The End of the Suburbs: Where the American Dream Is Moving

by Leigh Gallagher

  It’s safe to say that almost all the common complaints about modern-day suburbia relate in some way or another to single-use zoning. Robert Putnam, a Harvard professor and author of the 2000 book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, has said this setup forces people to live their lives in “very large triangles,” with one point being where they sleep, one where they shop, and one where they work—with a good chunk of their free time spent shuttling among these three places. This critique would grow more apt over the years, due to the creep of sprawl, commutes that grew longer, and the housing boom of the mid-2000s, which built new communities made of bigger houses farther away from one another in increasingly remote places. As a result, most suburban residents are not only dependent upon their car but spend an excessive amount of time in it, a ramification we’ll explore in depth later on.

  The suburbs have another kind of zoning baked into their DNA: race. During its early days, the FHA used a neighborhood rating system that was developed by the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC), a New Deal agency formed to help prevent foreclosures, to appraise default risk levels and determine who could qualify for a loan. Neighborhoods were colored green for pristine, blue for less so, yellow for declining, and red for slums. The HOLC’s policies weren’t explicitly racist, but they factored in the appraisers’ very real biases of the times. Virtually all black neighborhoods were marked as slums, or “redlined” (some white neighborhoods were also redlined), and affluent white neighborhoods were commonly understood to be the most desirable areas. Since the FHA used HOLC maps to determine where they would direct federal mortgage loans, this made it virtually impossible for residents of black neighborhoods to get a federal loan. At the same time, until the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it was perfectly legal for suburban realtors to refuse to sell or rent to African Americans, and nearly all of them did. Levittown, for instance, contained a clause in its leases prohibiting renting to African Americans for the first few years. The result was a federal policy directing all money away from older urban neighborhoods and toward the suburbs, while at the same time effectively denying federal benefits to blacks that were flowing to whites.

  While the suburbs in general are more diverse today, this racial homogeneity still pervades the U.S. housing market. The nationwide home ownership rate is 65 percent, but it’s much higher among whites: 73.6 percent. Even at the peak of the recent real estate bubble, the figure for blacks and Latinos was under 50 percent; as of the end of 2012, the rate for blacks was 44.1 percent. While I was researching this book, I had coffee with a writer whose friend was in the process of relocating with her family from Berkeley, California, to Connecticut. House hunting in the wealthy upper-middle-class suburb of Darien—perhaps Berkeley’s ethnocultural polar opposite—she asked her realtor about diversity. Was there any? “Oh, honey,” the realtor replied reassuringly, “you don’t have to worry about that here.”

  • • •

  So in solving one problem—the severe postwar housing shortage—we unwittingly created some other ones: isolated, single-class communities and the building blocks for sprawl. The federal housing policies put in place had several other consequences, too. For one, cities all but crumbled, seeing a net out-migration of thirteen million people throughout the ’70s alone—mostly the wealthy, educated middle class. The establishments and institutions that served them, retail and restaurants and cultural institutions, followed, and poverty, blight, street gangs, and violence grew in their place. Whole urban neighborhoods got bulldozed to clear the way for the ever-expanding highway network developed to serve the suburbs, further destroying many entrenched working-class urban communities. The now well-known image of a gritty New York emerged during this time. In those days, you couldn’t go to Central Park at night, and Times Square was infested with crime and prostitution.

  Jobs followed the middle class out of the city, too. As far back as 1942, AT&T Bell Telephone Laboratories moved from Manhattan to a 213-acre campus in Murray Hill, New Jersey, which offered more space, quiet, and the same graceful curving roads and bucolic feel of burgeoning suburban subdivisions. But the ’70s saw the beginning of an exodus of blue-chip companies from the cities that would continue for decades: IBM moved from New York City to Armonk, New York, GE to Fairfield, Connecticut, Motorola from Chicago to Schaumburg, Illinois, and on and on. These companies’ workers—and more tellingly, their executives—lived in the suburbs, where taxes were lower and space was plentiful. By 1981, half of office space was located outside central cities. By the end of the 1990s, that share would grow to two-thirds.

