What exactly is a suburb in USA?

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mkshane@reddit

If you stand naked on the front porch and the neighbors can’t see you: rural

If you stand naked on the front porch and the neighbors call the cops on you: suburban

If you stand naked on the front porch and the neighbors ignore you: urban

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Enough_Roof_1141@reddit

Urban wouldn’t have a porch. Balcony maybe.

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Some cities (aka Pittsburgh) have neighborhoods that are like the burbs but the housing is tighter. These areas are not in the city center. I owned a house with front, side, and back yards, with a front porch and deck/porch in the back of the house.

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CatBoyTrip@reddit

i remember driving in one of the highways that goes through pittsburgh and there were houses that had doors that exited right into the freeway it looked like.

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casapantalones@reddit

This is my Portland neighborhood (and true for most Portland neighborhoods).

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HudsonMelvale2910@reddit

Yeah, when they said urban porch I instantly pictured two-story red brick rowhomes with front porches.

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EuphoricMoose8232@reddit

Depends on the city. Urban LA definitely has porches

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CatBoyTrip@reddit

same in lexington kentucky. huge backwards as well.

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Live_Badger7941@reddit

Also depends on the rural area. In New England, even rural houses more often than not don't have front porches, though back or side porches/decks are common.

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LibrarianAcrobatic21@reddit

Detroit does.

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Cruitire@reddit

More likely a stoop.

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opman4@reddit

Stoop kids afraid to leave his stoop!

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username-generica@reddit

Does a fire escape count?

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Cruitire@reddit

Always

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Majestic_You_7399@reddit

A vast majority of urban city’s have townhomes with porches that are old as fuck lol. From new your to San Francisco there are 1900’s townhomes with front porches.

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round_a_squared@reddit

Detroit's urban areas are a mix of regular houses, apartment blocks, and these beautiful but often run down Art Deco era apartment buildings. Plenty of people have porches in the city.

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Enough_Roof_1141@reddit

Nope

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Majestic_You_7399@reddit

Well as someone who has lived in a 1900’s San Francisco town home with a front porch, I disagree

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VasilZook@reddit

I agree with those, mostly in that where I live is a more urban oriented suburb, and I’d only consider calling the police, but would hand wave the situation assuming one of the elderly neighbors will have it covered.

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4-Inch-Butthole-Club@reddit

I know it’s a joke, but I’ve lived in all three types and that’s actually extremely accurate. It’s unbelievable the shit urbanites will just ignore.

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Ok_Temperature_5019@reddit

This is fantastic

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wawa2022@reddit

Accurate

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mr_miggs@reddit

Its something that generally refers to the pockets of residential communities that exist near a major city. Suburbs are often comprised of many small towns and cities.

I live in a city with a population of about 70k. Its a small city in its own right, but I also live about 15 miles from a much larger city. When I am talking to someone who lives around here and they ask where I live,I just give the name of the city I live in. If I am talking to someone out of state, I just say I live in the suburbs of the larger city. Both are true due to the nature of suburban sprawl out here

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wooper346@reddit

To keep it very simple, a suburb is basically a residential area that's technically separate, but still very much centered around an urban core. The distinction between a suburb and a neighborhood is that the latter is actually part of that urban core itself.

There are suburbs of all kinds of demographic and socioeconomic status; some are lower to middle class, others are very affluent.

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SteakAndIron@reddit

Yeah. Suburbs are just houses. There aren't places of business around besides a few things that maintain the homes like car repair and grocery stores. Not office buildings or factories.

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mr_miggs@reddit

This just isn't true at all. Suburbs often have many businesses to cater to the nearby neighbrhoods as well as commercial buildings.

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mangomoo2@reddit

Not necessarily true. I’ve lived all over the US, sometimes in cities but mostly in suburbs. I usually define the suburbs as the towns that surround the main city hub. They have mostly houses/residential buildings, but they almost all have at least some small office buildings and even some very very small factories, or they are closer to more rural areas with larger factory type buildings. Even in a town I lived in that was 99% houses and was so suburban it almost can qualify as rural (but far less open land than I would consider rural) there were a few small office buildings and a very tiny factory that manufactured a very niche product. I’ve also lived in a suburb that some would likely consider urban except that it is a town that is outside a major metro area and it had multiple office parks but there were also large areas of just houses/neighborhoods that no one would consider urban (thing McMansions, sidewalks, large yards, etc).

Most suburbs are much more car dependent than large cities as well.

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Ok-Equivalent-5131@reddit

This definition falls apart with the use of the term suburban. Everywhere iv lived has been suburban, but they were all very much their own towns. There wasn’t an urban core that people commuted to for work etc.

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cyvaquero@reddit

Reposting without the Google Maps shortened link.

I'd point OP to San Antonio or Houston as the loops make it easier to see - although San Antonio is simpler because it has just two major loops.

https://www.google.com/maps/place/San+Antonio,+TX/

In San Antonio - generally speaking anything inside 410 we call city neighborhoods, you can push it a bit outside of 410 in some places. Anything else outside is considered the suburbs. There is a huge mix in class of neighborhoods found in both. There's also a half dozen enveloped and (now) adjacent incorporated cities, but they basically follow the same rule - Alamo Heights is considered city, Shevano Park not so much.

The thing is many of those neighborhoods outside the very city core (basically inside 10/35/37) that you would call city today were once considered suburbs. Which is why some might argue that Loop 1604 is the new line of demarcation.

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psychocabbage@reddit

It gets more nuanced than that as some suburbs incorporate and have their own police force and city hall while others rely on the main cities police to patrol. Usually tied to the areas affluence.

Kingwood in Houston comes to mind. It got annexed via some wild thinking on a map by using the electrical line right of ways to by pass Humble and Atoscacita to grab the tax dollars in Kingwood. Which then got the Houston Police force handling the patrols in the areas.

As for commute, Texas is different from many because many people choose to live in a nicer area than where their office is and hence end up with 45+min commutes each way.My wife's last commute was 1.5 hrs each way without any traffic.

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cyvaquero@reddit

Houston - the city where everything is an hour away from where you are.

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GrunchWeefer@reddit

I live around 10 miles outside NYC in New Jersey suburbs. Looking at street view photos of San Antonio, the whole thing pretty much looks like suburbs. It looks less dense than my town. The population density of my town is almost double that of San Antonio. Every time I travel to any city in the middle part of the country I'm surprised by how un-city-like it is. Anyway from what I can see the whole thing is burbs.

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cyvaquero@reddit

I get it, I'm from PA. In the U.S. I've found a few factors which heavily influence how dense the urban core, that "city feel"

Growth predating automobiles vs post
NYC was already at 5.6M people in 1920 while San Antonio was still a small city at 161K, Houston was about the same.
Available land for expansion
NYC growth is limited by water, especially Manhatten, and other geographical obstacles and other municipalities which combined with the above forced building up rather than out.
San Antonio is completely surrounded by hours of farm/ranchland - there is literally noting of note in the three hour drive between San Antonio and Houston.
Secondary note - until just a few years ago cities in Texas could basically annex with impunity which is why you'll see weird extension from what is otherwise a round city, those are the city adding lucrative (commercial or high dollar residential) land to it's tax base. Annexation now it requires a referendum vote of the targeted area so you're see city limit growth slow down considerably.
The economic base
The northeast (especially the mid-atlantic) and Great Lakes was heavily industrialized while for much of history the south and interior states it was/is agriculture. In one scenario the surrounding rural area support the city, in the other it's the opposite

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Cobra_McJingleballs@reddit

San Antonio's a great example because it has a pretty stark (for an American city) ring road.

To OP: visually (on satellite maps), its usually harder to distinguish where American cities end and the suburbs begin vs European cities since Euro cities are much more dense. Also, American cities don't usually abruptly transition from city to suburb... it's sometimes gradual and splotchy in areas.

Nonetheless, using the San Antonio link above, if you zoom in toward the southern I-410 border, pretty clear to see a density change between inside the 410 and, say, Mission Del Lago.

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Unable-Economist-525@reddit

My family lives in Alamo Heights. Lots of big trees. My aunt has actual English ivy on the stone walls of her house. Great schools.

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poorperspective@reddit

To add, much of what is considered suburb is mostly decided by zoning. If the residential area is within the town or city limits, and thus regulated to city taxes, than it an urban development. If it was originally not included and only had county tax imposed, then it was suburban. Now, if the suburb gets absorbed into the town or city, it may still be referred to as a suburb, even though it’s technically not.

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unsurewhatiteration@reddit

Also suburbs are very often not neighborhoods in the traditional sense at all. What I mean is they will often be made up of subdivisions that are kind of like islands, and all the people who live there drive somewhere else to work, shop, go to the park, etc.

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Puzzled-Parsley-1863@reddit

Very much depends on region/state. Suburbs in the Northeast tend to have more of a flow, as compared to the suburban sprawl seen in the South and Southeast/West Coast (Dallas/Houston/Atlanta, Phoenix, LA)

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Useful-ldiot@reddit

I think it has a lot to do with barriers.

Chicago is limited by the lake. NYC is on an island. Boston has the harbor.

There are no barriers in ATL. It's cheaper to go out rather than up, so planners went out.

