,437/sq mi) and African-American population (13.4%).

House, "Hayes Park"

Tract 26: The UPSAI study rates this the fourth-most-likely tract to be considered urban by its residents (97.6% likely). It includes Riverside Park and the historic Czech Village neighborhood, extending south as far as Wilson Avenue SW, between J Avenue SW and the Cedar River. Much of the residential part of Czech Village was destroyed by the flood, and will now be greenway, but Sykora's Bakery remains, joined by vibrant new shops. Residential areas south of the Czech Village district remain, and were dubbed Hayes Park by Ben Kaplan. It qualifies on all five definitions of urban, as was nominated to be an Opportunity Zone. It has an unusually high percentage (6.1) of Hispanics as well as unusually low percentages of whites (71.8) and those aged 62 and over (11.1); its median household income ($36,548) is unusually low as well.

The ROC Center, formerly Oakhill-Jackson
Community Church

Tract 27: This tract includes the southeast side areas of New Bohemia and Oakhill-Jackson. New Bohemia used to contain a lot of artists' studios, and before that was home to the Sinclair meatpacking plant; since the flood it has gentrified at a breathtaking pace. Oakhill-Jackson historically has been home to the most black residents, and the tract as a whole still has the second-highest percentage (24.1) of black residents as well as the lowest percentage (59.4) of whites. It also has the lowest median household income ($22,738), second-lowest percentage of owner-occupied housing (28.1%), and third-lowest percentage of single-family housing (35.9%). It qualifies on all five definitions of urban, and was designated an Opportunity Zone in 2018.

Appendix: Leading Linn County census tracts on urban-determining factors:

POPULATION DENSITY: 18 (6967), 17 (5519), 4 (4936), 14 (4458), 23 (4437)

HOUSING DENSITY: 18 (3931), 17 (2400), 10.03 (2125), 4 (2089), 14 (2049)

OLDEST HOUSING: 12, 17, 18, 19, 22 (1939)

% OWNER-OCCUPIED (lowest): 19 (17.6), 27 (28.1), 2.07 (42.1), 10.03 (47.7), 7 (51.4)

% CAR COMMUTING (lowest): 19 (44.2), 13 (64.1), 108 (68.3), 27 (70.8), 22 (72)

% SINGLE-FAMILY (lowest): 19 (22.6), 2.07 (31.9), 27 (35.9), 30.02 (38.5), 10.03 (39.7)

% BLACK: 22 (29.9), 27 (24.1), 10.03 (17.1), 17 (16.2), 23 (13.4)

% HISPANIC: 9.01 (7.8), 10.03 (7.7), 29 (6.3), 19 (6.2), 26 (6.1)

% WHITE (lowest): 27 (59.4), 22 (62), 10.03 (69.5), 2.07 (69.8), 26 (71.8)

MED HH INCOME (lowest): 27 (22738), 19 (25887), 10.03 (33833), 22 (35577), 26 (36548)

% 25-34 W/ BACHELOR'S OR MORE: 2.07 (12.42), 8 (8.47), 11.02 (8.18), 18 (7.46), 2.03 (6.96)

% 62+ (lowest): 22 (8.8), 13 (9.6), 30.02 (10.3), 26 (11.1), 24 (11.7)

BUSINESS/JOBS DENSITY: 😞 [no data]

UPSAI LIKELIHOOD URBAN: 19 (1.000), 23 (.994), 22 (.9918), 26 (.9757), 25 (.9724)

urban on five defs, designated OZ: 19, 22, 27

urban on five defs, submitted for OZ: 26

urban on five defs, not submitted: 13, 18, 25

Where are the suburbs?

1st Avenue west of Stoney Point Road: still Cedar Rapids, but definitely suburban

[NOTE: This post has been extensively revised in July 2020 due to numerous problems with the original data.]

A few years ago, I referred to the area around Stoney Point Road SW as "in the suburbs." The person I was talking to laughed, because, of course, Stoney Point Road is still within the city limits of Cedar Rapids, and anyhow this isn't like Chicago where they have The Suburbs.

However, there seems to be some analytical value in identifying differences in how and where people live, and it should be obvious to anyone who lives anywhere that we can do a lot better than corporate political boundaries. We can probably do a lot better than census tracts, too, but I'm not going to; at any rate they make a more finely-grained first crack.

