Commuters waiting for the morning train in Maplewood, New Jersey

A bedroom community, dormitory town, or commuter town is a town or city that is primarily residential in character, with most of its residents commuting to a nearby town or city to earn their livelihood. For this reason, many countries refer to these settlements as commuter towns. Maplewood is a township located in Essex County, New Jersey. ... See: commuting commutative (mathematical) operation This is a disambiguation page — a navigational aid which lists other pages that might otherwise share the same title. ...

The distinction between a suburb and a bedroom community is not always clear, but as a general rule suburbs are developed in areas adjacent to main employment centers, whereas bedroom communities once were autonomous places that over time attracted a predominance of commuters. Bedroom communities may be in rural or semi-rural areas, but urban sprawl and conurbation have erased clear lines among towns and cities in large metropolitan areas. Illustration of the backyards of a surburban neighbourhood Suburban redirects here. ... Urban sprawl (also called suburban sprawl and Los Angelization) describes the growth of a metropolitan area, particularly the suburbs, over a large area. ... A conurbation is an urban area comprising a number of cities or towns which, through population growth and expansion, have physically merged to form one continuous built up area. ...

Bedroom communities can arise for a number of different reasons. Sometimes, a town might lose its main source of employment, leading its residents to seek work elsewhere. Employment is a contract between two parties, one being the employer and the other being the employee. ...

Other communities start as small villages in rural areas, where employees seek to have a home that is beyond noisy urban life. The locals are often displaced by these commuters due to rising house prices and new housing estates. This can also be influenced by zoning restrictions in urbanized areas that prevent the construction of suitable housing closer to places of employment. In general, zoning is the division of an area into sub-areas, called zones. ...

The number of dormitory towns has increased in the UK since the 1960s because of a trend for people to move out of the cities into the surrounding green belt. Events and trends The 1960s was a turbulent decade of change around the world. ... For other uses of the word Greenbelt, see Greenbelt (disambiguation). ...