Yesterday’s cities are today’s metropolitan areas. Not only have cities grown beyond their early municipal boundaries, but the rapid expansion of suburban areas after World War II generated a seismic shift in the way people live and distribute themselves in urban areas and in the ways that we think about current and future urban issues. With over three-quarters of the U.S. population living in urbanized areas, this new urban reality concerns the entire nation.

While some cities in the United States have the ability to expand their boundaries as their population grows, Philadelphia, like most older cities, does not. The...

The narrative of the Philadelphia region’s transition into the twenty-first century is a tale of mixed themes. The metropolitan area has expanded dramatically, developing a complex spatial pattern of inequality that defies conventional categories of city and suburb. The timing of growth and decline has affected the kinds of communities we find in different locations in the region. At the most basic level, the emergence of elite suburbs in the late nineteenth century and the emergence of middle-class suburbs in the early- to middle-twentieth century created patterns of housing and land use that in turn affected the subsequent transformations that...

At the close of World War II both the United States and the Philadelphia region were known for their manufacturing prowess. Yet both already had seen manufacturing’s share of employment begin to decline. Although in 1950 manufacturing held a larger job share in the Philadelphia region than in the nation as a whole, improvements in communication and transportation, technological shifts, differences in labor costs, and other factors allowed production to relocate elsewhere and soon caused the economic paths of the region and the nation to diverge. By the late 1980s, manufacturing in both the city and suburbs of the Philadelphia...

The richly varied character of the region’s communities that we described in Chapter 1 provides choices among many different housing markets. Just as suburban employment opportunities and differentials have driven decentralization in the region, housing choices emerging in the suburbs and exurbs have led to a decentralization of residential opportunities far beyond the boundaries of the region as it existed in the 1950s and 1960s. Housing markets vary significantly across the region, paralleling the patterns of uneven development that differentiate older suburbs and smaller communities from exurban agricultural areas and peripheral industrial towns. Established communities now face disadvantages arising from...

Schooling is key to acquiring the skills and credentials needed to take advantage of opportunities, from obtaining consumer goods and services at reasonable prices to participating in the larger culture and finding gainful employment. Increasingly, success in our information-based society depends on our ability to manage the avalanche of information confronting us in every domain of life, particularly in our jobs. Admittedly, not all occupational categories require increasing levels of education. In fact, some forms of technology are being used by employers to automate processes in ways that reduce the need to invest in human capital. However, there is little...

Thus far, we have described the many ways in which the geographic distribution of employment, housing, and education—built on a base of class, race, and spatial disparities—reinforces these very same disparities, as the region expands and decentralizes. Residents of the region are keenly aware of these differences when they make decisions about where to locate. This chapter looks at how their choices are affected by jobs, housing markets, and schools. It explores this question: to what extent are households using a “value proposition” that includes assessments of both the opportunities available within particular locations and the costs in...

The opportunity gaps separating different locations across the region are likely to widen unless they are addressed by public policies. In Chapter 1 we argued that differences between places exacerbate differences in the quality of life for the region’s population. In our chapter-bychapter examination of the distributions of employment, housing, and education, we have paid particular attention to efforts being made to overcome the inequalities in our regional landscape. Looking for those public and private actors who are currently addressing the region’s uneven development, we have been struck by how many of them work in the third sector.

Policy research...