  Shopping followed as well—and soon took on a new form with the invention of the mall. The earliest indoor shopping centers appeared in the ’50s, but they fully took hold in the ’70s and ’80s, adding cineplexes, restaurants, carousels, and more. The ’80s brought the arrival of the “big box” movement that would see stores like Lowe’s, Home Depot, Best Buy, and others open cavernous locations dwarfed only by the size of their parking lots.

  Around this time the suburbs started to evolve into a new urban form entirely, sprawling self-sufficient zones that contained all the services one needed instead of being mere residential extensions of metropolitan areas. Whether called “technoburbs,” “à la carte cities,” or “boomburbs,” these areas were characterized by long corridors of mid-rise office parks, strip malls, chain restaurants, and big-box stores; no center or core; and density and populations approaching those of a small city. These areas emerged along major corridors like Route 128 in Boston, in Silicon Valley outside San Francisco, in developments alongside Aurora outside Denver, and, perhaps most notoriously, in Orange County, California, which grew to two million people in twenty-six low-density mini regions. Sprawl in Orange County is so vast that when discussing the suburbs with me one day, the financial blogger Felix Salmon gleefully proclaimed Orange County “a suburb without an urb!” In 1991, the author and scholar Joel Garreau famously coined the phrase “edge city,” his term for these concentrations of business, shopping, and entertainment that represented the new face of metropolitan growth.

  We would soon expand so far out that edge cities would lose their edge. But back then, they represented our official entry into sprawldom. In places like Atlanta, less than 10 percent of the metropolitan area’s residents lived in the city core. By 2000, metropolitan areas covered almost twice as much land as they did in 1970. That same year, a report written by Russ Lopez of the Boston University School of Publish Heath for Fannie Mae entitled Thirty Years of Urban Sprawl in Metropolitan America warned of the dangers of our settlement patterns. “Urban sprawl is emerging as a major environmental, health and social issue,” Lopez wrote. California’s Inland Empire, the twenty-seven-thousand-square-mile zone between Los Angeles and the Riverside/San Bernardino hubs, emerged as a poster child of urban sprawl, a massive region where two-thirds of residents lived more than ten miles from a central business district, and the packed highways and clogged arterial roads had led to almost unbearable rates of congestion and pollution. In 2002 a report by the nonprofit agency Smart Growth America rated it the nation’s worst example of urban sprawl. “There is no ‘there’ there,” said one of the authors of the report.

  • • •

  Experts, academics, and other influential thinkers have been expressing concern about our modern pattern of suburban development since the first Levittown. Intellectuals worried early on about the postwar suburbs’ uniformity and lack of character. The historian Lewis Mumford denounced Levittown almost as soon as it went up, saying it was using “new-fashioned methods to create old-fashioned mistakes.” In The City in History, he described the suburbs as “a collective effort to live a private life” and “a multitude of uniform, unidentifiable houses, lined up inflexibly, at uniform distances, on uniform roads, in a treeless communal waste, inhabited by people of the same class, the same income, the same age group, witnessing the same television performances, eating the same tasteless prefabricated foods, from
the same freezers, conforming in every outward and inward respect to a common mold.”

  Then there was Jane Jacobs, the writer and urban activist who championed the preservation of small-scale, authentic city neighborhoods and who is perhaps best known for beating back Robert Moses’s efforts to build an expressway through lower Manhattan in the 1960s. Her influential 1961 book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, laid out her argument for the preservation of what she famously dubbed the “intricate ballet” of city sidewalks in their natural form, referring to the commerce, activity, and lively interplay among people that dense, varied neighborhood streets encouraged. (Jacobs spends several passages describing this ballet on her own stretch of Hudson Street, which is my neighborhood now, and I can vouch that her description of its various characters—children heading to the neighborhood’s St. Luke’s School, commuters heading to work, shopkeepers tending their stores, stopping taxis appearing to ferry downtowners to midtown, “beautiful girls” heading out for a night on the town, and drunk young men—has remain practically unchanged.)

