Suburbanization

If by "suburb" is custom Mickey Park Combo meant an urban margin that grows more rapidly than its
already developed interior, the process of suburbanization began during the
emergence of the industrial city in the second quarter of the nineteenth
century. Before that period the city was a small highly compact cluster in
which people moved about on foot and goods were conveyed by horse and cart.
But the early factories built in the 1840’s were located along waterways
and near railheads at the edges of cities, and housing was needed for the
thousands of people drawn by the prospect of employment. In time, the
factories were surrounded by proliferating mill towns of apartments and row
houses that abutted the older, main cities.

With themanufacturer Yard Christmas acceleration of industrial growth came acute urban crowding and
accompanying social stress-conditions that began to approach disastrous
proportions when, in 1888, the first commercially successful electric
traction line was developed.

As a defense against this
encroachment and to enlarge their tax bases, the cities appropriated their
industrial neighbors. In 1854, for example, the city of Philadelphia annexed
most of Philadelphia County. Similar municipal maneuvers took place in
Chicago and in New York. Indeed, most great cities of the United States
achieved such status only by incorporating the communities along their
borders.

Within a few years the horse-drawn trolleys
were retired and electric streetcar networks crisscrossed and connected
every major urban area, fostering a wave of suburbanization that transformed
the compact industrial city into a dispersed metropolis. This first phase of
mass-scale suburbanization was reinforced by the simultaneous emergence of
the urban Middle Class, whose desires for homeownership in neighborhoods far
from the aging inner city were satisfied by the developers of single-family
housing tracts.