Our households are shrinking.
Today, only half of all adults in the United States are married, down from nearly three-quarters in 1960. And fewer people are having kids: families with children used to make up more than half of U.S. households, but by 2025 they’ll represent just a quarter, and, strikingly, we’ll have as many single-person households as families. The suburbs are built for life with kids, and we’re not having nearly as many of them. There are a variety of reasons for this that we’ll explore later, but the implication is the same: “The whole Ozzie and Harriet day has passed,” says Peter Calthorpe, the San Francisco–based architect and urban planner who pioneered the notion of transit-oriented development and who, as a cofounder of the New Urbanism movement, is one of the leading thinkers on alternative growth models to conventional suburban development.
Millennials hate the burbs . . .
America’s eighty million so-called millennials, defined for the purposes of this book as those born between 1977 and 1995, are an enormous group—bigger than the baby boomers. As such, they’re more poked, prodded, and studied than any generation. As of this writing, record numbers of the older segment of them—those that are in their early twenties and older—are still living with their parents, which presents its own problem for the economy since it creates a big logjam in the normal housing cycle. But here’s the bigger problem: studies show that when millennials do leave their parents’ homes, they don’t want anything to do with the kinds of suburbs they grew up in. Seventy-seven percent of them prefer to live in an urban area, and whether that means an inner city or an urbanized small town or suburb, one thing it doesn’t mean is the kinds of homes that will be left for them in conventional suburbia. Arthur C. Nelson, director of the Metropolitan Research Center at the University of Utah, has forecast that based on these changing demographic forces and a shift in consumer demand, there will be a surplus of as many as forty million large-lot homes—those on a sixth of an acre or more—in the United States by 2020.
. . . And they hate cars even more.
Millennials may also be the first generation of young people since the automobile was invented to be indifferent about cars and driving. In 1980, 66 percent of all seventeen-year-olds had their driver’s license. In 2010, the figure was 47 percent, a sharp and perplexing decline that has been discussed and dissected by millennial watchers and carmakers alike. The notion of a teenager opting to not get his driver’s license, to those of us who grew up in a different time, may seem sacrilege. But watch them fawn over their Apple products and you will see that this generation, as Steve Jobs encouraged them to do, “thinks different.” They don’t want cars, and they don’t want cul-de-sacs—two of the pillars on which suburban life depends.
The price of oil is still rising.
As energy prices have climbed, so has the cost of the suburban commute. In 2008, the average suburban household spent double on gas what it did in 2003. Many suburban families now spend half their income on housing and transportation costs. Since houses are cheaper the farther they are from urban centers, lower-income suburban households can very easily spend more on transportation than on their mortgage or rent. Economists say the cost of distance is starting to get baked into housing prices, sending valuations down in remote housing markets. The rising cost of energy is also starting to impact our behavior: for most of the last fifty years, the number of miles driven has increased with every year. In 2007, those numbers peaked and have been declining since. Some experts have attributed this to the recession, but the decline started before the recession and before gas prices spiked, and it’s happening even at higher income levels. This shift is major, and one The Atlantic pointed to in proclaiming “The Beginning of the End for Suburban America.”
We are eco-obsessed.
Thanks in part to Al Gore, everyone now knows suburban residents pump their houses full of hot and cool air, load gas into the SUV by the tankful, and pour gallons of chemicals onto the lawn. More recently, a powerful “anti-stuff” mentality has emerged, largely as a reaction to the excessive consumption patterns that sparked our financial crisis. Home size has decreased over the past few years, while movements like the “Not So Big House,” which focuses on building slightly smaller homes that offer greater function and higher quality, and “LifeEdited,” which preaches the reduction of posessions, have gained traction. The rise of so-called collaborative consumption, meanwhile, has popularized the mass sharing of cars, homes, clothes, and more. All of these philosophies run counter to the acquisitive lifestyle of suburbia and signal a powerful shift in the consumer zeitgeist. Less is now more.
The suburbs were poorly designed to begin with.
While older suburbs were built on a different model, the modern-day American suburbs were designed in a way that went counter to thousands of years of planning theory. They spread people far from each other and their jobs (though many jobs did migrate to the suburbs over the years) and the other places they need to go every day; and they make their residents wholly reliant on their cars. The financial viability of our modern suburbs, meanwhile, was flawed from the start: the lower-density pattern of development doesn’t yield enough tax revenue to pay for the infrastructure needed to support them—one reason many municipalities are struggling or going broke.