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ninjette847@reddit

That depends on how old the suburb is there are a lot of suburbs that are pretty walkable. It's mainly the suburbs closest to the city. Where I grew up I could walk to restraunts, stores, grocery store, a lot of parks, school, I walked to work in high school. A lot of suburbs around me are like that.

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kjb76@reddit

I live in a suburb like that outside NYC. It’s actually a village and we have a downtown core with shops and restaurants.

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Anonymous89000____@reddit

Those are usually referred to as the inner-ring (former suburbs) not what are typically thought of as suburbs anymore

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ninjette847@reddit

There are a few where I live that aren't inner-ring at all. Even the inner ring are still definitely thought of as suburbs.

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XelaNiba@reddit

Yes, suburbs built before the advent of the car tend to be walkable and more of a community.

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Affectionate-Art-152@reddit

Cambridge mass is both a city and suburb of Boston.

Very walkable. Very low car ownership. Lots of neighborhoods.

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rhino369@reddit

People in the cities don't usually work in the same neighborhood they live in.

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Putrid-Shelter3300@reddit

Kinda. Neighborhood just means a geographic area that is close to others. For example, in GA, there are these horrible things called home owners association (HOAs). Each HOa would govern the rules of the neighborhood (geographic area that is tied around a common item, such as a pool, church, or other market). A suburb is just an area outside of a city that isn’t politically tied to it. For example, in France, St Denis would be a suburb of Paris. La Defense is a suburb of Paris as well.

In the US, suburbs were initially created as a way to get away from the black people that were taking over cities (especially in the South). Now, we have a new turn (exurbs) which describe places that are further away from the city they are theoretically tied to.

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rhino369@reddit

I'll that the distinction between city and suburb gets somewhat arbitrary at the edges. To use Chicago as an example, there are a lot of neighborhoods that look and feel exactly like the nearby suburbs.

I don't think this is very different than Europe. I spent last summer in Aix-en-Provence. If you drove 5-10 minutes out of town, they had what looked like suburbs to me.

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Eastern-Zucchini6291@reddit

Also a lot of employment has shifted to the burbs. My city (Portland) so much of the high paying tech jobs are in the burbs. Intel hires tens of thousands in the Suburbs, nike is headquartered in the burbs.

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Floobersman@reddit

A town or city that is close to a major metropolitan city that is mostly houses and not businesses. Usually, when you look at a map, you can't see where the major city ends and the suburb starts because the two are right next to each other.

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Mesoscale92@reddit

There’s two things: suburbs and suburban development.

A suburb is a smaller city near a major city. They are generally still developed (as opposed to being rural).

Suburban development is a common urban planning philosophy emphasizing separate housing and commercial zoning, detached single family homes, and heavy reliance on personal vehicles for transportation. This can also occur within major cities, but was prevalent starting with post-WW2 development of previously agricultural land around major cities.

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butt_fun@reddit

I've personally never heard anyone make the distinction between "suburb" and "suburban development"

You might be correct to make that distinction, but for the purpose of answering OP's question, this might be more noise than signal

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BulldMc@reddit

I think it's pretty significant that the term is used in different ways. Some "suburbs" are pretty urban with dense, mixed use zoning and public transit, they just aren't part of the major city they're near. Other places that would be described as "suburban" might be more than 20 miles from the nearest real city, be entirely residential, and offer no connections other than the interstate to much other than more houses.

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Ok-Equivalent-5131@reddit

20 miles would be close. Iv lived in 3 suburban towns. They were 60 miles, 115 miles, and 400 miles to the nearest big urban center respectively. But they would all be considered suburban

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rhino369@reddit

You are right, nobody makes the distinction.

I used to get sneered at by DC residents living in detached single family homes in NE because I was a surbinite despite living in a 17 floor high rise in Arlington.

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80117BRI@reddit

This is an important distinction. The original suburbs were formed in the late 1800s, when railroads allowed commuting to a central city. Suburban development is something that happened in the 1950s with the automobile.

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username-generica@reddit

Exactly. We live in a suburban development in a major US city.

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police-ical@reddit

To this end, one of the major differences between the U.S. and (non-Eastern bloc) Europe over the 20th century was the degree of urban decay and suburbanization in the U.S. leading to mass flight of (predominantly white) middle-class and wealthy families to the suburbs, whereas European cities largely remained more desirable and poverty was pushed to housing development further out. This is a huge topic and there are a lot of reasons it happened. The U.S. was in a fairly different situation after the war as it had avoided any meaningful damage and boasted enormous wealth, cheap oil, ample land, and high car ownership, as well as government policy that aggressively favored buying single-family homes rather than renting in multi-family housing. Europe was recovering from mass destruction and had very different priorities. American racial dynamics and discriminatory policy also played a major role in the vicious cycle of urban decline/white flight/concentration of poverty that started after the war and accelerated after urban riots in the 1960s.

So, to OP's question, they're the same but different. While la banlieue in French and "the suburbs" in English are pretty one-for-one literal translations, they actually have opposite connotations. La banlieue around Paris brings to mind dense housing blocks with large immigrant populations and more crime and poverty, which in the U.S. is stereotypically an urban phenomenon ("the projects," "the hood," "the ghetto," "the inner city," all of which also have racial connotations.) Meanwhile, "the suburbs" in the U.S. indicates culturally bland and sleepy car-dependent neighborhoods, but also implies low crime and middle-class to moderately affluent families, often predominantly white, as well as that ultimate marker of prestige, "good schools."

These stereotypes have shifted some in recent decades as American cities have repopulated/gentrified and poverty has been pushed to the suburbs, but remain influential, particularly among older generations who grew up in the suburbs and always knew "the inner city" as a place to be feared.

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undreamedgore@reddit

I would say the cities stereotypes still remain largely negative. Either with thr "criminal" poor elements (usually they're also assumed to be black), or thr gentrified areas with their unrealistically liberal, usually being much more toxic, and extremely progressive. Which makes it sound like I'm conservative hating on liberals in general, but I'm not.

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police-ical@reddit

I think this varies regionally. Big cities in the Great/Lakes/Midwest/Rust Belt have broadly seen declining populations and the problems that come with them. Detroit and St. Louis maintain a very strong urban/suburban divide in terms of class/race/wealth. On the other hand a lot of Sun Belt cities blew up after WWII and are thus relatively suburban in nature, i.e. a relatively small built-up center that quickly turns into lower-density/single-family housing as you go out in any direction. In Houston or Charlotte, "the city" vs. "the suburbs" isn't that meaningful of a distinction.

Meanwhile, high-cost-of-living coastal cities often have more of the divide you describe, where the middle class is priced out and only the poorest or richest end up staying.

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msabeln@reddit

Frank Lloyd Wright was an early advocate for suburbanization: his specific worry was about the threat of nuclear warfare with the Soviet Union, and so spreading out the population would potentially reduce casualties.

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No_Weakness_2135@reddit

Very well said

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ramblingMess@reddit

Thank you, finally someone says it. It’s a pet peeve of mine when people lazily use “suburb” to mean one of several completely separate concepts. It just leads to everyone talking in circles about what is and isn’t a suburb because they can’t be bothered to clarify which concept they’re talking about. Regular respondents on this sub really ought to know better.

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Occhrome@reddit

Yeah I wonder this about most homes in Southern California that are meshed between businesses and neighborhoods.

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deleted_by_reddit@reddit

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OhThrowed@reddit

A suburb is an outlying community, neighborhood or smaller town to a city that is focused on residential.

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vaspost@reddit

Most suburbs are separate cities themselves

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Creepy-Floor-1745@reddit

In Texas, any suburb here would not exist without the nearest metro area. There would be no commercial and industrial source of income to draw anyone to live in the suburbs without the city. That may be different in the NE.

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vaspost@reddit

Suburbs are often separate legal entities with their own elected councils, taxes, police, fire, schools etc. They are typically bedroom communities; however, sometimes they'll have significant industrial and office complexes. By definition they are part of a larger metro area.

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Creepy-Floor-1745@reddit

Agreed

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Curmudgy@reddit

That kind of depends on your definition of a city. To me, they’re largely towns, often without universal sidewalks or a comprehensive bus system.

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Affectionate-Art-152@reddit

Cambridge MA (population 100k+) is both a city and a suburb. Solid public transportation (both bus and train, when they are working), very walkable (many sidewalks).

The whole suburbs are only horrible car centric places without trees or sidewalks is not as applicable in the northeast.

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Curmudgy@reddit

I don’t consider it a suburb. It’s a city in its own right that just happens to be adjacent to another few cities.

Is Minneapolis is a suburb of St. Paul? Or vice versa? Or are they just adjacent cities?

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vaspost@reddit

Cities are a legal entity with a charter from the state to tax and provide services. Typically they to have a certain population to qualify for a city charter.

A metro area might include 10 or more entities that are legally cities with independently elected councils and separate police, fire, building permitting, and parks and rec departments.

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Curmudgy@reddit

separate police, fire, building permitting, and parks and rec departments.

Towns in MA have all of those without being legally cities.

The thing is that the legal definition is one perspective, while urban characteristics versus suburban characteristics are a different perspective. Both are valid ways to think of cities vs towns, so you have to be clear on which is meant.