City Lab recently reported on a working paper from the Harvard University Joint Center for Housing Studies that group analysis of the urban-suburban divide into three broad approaches:

1. census-convenient: Urban means the principal city of a metropolitan area, as well as any other towns of more than 100,000 population; suburban means all other political entities in the metro. (By this definition, 70 percent of Americans live in suburbs.) (My Illinois readers will note this classifies the entire City of Naperville as "urban." I'll wait here while you finish laughing.)
2. suburbanisms: Urban means places where the proportions of commuting by private car, homeownership, and single-family housing are below the average for the entire metropolitan area, or where any two of the three are below the metro average; suburban means where commuting by private car, homeownership, and single-family housing are more the norm. (By this definition, over 60 percent of Americans live in suburbs.) (That this is lower than definition #1 surprises me, because I live in Cedar Rapids, where much of the political city is actually suburban, but I imagine in more complex metropolitan areas like Chicago many areas outside the political boundaries of the city would also be considered urban.)
3. typology: Urban means places where housing units are older and located more densely than the average for the entire metropolitan area; suburban means where housing units are newer and more widely spread. (By this definition, over 80 percent of Americans live in suburbs.) (That's a lot.)

A more finely-grained approach is going to allow us to see with more clarity the strength and duration of the apparent move "back to the city" that began about the middle of the last decade. (William H. Frey at the Brookings Institution is one among many skeptics.) It also enables us to imagine what combination of features might be most attractive to new residents, while also being financially and environmentally sustainable. (More on this soon.)

Uptown Marion: not in the principal city, but arguably urban

For now, here is how the three approaches define city and suburbs in the Cedar Rapids context. The data come from the U.S. Census Bureau via this website, which is way easier to navigate than the Bureau's own site.

1. census-convenient: The City of Cedar Rapids is urban, with the rest of Linn County as suburban. The Census Bureau's Cedar Rapids Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) also includes Benton and Jones counties. That produces an urban population (2018) of 131,369, with 90,761 suburbanites in Linn County (136,955 suburbanites including the other two counties). The Cedar Rapids metropolitan statistical area is 49 percent urban.
2. suburbanisms: In the Cedar Rapids metro area, 83.2 percent of workers commute alone by private car; 69.8 percent of housing consists of a single unit ("single-family detached"), 74 percent of housing units are owner-occupied. By these definitions, the 18 urban census tracts are
1. below average on all three dimensions: 2.07, 7, 13, 18, 19, 27, 29
2. below average on all except car commuting: 3, 5, 6, 8, 10.03, 11.02, 15, 26, 30.02
3. below average on all except single-family housing: 22, 25. Collectively this includes the urban core of Cedar Rapids, excepting areas west of 10th St NW between E and O Avenues, as well as south of 1st Avenue, and Wellington Heights above 15th St SE. Outside of the core it reaches as far north as Blairs Ferry Road NE and includes the older sections of Marion; the areas around Kenwood Park on Cedar Rapids's northeast side and Cherokee Park on the northwest side; north of Washington High School on the southeast side; and from Jones Park on the southwest side as far south as 76th Avenue SW around Kirkwood Community College. That produces an urban population of 71,275; the metro is 26.6 percent urban.
3. typology: The median housing unit in the Cedar Rapids metro area was built in the 1970s. There are 57 housing units per acre, because much of the three counties is farmland. By these definitions, the 20 urban census tracts are 4, 7, 8, 11.01, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, and 29. This includes the urban core of Cedar Rapids, excepting only the area west of 10th St NW between O Avenue and the Cedar River. Outside of the core it includes the Puffer District adjacent to downtown Marion; the areas around Kenwood Park on Cedar Rapids's northeast side and Bever Park on the southeast side; north of Washington High School and the Rompot neighborhood on the southeast side; and the southwest side stopping at Jones Park. This yields an urban population of 72,691; the metro is 27.1 percent urban.

Wellington Heights neighborhood's Stop the Violence Picnic, 2019 (swiped from redmondpark.org)
Census tract 17 qualifies as urban under definition three (housing density 2400, median age 1939)
but not definition two (76.1% owner-occupied, 81% single-family).

The first definition includes a significant chunk of Cedar Rapids that doesn't qualify under the other definitions, while excluding parts of Marion that do. The second and third definitions agree on 11 tracts, but the second includes seven while excluding nine that qualify under the third definition. Since all of the city qualifies under the housing density part of the typologies definition, the disqualifier always is median age of housing. For example, census tract 30.02 includes a degree of rental housing around Kirkwood Community College unusual for the metro, but the median housing unit was built in 2001 (and 87.1 percent of commuters drive alone). 

