Has a Levittown model suburb ever developed into a full fledged city?

[ThePhun1]

There are suburbs that either used to be a city in their own right and became a suburb to a bigger name in the region or competing towns where one emerged superior to another but what I'm looking for is a formerly rural area that only existed as a bedroom community for a larger, established city that has blossomed into a full fledged city in it's own right. I'm not necessarily looking for one created by Levitt & Sons but in that mold.

And please note that just because a place has 200-500K residents, it doesn't mean it's not an overgrown suburb.

[Samwill89]

I would imagine a few areas in the D.C./NoVa/Md. region would qualify under this criteria. Certainly places in Southern California & the Bay Area. Or places like Sandy Springs, outside of Atlanta. And I'm not talking about suburbs with overgrown lifestyle centers either. Places with a real economic base & emerging urban developments that did not begin as so.

In the Dallas area, Plano, Addison & Irving (especially the former two) seem to have made the transition from simple bedroom sprawlburbs into economic draws. What were once large office parks are beginning to take on traits of traditional CBDs with multimodal transit availability, connected & (somewhat) walkable neighborhoods & a ton of diverse commercial activities.

However, I am the most familiar with The Woodlands, 30 miles north of Houston. It was first developed in the 1970s as a bedroom community. It has since grown into the region's secondary city with over 100k population. It has a "CBD" with millions of Class-A square footage & is home to multiple Fortune 500 HQ or satellites & 50K employees. Exxon Mobil has recently relocated much of it's jobs in the area, adding another 15k employees. It also maintains a sizable "urban" retail & dense residential component in some areas in & around its "CBD".

With all of that, it is still witnessing exponential growth on all fronts & I expect to see it rise an order of magnitude in name recognition over the next 20 years. It certainly is overwhelmingly a sprawlburb, but it has begun to take on characteristics of a traditional city.




Town Center CBD (western portion) ground view
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Town Center CBD skyline view (eastern portion)
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Nearby Exxon Mobil construction
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[ThePhun1]

Yeah, The Woodlands was the only one that sprung to mind for me.

Maybe a Canuck can fill me in on their opinion of Mississauga.

[Centropolis]

overland park, ks, pop 184,000, is close.


marketingxchange.com

[timpdx]

Woodlands and Tysons Corner spring to mind

oh and Concord/Walnut Creek in the Bay Area plus Bellevue Washington is insanely urban for a former bedroom community

Mesa AZ is huge, 450K people, but not an urban city

[ThePhun1]

I'm surprised KCK hasn't tried to mirror KCMO to any level though KCK is obviously not what I was looking for in the OP.

[brickell]

Florida? Like all of it. I would think that any place that has grown in the last 4 or 5 decades will have these by the handful. Maybe I'm a little loose with the definition of "full fledge city" though.

[hammersklavier]

When you are thinking of "city", what are you thinking of? (I mean, besides skyscrapers.) All of the examples so far cited have been of edge cities seeing further commercial intensification, above and beyond the limitations of the office park typology.

For the most part zoning has kept a lid on intensification and conspired to keep tract housing ... tract housing. There's only one area where I think we've seen postwar suburbia truly urbanize: along the DC Metro.

Bethesda and Silver Spring, MD. Arlington Co., VA. These are the areas that set the standard for what could happen all over the country.

[Reverberation]

Suburbs like those were intentionally designed to not become like cities. They were developed in a time when cars, factories, etc. made city living dirty and crowded. Offices may move into the area but a planned community implies strict controls on how space is used. Most big cities that we think of grew up first, THEN adopted the tighter land use rules to improve quality of life.

[dc_denizen]

yes DC is the gold standard in the US.

[PhillyRising]

Parts of Levittown PA is starting to get run down. It's not aging well.

[Leo the Dog]

Maryvale, Phoenix was one of the first mass produced tract housing developments. It was on the very fringe of town, cheap affordable homes for as little as $300 down payment. It used to be a pleasant suburban part of town.

Fast forward to today: The area is one of the densest neighborhoods of Phoenix. Very high crime rates, making it the most violent area of the city. Crime has dropped in recent years, but it wasn't uncommon for 75+ homicides/year to occur here. The area is home to many violent gangs, where drug dealing and prostituition went unchecked due to the open air apartment complexes.

The Maryvale precinct is 15 sq miles with a population of 116,000. It is majority Hispanic by far, low income, low education.

It might not have the urban built form, but it has acquired a high population density with inner city urban blight and societal issues.


http://archive.azcentral.com/i/7/5/C...998F02DC57.jpg

http://www.memoriesaz.com/wp-content...-billboard.jpg

[fflint]

I don't believe any part of the Bay Area transformed from mass-produced Levittown style suburban tracts into a full fledged urban city. The urban nodes within the more suburban Bay Area regions are mostly clustered around historic railroad stations and pre-date the Levittowns of the world.

[Centropolis]

Originally Posted by ThePhun1

I'm surprised KCK hasn't tried to mirror KCMO to any level though KCK is obviously not what I was looking for in the OP.

KCK developed as a sort of quasi-industrial satellite of KCMO during the pre-war era.

The post war suburban county to the south of KCK, Johnson County, KS on the other hand has taken on a huge corporate presence and has it's own arboretum, doesn't cooperate with the KCMO transit system or parks/amenities/pro-sports of KCMO. That's where Overland Park, is, that I already posted. It has a stand alone mentality.