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o93mink@reddit

Maybe where you live, but have the humility to realize that this is a very large country

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NWYthesearelocalboys@reddit

It's not different, that's what people above are trying to explain. It's the same everywhere, but I'll use Phoenix as an example. All of the developments in the Phoenix city limits are neighborhoods. Many of those neighborhoods are track home developments just like in the suburbs of Glendale, Mesa, Tempe, Scottsdale etc.

The suburbs can be cities with their own central core. The houses of those Suburban cities are in neighborhoods of the Suburbs of Phooenix.

Technically if you live in a high rise in downtown Tempe you live in a Phoenix suburb.

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Upset_Version8275@reddit

Feels odd to call Tempe a suburb considering it’s practically downtown

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TsundereLoliDragon@reddit

Especially in the north east where a lot of the suburban towns are hundreds of years old themselves. I'm well outside Philadelphia and there's been people living here since the 1700s.

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frederick_the_duck@reddit

A suburb is a separate municipality

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chancimus33@reddit

Swampskit

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SpookyBeck@reddit

Most people in suburbs drive cars.

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Creepy-Floor-1745@reddit

Interesting observation on the suburbs appearing to be high middle class - it’s much cheaper to live in the suburbs so a middle class working family can have a house with a yard and bedrooms for each of their kids but they pay the price with lack of cultural vibrancy in the immediate neighborhood and a horrible commute

The same prices would only get you a very small studio or one bedroom in a less desirable corner of the urban residential area but you might have a train or bike to work and nearby arts, recreation, shops without the need to drive your car.

As an example, I need to drive nearly an hour to see a professional theater production or baseball game and use my car to go to the grocery store, negotiate remote work to avoid commute, but we have 4 bedrooms for our family of 6. The same housing in a desirable neighborhood in Chicago would be 4X the cost.

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bluescrew@reddit

This isn't universal but a simple way to separate it in your mind:

If you start at the city center and drive until more than 10% of the housing is single-family homes with driveways and yards that are 5+ blocks from the nearest grocery store, you're probably in a suburb.

If you think of a city in concentric rings, the smallest one being downtown; the suburbs are the next smallest, followed by the country.

Some suburbs used to be cities in their own right, but have been absorbed into a larger metro area. These will have their own tiny walkable "downtowns" but otherwise be mostly comprised of those cookie-cutter neighborhoods you're referring to.

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xxxHAL9000xxx@reddit

the word "suburb" has lost its meaning in the last 100 years.

think back to a city 100 years ago in the US. Most people didnt own cars. The cities had streetcars on rails and city busses. The people lived in apartments and townhomes. People had very tiny yards or no yard at all. The shopping districts were designed for foot traffic.

a suburb was an area outside the city for larger homes with huge yards and this style of life necessitated car ownership. The suburb was the domain of the rich people.

fast forward to the post war era (after ww2)…

suburbs began being built (mass produced, actually) for average income people. Smaller houses with smaller yards but still necessitated car ownership.

fast forward to the late 1960s…

cities began to decline. Horrific crime rates, dilapidated buildings, slums, apartments that charge weekly rents. The shopping districts began to lose customers because modern malls in the suburbs were where the affluent spent their money.

so…it doesnt really mean anything anymore. Everyone lives in a suburb.

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Ok_Television9820@reddit

Demographics of US suburbs (many- not all, it depends) historically since post WWII are shaped by the fact that certain people left urban areas basically to get away from people not like them. Racism, in short. And many suburban developments included racial covenants to keep minorities from buying houses there. Other policies like car-only infrastructure (no public transportation, even building bridges too low for busses to pass on some main roads) helped develop white suburbs and leave mixed urban areas to rot.

This has switched recently now that many people figured out that living in a city is convenient and fun and nice, so public policy on urban infrastructure plus stright up gentrification by people buying into urban centers have changed the demographics- and in many cases pushed out the people who had been living in these urban areas when the grandparents of the new incomers moved to escape having to live with them.

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kilertree@reddit

It's the areas outside of the city built after World War II that were intentionally racially segregated by the banks and the US government In a process called red lining

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a_sandcat_196@reddit

It’s a place city residents live who are too sissy to live in the city proper.

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SamsonOccom@reddit

It depends on who you ask. I'd define suburbs as municipalities with restrictive zoning laws intended to prevent higher density, thus preventing lower socioeconomic residents

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MollyWeasleyknits@reddit

At least in my city, suburbs used to be small towns that were “absorbed” into the general metro area. The suburbs tend to have more single family, detached homes and more green spaces. Incomes are not lower but there’s a lot more “bang for your buck”. Commute times are definitely high if you’re working in the urban core but many people work in the suburbs themselves these days.

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Arkyguy13@reddit

An interesting thing I've noticed in my city (a small town until the 90s) is the new subdivisions today have much less green space than the old ones. The old neighborhoods mostly have parks interspersed but the newer ones you have to drive to the parks.

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MollyWeasleyknits@reddit

Interesting I think it’s almost the opposite near me. Most of them are built with a park in the middle.

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Arkyguy13@reddit

I just checked the new part of town has 8 parks at the 2000 ft zoom level on google maps and the old part of town has 15 parks.

The new side of town mostly has small neighborhood parks whereas the old part of town has neighborhood parks as well as big city parks. I will say they just finished a new city park in the new side of town and are about to start another so they're working on it so maybe it just takes time to catch up. Also trees take a long time to grow so the new side of town just feels ugly because of the lack of trees.

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allieggs@reddit

This is largely true for the LA area as well

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lfxlPassionz@reddit

sub·urb /ˈsəbərb/ noun plural noun: suburbs an outlying district of a city, especially a residential one.

It's just a small area right on the edge of a city where it's all homes and very few to no businesses. There are rich and poor ones but in the USA most of them are rich people because homes cost an insane amount of money. If the house has a large yard like they do in most of the american suburbs then it's an even larger cost.

My house is probably worth about $240,000 in the suburbs right at the edge of the city in Michigan with 1 acre of land and no garage.

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K9WorkingDog@reddit

It is an area far from downtown, not everyone works downtown though. Typically higher income commuters and retirees

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On_my_last_spoon@reddit

“Downtown” means something different based on the city. The area that is considered “downtown” in Chicago is the center of the city where business happens. The residential areas around it are not the suburbs. The suburbs are the towns that surround Chicago.

In NYC, “downtown” is a direction. Traveling “downtown” or “uptown” is relative to your starting point. But, once again, you don’t get to the suburbs until you hit Long Island, Westchester County, or New Jersey past Newark.

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Flat-Leg-6833@reddit

And to be “that guy”’only the two easternmost counties on Long Island are considered the suburbs. Funny thing is I met an old guy who moved from Brooklyn to “the country” in the early 1940s - the “country” being Jackson Heights, Queens (geographically Long Island but a part of NYC).

Also here in the northeast, the concept of what is suburban shifts - Flushing, Forest Hills, Irvington (NJ) and East Orange (NJ) were considered “the suburbs” until developers built further out after WWII.

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On_my_last_spoon@reddit

Right? In some ways, Staten Island isn’t much different than the suburbs across the bridge in Bayonne, but technically it’s part of NYC so is it the city or a suburb!

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Andy235@reddit

If anything, Bayonne is more built up and urban than much of Staten Island.

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royalhawk345@reddit

Exactly. If someone called Rogers Park a suburb they'd get looked at like they were insane. And "Downtown" is pretty much just the Loop and River North.

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GiveHerBovril@reddit

I wouldn’t say higher income. Cities have gotten really expensive and most people can’t afford to live in them, so they get pushed out to the suburbs where housing is cheaper.

I personally live in a suburb of a downtown area where I work. It sucks to have a commute but I can’t afford to live closer to my job

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K9WorkingDog@reddit

Housing isn't necessarily cheaper in the suburbs, but it's always better. I lived an hour and a half from work for years so I could make bank and also live in a 5 bedroom with a big yard

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Eastern-Zucchini6291@reddit

It seems like more and more employment is in the burbs. I got laid off a couple of years ago and every interview I had was for jobs in the burbs. Lots of people commenting out of the city in the morning

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frederick_the_duck@reddit

A suburb is a small city near a large city. They’re part of the larger city’s metropolitan area and are medium density. They are populated by mostly middle class commuters, at least stereotypically. Since car ownership is so widespread in the US, living outside the city isn’t so bad. That also comes with the history of American urban development, which is more complicated than this question.

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SimilarElderberry956@reddit

A suburb was once explained to me as a “reasonable commute “.

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BoltsGuy02@reddit

You mix it with strawberries and sugar and cook it in a pie

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gonzagylot00@reddit

Thee suburbs are outside of the city and where Middle to Upper Middle class people live. I grew up in a suburb of Philadelphia called Doylestown. It’s safe and a nice place, but can get a little dull.

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PsychologicalBat1425@reddit

Suburbs and tract housing developed after WWII when GIs were coming home and could qualify for favorable real property loans with the US Government. The cities were considered an undesirable place to raise a family. Plus it was a means to home ownership verses just renting. It's the American Dream.

