If you are familiar with U.S cities, which would you say has the larger population: the Phoenix suburb of Mesa, Arizona or Minneapolis? The surprising answer is Mesa, with 396,375 residents versus 382,618 for Minneapolis.
That’s just one example of the rush to the suburbs that occurred in America during the 1990s. The Fannie Mae Foundation calls this breed of big and fast-growing suburbs “boomburbs.”
Most of them are located in the South and West.
Urban leaders have until now focused on the problems of declining cities from high crime and racial tensions to distressed neighborhoods. But the problems of the boomburbs are just opposite how to keep up with phenomenal growth.
Source: Haya El Nasser, Census Analysis Shows Birth of Boomburbs, USA Today, June 22, 2001.
For text http://www.usatoday.com/hlead.htm
For more on Demographic Trends http://www.ncpa.org/pd/social/social1.html
FMF\26 June 2001
