I’ve been examining data lately, revisiting a topic I’m mentioned in the past, namely the smaller sizes of suburbs in Midwest cities compared to other parts of the country. This applies to much of the US east of the Mississippi as well.
West of that river, there are a number of states and regions where there are large suburbs, some of them ranking among the largest municipalities in the country. For example, here are the ten largest suburbs of Dallas-Ft.Worth:
| Suburb | Population |
| Arlington, TX | 398,112 |
| Plano TX, | 288,061 |
| Garland, TX | 242,507 |
| Irving, TX | 242,242 |
| Grand Prairie, TX | 194,614 |
| McKinney, TX | 191,645 |
| Frisco, TX | 188,170 |
| Denton city, TX | 138,541 |
| Carrollton, TX | 136,879 |
| Richardson, TX | 120,981 |
And here are the suburbs of Denver with a population greater than 100,000. Aurora especially is large.
| Suburb | Population |
| Aurora, CO | 374,114 |
| Lakewood, CO | 156,798 |
| Thornton, CO | 139,436 |
| Arvada, CO | 120,492 |
| Westminster, CO | 113,479 |
| Centennial, CO | 110,831 |
The Midwest just doesn’t have that many large suburbs. Some major metro areas don’t even have a single suburban municipality with more than 100,000 residents. If you pull the list of largest municipalities in these states, the top ten are frequently dominated by or have strong representation from core cities of small metros.
Those suburbs that are large are frequently what Pete Saunders labeled “captured satellites.” That is, they were established, independent cities with their own history and identities that got swallowed up by suburbanization. Hence their size results from having previously been a genuine core city in their own right.
In the Chicago area, for example, four of the five largest suburbs – Aurora, Joliet, Elgin, and Waukegan – are classified as captured satellites by Pete. Incidentally, these four, the largest of which is Aurora at 199,602, are all among the top ten municipalities in the state. Excluding these, here are the ten largest Illinois suburbs:
| Suburb | Population |
| Naperville, IL | 148,304 |
| Cicero, IL | 81,597 |
| Arlington Heights, IL | 75,249 |
| Bollingbrook, IL | 75,178 |
| Evanston, IL | 74,106 |
| Schaumburg, IL | 73,509 |
| Palatine, IL | 68,053 |
| Skokie, IL | 63,280 |
| Des Plaines, IL | 58,959 |
| Orland Park, IL | 58,312 |
Compared with Dallas and Denver, Chicago only has one true suburb with more than 100,000 people.
Detroit has a couple of suburbs that reach this threshold. Here are the top ten in that region:
| Suburb | Population |
| Warren, MI | 134,587 |
| Sterling Heights, MI | 132,964 |
| Dearborn, MI | 94,333 |
| Livonia, MI | 93,971 |
| Troy, MI | 84,272 |
| Westland, MI | 81,720 |
| Farmington Hill, MI | 81,093 |
| Rochester Hills, MI | 74,696 |
| Southfield, MI | 73,158 |
| Taylor, MI | 61,148 |
Detroit’s suburbs are often square shaped, as they follow township boundaries. I believe many of them are townships that incorporated. This limits the population these places can achieve at suburban densities, given the typical Midwest township size of 6×6 miles.
I believe the same township orientation is true in Minneapolis-St. Paul, which also has a lot of square suburbs, the biggest suburb is only 85,578 people. Keep in mind, MSP’s population is 700,000 more than Denver’s. Here are MSP’s ten largest suburbs.
| Suburb | Population |
| Bloomington, MN | 85,578 |
| Brooklyn Park, MN | 80,610 |
| Plymouth, MN | 79,450 |
| Maple Grove, MN | 71,807 |
| Woodbury, MN | 71,306 |
| Eagan, MN | 66,527 |
| Lakeville, MN | 65,877 |
| Blaine, MN | 65,212 |
| Eden Prairie, MN | 64,334 |
| Coon Rapids, MN | 62,527 |
In Indianapolis, a much smaller region, the suburbs are tending to be limited roughly by township boundaries as well, primarily because those are the most logical lines for next door suburbs to agree to in mutually setting their annexation limits. Now that we are reaching these smaller metros, I’m only listing suburbs with more then 50,000 people.
| Suburb | Population |
| Carmel, IN | 93,510 |
| Fishers, IN | 93,362 |
| Noblesville, IN | 63,133 |
| Greenwood, IN | 58,778 |
Technically Anderson could be on this list, but it’s clearly a satellite city that just got roped into the metro area through county addition to the region. It’s not really a suburb so I’m excluding it.