• • •
People have predicted the demise of the suburbs before. The author and provocateur James Howard Kunstler’s 1993 book, The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-made Landscape, called suburban development “a landscape of scary places, the geography of nowhere, that has simply ceased to be a credible human habitat.” In an interview in the late 1990s, the urbanist Jane Jacobs suggested that sprawling-style suburbs were going out of fashion. A 2006 documentary, The End of Suburbia: Oil Depletion and the Collapse of the American Dream, explored the potentially disastrous implications of a worldwide oil shortage on the suburban development pattern. But never have so many forces been working against conventional suburban development at the same time. The facts laid out in the pages that follow represent a slow-burning revolution, a realignment of our societal priorities, and a reversal of the fundamental social equation that’s come to define our nation. In the energy world, people talk about peak oil, the moment after which our supply of fossil fuels will begin to dwindle. After more than half a century of expansion and the housing equivalent of gas-guzzling, we may have hit peak suburb. When migration patterns are starting to head in a different direction, when the market has changed its mind on what’s valuable, when Whole Foods opens in Harlem and Toll Brothers takes over Manhattan, it’s hard to deny we’re at the beginning of a serious transformation. “We’ve reached the limits of suburban development,” Shaun Donovan, the secretary of Housing and Urban Development, has said.
But to say the suburbs are ending does not imply that everyone will up and relocate to city skyscrapers. Yes, cities are resurgent, but many people still want to live on a tree-lined street, have a front yard, and be able to drive to the grocery store to load up for their family of four. Schools, too, play a big role in making the suburbs attractive, and while this is now less of an issue for a variety of reasons, schools are still a major factor drawing young families to the suburbs.
Besides, some people just like their half, quarter, or whatever portion of an acre and a car. “There are certain segments of the population who would say, ‘Over my dead body am I going to live in a dense situation,’” says Jonathan Smoke, chief economist of housing industry research and publishing firm Hanley Wood, publisher of Builder magazine. People tend to have strong opinions about this topic on one side or the other, but of all the people I spoke to for this book, Smoke might be the most measured. A hard-data-driven market analyst, he has a deep knowledge of the mechanics of the housing industry. But Smoke also spent more than a decade working as a consultant to several home builders and as an executive in strategic planning for one of them, Beazer Homes, so he shares the perspective of big builders and
understands the realities of what the American home owner wants more than most housing economists. That experience has given him what he likes to say is a more “balanced” view. Yet Smoke, too, says we’ve reached a turning point. “Bottom line, there are going to be changes,” he says.
In my quest to figure out what the future of America might mean for the future of the suburbs, and vice versa, I’ve interviewed people involved in many different aspects of the debate: I’ve talked to home builders, developers, planners, transportation engineers, home buyers, home sellers, residents of suburbs, residents of cities, residents who left the city for the suburbs, and residents who left the suburbs for the city. I’ve grilled academics, economists, architects, and psychologists; I’ve talked to toilet makers, air-conditioning suppliers, and deck builders. In exploring all the nuances of this shift, this book first explores the history of suburbia, because to understand where we’re going, it’s important to understand how we got here. It ponders the origins of the American Dream and how it came to be synonymous with a house and a yard. It seeks to explain the backlash against traditional suburban development and then in great detail lays out the many ways planners, builders, and developers are hard at work creating new kinds of neighborhoods—even within our existing suburbs—that are completely different. Finally, the book analyzes our changing priorities and the new types of homes and lifestyles Americans are looking for—because if our most popular way of life is on the wane, the next logical question is: Where will everybody go?
The night before Aron Ralston spoke at the 2012 builders’ convention, I went to a swanky party put on by Hanley Wood. While guests dined on filet mignon and sushi, recession be damned, I approached the company’s then CEO Frank Anton and asked whether he thought the suburbs were threatened. We chatted for a while; he pointed out that the most expensive real estate has always been in cities, lamenting how he can now say that firsthand after having recently put his twentysomething daughter up in a Manhattan apartment. Then he stopped and looked at me as he fully considered my argument. He gave me an imploring look. “Does the story have a happy ending?” He paused, considered what he asked, and rephrased himself: “Please,” he said, “tell me it has a happy ending.”
This story does have a happy ending. Roughly speaking, we rebuild once or twice a century in this country, and when we do, we have an opportunity to change things for the better. The new homes and communities being planned for the next phase of our development will be better suited to our needs. They will factor in the mistakes of the past to make things better for our future. They will reduce our dependency on the car. They will be developed around places where people can naturally interact with one another. They will be located closer to where we work and closer to the things we need, which will give us more time with our families and friends and more time to pursue all of the things we like to do. These changes won’t happen overnight, but they will ultimately lead to more choice, more freedom, and richer lives. And that will be a happy ending for everyone.
1
THE GREAT URBAN EXODUS
The building of houses constitutes the major architectural work of any civilization.
—LEWIS MUMFORD
People have always wanted to get out of the city. At least they have since the days of ancient Egypt, which is where scholars have traced one of the earliest known references to the suburbs. In the fourteenth century BC, wealthy suburban villas with spacious gardens south of the ancient Egyptian capital of Amarna housed estates of the city’s powerful nobles. Scholars cite later references by Cicero to suburbani, big estates outside of Rome, as early as the first century BC. Historian Kenneth T. Jackson cites a clay tablet dating from 539 BC on which a resident of the then booming Mesopotamian city-state of Ur, whose residents had started settling in the countryside, marveled to the king of Persia about how his property was “so close to Babylon that we enjoy all the advantages of the city, and yet when we come home we are away from all the noise and dust.” It wasn’t a leafy subdivision, but the appeal—to live outside the metropolis in quieter, more peaceful environs—was the same.
