Neighborhood Life Cycles and Social Status

clearly indicated that older metropolitan areas are most apt to have higher suburban than central city status and have distance from the CBD covarying positively with census tract status. Age of metropolitan areas has been melasured several ways, including the census year that the central city reached 50,000 population [18; 9] and the amount of metropolitan population growth in various historical-transportation periods such as the electric streetcar era and the automobile era [10]. Most of this research has been cross-sectional as opposed to longitudinal in design. These studies have been interpreted by Schnore [18; 16] as indicative of a current evolutionary or life cycle pattern of metropolitan development, in which central, older sections of metropolitan areas decline in status over time. Older metropolitan areas, it is alleged, have lower status in their central dis-