I grew up in the suburbs and loved it. Yes, it is very middle class. I commute about 25-mins to get to my office in the city.

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ChalkButter@reddit

In my country, suburb is a neighborhood far away from city downtown where usually lower income people live and have to cope with insane commute times if they work downtown

Yeah, that's pretty much exactly it, except that it's usually not 'low income' - the suburbs are where you can often buy a house on a plot of land in a neighborhood being developed. If you're lucky, a local farmer just sold their farm for development land and you can buy a very large lot

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No_Cellist8937@reddit

And it’s not low income people or far from a city. Pretty much all suburbs have commuter trains that go into the near by city

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beenoc@reddit

What the fuck is a commuter train? Sincerely, North Carolina (really most of the Sun Belt.)

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Curmudgy@reddit

Here’s the map for Boston. The purple lines are the commuter rail, while the red, blue, green, and orange lines are the ones traditionally called the subway (even though the green line is mostly streetcar) or (in the greater Boston area) the T.

The map isn’t strictly to scale or real locations or angles, so some of the purple line stops are really further out than the subway stops that appear nearby. Still, it’s a good image of how many suburbs are served by our commuter rail.

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foxlight92@reddit

I think they were making fun of the fact that Sunbelt cities don't have commuter rail/regional rail, despite having large populations that could probably use them.

I like that map though.

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Curmudgy@reddit

I figured that, but thought the Boston commuter rail deserve to be shown off anyway.

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MajesticBread9147@reddit

They're heavy rail trans that generally focus almost exclusively on getting people (especially 9-5 office workers) in and out of a city's downtown. Some examples are New Jerseys PATH, New York's LIRR, Maryland's MARC, and Virginia's VRE.

They usually use train lines that were previously used to bring manufactured goods in and out of a city when manufacturing was bigger and trucking did not exist yet.

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beenoc@reddit

I do actually know what commuter rail is, and think it's not a bad thing - probably not a great fit for most Sun Belt cities because of the sprawl (light rail would be better IMO) but good where it exists. It was a joke because outside of limited Amtrak services, there's not even light rail in most of the Sun Belt, let alone actual commuter rail.

And now, much like the humble frog, the joke has been dissected and explained and is now dead.

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Striking_Computer834@reddit

Around here that's how the homeless people travel to richer areas to steal stuff.

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undreamedgore@reddit

Which is why people don't like them. Mass transit means, the masses can transit, bringing their problems with.

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wwhsd@reddit

There are very few things that might qualify as “commuter trains” that go from suburbs into the city in most of the places I’ve been. There might be some sort of trolley or light rail that connect some locations, but most folks out in the suburbs have almost as long a drive to get to a stop as it would take them to just drive into the city.

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No_Cellist8937@reddit

Well for the Boston metro area the Commuter Rail is how people commute into and out of the city from the suburbs…even connecting Boston to providence

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wwhsd@reddit

Right, some cities and suburbs have something like that but I don’t think it’s anywhere near “pretty much all”.

I think once you get outside of the East Coast or further down than maybe DC, having a good commuter train system that gets people from suburbs into the city will be an exception rather than the norm.

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NSNick@reddit

Commuter trains? What country are you talking about, cause it ain't America lol

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Deep_Contribution552@reddit

Eh, Atlanta metro covers 8 thousand square miles but has under 50 miles of railway. Houston has under 25 miles of rail serving 1700-square mile Harris County; if you are one of the two million people living outside of Harris County in the Houston metro you get nothing. Those are premier metro areas for this country- down in tier 2 places like my local region, Indianapolis, barely have bus service to the suburbs.

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Living_Molasses4719@reddit

Only around the big cities that have mass transit. Smaller cities can still have suburbs but say, only a bus system for public transportation

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Striking_Computer834@reddit

Buying in a new development is very risky. You don't know what kind of neighborhood it ends up being and what kind of kids will fill the schools. Buying in established neighborhoods is far less risky.

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MajesticBread9147@reddit

You don't know what kind of neighborhood it ends up being and what kind of kids will fill the schools.

What does this even mean, beyond racially coded/classist connotations.

Also I hate to tell you, but neighborhoods change, places can be gentrified and places can face divestment.

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undreamedgore@reddit

I mean, are your neighbors nice or dicks? Do they care about their lawn and appearances or are they going to let it rot out of sheer apathy? Are you suddenly one day going to here gunshots?

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MajesticBread9147@reddit

I honestly don't care about a lawn, and regardless many communities have lawn moving of shared spaces part of HOA dues, with the houses themselves having no lawn at all which makes things much easier.

As for "Are you suddenly one day going to here gunshots?" That is absolutely not exclusive to New communities.

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undreamedgore@reddit

What do you mean shared spaces? Each person's lawn is their own, but it's appearance affects the whole neighborhood.

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MajesticBread9147@reddit

Take this example

Generally the grass in front is considered "shared" because it's no owners individual property, and HOA dues pay people to mow it simplifying everything.

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undreamedgore@reddit

Taht's not really a suburb though is it. Not single-family housing, no lawns, loses all the benefits of suburbs.

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MajesticBread9147@reddit

Brother, it's an hour out by train of the city it relies upon for its existence, although there are plenty of jobs and stuff to do nearby.

The benefit is it's cheaper and closer to some jobs that are in the suburbs. It has more room than most SFHs, and there's a park with a lawn a short walk away.

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undreamedgore@reddit

That's just a town in my opinion.

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username-generica@reddit

Not necessarily. My older son attends the neighborhood suburban high school. Since he started attending district schools in 7th grade he’s been offered crack, had someone threaten to jump him, had student bathrooms closed due students smoking pot in them, had stairs made 1 way due to fights on the stairs, etc .

His younger brother was accepted a city arts/stem high school just south of downtown in another district that’s down the street from most of the city’s homeless services. It’s much safer than the high school his brother attends. The student population is self selecting because students have to apply and they have much more leeway to kick out problem kids because it’s a school of choice.

Both schools are majority minority in terms of the student population and the makeup of the administration. Both have similar socioeconomic makeups.

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Striking_Computer834@reddit

What does this even mean, beyond racially coded/classist connotations.

Meaning you don't know if they're stabby/shooty kids or not. Race or class is irrelevant. I don't care who is stabbing or shooting my kids or what race they are or why they are doing it.

Also I hate to tell you, but neighborhoods change, places can be gentrified and places can face divestment.

Neighborhoods do change over time. A new neighborhood changes all at once.

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MajesticBread9147@reddit

How do you determine whether kids are stabby or shooty? Lots of places have zero incidents before something big/notable happens.

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Striking_Computer834@reddit

By stabbings and shootings.

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smokiechick@reddit

You are not making any sense. Nothing happened in Columbine, until it did. Nothing happened at most schools, until it did. Uvalde? Sandy Hook? History would tell you they were safe, the day before they weren't.

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wookieesgonnawook@reddit

I don't think they're looking for examples like that. Rather, there are some schools that are just shit. Streamwood IL can be an OK suburb. When I was born there it was a nice town and we had a great house. But Streamwood high school is shit. Even 40 years ago we knew that, as my parents have told me they always intended to move before I got to high school. It's low quality compared to the surrounding schools and the incidents with students i heard about from kids going there were terrible compared to the school i went to. It would suck to buy into a new community only to have the school end up like that, which you may not know about until it's too late and your kids are at the school.

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smokiechick@reddit

I think I'm having an issue with the idea of a new development automatically becoming shit. Just, boom, year 3 it looks like Mad Max. People who can afford new tend to be either really safe or a ticking mental health timebomb, but not random stabbings every other week.

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Striking_Computer834@reddit

You are not making any sense.

I'm making perfect sense. Your confusion stems from you having a world-view that cannot permit sense.

Nothing happened in Columbine, until it did. Nothing happened at most schools, until it did. Uvalde? Sandy Hook? History would tell you they were safe, the day before they weren't.

You're confusing statistical probability with certainty. There's no possibility of assessing the risk of your child being stabbed or shot at school with certainty, but I guarantee you with certainty that it's more likely to happen in schools with a student body that has a history of shooting and stabbing people than one that doesn't.

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Figgler@reddit

This is basically all of western Phoenix in the last ten years. Lots of alfalfa farms turned cookie cutter houses. It actually saves a ton of water developing that direction though.

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PPKA2757@reddit

People give us shit for our sprawl and how “Phoenix shouldn’t exist” due to the climate and water resources.

When in reality, it’s because of the sprawl (and solid legislation on water usage) that the valley uses less water now than we did in the 1950’s, despite having 7million more people living here.

Agriculture uses a massive fuck ton of water, especially compared to municipal (people) and industrial usage, and agriculture is still responsible for the majority of our water usage today.

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smappyfunball@reddit

When I lived in Phoenix and saw all the farms outside the city it always boggled my mind cause it seemed like the worst place in the world to grow anything. I couldn’t understand why anyone would want to.

There’s no shortage of agricultural land in the United States, so to grow corn or soybeans in the desert seems mind numbingly stupid.

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PPKA2757@reddit

It is and it isn’t.

The sun shines 300 days a year here and it hardly gets cold enough to where frost will kill crops. That means you can plant and harvest crops while the rest of the country can’t grow anything. This is why California’s Central Valley produces so much.

