Abstract
By any measure, at the turn of the twenty-first century, New York was, by a large margin, the least suburbanized populous metropolitan area in the northeastern quadrant of the United States. This chapter considers a range of explanations for this difference and concludes that, for the most part, the outcome is the effect of extensive local, state, and Federal government intervention in the City’s housing market.
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Notes
- 1.
At the time, the New York Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area included the City, Putnam, Rockland, and Westchester Counties, NY, and Bergen County, NJ. Depending on the context and the time period, this and the subsequent chapters will refer to different definitions of the New York region. Definitions will be provided for each such reference.
- 2.
Throughout this section, the following will be used to represent “large Northeastern and Midwestern” cities, the municipalities, and regions that were and are most comparable to New York City: Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Detroit, Minneapolis, New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, and Washington, DC.
- 3.
“Large cities” are those that had populations greater than 100,000 in 1990. The New York metropolitan area refers to New York City, Nassau, Putnam, Rockland, Suffolk, and Westchester Counties, NY, and Bergen, Essex, Hudson, Morris, Somerset, and Union Counties, NJ.
- 4.
Note that the conclusions regarding the relatively dense concentration of metropolitan area population in New York City do not change if the basis of geographic comparison is changed from Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) to the larger Consolidated Statistical Area (CSA).
- 5.
1969 was the first year for which these data were available.
- 6.
The only exception was with respect to centralization. Massey and Denton found that, even after controlling for metropolitan areas’ geographic size, African-American neighborhoods were significantly less “centralized,” that is more distant from the central business district, in New York than in other northeastern cities.
- 7.
When referring to cooperatives in New York City, it is important to distinguish between “affordable cooperatives,” mostly developed under the Mitchell-Lama program, and “market-rate cooperatives.” The latter receive no development or tax abatement subsidies, are much more expensive to buy into, and serve an upper-middle- and higher-income group of residents. The role of market rate coops in the New York City housing market will be discussed in a separate section below.
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Gurwitz, A. (2019). Social Democracy and Suburbanization. In: Atlantic Metropolis. Palgrave Studies in American Economic History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13352-8_14
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