Seventeen U.S. metropolitan areas are analyzed individually to determine support for two pricipal propositions of the well-known Burgess hypothesis: White-collar persons are decentralized in American cities, and the decetralization is greatest in the largest and oldest places. Only a slight tendency is found for the proportion of white-collar workers to increase with linear distance from the central business district in most metropolitan areas. Much of this distance-white-collar relationship may be explained by the spatial location of other population groups, such as Negroes and married couples with children, and by housing types, such as single unit, roomy,sound, and new. Tendencies for white-collar decentralization are indeed greatest in the oldest places. And this relationship may also be explained by the differential location of population groups and housing types in old versus new cities.
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Avery M. Guest (1971) studied this question.