  Jacobs had plenty to say about the suburbs, too, her chief complaint being that they were a patronizing fake-ifying of nature. “It is no accident that we Americans, probably the world’s champion sentimentalizers about nature, are at one and the same time probably the world’s most voracious and disrespectful destroyers of wild and rural countryside,” she wrote in Death and Life. “It is neither love for nature nor respect for nature that leads to this schizophrenic attitude. Instead, it is a sentimental desire to toy, rather patronizingly, with some insipid, standardized, suburbanized shadow of nature. . . . And so, each day, several thousand more acres of our countryside are eaten by the bulldozers, covered by pavement, dotted with suburbanites who have killed the thing they thought they came to find.”

  Jacobs and Mumford were not alone. Raymond Tucker, the mayor of St. Louis from 1953 to 1965, commented that there wasn’t enough room to enable the new housing landscape that policy makers had in mind without causing serious damage to society. “The plain fact of the matter is that we just cannot build enough lanes of highways to move all of our people by private automobile and create enough parking space to store the cars without completely paving over our cities and removing all of the . . . economic, social, and cultural establishments that the people were trying to reach in the first place,” he said. Even Victor Gruen, the Austrian-born architect considered the inventor of the modern-day shopping mall, soon came to abhor the impact of his creation, describing them as early as 1978 as “land-wasting seas of parking.”

  Whatever the critics say, it is important to note that there is, of course, a tremendous amount of appeal in suburban life. On a fundamental level, trees and grass and quiet calm are extremely inviting to humans, and it’s understandable how someone who works hard in the city would want to commute home to a quiet, residential street and a house with no shared walls. Then there’s the space, which a house in the suburbs lets you have in spades: a dining room, a TV room, a basement, a spare guest room or two—things that are impossible to claim for the same price in most cities. Plus, it’s all private and, if nothing else, suburbia is, as Lewis Mumford said, a collective effort to live a private life. For a nation that prides itself on individualism, living on one’s own quarter-acre lot gives every man or woman his or her own castle, his or her own island.

  And of course, just because suburbanites live apart doesn’t mean they’re alone; many suburbs have extremely strong and tight-knit communities. And as formulaic as critics say cul-de-sacs are, they do have design virtues that make them appealing to families with young kids. Jason Duckworth of Arcadia Land Company points out that there’s something “almost a little Jane Jacobs-y” about them, he says; when children are playing outside, the circular arrangement of homes with parents looking out tends to put multiple “eyes on the street,” Jane Jacobs parlance for the natural surveillance that comes from the presence of people in homes or stores who can easily view street activity.

  The biggest issue with the suburbs is the way we have developed them in recent years. You can almost chart the change over time by talking to people of different ages about their suburban experience. Like tree rings, each concentric circle of our suburban development denotes a different era, and a person’s individual memories of suburbia depend entirely on what ring on the tree his or her experience dates from. The earlier the experience, I found, the more sentimental the memories. Talk to anyone who grew up in the suburbs in the 1950s, ’60s, or early ’70s, and you’re likely to hear talk of neighborhoods chock-full of children, where neighbors could knock on one another’s door and kids played freely in the streets. While I encountered many people who disliked the suburbs altogether over the course of my reporting, there was also a sizable segment of people who were highly nostalgic for the kinds of suburbs they grew up in.

