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service allowed people to live on large lots, away from the

congestion in the city centers.  By the 1960s a majority of

Americans lived not in rural areas or cities but in suburbs.

By the 1980s most jobs were also located in the suburbs as

employers followed their workers away from urban congestion.

Increased mobility improved American life in many other

ways.  Drawing on a huge consumer base, stores could provide

increased variety and reduced prices.  A typical American

grocery store in 1900 offered about 3,000 different prod-

ucts.  By the 1950s supermarkets were offering 15,000 dif-

ferent products.  Today some superstores sell well over

100,000 different products.

Automotive technology also gave urbanites a greater

appreciation for nature, and urban residents demanded more

parks and open space within the cities as well as wilderness

and other recreation areas outside the cities.  Fortunately,

the spread of the suburbs allowed the creation of many types

of open space, from large back yards to greenbelts and

forest parks such as those in New York, Chicago, and St.

Louis.

Problems for Cities

The automobile is not without its problems, of course.

Air pollution is an obvious problem, but more subtle is the

tension between the central cities and the suburbs.  Central

city officials consider the suburbs parasites, benefiting

from city services but failing to pay their share of taxes.

Suburbanites have often successfully opposed annexation,

city-county consolidation, and other attempts by the central

cities to absorb the suburbs into their tax bases.

For many city officials, the most upsetting thing about

the suburbs is not that they seem to be parasites on the

cities but that the suburbs do not even need the cities.

With jobs, shopping areas, and various cultural facilities

moving to the suburbs, central city downtowns have declined

in importance.  In fact, as Frank Lloyd Wright realized as

early as 1922, the invention of the telephone, automobile,

and electric lighting made downtowns obsolete.  Joel Gar-

reau, author of Edge City, points out that "we have not

built a single old-style downtown from raw dirt in seventy-

five years."4

City officials and planners have viewed the decline of

downtowns as a crisis and responded in various ways.  In the

1950s they combined "urban renewal," which often proved