Thing get smaller from there. Here’s Cleveland’s suburb list:
| Suburb | Population |
| Parma, OH | 78,751 |
| Lorain, OH | 64,028 |
| Elyria, OH | 53,881 |
| Lakewood, OH | 50,100 |
Pete classifies Lorain as a captured satellite, and Jason Segedy from Akron says Elyria is one too. So Cleveland as a very limited number of decent sized true suburbs.
Cincinnati only has one suburb with more than 50,000 people, and it is classified as a captured satellite by Pete.
| Suburb | Population |
| Hamilton, OH | 62,174 |
Columbus doesn’t have any real suburbs with more than 50,000 people. Newark is over the limit, but I believe is similar to Anderson, IN in that it’s not really a suburb but a satellite city. So I’m excluding it. Dublin is getting close to the 50,000 person threshold in the Columbus area.
Here are Milwaukee’s suburbs:
| Suburb | Population |
| Waukesha, WI | 72,549 |
| West Allis, WI | 59,492 |
And St. Louis, whose regional population trails Denver’s by only 100,000.
| Suburb | Population |
| O’Fallon, MO | 88,472 |
| St. Charles, MO | 70,764 |
| St. Peters, MO | 57,127 |
| Florissant, MO | 51,272 |
Kansas City is interesting. Its largest two suburbs are in Kansas. The only Missouri suburb over 100,000 is Independence, which Pete classifies as a captured satellite.
| Suburb | Population |
| Overland Park, KS | 192,536 |
| Olathe, KS | 139,605 |
| Independence, MO | 116,925 |
| Lee’s Summit, MO | 98,461 |
| Shawnee, KS | 65,845 |
| Blue Springs, MO | 57,127 |
| Lenexa, KS | 55,294 |
It would be interesting to know what about the laws or history of Missouri vs. Kansas may have caused this. It’s also interesting to me that KC has larger suburbs vs. its Midwest peers, and is also the city that extends furthest into the West, being well west of the Mississippi River.
Midwest cities tend to have a fragmented geopolitical landscape and relatively small sized suburban municipalities. Most of these are too small to have the scale to do a lot of things. Scale doesn’t necessarily save you, but it does open up possibilities. I think it’s interesting to think about what you can do at 50,000, then at 100,000 people, etc. Once it gets to the size of a Plano, Texas, then these places can be cities in their own right.
Again, this is not unique to the Midwest. The Northeast is very, very fragmented and has tons of small municipalities and unincorporated township areas. Atlanta is a huge metro area with only one suburb having a population of more than 100,000 (Sandy Springs at 108,797).
Please verify these numbers before using. I pulled them quickly and copy/pasted them into the tables. Also, I may have missed a suburb in some of these places, as I don’t know all the suburbs everywhere. This is just to get the conversation going.
Chicago’s suburbs are so patchy because they grew out of closely spaced short-haul rail stops. If you look at a map of the uncharacteristically large suburb of Naperville, it’s so big because it’s sprawling mostly south from its historic downtown centered on a train station, toward the outer limits of Chicagoland. Other Midwest cities don’t have much of an existing commuter rail system, but prior to the first World War they had similarly dense networks of outlying communities supplying the central city daily from truck farms, dairies, brickyards, etc., which form the core of many of today’s suburbs. I think you find something similar on Long Island.
Some of those opportunities dried up across the Mississippi where you have to fight over land use and water rights, though a glance at Wikipedia tells me Denver was once supplied with produce from Arvada and horses from Westminster. Nonetheless, the city and its megaburbs strike me as considerably less hemmed in by territorial burghers.
Isn’t the relative balance of demographic and economic power among the local governments in a metro the real issue? Without a sufficiently powerful unifying set of interests a metro starts to pull in different directions or to just get stuck spinning in its own orbit.
I wonder to what extent this has to do with when the territories were first settled and laws about forming municipalities were crafted. Georgia was one of the original 13 colonies; Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota were part of the old Northwest Territory and their laws were strongly influenced by the Northwest Ordinance. St. Louis long predates the American Revolution, but as a French city, while Kansas City wasn’t even founded until 1850. (Kansas City, Kansas wasn’t founded until after the Civil War.) Perhaps changing attitudes toward what constitutes an ideal size for government has been echoed down to the present day.
Also, I would note that Kenosha, WI (pop. 99,889) might be considered a captive satellite of Chicago, and Racine (78,869) is poised to become a captive satellites of Milwaukee by the next census. By 2030, I’d wager that they’d all be part of a continuous Milwaukee-Chicago-Northern Indiana combined statistical area.
Kenosha is already part of the Chicago metro area.
My favorite example of suburban weirdness is LOUISVILLE. A single 1940s subdivision with ten blocks and 200 people is somehow a “municipality” under Kentucky law. Of course, the recent unification program has changed that to some extent.
WTF is “Strathmore Manor” a “home rule city”? It is, of course, a particularly lovely slice of pre-war suburbia, but….a city.
Kentucky used to have six classes of cities. Some 6th class cities were indeed flyspecks. A change to the law revamped that. Now there are are only two classes of city: First Class and Home Rule. I believe Louisville and Lexington are the only first class cities in the state. By the way, under the Louisville-Jefferson County consolidation, none of the existing suburban municipalities in Jefferson County were eliminated. So I think all those microburbs still exist.
Kentucky has very few municipalities of any size. The third biggest city in the state is Bowling Green at 68,401 people.
Interesting. So the microburbs still exist!
Boundaries, boundaries, boundaries – how are they created under which set of state constitutional provisions [Northwest Territory, Texas, Missouri Compromise States, Original Colony State, etc]. Why does NJ have 535 ± municipalities? How does annexation work in Illinois? The numbers are interesting but in this format without additional urban geography knowledge of legal history they are mostly meaningless except for fun at cocktail parties and bars.
I don’t know details, but in TX, annexation is pretty easy. So as Dallas has expanded, it annexed a series of former suburbs (Oak Cliff among others). Some suburbs started annexing neighboring ones (Plano annexed Renner, for example). The end result is almost all of the municipalities ended up above a certain threshold size, which is much larger than, say, most of the suburbs of Boston or Philadelphia.
First, Pearland is outside Houston not Dallas. Minor point. Annexation laws are a major factor. Annexation in Texas was easy, but no longer. Dallas basically went to sleep from the 60’s on and the surrounding smaller cities aggressively annexed and landlocked Dallas. During the same period, Houston gobbled up land. That’s why Houston has a larger population while DFW is the bigger metro area.
Thanks for the catch. I corrected the list.
I guess Aurora 200,000 Joliet 147,000 and Elgin 100,000 are no longer part of Chicago metro area.
As my post says, those are captured satellites that were independent cities absorbed into Chicagoland and I explicitly excluded them in order to focus on genuine suburbs.
Those cities are also said to have their own suburbs i.e. Montgomery and Oswego for Aurora, Minooka and Shorewood for Joliet and Gilberts and Huntley for Elgin. This is something brought up when trying to cool down talk of extending the BNSF Metra Line from Aurora to as far west as Plano – aside from those exurbs having to be cajoled into foisting the RTA sales tax within their county, nays claim that the local commutes from the further west towns are focused on Naperville and Aurora, not downtown Chicago.
What I want to know is if these larger suburbs lead to any sort of better outcome than the highly fragmented smaller ones. My guess is that they may look better in the short term as they’re newer and in growing mostly sunbelt locales, but maybe that means they’ll crash harder in the longer term (the bigger they are…). Do they have any inherent value other than their newness and/or relative cheapness?
While the small or micro-burbs might not have the resources to go long on big projects, they also can’t hide their liabilities and have to deal with them sooner. Tough love. That’s one reason I’m wary of city/county consolidations. Political implications aside, once everything is on the same ledger, it gets much easier to hide and subsidize the underperforming areas, which are almost universally the newer lower density ones that everyone thinks are the payors not the payees.
While I suppose consolidation “hides” things, the reality is that many if not most suburbs will have very little opportunity to support themselves, especially given the consolidation of control over retail sales tax and the (now) ongoing retail implosion. Given the metropolitan scale of modern economies, I am also not sure how metropolitan-wide infrastructure and policies can be implemented except through some form of consolidation.
I suppose it depends on what services you expect to be provided. I imagine “Strathmore Manor” provides very, very few services….its existence as a home rule city may be limited to zoning matters. Some small suburbs may provide police, but then you get speed trap towns like the St. Louis suburb that has no other real way to earn income.
Lorain and Elyria are captured satellites of Cleveland. Although they’re part of the Cleveland MSA, they comprise their own census-defined urbanized area. They are very much older core cities rather than suburbs in the traditional sense.
It’d be interesting to research how many of these places in the Midwest were founded around the same time the larger cities they are now suburbs to were. Worthington and Dublin both pre-date the founding of Columbus and were even contenders for the final location of the state’s capital. That certainly would’ve shaped their histories. The railroads also did not yet exist.
