A dynamic approach to population change in central cities and their suburbs, 1980-1990: crime, employment, and spatial proximity

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, The, April, 2005 by Joong-Hwan Oh

At this juncture, I reassert that population change in a given area is conditioned by its intrinsic and extrinsic factors. Taking either central cities or their suburbs as units of analysis, I argue that reliance on either one alone can limit the entire understanding between urban crime and population change and between urban economic activity and population change. For example, suburbanization reflects an external impetus of spatial expansion that is closely associated with the internal forces of change in central-city population. Given this close link between a central city and its suburban fringe in a metropolitan area, research on population change in central cities or their suburbs no longer can ignore the impact of spatial proximity.

Since speculating that violent crime affects short-distance mobility, such as from central cities to suburbs, Liska and Bellair (1995) report that violent crime rates, based upon a sample of U.S. cities for the 1950-1990 period, have a stronger impact on white suburbanization. Frey (1979), in a study of 39 large metropolitan areas, reports that city crime stimulates white suburban migration. There is also evidence that high central-city violent crime increases black suburban mobility, but that high suburban violent crime has no impact on race-specific suburb-to-city mobility (South and Crowder 1997). Although these studies were not concerned with the impact of suburban crime on population change in the central cities, spatial proximity cannot be ignored when we study social issues occurring in a subsector of a metropolitan area.

Population change in central cites or their suburban rings is also under the influence of economic change in the context of metropolitan areas. For instance, increasing suburban employment stems from the decentralization of employment characterized by relocation of manufacturing industries out of the central city (Wilson 1987; Sassen 1990), and the ongoing growth of entire employment sectors within the boundaries of suburban areas (Frey and Speare, Jr. 1988; H. Hughes 1993; J. W. Hughes and Sternlieb 1988). Kasarda (1990) also proposes that the blue-collar employment decline in the goods-producing industries contributed to out-migration of white middleclass families from cities. Thus recent out-migration toward suburban areas in the Northeast and Midwest particularly reflects the influence of deindustrialization in those regions on central-city population (Bluestone and Harrison 1982).

As suggested earlier, in this paper I will reemphasize the importance of economic organization in studying population change, in light of the growing concern over the causal relationship between crime and population change. Further, this study will investigate the dynamic influences of the internal and external factors on population change in either location (i.e., central cities or their suburbs) of a metropolitan area. Therefore, the specific hypothesis tested in this study is that, like suburban population change, central-city change among white and black populations is affected by crime and economic activity in both territories of a metropolitan area.