[ThePhun1]

Originally Posted by hammersklavier

When you are thinking of "city", what are you thinking of? (I mean, besides skyscrapers.) All of the examples so far cited have been of edge cities seeing further commercial intensification, above and beyond the limitations of the office park typology.

For the most part zoning has kept a lid on intensification and conspired to keep tract housing ... tract housing. There's only one area where I think we've seen postwar suburbia truly urbanize: along the DC Metro.

Bethesda and Silver Spring, MD. Arlington Co., VA. These are the areas that set the standard for what could happen all over the country.

I'm looking for a place that has turned into a city in any form or fashion, there certainly aren't any major cities in that mold yet. A place that may have been full of McMansions previously that has grown up well.

[brickell]

Cities.?.?. meh but definitely nodes in a regional sense.

[James Bond Agent 007]

Bellevue. Lots of cities like that, frankly.

[llamaorama]

Bellevue seems like a possible winner here. Core is on the site of the old town/main street area but there was really nothing there at all until the post war era. And now that core in the picture feels truly urban not just because of some tall buildings close together but because of how natural its growth was. Nobody really planned it beyond some real estate moguls putting their big stuff next to each other.


Arlington might not count- its too old to be "levittown model". More like streetcar suburban. It effectively functions as the southwest quandrant of DC- it is closer to the urban core than many parts in the District of Columbia itself. My grandmother moved to Arlington as an independent young woman in the mid 1950s in search of an apartment close to a place where she could go have fun and go out and dance(and meet my korean war vet grandpa), maybe she was the first ever NoVa hipster?

The Woodlands- its really a lovely place and I am not criticizing it so much as saying that is does not fit in with the threads question. Its a suburban satellite center that was planned and does not feel urban or like a city outside of a small corner. It's remarkable mostly in terms of scale. But it will always have a master planned, stepford type vibe. It's not even a city, it is a private development run as a township and served by a patchwork of utility districts and its civic amenities require membership/residence. It will NEVER be urban in the sense of a improvised cluster of developments and people that accreted naturally. It is a very nice upper class suburb for people who want a nice suburban lifestyle. If you want secure home values and know that the schools will always be good and there is no crime, its great sure but not a city.

Overland Park, KS is office park sprawl. Nice camera work to make the 5 brown stripey towers look sort of close together. Barf.

Actually Plano and its neighbor to the south, Richardson, has the potential to do this, but not in the way you expect. Of course Legacy and Plano West will continue to blow up with corporate offices and the like. The old, southernmost part of Plano and the section east of Central around the DART station has a much different character from the rest. It is sort of like far north Orange County, still nice and upper middle class but where it transitions, if that helps anyone understand what it feels like. Its has a need for reinvention. In the immediate area is a massive TOD project centered around a high rise State Farm office. Collin Creek Mall is on life support and will be gone in a decade. There are a bunch of ancient warehouse style business parks all in the Red Line corridor. I can very easily a future for this area that is not merely new urbanist cheese, but also has a ethno-burban quality too. Also not far away is UT Dallas. Affordable enough for small businesses to locate storefronts. All connected by transit. Actually, you could say this about a LOT of the DFW metroplex. Irving is the same story.

Another one- what about Santa Ana, CA?

[fflint]

Originally Posted by llamaorama

Another one- what about Santa Ana, CA?

Santa Ana, founded in 1869, is most notably densely populated and urban in its prewar core--there's no Levittown history there. The rest is the usual California mix of high population densities with auto-oriented sprawl.

[vid]

Originally Posted by fflint

I don't believe any part of the Bay Area transformed from mass-produced Levittown style suburban tracts into a full fledged urban city. The urban nodes within the more suburban Bay Area regions are mostly clustered around historic railroad stations and pre-date the Levittowns of the world.

ThePhun1 mentioned Mississauga. Like the suburbs in the Bay Area, its nodes (except for the main one) were pre-existing towns, some nearly 200 years old. Surrey, BC in Vancouver (which is on track to exceed Vancouver's population and become the largest city in the metro) is the same deal: it's just a handful of towns in a general area that got developed because another city was nearby, but not an independent city in its own right.

Mississauga have thrived because of the airport, but that only exists because Toronto is nearby. It's thrived because it offers inexpensive office space, but that's only in demand because Toronto is nearby. Mississauga has more jobs than people, but those jobs are primarily driven by the economy of Toronto right next door. You can't say you're an independent city when your primary economic driver is the airport that serves another city. That airport hasn't been named after anything in Mississauga for decades.

In Surrey's case, it's a less expensive place to live in an expensive metropolitan area and it has a rail connection that brings you to the downtown core of the real city within ~30 minutes. Kanata Ontario, which is geographically separated from Ottawa, is a similar deal: it only exists because Ottawa does, and wouldn't be populated if it weren't for Ottawa, but like Mississauga it does have a large employment base, primarily government jobs. Which are located there because Ottawa is literally right beside it. (It's actually inside Ottawa's gigantic city limits now.)

There isn't really any case of this happening in Canada. Many of our suburbs have decent focal points, but are they full fledged cities in their own right? No.

The only example I can think of where suburbs really took off and became their own cities might be the suburbs of Detroit, but that was only at the great expense of an already existing city.