Even while these suburbs replicated urban villages, a separate vision was emerging that saw the suburbs as tranquil, pastoral places that more closely represented the country. Two seminal developments in the mid-1800s broke the gridded village mold in search of this new, more romanticized ideal: Llewellyn Park in West Orange, New Jersey, conceived by New York businessman Llewellyn Haskell and designed by Alexander Jackson Davis, and Riverside outside Chicago, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, the well-known landscape architect who had just designed New York City’s Central Park. Both developments were railroad-accessible suburbs meant to be bedroom communities for the ultra wealthy, but bearing the more bucolic imprint of landscape architects as opposed to the rigidity of urban planners, both rejected the right angles of conventional planning in favor of winding streets and hilly, natural terrain. Riverside’s streets were specifically designed, as Olmsted put it, with “gracefully curved lines, generous spaces and the absence of sharp corners . . . the idea being to suggest and imply leisure, contemplativeness and happy tranquility.”
But with these and other country-inspired enclaves, social and intellectual life was still rooted in the city. Most suburban residents not only worked in the cities but socialized, shopped, and dined there. So while a natural village life did emerge in new residential areas, the city was still the heart of the community; the suburbs were its limbs.
It wasn’t until Henry Ford gave the middle class wheels that everything changed. The first Model T rolled off the line in 1908 for $850 ($22,000 in today’s dollars); four years later its price dropped to less than $700. This newfound mobility was like a drug; once people tried it, they were hooked. Automobile registrations went from eight thousand in 1905 to more than seventeen million by 1925. Even during the Great Depression, many Americans were more likely to part with some other necessity than give up their car. As one farm woman famously told an inspector from the U.S. Department of Agriculture who’d inquired why she had a car but no running water in her house: “You can’t get to town in a bathtub.”
Motorized transport presented untold opportunity for suburban development, allowing households to spread out wider and faster, but it also posed new challenges—namely, the introduction of car traffic into residential communities. In the early 1900s, a planner named Clarence Perry came up with a solution for this, a new design for suburban neighborhoods that would limit the traffic going through them. He replaced the traditional street grid pattern with a network of separate, self-contained, almost pod-like communities, each populated with enough families to support a local elementary school. These discrete “neighborhood units” would contain only houses and schools and therefore draw only local traffic, and their streets were specifically designed to minimize and slow car speed by making use of cul-de-sacs and T intersections. All other traffic would be kept outside the unit on fast-moving arterial roads that would connect the neighborhoods and also host retail and commercial activity. Perry thought this plan would benefit everyone: it would excise fast-moving “cut-through” traffic from residential neighborhoods, while still allowing residents to access stores outside their neighborhoods on their trips to and from work. Retailers and businesses, meanwhile, would be better positioned to serve multiple communities at once from the connector roads that exposed them to higher volumes of traffic.
While Llewellyn Park and Riverside were the first suburbs developed with a deliberate country-like feel, Perry’s neighborhood unit marked the first suburban layout designed specifically around the car. One of the first communities to bear Perry’s imprint was Radburn, New Jersey. Developed in 1929 (by another Clarence, Clarence Stein), Radburn was, as its developers proudly proclaimed, a “town for the motor age.” The purpose of the neighborhood unit and its implementation in places like Radburn was traffic safety, but it represented a radical revision of traditional town planning principles, and it would leave an indelible imprint on American suburbia.
The widespread adoption of the car by the middle class, providing individual mobility to everyone anywhere, anytime, forever transformed the arrangement of our landscape, as developers were finally untethered from the constraints of public transportation. As the influential urban historian and sociologist Lewis Mumford would later write in his 1961 book, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects, “As long as the railroad stop and walking distances controlled suburban growth, the suburb had form.” The automobile suddenly unhooked us from the need to keep communities compact, the freeways soon gave us unfettered access, and there was land as far as the eye could see.
From 1921 to 1936, the “golden age of highway building” saw the construction of more than 420,000 miles of roads in the United States, opening up fresh stretches of land for suburbanization and kick-starting what you could call our first housing boom. Between 1923 and 1927, new homes were built at a pace of almost nine hundred thousand per year; from 1920 to 1930, according to Jackson in Crabgrass Frontier, the suburbs of the nation’s ninety-six largest cities grew twice as fast as the cities themselves. And soon, they would grow even faster.
• • •
By 1945, America had two big, related problems. The first was a housing market that had been nearly dead for fifteen years. During the Depression, development froze, and during the war, all resources went to the military effort. For twenty years, housing starts averaged fewer than 400,000 per year, down from a peak of 937,000 in 1925. The second problem was that as soon as the war ended, thanks to an onslaught of returning veterans and an ensuing surge in the birth rate, Americans needed homes again, and a lot of them.
But because construction had stagnated for so long, there was nowhere for people to go. The housing shortage was so severe that by 1947 six million families were doubling up with relatives or friends, and another half million were occupying temporary quarters like mobile homes, barns, and garages. Kenneth Jackson, the historian, remembers his family moving in with his grandparents. “That was our situation, with four kids,” he says. “I remember sleeping in a dining room.”
