The suburban vote is essential but no one knows what a suburb is - Business Insider

Both could be correct, since there's no existing federal definition for suburbia.Existing HUD definitions of American areas include "urban" and "rural," but there is no such "suburban" category.A 2013 Harvard University study found that there is "no consensus to what exactly constitutes a suburb." It added that suburbs have been defined over the years by any number of metrics from physical proximity to cities, to modes of transportation, to general appearance.The 2017 HUD/Census survey which found most Americans consider themselves suburban also found that 27% describe their neighborhoods as urban and 21% as rural.The results of the 55,000-person survey, discussed in summer 2020 webinars and papers, were built upon similar surveys from Trulia, Indeed, and Pew Research Center. "It is critical to get these classifications right as they play an important role in how HUD and other federal agencies allocate billions in tax dollars in communities," Bucholtz said.Trump and Biden's suburb-related debate exchange came after a summer of Trump tweeting and talking about Biden's plan to "abolish" the suburbs — a mischaracterization of Biden's real plans to maintain Obama-era fair housing policies combatting racial segregation while also increasing the supply of affordable homes.In a "tele-town hall" in July, Trump had said that Democrats want to eliminate single-family zoning, which would bring "who knows who into your suburbs, so your communities will be unsafe and your housing values will go down."Some states and cities (often government by Democratic governors or mayors) have been eliminating single-family zoning to combat the chronic lack of affordable housing, an economic rather than racial issue. By the 1970s, "you could go nearly anywhere in America and find housing developments, rows of ranch homes covered in aluminum siding with green lawns that all looked very similar, situated next to big gaps of empty or wooded areas," Jason Diamond wrote in his new book "The Sprawl: Reconsidering the Weird American Suburbs."Reforms enacted in the 1970s were meant to mitigate the racial wealth gap that was inextricable from suburban housing as an asset class — and Obama-Biden housing policies were geared toward continuing that work.During Trump's summer of stoking suburban fear, however, he rolled back a key plank of those policies: the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule.