inner suburbs

Atlanta Park

The Blue Beltway

Ronald Brownstein, a senior editor at The Atlantic, coins a new political-geographic term in the wake of the Georgia U.S. Senate runoff elections to describe a shift in the political alignment of nearly all large metropolitan areas in the nation.

January 8, 2021 - The Atlantic

Virginia State Government

Election 2019: Changing Demographics Explain Democrats' Victory in Virginia

It's not suburbs vs. cities but inner vs. outer suburbs that determined the outcome of elections in Virginia last Tuesday that flipped the General Assembly from red to blue.

November 12, 2019 - The New York Times

Single-Family Homes

Dormant Inner Suburbs and the Affordability Crisis

Richard Florida takes a look at a new report that traces the affordability crisis to cities' inability to densify their older, inner suburbs.

February 12, 2018 - CityLab

Greyhound Station

Greyhound as an Urban Place

Like train stations, Greyhound stations can be tolerable urban places- or they can be another example of suburban sprawl.

June 27, 2016 - Michael Lewyn

Neighborhood Polarization in a Canadian City

In Canadian cities, rising income inequality has been reflected in neighborhood polarization. The experience of Hamilton, Ontario, has been typical. Here, inner-city decline is now giving way to gentrification, displacing poverty to the suburbs.

November 4, 2015 - Neighbourhood Change Research Partnership

Downtown Phoenix Skyline

The Changing Shape of American Cities

A newly released report shows the demographic transformation of American cities spatially from 1990 to 2012 by charting their neighborhoods based on distance to the center of the city.

February 27, 2015 - University of Virginia Center for Public Service

After Tragedy: Reject the 'Ready Made' Narratives of Urban Decline

G.M. Donley pens an impassioned plea to reject "ready made" narratives about the decline of Cleveland Heights, an inner suburb of Cleveland, after the murder of local bar and restaurant owner Jim Brennan.

July 8, 2014 - Belt Magazine

Traffic deaths and safety: who's really the safest?

William Lucy of the University of Virginia has written extensively on the question of whether outer suburbs are safer than cities or inner suburbs; he argues, based on traffic fatality data, that outer suburbs are certainly less safe than inner suburbs, and maybe even less safe than cities. (1)  However, Lucy’s analysis is not particularly fine-grained: it analyzes data county-by-county, rather than town-by-town. What’s wrong with this?  Often, suburban cities within a county are quite diverse: some share the characteristics of inner suburbs (e.g. some public transit) while others look more like exurbs.  So I wondered whether there is any significant 'safety gap" between inner and outer suburbs. 

April 29, 2012 - Michael Lewyn

New urbanists and old-fashioned Jews

A few years ago, someone asked me the following question (loosely paraphrased) on a listserv: “Since the most tradition-minded* religious Jews are required by Jewish law to walk to synagogue on Sabbaths and holy days (and thus presumably prize walkability) why aren’t they a major market for new urbanist developments?” At the time, I didn’t have a coherent answer. But now that I know more about both traditional Jews and new urbanism, I do.

August 17, 2009 - Michael Lewyn

News from HUD User

HUD's Office of Policy Development and Research

Call for Speakers

Mpact Transit + Community

New Updates on PD&R Edge

HUD's Office of Policy Development and Research

Top Books

An annual review of books related to planning.

Top Websites

The best of the Internet—since 2002.

Top Apps

Planning apps for a brave new world.

Top Schools

The definitive ranking of graduate planning programs.

Urban Design for Planners 1: Software Tools

This six-course series explores essential urban design concepts using open source software and equips planners with the tools they need to participate fully in the urban design process.

Planning for Universal Design

Learn the tools for implementing Universal Design in planning regulations.