The crisis was so acute that the government intervened. In 1934, after the Great Depression caused a spike in home foreclosures, the government had created the Federal Housing Administration, a new agency whose purpose was to stimulate lending in order to jump-start the ailing housing market. It did this by insuring long-term mortgage loans made by private lenders, which had a transformative effect. Before the Depression, mortgages were short-term and so expensive, covering only a small percentage of the home purchase price, that only the wealthy could afford paying so much up front for the cost of a home. But with the new government backing, private lenders were suddenly willing to lend on much more generous terms, extending the length of the loan to twenty and then thirty years and ultimately lending more than 90 percent of the cost of the home to buyers. The modern-day long-term fixed-rate mortgage was born, making it possible for almost anyone to get a home loan. The mortgage interest tax deduction, a by-product of the 1913 law that established the federal income tax—and still one of the biggest incentives for home ownership to this day—provided a welcome assist. Then in 1944, the government passed the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act, otherwise known as the GI Bill, which provided low-interest, zero-down-payment loans to millions of veterans.
Combined, these moves were effectively like throwing a match on a pile of drywall. Housing starts jumped from 142,000 in 1944 to more than a million in 1946 to almost two million in 1950, figures we wouldn’t again come close to until the housing boom of the 2000s. The percentage of American families who owned their homes soared, rising from 44 percent in 1940 to 64.4 percent in 1980. By 1950 the national suburban growth rate was ten times that of central cities. The suburban surge continued for the next two decades, what would later be known as suburbia’s heyday and becoming, as Kenneth Jackson called it, “a demographic phenomenon as important as the movement of eastern and southern Europeans to Ellis Island or the migration of American blacks to northern cities.” By
1970, 38 percent of the metropolitan population was living in suburbs, up from 23 percent in 1950, and more Americans lived in suburban areas than anywhere else. “Everything had been on ice for twenty years, and at the same time everyone thought cities were deeply flawed for various reasons,” says Jason Duckworth, president of Arcadia Land Company, a Philadelphia-area developer of walkable residential communities. “So all of a sudden, everything—twenty years of pent-up demand, the sentiment against the city, and the newfound adoration of the automobile—it all gets unleashed into the 1950s.”
The economy was booming, too. From 1950 to 1970 Americans’ incomes nearly doubled and the middle class ballooned, growth that translated into the purchase of more new houses—not to mention the sofas, TVs, dining-room tables, kitchen appliances, washers and dryers, lawn mowers, and everything else needed to fill them. Television helped reinforce the image of this new utopian suburbia, with shows like The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, Father Knows Best, and Leave It to Beaver depicting this new, happy, middle-class life in its full splendor.
The homes themselves were also very different from their predecessors in earlier suburbs. Previously, residential development typically took the form of either custom-built homes for the wealthy or lower-income rental housing. But the post–World War II era brought with it new developments in materials and mass production that lowered costs dramatically and enabled the commoditization of the home-building process.
The popularization of these techniques is credited largely to William Levitt, the enterprising young seaman from Long Island who returned after the war to Levitt & Sons, the building company started by his father, Abraham. A successful operation before the war, Levitt & Sons had mostly built custom homes for the upper middle class on Long Island, developing now well-established places like Rockville Centre and Manhasset. But young William returned from the navy armed with two things: the knowledge of new mass-production capabilities he’d learned from building military barracks, and the utter conviction there was about to be a massive surge in demand for housing. He convinced his father and brother, Alfred, to embark on a new development concept they called Levittown, the now iconic four-thousand-acre development in the center of Long Island’s Nassau County composed of mass-produced “tract” houses designed for returning veterans and their families.
The genius of the Levittown houses was their simplicity and uniformity: the structures were little more than a rectangular floor plan atop a concrete slab, an unfinished attic, and few variations. But they featured practical layouts that were easily expandable and adaptable, and thanks to the Levitts’ pioneering use of assembly-line and mass-production techniques, they were cheap. Originally available only to rent, by 1949 they were for sale, costing between $7,990 and $9,500, with a washing machine included. For this generation, many of whom grew up in the Depression, the opportunity to purchase a brand-new home was impossible to pass up. On a single day in March 1949, Levitt & Sons drew up fourteen hundred contracts, some for families that had been in line for four days. Levittowns in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and even Puerto Rico would follow, but Long Island was the biggest, ultimately housing eighty-two thousand residents.
Soon builders all around the country were laying out tract after tract of simple, mass-produced houses as fast as they could to keep up with the demand. In 1950, a builder in Fullerton, California, set a record by assembling a two-bedroom house in fifty-seven hours and fifty-seven minutes. Lakewood, California, the fastest-growing community that same year, on one day sold 107 houses in an hour. Styles varied slightly by region, and the wealthy still opted for custom-built houses, but tract housing became the norm. The homes went up on cheap farmland that had no access to public transportation, but thanks to the car that didn’t matter. In 1956, President Dwight Eisenhower signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act, paving the way for another forty-one thousand miles of highway and making it possible to build suburbs farther and farther away. New developments started covering our landscape at a breakneck pace. “We pushed the pendulum all the way over,” says Christopher Leinberger, founder of the real estate consultancy Robert Charles Lesser & Co., who is now a professor at George Washington University, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a leading land-use strategist, and the author of The Option of Urbanism: Investing in a New American Dream. “The market wanted it, we in real estate built it, starting out with Old Man Levitt, and we reoriented the entire society around this drivable suburban vision.”