On paper, as long as the crops are heat resistant, it’s actually the perfect place to farm, because you can do it year round.

The only problem is water. Crops need a shit ton of it and we only have so much.

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smappyfunball@reddit

Yea but it’s mainly the water part, I know about the sun part. I lived through enough summers there.

And being from San Jose I’m fully aware of the Central Valley. My grandfather was a fruit buyer.

But the sheer volume of water needed to grow crops there doesn’t seem practical

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Impressive-Ad210@reddit (OP)

Phoenix is where Elvis Presley was born right? So it's like Las Vegas, a city in the middle of a desert. I think it's a cool concept.

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PPKA2757@reddit

Phoenix is not where Elvis was born. He’s from Tupelo, Mississippi.

Phoenix and Las Vegas are both desert cities, though that’s about all they have in common.

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velociraptorfarmer@reddit

Yep. When it comes to just residential population, Arizona is water independent. It's only when you start adding in agriculture that it becomes a problem.

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3rdcousin3rdremoved@reddit

Suburbs are generally wealthier. It’s the middle class running away from pollution and crime of the city.

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BearsLoveToulouse@reddit

I think the cultural difference from OP’s suburbs and American suburbs is that in the US we had the “white flight” where many immigrants and people of color were living in cities so racist whites left for the suburbs- cementing the idealism of suburbs over urban life. As other people pointed out that there are a diverse population in modern American suburbs now

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Eastern-Zucchini6291@reddit

Lots of people reverse commute in my city. The burbs have a lot of high paying employment .

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lupuscapabilis@reddit

It’s not always far away. I’m in a suburb of NYC and can be in the city in a quick train ride.

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No-Lunch4249@reddit

Actually, the plurality of people below the poverty line do live in the suburbs now. This is a phenomenon known as "The Suburbanization of Poverty" or "drive till you qualify."

Of course, the suburbs you're thinking of aren't the ones where those in poverty are relocating to. But this is a very real and data backed tred that goes back a few decades now

Source: Brookings Institute testimony to US House Committee for Ways and Means

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Appropriate-Food1757@reddit

Makes sense cities are expensive as fuck now

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TheRandomestWonderer@reddit

I am in an older suburb built in the 1960s close to downtown. There are lots of brand, new overpriced suburbs being built all around me. Unless you live in an apartment downtown, you basically live in a suburb around here.

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r_GenericNameHere@reddit

You have urban, suburban (suburb), and rural

Urban is city living Suburbs are just that sub-urban, not quite urban Rural: living in the boonies

A lot of suburban neighborhoods are built as an entire neighborhood so all houses are cookie cutter cause a builder is coming in and putting 200 house down in a relatively short time span, but not all suburb areas look as cookie cutter, just depends on where you are.

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North81Girl@reddit

Rural means far away from a city

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thoth218@reddit

Anyplace outside of NYC

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tea-wallah@reddit

It’s in the word: sub-urban. It’s not midtown, it’s just near enough to catch a show.

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Richmondisjustok@reddit

Suburbs are where dreams of escape go to die in cul-de-sacs. Picture a sprawling maze of beige vinyl siding, HOA rules about mailbox height, and endless parking lots guarding a single Panera Bread like it’s a sacred relic. It’s the land of lawn care worship and Amazon boxes stacked like trophies of consumer conquest.

Need culture? There’s a strip mall for that—conveniently located between a dentist named “Smiling Faces and Braces” and a vape store called “Cloudz.” Public transit? Only if your SUV breaks down and you’re ready to wait three hours in the sun for a bus that no one admits exists.

Suburbs are where individuality goes to become a Pinterest board and where rush hour starts at 3 p.m. because nobody can remember why they moved there, only that the schools “seemed nice.”

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Usuf3690@reddit

I think generally speaking suburbs are the outlying smaller towns/ cities, of bigger cities. For instance Lexington and Concord, famous for being the sites of the opening military actions of the American Revolution, are suburbs of Boston.

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MaleficentMousse7473@reddit

A place where you can live if you don’t mind having to drive for everything

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Aromatic-Winner-2102@reddit

Typical US city concentric circles

downtown core (the part with the skyscrapers) is just for working
historic neighborhood right outside downtown, both and entertainment district and expensive place to live
poor older suburbs a little further out. People are scared to go here. This is the gunshot neighborhood.
rich new suburbs even further out
middle class suburbs on the far side of the moon

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GiveHerBovril@reddit

I live in the third one ✌️

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Dangerous-Safe-4336@reddit

Me too. It was the first "suburb" in the city. People that live out in the suburbs are afraid to come here. It's probably no more dangerous than where they live, but boy, does it have the reputation.

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Candid-Math5098@reddit

Those last ones are, I think, exurbs?

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JoeCensored@reddit

Suburbs are small cities or towns within driving distance to a major city. They are primarily filled with single family homes.

The class of people is roughly middle class, but it depends on which suburban city. For example, Sausalito and Tiburon are suburban cities of San Francisco, but are where primarily extremely wealthy people live. While nearby Marin City is full of poor people and government housing apartment buildings.

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batcaveroad@reddit

In the North American Development pattern, suburbs are middle class single family homes near a highway with access to a city. Generally, it’s the kind of place where you move to to raise kids and it’s nicer than the inner city, but there will be uptown neighborhoods of a city that are nicer than suburbs.

Usually all the houses were built at the same time, usually recently, and there are usually rules against changing their appearance. A lot of neighborhoods will have schools built inside/nearby them. You’ll need a car to get around, but it’s cheaper to own a car in America so that doesn’t necessarily mean that everyone’s upper middle class. But everything’s really uniform anyway so it’s hard to tell if anyone’s lower class if they’re not letting their house run down

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Spiritual_Lemonade@reddit

A suburb could be 5 minutes or 50 minutes away from the main hub of a city. There are also many branches of cities, towns, and counties.

The closest ED (A&E) is literally up a street that leads to a suburban neighborhood that probably stretches 1.5 mile further in all directions.

But shopping like food is in the opposite direction.

I live in a suburban neighborhood with some houses nearly 100 years old and then a bunch that are around 12 years old. 5 minutes away is decent shopping. And some brand new. Lots of trees, kids playing and being kids, people have chickens and goats.

I think it's called urban sprawl. So we've spread out far and then some businesses or services follow the housing.

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gramersvelt001100@reddit

A place where people go to stop living.

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damageddude@reddit

NYC is weird. Technically the suburbs are everything outside the five boroughs. NYC started as just Manhattan and then incorporated their suburbs, including the independent city of Brooklyn in 1899.

These days suburbs generally revolve around the NYC economy and used to be bedroom communities are not a part of NYC. That includes a number of small and large cities and towns that used to have generally independent economies. Where I live in NJ, while most commuters go to Manhattan, many commuters also go to the cities of Newark and Jersey City, with mass transit taking them there. I am excluding businesses and services that serve locals on what was farmland 65 years ago.

Most of NYC’s ports and some sports venues are in what are technically the suburbs. Many workers have been priced out of what used to be considered bedroom yet urban neighborhoods within the city. Basically my NJ house is what parts of Queens or Brooklyn would have been 65 years ago.

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Novel-Resist-9714@reddit

Where I live, the suburbs are mostly populated due to school bussing policies in the 70s. Google the term “white flight” to learn more.

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Imaginary_Roof_5286@reddit

It depends on what part of the country you’re in, I’m in a S. CA city and live 8 miles from down town. Houses here are generally single family homes with a front and back yard & are mostly 50-60 feet wide and 100-120 feet deep. Because it is less densely populated & we aren’t deep into the city, we’re considered a suburban area. Our city, while urban itself with a densely populated inner city, is considered a suburb of the nearby mega city. So usage changes the meaning as well.

We don’t really sort people by “class” (although we use the term “middle class”, but perhaps by income & job or education. Many in our area would be called “blue collar” or tradesmen in some countries, ie plumbers, electricians, mechanics, etc. There are also “white collar” professionals as well, working in offices in various professions, maybe with more education (or not). They would all be in various levels that could be called middle class. It’s really a jumble. I even know of someone in a nearby more upscale area that runs a small day care for children in her home.

I would say in my city, the closer to downtown, the more densely populated inner the population & lower the income, but that is not without exceptions. Downtown would have more expensive housing and people who want a more “NYC” kind of lifestyle. Near the waterfront are small homes crammed together owned by the very wealthy. So like most things in life, not much is always one thing or another.

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OldRaj@reddit

The place where people often move when having children.

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alamohero@reddit

Newer suburbs tend to be hundreds of houses spread out over several acres with some having up to a ten minute drive just to leave the neighborhood for anything that you might need. Mostly they’re areas of 1-2 story houses with occasional clusters of shops and businesses (typically strip malls).

Suburbs can often refer to an actual city where most people commute to a much bigger city nearby.

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Unable-Economist-525@reddit

My neighborhood was once a town, and was called a suburb. Over time the adjacent city grew, annexed the town, and now it is a "historic urban neighborhood" just a few miles from downtown. However, abutting the other side of this "urban neighborhood" is a national forest full of trails and trees and caves and critters, so I kind of have the best of both worlds.