When Cincinnati was originally founded (then called Losantiville), it was one of three settlements vying to be the predominant river-based trade center along that portion of the Ohio RIver. The competing settlements were North Bend (still a small village) and Columbia (now a neighborhood in the city proper). The larger area of relatively flat land to develop and a rise in topography between modern-day 3rd and 4th streets, which protected said area from flooding and resulted in the fort protecting the region being constructed their, gave Cincinnati the competitive edge.
Some of these are not suburbs though – they are smaller nearby cities that grew from industry of some sort, but yes overall, there is a vast difference in suburban boundaries.
It goes without saying (and I’m confident you know this) that annexation plays a huge role in whether or not metros (particularly those to the east) have large, populous suburbs. Your Texas writers hint at this.
Philadelphia is a major metro (#8 I believe) but it has no suburbs of any great size. Though smaller, Pittsburgh is much the same way. Since 100% of Pennsylvania is incorporated (per its constitution), annexation is impossible, and the only compensatory gesture municipalities can engage in is consolidation, usually a borough and an adjacent borough. An amendment to the PA constitution in the 1960s precluded what had previously passed as “annexation”, though it usually meant that a borough/city would seek to incorporate adjacent rural township territory, thereby essentially demoting townships and making them a “lesser” municipality than boroughs or cities. Now that practice is abolished, the merging of two adjacent boroughs is about the only practice that somewhat mimics annexation, and it is very rare. These same conditions characterize most states in the Northeast to a certain degree, though it’s most pronounced in PA and NJ. PA’s constrained status is also why so many of its municipalities have steadily lost population since 1950–probably more than any other state. They cannot grow.
I suspect in general that the farther one travels from the 13 colonies, the easier it typically is to annex.
Interesting that you mention Anderson as not really a suburb. I’d agree, though if the suburbanization patterns continue, within 50 years it could be a captured satellite, placing it in a status more or less identical to Elgin or Aurora within Chicagoland.
Naperville IL was an indepent village, founded in 1831, before it came to be considered a suburb. It had a toll plank road to Chicago and didn’t want the train to come through. It did but Naperville, unlike the neighboring villages, does not have its downtown on either side of the train tracks
Instead it’s several blocks to the south. It claims to have the oldest municipal band in the state.
Growing up there, I was told Naperville had once been the county seat for DuPage, but Wheaton said they should have because they were more centrally located. Wheaton backers stole all the records in the middle of the night, but some fell off a wagon and wete sent to Chicago until a judge could rule and were destroyed in the fire.
I was also told the entire city council was voted out after they turned down the Fox Valley Mall backers, hoping to stop the project, only to have Aurora agree to run water out miles to it and annex the site. And that was why, I was told, Naperville never turned down another opportunity to expand.
Old Naperville is in DuPage County and school district 203. It has annexed a fair bit of school disrict 204 and reached into Will County.
@Marie E – I live in Naperville now and it’s interesting that two of the things that you mentioned – the BNSF train tracks not running through the middle of its downtown and the losing of Fox Valley Mall – are actually what spurred Naperville to develop its now very strong downtown (in an interesting juxtaposition with its general perception as classic suburbia). The town was many years ahead of the curve in that regard and, at least in commercial terms, it’s the most successful walkable area in the region outside of Chicago itself. The top end retailers and restaurants (e.g. Apple Store, Pottery Barn, Starbucks Reserve) generally all fight to be in downtown Naperville as opposed to Fox Valley Mall and that was happening even before the precipitous nationwide decline in mall retailers over the past several years. It’s indicative that downtown Naperville still has two great and huge comprehensive book stores within blocks of each other (independent Anderson’s and a Barnes and Noble) that sadly not even downtown Chicago has at this point.
To the poster that asked about the advantages of being in a larger suburb, I would definitely point to the scale of the amenities both private (such as the development of downtown Naperville mentioned above) and public (the library and park district systems are particularly top notch). The top restaurants and stores create Naperville outposts and arts organizations (such as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra) find it worthwhile to perform regularly here, so it feels more like a full service city in that regard.
Granted, similar to how a lot of Sun Belt cities didn’t have the legacy costs of de-industrialization weighing them down like a lot of Midwest cities, Naperville didn’t have those legacy costs in the same way as Aurora, Joliet and Elgin. As a result, Naperville was generally able to grow to its current size by adding households almost purely in the upper middle class to upper class demographics without any preexisting “urban” issues to weigh them down. Not many towns of this size had that historical luck. (Carmel, Indiana is probably the best example of a similar type of town.)
Massachusetts has no unincorporated land and hasn’t for centuries. All land had to be incorporated so you would know which church you were required to attend. This was pre-revolutionary war when the Puritans were still ecpelling anyone who did not accept and follow their religous beliefs.