MICROPOLITANS: THE BEST OF BOTH WORLDS Part 2

MICROPOLITANS: THE BEST OF BOTH WORLDS

With their small cores but sometimes expansive boundaries, micros are more rural and less intense than cities but more civilized and less rustic than traditional rural areas. They frequently come with the promise of cheap land and lower construction costs, plus fewer bureaucratic hoops to jump through than urban centers.

One in 10 Americans lives in a micropolitan. One out of five U.S. counties is a micro. Micropolitans grew by nearly 8 percent in the 1990s.

Lang is careful to differentiate micros from exurbs, a concept with which they are sometimes confused.

“Exurbs are a subset of the suburbs, and are still part of the metropolitan community and economy. Exurbs are within the metropolitan area, on its fringe. Micros are a fringe metropolitan area,” he explained.

People living in exurbs tend to commute back and forth to the core city, while micropolitan residents can and often do live, work and play within the boundaries of the micro, without venturing into the nearest metropolitan area. That is what makes them attractive as growth areas.

While micros lack a large central city of over 50,000 residents, they often contain central cities akin to modest-sized towns, according to census analysis of 567 micros in the continental U.S. published by Lang and co-author Dawn Dhavale. Yet some of the country’s largest micros are more than just overgrown towns; they are better characterized as a new decentralized or countrified city.

“Micropolitans are as diverse as cities, as different as Detroit and Los Angeles,” Lang said.

“Some are poor, some affluent. Some are politically conservative, some liberal. Some are racially homogenous, some very ethnically diverse.”