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Puzzleheaded-Art-469@reddit

Give you a concrete example: Detroit MI

It's a long the Detroit River so you can see the gradient of Urban to suburban to rural on a semicircle on the map.

The city limits of Detroit have denser development until you get outside and then see these smaller focused towns like Ferndale, Farmington, Mt. Clemens and Plymouth. Those are areas with established "downtowns" but aren't real "cities".

Everything in-between is a suburb. Lightly dense communities with all the essential services, but no concentration of business. You'll have malls and plazas, but nothing like a Times Square.

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AnOkFella@reddit

If you’re familiar with the “council house” setup in England, an American suburb is somewhat like that, but the houses are never connected, and have vastly more space in between (plus the houses are newer/nicer-looking)

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3rdcousin3rdremoved@reddit

Say really any city for example. You got the big part, then go in a straight line for 10 miles and there’s still towns and neighborhoods that never even broke off from the city. It’s the less dense areas of residential neighborhoods, office parks, and commercial/entertainment zones surrounding a city that are the suburbs

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Channel_Huge@reddit

I’m about an hour west of NYC. Suburbs. Train ride is 20 minutes…

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soulmatesmate@reddit

Typical characteristics (but not requirements):

One or two entrances to a housing area.

Themed streets (all trees, birds, colleges, states, etc.)

Houses of similar size, similar construction material, and in five or fewer layouts. I have lived in my subdivision for about 5 years. In this year, I have driven past my house three times while looking for it.

Over 100 houses.

All land plots are of similar size (corner plots might be larger)

No fencing in front yards. (Back yard fencing is common)

Houses set back from road far enough for 1-2 cars to park on the driveway.

Other than a school or a church visible from the road that the entrance(s) are connected, there are no non-housing structures. It is ALL housing. The strip mall with the grocery store is down the road 1-4 miles once you get on the main road.

There is no reason to drive through a subdivision except to reach a house in the subdivision.

In order to help keep speed down, subdivision roads built in the past 50-60 years twist back and forth. They usually have a much lower speed limit. Some have speed bumps, but many do not.

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iaminabox@reddit

Sub urban. Not the city.

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arsonall@reddit

In America, the “city” is very populated, and thus, living spaces do not account for the working population that works in that area, so more areas are developed outside the urban center, often planned, and as such, their design is repeated often so that the workers of the city can commute from their sub-urban housing into the urban city where they work.

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Otherwise-External12@reddit

Suburbs are usually cities that are located around major cities. They have mostly single family houses, a few apartments, and shopping centers.

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Nightcoffee_365@reddit

You pretty much have the American suburb correct. Single family houses with two cars in the driveway. Affluent.

Our lower income people are usually in tenement buildings pretty close to the downtown area. Hence the term “inner city”. The people in American suburbs do not tolerate the disadvantaged. They like to protect their pristine little pocket neighborhoods by having many ways to make sure only the correct people can live there.

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Dragosal@reddit

A suburb can be its own city/county around a bigger "main" city. For example when people live in the "metro" of a city like say metro Detroit, that means they live in a suburb of Detroit usually

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Ppt_Sommelier69@reddit

Suburbs are basically neighborhoods designed with car transportation in mind instead of walking or mass transit. People have very mixed views on it.

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billy310@reddit

I live in an odd place. Los Angeles (the region, not necessarily the city itself) started as a series of suburbs with the occasional urban area here and there.

Now we’re trying to grow into a proper City with transit and such, but people want to “preserve the character of their neighborhood” We call them NIMBYs. So there’s a lot of tension. Two steps forward, one step back. So we have urbanizing in areas that were suburbs, and suburbs (aka exurbs) that are 50+ miles away. We also have rich urban areas right in the heart of the city where it goes to swanky single family homes from gritty city in like 1 block

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baddspellar@reddit

There are indeed stereotypical suburbs like you're talking about, but suburbs vary.

Ford Heights Illinois and Winnetka Illinois are both nearby suburbs of Chicago

The median household income in Ford Heights is $37,083. 37.8% of the population are below the poverty line. Median home value is $48,000. Its violent crime rate is well over the national average (https://crimegrade.org/safest-places-in-ford-heights-il/).

The median household income in Winnetka is $250,000. 2.6% of the population are below the poverty line. Median home value is $1,206,300. Its violent crime rate is well below the national average.

When I live in that area, I was indeed in a suburb that matched you stereotype. It was further away from downtown than either Ford Heights or Winnetka. Middle of the road home prices, low violent crime rate, no real walkable downtown. You had to drive everywhere

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Heights,_Illinois

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winnetka,_Illinois

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robbert-the-skull@reddit

Simple explanation is it is a residential area just outside the city. Close enough for people to drive into the city for work, or even walk or take the train into the city. But not far enough out, away from the city that it is considered a separate town or in the country. Hence the name Sub-Urban 'Suburb'.

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datsyukianleeks@reddit

To understand the what and why of American suburbs there are a few pieces of history that you should know. First, American cities West of the Mississippi were really only developed after the second world war. After the war, America was newly rich and really pushed to develop the middle of the country as fast as they could. This mean cookie cutter mass produced designs on homes, strip mall, etc. Simultaneously, Ford had made car ownership possible for the masses for the first time, the federal government was building the interstate highway system, connecting everything. So the western states developed with cities as basically sprawling suburbs. Cities like Phoenix and Los Angeles are largely suburban design with very small urban cores. Whereas Eastern cities which are a few hundred years older in some cases are true cities and the suburbs are regions outside of the city.

Now the ugly side of it in the older cities in the East and the great lakes...during the first half of the 20th century southern black people migrated to the northern cities in large numbers for the factory jobs to be had. There was a huge backlash from white people in cities. This led to a phenomenon known as white flight where white people in cities pulled out and moved to the suburbs where they could have more space and they wouldn't have to share it with perceived undesirables. This phenomenon continued and was exacerbated by the riots in the late sixties after black civil rights leaders were assassinated. Then you had the Reagan era where they basically cut services in cities and allowed them to totally crater. So the result was cities that were poor and suburbs that were affluent.

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notyouraveragejared@reddit

an urb that is sub

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NE_Pats_Fan@reddit

I think Rush put it best. Sprawling on the fringes of the city In geometric order An insulated border In-between the bright lights And the far unlit unknown

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andmewithoutmytowel@reddit

I live about 30 minutes from downtown, it's a nice area, clean, safe, big houses, good schools, and lots of trees. It's pretty much a quintessential suburb. If you keep going about 3 miles down the main street, you start hitting farms and a smattering of houses on very large plots. Suburbs started being developed in the postwar boom - lots of young men coming home with money from the GI bill, wanting a place of their own to raise a family without the noise, congestion, crime, and bustle of the city. It's a place where kids can ride their bikes all over and where people don't have to lock their doors.

The Suburbs are also kind of boring - lots of the restaurants are chain restaurants because they don't develop over time, they are typically built by a single developer who starts with empty land or farmland. Suburbs are dependent on the urban center, but aren't really a part of the civic community.

The suburban horror genre is because it's very counter to the vibe from the suburbs. My favorite portrayal of a suburb is actually in "Edward Scissorhands" by Tim Burton, the opening scenes showing the suburbs is hilarious, and it definitely captures the stereotypical vibe of a suburb.

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harlemjd@reddit

US suburbs look uniformly well-off to you because you’re watching movies

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sickostrich244@reddit

A suburb in America usually just means a residential area on the outskirts of a larger city and population where folks usually focus on raising kids and taking care of their house.

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millenium-kestrel@reddit

You gotta drive 15-20min to go to the grocery store.

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boulevardofdef@reddit

The American concept of a suburb really originates from the period following World War II, when people -- especially young war veterans who were starting families -- bailed out of crowded and diversifying cities in favor of a lifestyle that was quieter, more idyllic, more homogeneous, with more space and creature comforts such as backyards. The typical American suburban home is influenced by the country houses that wealthy people in the UK owned, albeit more modest and more affordable. The idea was that a growing middle class should have access to the same luxuries you once had to be wealthy in order to enjoy. The widespread availability of cars made this possible.

Over the decades, suburbs have become more ethnically and economically diverse (in many, black people were once banned from buying houses). But many Americans still think of the suburbs as the idyllic respite from noisy, dangerous cities that they were originally sold as, a way to have access to city jobs and amenities while experiencing a less cramped and more peaceful life.

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AgeOfReasonEnds31120@reddit

Europe has them too; more people just live in the city centers over there, since America had to be developed faster.

It's basically a way smaller city outside a major city, usually filled with mostly small apartments and single-family homes (hardly any places of work).

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Alert-Algae-6674@reddit

Suburbs in the US are typically higher income which may not be the case in some other countries.

It mostly started after the 1950s when highway systems were built across the US. It allowed city workers to live in bigger homes with more green space farther from the urban areas, with the option of commuting to work by car.

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nyx-hawk@reddit

So everyone has given good answers here. Suburbs are basically the half step between “urban” and “rural” areas.