But even though suburbs have been with us for some time, they were, for much of history, primarily the home of the poor. Throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance, cities were the centers of culture, commerce, and the arts; merchants, politicians, and other elite members of society all lived and worked closest to the core, while the poor lived at the edges or outside the city walls (it’s still that way in many countries, like France, India, and Brazil). Of course, the upper crust did not avoid the outer regions altogether, and while the immediate fringe might have been déclassé, pure air and the countryside appealed to the wealthy just as they do today. Throughout European history the privileged classes retreated to rural settings for restoration and contemplation; think of the English manor or the Italian villa, or the wealthy Florentines who fled the plague in the 1300s by retreating to the countryside in Boccaccio’s The Decameron.
The modern-day suburban pattern—in which large swaths of the middle class work in the city but make their homes in comfortable neighborhoods outside it—didn’t begin to take hold until the early 1800s, when the burgeoning merchant elite in England began building estates in the countryside outside London and Manchester. After industrialization began, allowing this new upper middle class to amass great fortunes, they began moving there permanently. As wealth started to spread and cities became increasingly polluted, the middle class followed.
While the suburbs have come to symbolize something quintessentially American, early suburban development in the United States actually drew inspiration from this English model. By the early 1800s, the majority of Americans were still living on farms, but the intellectual and cultural elite had begun to cluster in our cities. Merchants, lawyers, manufacturers, and magnates built big town houses on the main thoroughfares in New York and Boston close to where they worked, while the poor lived in back alleys or courtyards nearby or on the city’s outskirts. But while they were the center of the action, cities were also crowded, noisy, and incredibly filthy. Since there was no sewage system, residents would empty chamber pots by throwing their contents out the window (think about that the next time you complain about your neighbors), leading to outbreaks of disease, not to mention stench and grime. A New York Times article in 1863 lamented that “the accumulation of garbage, ashes and all pollutions, the choked gutters, the reeking and deadly odors, in most of the back and side streets, is intolerable.” Things got worse as the Industrial Revolution arrived in the United States, and with the increase in population and factory pollution, cities became even grimmer. By 1910, the population of Manhattan reached 2.3 million—today it’s about 1.6 million—with most of those people living in tenement buildings. Some ninety thousand windowless rooms were for rent, and immigrants lived in small rooms with as many as ten people. The Lower East Side, now a trendy residential area filled with boutiques, restaurants, and bars, was one of the most crowded places in the country.
Gradually, those who could afford it started moving away from the dense and dirty downtown, and in our biggest cities pockets of nicer neighborhoods started to spring up—Greenwich Village or Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, Cambridge and Beacon Hill in Boston, Germantown in Philadelphia. In 1814 in New York, the arrival of the steam ferry soon led to the colonization of Brooklyn Heights, just across the East River, considered the first large-scale commuter suburb.
As they would over the course of suburbia’s history, advances in transportation technology soon delivered us at faster speeds to farther-flung places, each innovation enabling a new phase of development. Stagecoaches and ferries gave way to horse-drawn streetcars, then horse-drawn railroads, and by the 1830s the first steam-powered railroads. Gradually, in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, and San Francisco, the wealthy began settling in enclaves that formed around these railroad stations. By 1849 there were fifty-nine commuter trains running from Boston. The population of New York City’s Westchester Co
unty doubled between 1850 and 1870, then doubled again by 1890, and again by 1910. This was, of course, thanks in large part to Grand Central Station, which opened in 1871 as Grand Central Depot and granted easy access to midtown Manhattan from its northern suburbs. Suburbs were blossoming in Chicago, too, where a local newspaper hailed the opportunity for businessmen to “avail themselves of the beautiful quiet of a country residence without shortening the number of hours usually devoted to their daily avocations.”
Soon the railroad gave way to electric-powered streetcars, which were easier and cheaper to build, so they spread out wider and faster. Towns started to emerge around streetcar stations, forming now-iconic places like Medford outside Boston, Oakland outside San Francisco, Shaker Heights outside Cleveland, and thousands of other communities. Each of these early railroad and streetcar suburbs was unique, but they were similar in one important way: their design was compact. In the pre-automobile era, suburban residents had to walk once they disembarked from the railroad or streetcar, so houses needed to be located within a reasonable distance to the station. So while these early suburbanites lived in individual, single-family houses—that was, after all, the whole appeal of leaving the city—homes were built close together. Entrepreneurial shopkeepers and service providers set up their storefronts around the station, where pedestrian traffic was likely to be highest. The result was a village center with a grid-shaped street pattern that emerged organically around the day-to-day needs and walking patterns of the people who lived there. Urban planners describe these neighborhoods as having “vibrancy” or “experiential richness” because, without even trying, their design promoted activity, foot traffic, commerce, and socializing.
The End of the Suburbs: Where the American Dream Is Moving Page 3