And yet as early as the 1950s, authors, critics, and other social observers found reason to ridicule the new suburban lifestyle. In 1957, first-time author John Keats wrote the book The Crack in the Picture Window, which excoriated suburbia for creating stultifying communities and blighting the landscape with mass-produced housing. “For literally nothing down—other than a simple two percent and promise to pay, you too can find a box of your own in one of the fresh-air slums we’re building around the edges of American cities,” he wrote. In 1962, the songwriter Malvina Reynolds wrote “Little Boxes,” the now-famous satire of conformist middle-class America and houses made out of “ticky tacky,” the slang term for the materials used in commoditized construction. (The song would much later gain a second life in the mid-2000s as the opening theme song for the Showtime series Weeds.)
Pop culture wasn’t the only early critic of suburbia. As early as 1959, land-use experts started to raise concerns about the breakneck pace of development. That year, the Urban Land Institute and the National Association of Home Builders released a sixteen-minute film called Community Growth, Crisis and Challenge, which warned of the negative impacts of what had become known as sprawl. “Once, the land seemed inexhaustible,” a deep-voiced narrator explained as the camera panned across wide-angle shots of lush farmland to the peaceful sounds of birds chirping. Then his tone became dark and foreboding: “Today the land surrounding our metropolitan areas is being swallowed up at the rate of one million acres a year, by factories, shopping centers, highways, housing developments, and more housing developments. How did it happen in the span of a single generation?”
What the somber-toned narrator didn’t know was that we were just getting started.
• • •
Both the car and the government made possible one other critical building block of modern-day suburbia: single-use zoning. In 1926, the Supreme Court ruled in a landmark case that the town of Euclid, Ohio, an otherwise unassuming Cleveland suburb, had the right to prohibit a local developer from developing land for industrial use. The ruling itself was well-meaning enough; it was an attempt to prevent the building of noxious waste-spewing factories next door to people’s houses and to preserve the character of the neighborhood. But it also made it constitutional for the first time for municipalities to separate the use of their land into buckets, designating certain areas for residential use, others for commerce, and others for industrial purposes. Later, when the FHA required single-use zoning as a condition for granting mortgages, this separation became baked into most new developments. More than almost anything else, single-use zoning permanently altered the look, feel, and overall DNA of our modern suburbs.
Even now, single-use zoning is the easiest way to distinguish modern suburbs from their older counterparts. Instead of having a single downtown core with stores, apartments, and offices mixed together in one place, postwar suburbs typically separate everything: subdivisions are off in one area, stores in another, and office space and industrial spaces in others. Andres Duany, a renowned architect and planner, and, as a founder of the New Urbanism movement, one of the leading critics of sprawl, likens this setup to an “unmade omelet,” with “eggs, cheese, vegetables, a pinch of salt, but each consumed in turn, raw.” Consumed separately, these things aren’t very pleasing, but when they’re mixed together and cooked, the result is much more satisfying.
Some of the country’s most charming places are examples of cooked omelets: if you’ve ever been to Nantucket, Massachusetts, or Charleston, South Carolina, or
Georgetown in Washington, DC, or Alexandria, Virginia, or Philadelphia’s Chestnut Hill, or Boston’s Beacon Hill, you know what this looks like. Many places like this are on the East Coast because that’s where the bulk of the older suburbs are located, but they exist everywhere, in places like Lake Forest, Illinois, Palo Alto or San Mateo, California, the Country Club district of Kansas City, or Edina, Minnesota. These suburbs predate single-use zoning, so buildings of all uses are mixed together. There’s usually a clearly defined town center, many residents are within walking distance of the necessities of daily life, and the streets are narrow and generally pleasant to walk on. Residents outside the walking zone might need a car, but the design and placement of the streets and their components naturally encourage walking once they get to town. Among homes, there might be big mansions next to town houses next to apartments, so people with different levels of income are mixed together, too.
Most suburbs built after the war look a lot different. While “Euclidean” zoning, as it’s known, became law in 1926, it wasn’t truly adopted and its impact was not truly felt until the post–World War II housing boom. From then on, residential communities were built around a different model entirely, one that abandoned the urban grid pattern in favor of a circular, asymmetrical system made of curving subdivisions, looping streets, and cul-de-sacs. Clarence Perry and the developers of the early automobile suburbs had used this template, but single-use zoning led developers to adopt it as the standard. As they did in Perry’s design, the streets within the system adhere to a specific road hierarchy: cul-de-sacs and other small residential streets feed into larger residential streets, which in turn feed into larger, higher-volume “collector” roads that feed traffic from all the local residential streets and connect the various neighborhoods; those collector roads then feed into “arterial” roads, the giant, high-capacity thoroughfares that connect one town to another.
The End of the Suburbs: Where the American Dream Is Moving Page 4