The disqualifiers for the second list ("suburbanisms") vary for those who qualify under the typologies categories. All nine tracts have higher rates of single-family housing than the metro average; eight have higher rates of car commuting, and five have higher rates of owner-occupied housing. Four tracts miss on all three! These include census tract 4, northeast of downtown Marion, which is bounded by 7th Avenue, 31st Street, 29th Avenue, and 10th Street/Indian Creek Road. The tract has 2089 housing units per square mile, and the median year of construction is 1961. Its car commuting rate is 85 percent, 88.5 percent of residents own their own homes, and 87.5 percent of residents live in single-family housing.

Why does it matter how we draw the urban-suburban line? Public perception of the line certainly affects how specific areas of the metro are perceived, though I'm not sure the analysis-by-census-tract featured above is going to have much impact on public perception.

The very fluidity (and arguability) of these lines teach us that the terms "urban" and "suburban" are not binary, that they each cover a range of neighborhood types and contain a range of people. One thing we can agree on: political boundaries rarely reflect social realities.

"Welcome to Suburbia!"

The future of the suburbs

Suburban neighborhood in my childhood town of Wheaton, Illinois
Walk Score 24 (Screen capture from Google Earth)

The last 70 years of American history have featured the dramatic growth of suburbs in metropolitan areas. From the literal fringes of American society they have emerged as centers of political and economic power: suburban job creation far outpaced that of central cities until the mid-2000s, and suburban residents comprised a majority of voters in presidential election since 1992. Not always respected or admired, their importance is nonetheless unmistakable.

But what about the next 70 years? Much as the rise of edge cities must have been unimaginable to people in the mid-1940s, and the resurgence of central cities was unimaginable to us in the 1970s, today's suburbs are likely to transform in the 21st century. A lot depends on how the 21st century progresses, but some suburbs are better positioned than others to face whatever it brings.

Suburbs were founded at different times and by different groups of people, so it's not news to anyone that there are several types of suburban areas. It's not always accurate, either, to define urban and suburban strictly according to the corporate boundaries of the central city. Cedar Rapids, for example, is not landlocked by surrounding municipalities, so it has continued to grow during the suburban decades, and many parts of the city look a lot like suburbs, particularly subdivisions like Bowman Woods and Granite Ridge, not to mention the development along the Highway 100 extension under construction. Nevertheless, following political boundaries is a convenient way to define things, so I will wind up doing that through this essay.

Suburban areas vary by age, density, wealth, diversity, walkability, local employment, presence of a traditional downtown or something that could become one, public transit, and distance from the central city. You could probably come up with 25 categories or even 55, but we must be getting on here, so I'll suggest six. Examples are from the Chicago area which is where I grew up and where I flatter myself I can still find my way around.

1. First suburbs: Older towns from the early years of suburban development e.g. Evanston, Oak Park, Cicero. These are like extensions of the central city, and feature greater diversity, more density and more poverty than more recently-developed suburbs.
2. First suburbs in pain: Same as above but with concentrated poverty e.g. Dixmoor, Ford Heights, Robbins. Each has a significantly higher poverty rate than Chicago itself (more than double, in the case of Ford Heights). These might be older towns--Robbins was incorporated in 1917--that were predominantly working class and have suffered mightily from deindustrialization.
3. Wealthy enclaves: The very earliest wave of suburban development came from wealthy people who could afford to live away from the noise and stink of the city. Their financial resources and use of zoning laws (Rothwell) have preserved their physical as well as social character e.g. Hinsdale and Lake Forest, but also includes newer towns like Burr Ridge and Deer Park.
4. Edge cities (boomburbs): Newer suburbs that are also major employment centers e.g. Naperville, Schaumburg.
5. New traditional suburbs: Largely residential, mostly in outlying areas of the metro region, with recent development so lots and houses are larger than older suburbs e.g. Boulder Hill and Long Grove, but I'd also include older towns like Huntley and Wheaton that have grown quickly in recent years.
6. Whatever the hell Bedford Park is. Founded in 1940 and located on the western edge of the city of Chicago south of Midway Airport, it has a population of 580, and is aggressively recruiting businesses. Its density is 98 per square mile, because most of the city space is industrial or commercial.

The acceleration of suburban development after World War II was facilitated by a broad set of conditions (see Stief): widespread economic prosperity, people's desires for more space and/or protective enclaves, affordability of private motor vehicles, U.S. national government incentives for new construction (interstate highways and the structure of Federal Housing Authority programs), abandonment of older cities by manufacturers and other businesses, and a willingness to tolerate costs such as environmental damage and traffic congestion. The next 75 years are likely to see substantial change in most or all of these conditions, with profound effects for the suburbs they produced (see Gallagher, esp. ch. 9).

