Distribution and Density of Population

Population policy is concerned not only with the total numbers in the nation as a whole, but also with the numbers in particular regions and localities.

The most significant movements of peoples, however, relate to their concentration in centers of high density where the question is arising whether the larger cities are becoming too crowded to be comfortable and economical. Although this difficulty may be solved by the automatic working of economic forces and considerations of comfort, the delay and costs may prove great. There is evidence that factories have been moving from large cities to smaller places where land and labor are chapter and living conditions are more favorable. Nevertheless, our largest two cities have continued to grow faster than the general population, though no faster than the total urban population which includes small towns as well as cities. The fastest rates of urban growth from 1920 to 1930 were found in the smaller cities within the orbits of the metropolitan centers. The ideal of the Greeks was to limit the size of their cities, but in the United States most of the effective vocal element in cities appears eager for greater size. Various economic forces have in the past offered encouragement to growth, in part because of the unearned increment of wealth accruing to real estate owners and to other established groups interested in expanding markets.

Suburban transportation has helped to disperse the population of cities. Indeed, the boundary line of the city becomes more and more shadowy in a social and economic sense. The surrounding country is linked to the metropolitan center by delivery services of stores, by extension of telephone exchange areas, by daily newspaper routes and other similar bonds. The automobile helps to fill up the suburbs, families move outward, and in some cases they engage in gardening or even in part time farming. Little cities, towns, trading centers and shops grow up along the highways. In short, a new type of population grouping is appearing: not the city, but the metropolitan community–a constellation of smaller groups dominated by a metropolitan center. As the railroad and telegraph tended earlier to create our cities, so the automobile and the telephone tend now to create our metropolitan communities.

This dramatic development of a new type of population grouping–the metropolitan community–has not only affected city planning but has led to regional planning. A problem for city planning has been left by the outward drift of the city’s population. Disorganized areas where the older residential sections impinge upon the business districts have been left to the weaker economic elements and sometimes to criminal groups with resultant unsatisfactory social conditions. The motor age has brought “boom” suburban towns planted with as little planning as the “boom” towns which burst into existence in the railway age.

This unanticipated type of aggregation has not only meant a reorganization of city planning, but has precipitated many adjustments of social habits. Large cities throughout the United States have been confronted with the task either of extending municipal services to surrounding suburban urban communities or of developing some new form of political association. Economic services, lured by gain, have responded promptly. The cultural institutions, schools, churches and similar organizations have found more difficulty in adjusting themselves to the rearranged population, political instutions, unpressed by competition, have been the least adaptive and have remained for the most part the same as in the pre-motor period. The costs involved in maintaining an obsolete political structure are now becoming the subject of conscious consideration and the problem cannot be neglected much longer.

The quantity of population in a particular region is affected by its distribution, the nature of which is changing rapidly; hence, the time is ripe for social and physical planning of these communities. How large our cities should be rests in part on conscious wishes and will power, but it will probably be decided for the most part by powerful economic factors, such as the dispersal of manufacturing and trading centers and business policies dictated by land values and labor costs.

Source: Recent Social Trends in the United States, an examination of the social state of the United States at the end of the 1920s undertaken at the direction of President Herbert Hoover.