Questions about Tulsa, Oklahoma?

[ProgressiveModerate]

I've always found the political geography of what of this fairly notable city interesting.



For reference, here is a map of Tulsa based on 2020 Pres results. A few things stand out to me:

1. How are some of the clearly developed suburban areas so red they literally blend in with the surrounding rurals? Even for a Southern City, that's quite unusual as while there are many cases of deep red exurbs, suburbs are almost at least slightly influenced by the city politically and hence pulled leftwards.

2. Why does is the city's growth so unbalanced, with there being far more development on the Southeast side whereas the Northwest side seems very unnaturally stunted. Does it have to do with Osage County specifically as it seems like that's a pretty hard line of where development stops

[If my soul was made of stone]

Tulsa, or at least white Tulsa, has long been dominated by the oil and gas industries and a regional center of Evangelicalism (Oral Roberts, etc), not to mention its history of fraught racial tensions. It's pretty clear from the map that it's also fairly segregated.

[Del Tachi]

To answer your second question, Osage County is an Indian reservation. 

[ProgressiveModerate]

To answer your second question, Osage County is an Indian reservation. 

Huh I never knew that. I knew that Oklahoma used to be where settlers made all the Native Americans go but overtime that seems to have faded out with native americans being blended into white culture for the most part.

[Torie]

To answer your second question, Osage County is an Indian reservation. 

Huh I never knew that. I knew that Oklahoma used to be where settlers made all the Native Americans go but overtime that seems to have faded out with native americans being blended into white culture for the most part.

It matters whether or not you live on a reservation with a communal land system for obvious reasons.

[NorCalifornio]

Looking at the Terrain view on Google Maps, there's a topographic transition that lines up with the edge of development to the northwest. It's a better match than the Osage County line too.

So Tulsa grew a lot to the southeast, which is quite flat aside from a patch of hills next to Oral Roberts, but very little to the northwest, where it ran up against some larger hills just a couple miles from downtown.