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Originally Posted by Steely Dan
i don't know if it's centralization so much as it is just general stagnation for decades on end.
in a growing/thriving metro area where the rising tide lifts both city and suburban boats, there's just less to fight about, but when the game gets a lot more zero-sum, the claws come out more often as people seek to protect what they perceive as "theirs".
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Agreed. And it might be exacerbated by the larger land area of counties in the Midwest. In the NY/NJ area, county land areas tend to be small - Suffolk County, L.I. the notable exception - and they get built out fast. Counties with smaller land areas start competing for resources much more quickly than big ones, which probably encourages local leadership to be anti-sprawl more quickly.
For instance, Oakland County was often positioned as the anti-Detroit in 1970s-2000 era. But by the early 2000s, inner-ring Oakland County communities were more in agreement with Detroit on the aggressive pro-sprawl policies of O.C. than they were with their own County Executive (Patterson). In fact, Oakland voted in favor of the most recent attempt to fund the regional transit authority. The only count to vote against it was Macomb. Macomb was also the only core Metro Detroit county to grow substantially between 2000 and 2010, mostly through exurban sprawl. Macomb added about 54K residents, Oakland added about 8K, and Wayne lost 240K.