• The distribution of wealth and income in the United States has since the 1970s become sharply more unequal. The wealthy minority will be able to afford to live however and wherever they wish, but there is unlikely to be a sizable middle class around to buy and maintain suburban homes on a mass scale.
• Millennials and empty-nest boomers have shown greater preferences for urban living in recent years (Gallagher, esp. ch. 3). This can be overstated, and could easily be reversed in another generation or less, but whether for reasons of economics or personal taste, demand for alternatives to the large-lot subdivisions predominant in the last two decades has implications for both central cities and suburban municipalities.
• Families took multiple motor vehicle ownership for granted when the fuel to run them was cheap and plentiful, as it was for much of the 1980s and 1990s. The last 15 years have seen a roller coaster of gas prices, giving rise to several different versions of our energy future. If American energy reserves are not as high as the optimists say, or if the costs of extracting them drive prices up, or if global economic growth means more people all over the world are competing for those resources, or if the environmental impacts of fossil fuels become too great to be borne, suburbs of two- or three-SUV households in subdivisions far from schools, shopping and work are not going to survive.
• The national government continues to fund new construction generously in the face of long-term budget uncertainty and alarms about the state of existing infrastructure. Politicians would still rather build and widen than fix, not to mention more environmentally- and financially-sustainable alternatives. So far conditions have not forced them to change much. How long can this possibly last? Charles Marohn of Strong Towns told author Leigh Gallagher: The fact that I can drive to work on paved roads where I can drive fifty-five miles an hour the minute I leave my driveway despite the fact that I won't see another car for five miles is living beyond our means on a grand, grand scale (p. 60).
• Many businesses have decided the advantages of clustering outweigh the hassles of dealing with central city governments, and are relocating downtown.
• Despite recent attention to mass shootings, violent crime has declined for a long time and is now much lower than it was during the heyday of suburban development, removing a major incentive people had had to flee the city.

How do all these changes affect the different types of suburban areas? Wealthy enclaves will be fine, thanks to the increasing wealth of the upper class. First suburbs and even first suburbs in pain often have "good bones," a tried-and-true design structure that can adapt to multiple realities. They frequently are close to the central city and public transportation between them is either already in place or likely to be viable. Some, like LaGrange, Illinois, have particularly excellent traditional downtowns and nearby residential districts. Gallagher (p. 202) points out their smaller houses are affordable to young families. On the other hand, the harder cases in particular are unlikely to flourish without substantial gentrification, which might be hard to attract when they're competing with other first suburbs in better shape as well as a better-positioned central city and, if successful, raises the inevitable issue of what happens to the people who live there now?

The future is murkier for edge cities, new traditional suburbs and whatever the hell Bedford Park is, because their development has been closely tied to the hegemony of the automobile. It's been awhile since I've spent time in my former stomping grounds of Naperville, Illinois, but I think that particular "boomburb" has several advantages for changing times over, say, Tysons Corner, Virginia: it's an older municipality (incorporated in 1857) with a traditional downtown and a lot of resources. On the other hand, most of its 39 square mile territory has been developed in a purely auto-oriented way with large lots well spread-out and rudimentary public transit. Naperville will doubtless need to make adjustments as the century goes forward, but it has the resources with which to make them.

America invested heavily beginning in the 1940s in development that assumed infinite cheap energy, available credit, and the dispensability of the urban poor. And fecundity (Gallagher, ch. 5). And ever-increasing home values (see Cortright). The prudent municipality will take steps to ensure its survival in the face of inevitable alteration to those conditions. The prudent superpower-facing-long-term-budget-deficits should doubtless do the same.

SEE ALSO:

 Peter Calthorpe and William Fulton, The Regional City: Planning for the End of Sprawl (Island, 2001), ch 9
 Leigh Gallagher, The End of the Suburbs: Where the American Dream is Moving (Portfolio/Penguin, 2013)
 Nathan Lewis, "Letting Go of Suburbia," Strong Towns, 20 July 2016, http://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2016/7/18/suburbia-retrofit
 David L. Rigby, "Urban and Regional Restructuring in the Second Half of the 20th Century," in John A. Agnew and Jonathan M. Smith eds, American Space/American Place: Geographies of the Contemporary United States (Routledge, 2002), 150-183
 Strong Towns, "America's Suburban Experiment," Strong Towns, 10 December 2015, http://www.strongtowns.org/curbside-chat-1/2015/12/14/americas-suburban-experiment
 Steven V. Ward, Selling Places: The Marketing and Promotion of Towns and Cities, 1850-2000 (Routledge, 1998), chs 5-6