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DrMindbendersMonocle@reddit

Suburbs are for people who work in a city but want to live in a 3 or 4 bedroom house with a yard rather than a cramped place in the city which would cost the same per month. Suburbs surround the city so distance isn't that far, but you will need a car

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MajesticBread9147@reddit

I would say this may very much depend on the area. There are lots of suburbs where rowhouses, apartments and even high rise condos are the norm. Although they aren't really cramped.

For example I grew up in a small suburb called Arlington, Virginia, you can look it up, but even 20 years ago a SFH meant you were rich.

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PocketPrin@reddit

Many people, including those from the US, confuse suburbs (residential area with some degree of separation from urban) and suburbia, the concept you're thinking of. Suburbia is the nickname for wealthier suburbs. Many people will say suburbs while referring specifically to suburbia.

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Dave_A480@reddit

Is your country France (the one place I've heard of where the poor are out in the suburbs)?

In most of the US, the lower-income people live in run-down neighborhoods of a large city. Although unrelated to anything about the Nazis/Poland/Jews-in-WWII, the term 'ghetto' has been used to describe such places....

Suburbs are small towns composed of one or more schools, some parks, and single family houses - located within car-commuting distance of a larger city and generally oriented towards the middle/upper-middle class. There is little or no commercial activity beyond gas stations, restaurants and maybe a few small storefront shops, and development rules keep everything expensive-enough that there is effectively a 'minimum buy in' to live there. Also little to no public transit - car ownership is expected.

54% of Americans live in such communities. It is overwhelmingly the preferred living arrangement.

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Impressive-Ad210@reddit (OP)

I'm from Brazil. And it's very different for each city. In Rio de Janeiro you literally have to be reach to live in the south zone where it's the most known part of the city from the media.

In my city middle class live in apartments, middle class horizontal neighborhoods exist, but they are getting "out of fashion" due to constructions companies buying any piece of land they can in the city so they can build apartment buildings whitout any care of how it will affect traffic, water supply, sewage system and etc. . Me personally live in an "adjacent town" of the main city and here I can afford a simple house but can have a garden and a dog.

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RevolutionaryRow1208@reddit

Suburbs are bedroom communities (residential communities) outside of a larger city. They are usually far from the city center, but economically it can vary from lower income to middle class to affluent. In most cases it is more affordable than living in the city and many people leave the city for the suburbs when they start having a family and raising children

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Impressive-Ad210@reddit (OP)

Complementing my OP here. In Brazil for example suburb is an residential area that is not necessarily in poverty but most inhabitants are lower income workers. And many have to do insane commute times (think working a normal 9 to 5 job, but waking up 5 am so you can get a bath and etc, so you leave your home 06:30, needs to endure 2:30 hours of crowded public transportations to arrive in time, and going home is the same thing).

Its common for a person leave home 6 am and just arrive 10 pm. In bigger cities like São Paulo and Rio and can get even worse with people leaving home 4 am and arriving 11pm or later. And having basically 3 hours of sleep a day.

And what would be the concept of suburb we see in movies would be more aligned with private vertical housing complexes. Where you buy a piece of land and build your own home, but within the directories of the company administrsting this space. So you pay you taxes and a condominium fee to live basically in a pocket dimension of high middle class/rich people.

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Casharoo@reddit

Wikipedia has a fairly good explanation of how "suburb" is used in different English-speaking countries, and how suburban communities vary.

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TPSreportmkay@reddit

An important thing to consider is not just what a suburb is by why they exist.

In the post WW2 boom people could afford a mass produced car and cookie cutter home that were massive improvements in personal luxury over living in the city center. Less crime, more space, freedom. So all the middle class white people moved out of the cities. Cities got worse and by the 70s you pretty much had to live in the suburbs if you wanted a nice place.

Then in more recent decades cities have been revitalized and it's desirable to live downtown again.

So you end up with a weird bullseye thing going on where downtown is nice with some pockets of ghetto before you drive all the way out to the suburbs and areas beyond.

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ryguymcsly@reddit

The reason you see them so heavily represented in US media is because Hollywood writers often grew up in them, or are currently raising kids in them. It's why they're always living in the fancy suburbs, because that's the world they know or wish they lived in. It's rare to see a depiction of living in the lower income suburbs (there are fantastic counter-examples, like Suburbia).

In general people don't want to go see movies or TV that depicts their own depressing lives, and it's hard to move a movie camera around a small house. So you get stuff like Ferris Bueller's day off where the main character lives in a ridiculously oversized house with parents most people would consider rich. When it shows 'teenage problems' with these groups like in (going John Hughes again) 16 Candles they're trying to show what teenage life is like for the upper classes and showing it has the same problems.

In reality the US suburban experience is more like Suburbia than American Pie.

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cdb03b@reddit

A suburb is one of two things.

1) Residential developments, typically the style we call subdivisions, outside the city limits but still adjacent to the city.

2) Small towns very close or adjacent to large cities. Typically becoming suburbs as the city grows to be adjacent to or absorb them.

There are poor and rich suburbs. Again what defines them as being suburbs is being residential AND outside the city limits. But most Suburbs are middle class. Lower class tend to be in the urban city proper, or rural.

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BeautifulSundae6988@reddit

Suburbs are developments built as neighborhoods that only offer housing, no retail. Rarely, an exception can be made for a gas station and connected store.

Less commonly, a suburb can be defined as an incorporated city adjacent to a big city, which will still be mostly residential but will include obviously grocery stores, gas stations etc.

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Personal_Pain@reddit

I think of a suburb as being any municipality that is separate of the central city(s) in a metro area. In my mind, a suburb isn’t strictly residential, but often times they are.

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CountChoculasGhost@reddit

Suburbs in the US are almost exactly the opposite of what they are in a lot of other cities around the world from what I understand.

From my understanding, the idea of suburbs somewhat started post-WWII during the baby boom. Soldiers came back from the war and started families. The US needed a lot of relatively cheap housing and a lot of people wanted “land”. As in a standalone house and a yard (ie the American Dream. 2.5 kids a dog and a picket fence).

Fast forward a decade or two and due to various factors that I won’t get into (mostly racism) a lot of the “high or middle class” white people that still lived in cities, fled to the suburbs. This is coined as “White Flight”.

This left a lot of cities with stagnating or declining populations and struggling economies, which only exacerbated things. Basically anyone with the means to leave the cities for the suburbs, did.

So the suburbs became wealthy, and inner cities became poorer.

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cbrooks97@reddit

Not exclusively "high middle class". In fact, they can be just barely middle class, but probably a little better than that. Otherwise, just like your country. The richer people or people who want to live in apartments will live in the big cities, and people who don't make as much or who want bigger yards and better schools will move out to the surrounding communities (the suburbs). The trade off is the commute to work in the city.

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BoldBoimlerIsMyHero@reddit

In California it’s a smaller city around a larger city. If you look at a map of the Bay Area. For instance you have lots of cities bunched together but a city like Pleasanton is considered a suburb. It has no high rises. Few tall apartments. Mostly single family homes either on modest lots or very small lots. Larger house lots are seen more east of California. I have an 1200sf front yard, for instance and about the same in the back. I can grown a small garden but I can’t have a goat.

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dausy@reddit

Usually a town right outside a major city focused on residential areas. Youre still close enough to the major city to take advantage of those perks but the suburbs allow for less car traffic and bigger houses and plots of land for cheaper.

Suburbs are supposed to be for your average family. Perfect place to raise a family and socialize with your neighbors. New subdivisions constantly pop up with more perks for desirable American dream style living. Theyre also getting crazy expensive and while Id like to live in such a neighborhood myself as an adult, even me and my husband are having a hard time affording these "average family homes" and by all means, with our jobs I feel we should be able to walk into any one of them. Cost of living is quite unfair these days.

Older suburbs can certainly age themselves out and be for poorer families.

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vaspost@reddit

Families move to suburbs or order to have peace and quiet, trees and yards, lower crime, far better schools, larger homes, and often more of a sense of community.

Many jobs are no longer in the city center or urban core now anyway.

Many families would never even consider living in an urban core. Personally I would move further outside the city if I could afford to have a house built on 5 or 10 acres.

The inner core typically consists of 2 very different areas. One is crime ridden urban poor areas with terrible schools. These people would leave if they could. The other is high density affluent areas which are typically populated by young single professionals who are more concerned about night life than school districts or the size of the home and retirees whose kids have moved on and have money to burn.

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LawfulnessMajor3517@reddit

So when I think of suburbs I think of it as like a neighboring city within the metro area of a larger city. So New Orleans for example. The city limits only has like 300k people or something. But if you count Metairie, Kenner, etc. it’s like a million or something. I think of those areas as suburbs because jurisdictionally speaking they are separate cities but if you are talking to somebody outside of the area it’s just known as New Orleans. That’s separate than a neighborhood. Like the Lower 9th Ward or Garden District are neighborhood within the city limits. Suburbs have all kinds of neighborhood ranging from low income to mansions.

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TheJokersChild@reddit

A suburb is the area just outside the city (the "urb"). Less crowded, less expensive, but still within easy commuting distance. Very appealing to many. We also have exurbs, which are even cheaper and farther out, and are somewhat more like your suburbs.

