If by "suburb" is meant an
urban margin that grows more rapidly than its already developed interior, the
process of suburbanization began during the emergence of the industrial city in
the second quarter of the nineteenth century. Before that period the city was a
small highly compact cluster in which people moved about on foot and goods were
conveyed by horse and cart. But the early factories built in the 1830's and
1840's were located along waterways and near railheads at the edges of cities,
and housing was needed for the thousands of people drawn by the prospect of
employment. In time, the factories were surrounded by proliferating mill towns
of apartments and row houses that abutted the older, main cities. As a defense
against this encroachment and to enlarge their tax bases, the cities
appropriated their industrial neighbors. In 1854, for example, the city of
Philadelphia annexed most of Philadelphia County. Similar municipal maneuvers
took place in Chicago and in New York Indeed, most great cities of the United
States achieved such status only by incorporating the communities along their
borders .
With the acceleration of industrial
growth came acute urban crowding and accompanying social stress conditions that
began to approach disastrous proportions when, in 1888, the first commercially
successful electric traction line was developed. Within a few years the horse -
drawn trolleys were retired and electric streetcar networks crisscrossed and
connected every major urban area, fostering a wave of suburbanization that
transformed the compact industrial city into a dispersed metropolis. This first
phase of mass - scale suburbanization was reinforced by the simultaneous
emergence of the urban Middle class whose desires for homeownership In
neighborhoods far from the aging inner city were satisfied by the developers of
single-family housing tracts .