  But at the same time, I encountered plenty of people eager to unload their stories about how much they hated the suburbs. Writing part of this book in seclusion in rural northwest Connecticut, I struck up a conversation with a dairy farmer who’d been raised in nearby Brookfield and considered himself a firsthand witness to sprawl’s wholesale consumption of much of Connecticut’s farmland in the ’70s and ’80s. He hated growing up there, he said, because he felt it was isolated and limiting. “It’s not the people,” he was careful to clarify. “It’s the construct.” Then he lowered his voice, looked into my eyes dead serious, and spoke slowly so I would take in every word: “It is a vapid. Empty. Wasteland.” During a meeting about something else entirely, a colleague I’d mentioned the book to launched into an impassioned tale of how she was traumatized during a family road trip through suburban Denver after driving past what seemed like the exact same strip mall every eight miles and how, largely as a result, she and her husband were doing everything within their power to stay in Boston and not leave for the suburbs. When I told a thirtysomething public relations executive about my project, he bluntly offered up his opinion of the Long Island suburb where he’d grown up. “I had no intention of ever, EVER going back there,” he said. “I honestly can’t even understand how someone my age could even think that’s an option. It seems like the end of the world to me.” Another business contact volunteered that while his suburb of Washington, DC, offered “room and some greenery and good schools,” he was “not a big fan” of the lifestyle it meant subscribing to. “It’s just so goddamn boring,” he said.

  Throughout the course of my research, the fact that I was writing a book about the future of the suburbs would often come up when I was at social events. About 70 percent of the time, the person would make some version of the same snide quip: “And what is it? Over, I hope?” or “Please tell me there isn’t one!” or “Do the suburbs even have a future?” If I was more specific and revealed I was writing a book called The End of the Suburbs, I would get high fives and hurrahs, or once, from a New York investment banker, “Good for you!” What became abundantly clear is that the topic struck a chord with just about everyone. As my deadline loomed and I became increasingly strapped for time, I actually found myself sidestepping talk of my book at cocktail parties because I knew if I broached the subject, I would be stuck in conversation for another forty-five minutes.

  Popular culture hasn’t been too kind to suburbia, either. When it comes to dark satirical send-ups of cul-de-sac life, you can take your pick: the movies Blue Velvet, Revolutionary Road, and American Beauty, and the TV shows Desperate Housewives, Weeds, and Suburgatory, to name just a few. In 2011, the indie rock band Arcade Fire took home the Grammy for best album for The Suburbs, an entire album dedicated to teen angst and isolation inspired by band members’ Win and William Butler’s upbringing in Houston’s master-planned community The Woodlands. The social network Twitter, perhaps not surprisingly since it acts as a proxy for general sentiment, is overflowing with gripes about the suburbs. Kate Taylor, a stay-at-home mom who lives in a suburb of Charlotte and tweets as @culdesacked, is one of the
more amusing: “If the only invites I get from you are at-home direct sales ‘parties,’ please lose my number, then choke yourself. #suburbs.” At one point I searched for the hashtag #ilovethesuburbs and found, on all of Twitter’s billions of tweets, a single tweet, from Joy Kirr in Elk Grove Village, Illinois: “Ooh! It IS a good night for that! I love being able to have the windows open again! #ILoveTheSuburbs.” To be sure, Twitter tends to reflect the exceptionally opinionated one way or the other. But even when you look at the more neutral patterns of Internet search requests, the result is not that different. Google the phrase “Suburbia is . . .” and the next word the auto-fill feature suggests is “hell.”

  By the early 1980s, a small group of urban planners and architects, alarmed by the rate of sprawl, started meeting to come up with solutions to it, looking to traditional European city planning as their inspiration. In 1993 they organized under the name the “Congress for the New Urbanism,” with the goal of promoting the design and building of traditional neighborhoods that were small and walkable, mixed stores and housing together, and emphasized community. Their early leaders included the San Francisco urbanist and architect Peter Calthorpe and the Miami-based husband-and-wife architect team of Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk. Over the years their leagues expanded to include hundreds, among them the author James Howard Kunstler, whose The Geography of Nowhere spoke of the “immersive ugliness of our everyday environment” and the “despair” that environment was generating among the young, and who has called suburbia “the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world.” Kunstler likes to provoke—the article that became his first best-selling book was originally titled “Why Is America So Fucking Ugly,” until his publisher, Simon & Schuster, changed it. His points resonated anyway.