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LivingGhost371@reddit

Yeah, your typical American suburb is middle class or above, single family fully detached houses with private yards, garages out front, and essentially all trips being done by car. Quite a few suburbanites don't work downtown and want nothing to do with the city, I live in the suburbs of Minneapolis but only get downtown about once a year or so, I haven't been to downtown St. Paul since before the pandemic.

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Appropriate-Food1757@reddit

It’s like that but not lower income. Big houses, low crime, and good schools is the appeal of suburbs.

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MyUsername2459@reddit

A suburb is a broad category of places where people live that is outside an urban center, but not rural.

They generally have single-family homes, sometimes interspersed with apartment complexes.

They are generally places where the middle-class live, but "middle class" in the US is a pretty broad category of people who are are not in obvious poverty, and not rich enough to not need to work a "normal" job.

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Danibear285@reddit

It is a place that is outside of an urban area. Hence Sub-Urban.

If you aren’t living in farm country and not in the middle of a concrete jungle, you live in the Sub urban areas of the country.

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hohner1@reddit

Not here. Here the middle income prefers the suburbs, as a compromise between access to the city and the country I gusss. The lower income is "inner city".

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beta_vulgaris@reddit

It depends on who you ask and where you live, but the simplest definition is a town on the outside of the city where houses and lots are bigger and the residents are middle class or higher. Over time, many newer suburbs have gotten farther from the city with even bigger lots and even more wealth while older suburbs have changed as well.

Most streetcar suburbs of the 20’s are part of the actual city, many inner ring suburbs of the 70’s thru 60’s have matured and become quasi urban with many of the same challenges of the city.

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tlonreddit@reddit

Commute times are fairly subjective. How long is an "insane commute time" for you?

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Crayshack@reddit

Also, depending on the transportation infrastructure, the same distance can have a very different commute time. That's not even counting the fact that, in the US, a lot of businesses put their offices in the suburbs rather than them being exclusively in the city center.

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Crayshack@reddit

Suburbs are lower-density areas that are outside of the city center and are still economically dependent on the city. Many people prefer living in the suburbs and some companies actually put their offices in the suburbs. So, depending on the exact suburban areas and urban areas you are looking at, the suburban areas can actually be higher-income areas than the urban ones.

Sometimes, the term "suburb" is used to refer to a minor city that is near a larger one. For example, if we look at DC, cities such as Fairfax and College Park are cities in their own right, but they are still suburbs of DC. The economy of these small cities are heavily shaped by their proximity to larger ones and they are a part of the same metropolitan area, but it would be wrong to say that Fairfax City is a part of DC because it is not. It is a suburb. How they fair economically compared to their parent city varies greatly. Sometimes, they are extremely wealthy, and sometimes they are worse off than the city center.

In other cases, the term "suburb" is used to refer to areas that are incorporated as a part of a city but represent a lower population density than the city center. These neighborhoods are a part of the city, but they aren't quite as urban as the city gets so they are called suburban. They tend to be on the wealthier end.

Some people use the term "suburb" exclusively to refer to housing developments of single-family homes. This does result in a bit of confusion sometimes when people are discussing the pros/cons of living in a suburb. For example, I've sometimes shared images of this building to refute claims that suburbs don't have high-rise apartment complexes. This building is located in Reston, which is an unincorporated town within the DC Metropolitan Area. Most people who live in Reston (including those who live in this building) would find it very accurate to say that they live in "the DC suburbs." However, I've had people respond that this building is not representative of a suburb because the very fact that it is an apartment complex makes it not suburban.

Overall, suburbs tend to be very wealthy areas. Some people who live in them do commute into the city center for work, but enough businesses move out into the suburbs that that is not a major factor. In cases where a lot of people do make that commute, it's either a suburb close to the city center or there is very good transportation infrastructure. Suburbs tend to have the best quality schools and they have easy access to the shops and amenities that come with living near a major city. But, suburbs are also less crowded and so preferred by people who want more space, quiet, and better access to nature. Some people see them as having a mix of the worst qualities of urban and rural living, while others see them as having a mix of the best qualities of the two. Given that it's often more expensive to live in the suburbs, I would say that the people who see them as a mix of the best qualities are more common.

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offbrandcheerio@reddit

American suburbs started as white flight destinations (middle class and upper class white people fleeing cities after WWII to get away from the “scary” black and brown people in the cities). Over time suburbs have diversified in many senses of the word. They’re more racially and ethnically diverse now than ever. There are also a range of suburbs from very wealthy to very poor and everything in between.

Suburbs are basically now just areas outside of a main city that are still economically and socially tied to that city but tend to have lower densities, are much more car oriented if not entirely car-centric, and they’re often cheaper to live in because they aren’t as trendy as the main city. For silly political and structural reasons, suburbs are often also viewed as being safer and more family friendly (usually the school districts are considered to be better). The majority of Americans live in suburbs today, so suburbs are effectively the typical American neighborhood.

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No-Conversation1940@reddit

If you define it solely by built form, then there are cities in the Midwest that are almost entirely suburban. Springfield, MO comes to mind here. Even the neighborhoods next to downtown have unattached houses, yards of decent size, and an ample amount of trees. I should know because I lived in houses in several of these neighborhoods.

Suburbs can be quite nice here, or they can be run down. Chicagoland has both extremes.

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IP_What@reddit

In our media, suburbs are mostly what you see, tracts of housing developed by the same developer at the same time and with the same or similar styles with car centric meandering roads that are connected to the city by high speed roads or highways dotted with strip malls.

This might be the most common type, but there is a huge range of American suburbs. In some of our older cities, probably most notably Philadelphia, there are “streetcar” suburbs that are full of historic (to us) housing with relatively densely packed single family homes still on grid street patterns, often with little mini village “downtowns” and more integrated commercial options.

There are “inner ring” suburbs, which mostly popped up during the post war period as white folks fled the cities. Again, often grid streets, they bleed into the city, and usually have a diversity of housing styles.

There are semi-rural suburbs, which are now often called “exurbs,” which are very large lots that could be farms, but aren’t because small scale farming is no longer economically viable.

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BusyBeinBorn@reddit

In the Midwest where I live, suburbs are the desirable middle class and above flock to while the cities decay. These are the places adjacent to cities or otherwise developed places. If you go any further out, it’s just poverty, trailer parks, and meth. In coastal cities, redevelopment and gentrification have priced middle class and lower incomes out of the cities so the suburbs are where the working class and lower incomes live.

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rawbface@reddit

It's about the density of housing - mostly single-family homes and residential streets. It has nothing to do with income. You can have high income suburbs, and low income suburbs. That just affects how big the houses are and how close they are to each other.

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notthegoatseguy@reddit

You can't really think of our cities as just the principal city.

Los Angeles, for example, is just one city in Los Angeles County. There's something like 80 other cities and towns in Los Angeles County alone. And that's not even counting the cities and towns in adjacent counties. For example, Anaheim/Disneyland is located in another county.

In a strict sense, a suburb is any development outside of city limits. Suburbs are their own areas and have their own grocery stores ,shopping, retail, parks, schools and other amenities. Some even have major attractions like concert venues, theaters, and sports arenas.

In most of the US and especially outside of the Northeast and New England, our city limits are big. Indianapolis is about as large as New York City in area, but with less than 1 million people. So there's a lot of suburban style development even though its in city limits. The skyscrapers and high rise office buildings are all concentrated downtown in a specific area.

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World_Historian_3889@reddit

Pretty much a suburb is the typical non-urban " neighborhood" if that makes sense. Long streets that drive out to others maybe have some woods in between them. Commute times vary of course but I wouldn't say for the majority its insane unless you live out of state. For example, the closest city to me is Boston (When I'm not at college) and that's about 40 to 50 minutes away maybe an hour not insane. For low income usually no if you can afford to buy or mortgage a US suburb home, you're at the bare minimum lower middle class and that's if you're the top of that. Most people who live in typical suburbs are on a scale of middle class.

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101bees@reddit

It's pretty much the same here. Suburbs come on all different shapes and sizes here, and are outside the limits of a major city. Not all are white picket fences and manicured lawns like you see in the movies either. There are some pretty rough, low-income suburbs here.

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anneofgraygardens@reddit

Scream was actually filmed near where I live. If you want to pull up your Google Streetview, take a look at Healdsburg and Sonoma, California and look around at what those places are like.

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iuabv@reddit

A suburb in the US is typically stand alone homes with front/back green space. A lot of suburbs are actually towns or cities in their own right with commercial areas and such, but usually it's considered a suburb if a significant percentage of the working population commutes into the city or thinks of themselves as part of the city's metro area.

The suburbs aren't really associated with the poor, more so with middle class people, though often those middle class people have been priced out of the expensive city. The stereotype is that they're depressingly boring (and turning them into horror zones plays on that trope) and lack the culture and vibrancy of the cities they abut.

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manicpixidreamgirl04@reddit

They're towns within commuting distance of cities. They're desirable to live in, because you can get a bigger house with a backyard. The people who live in them tend to be at least middle class, because you need to have a car.

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An8thOfFeanor@reddit

Suburbs became a big thing when cars became commonplace. Affording a car meant affording a farther commute, which meant you could move away from the noise and stink of the city and buy a piece of quieter, greener land with a house and neighbors that were more than 2 yards away.