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

by Leigh Gallagher

  • • •

  Whether it’s because everything is so far apart or because it’s not possible for safety reasons or because it’s just not fun, suburban residents, relatively speaking, don’t really walk all that much. Studies using pedometers have found the average American takes a little over 5,100 steps a day, compared with 9,700 steps for Australians, 7,200 steps for the Japanese, and 9,650 for the Swiss. That’s because most Americans use their cars for just about everything. In the United States, roughly half of all trips taken by car are three miles or less. When it comes to trips under one mile, we hop in our car 62 percent of the time; in areas of sprawl, that figure jumps to 78 percent.

  This has taken a huge toll on our health. You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to deduce that more time in cars means we are less active. But research has been piling up that establishes a link between the spread of sprawl and the rise of obesity in our country. By now, the obesity problem in the United States is well known: more than a third of U.S. adults and 17 percent of children and teens are considered obese. But research by the CDC and others has found that some of the biggest reasons cited for not exercising are lack of structures or facilities—like sidewalks or parks—and fears about safety. Researchers have also found that people get less exercise as the distances among where we live, work, shop, and socialize increase. As far back as 2001, a report from the CDC asserted a link between the design of our “built environment” and our increasing rates of chronic diseases like heart disease, diabetes, obesity, asthma, and depression. “There is a connection . . . between the fact that the urban sprawl we live with daily makes no room for sidewalks or bike paths and the fact that we are an overweight, heart disease-ridden society,” wrote the report’s author, Richard Jackson, MD, a pediatrician, chair of Environmental and Health Sciences at UCLA, and former director of the CDC’s National Center for Environmental Health. Jackson has been tracking the impact of environment on health for his entire career, in recent years focusing specifically on the influence of urban planning, including sprawl, on our overall well-being. Jackson has become a fierce advocate for the design of what he calls “healthier” communities—those that have safer places to walk, designated bike lanes, green spaces, better air quality, and the like—elements that draw people out into the environment and get them walking and exercising naturally. “We have built America,” he says, “in a way that is fundamentally unhealthy.”

  In places where people walk more, obesity rates are much lower. New Yorkers, perhaps the ultimate walkers, weigh six or seven pounds less on average than suburban Americans, Jackson says. It’s not just the greater prevalence of type A perfectionists addicted to their spinning classes. Anyone who’s ever set foot in Manhattan (or New Yorkers who have hosted visitors from car-dependent areas who naively pack the same high-heeled shoes they wear at home) quickly realizes that walking a single New York City block is more than most people from almost any other place in the country walk in an entire day. I learned this the hard way when I moved for a few months to a small community on Long Island while working on this book; despite eating healthier and exercising more, my pattern of walking about three-quarters of a mile a day to transport myself suddenly ceased—and I gained six pounds in two months. My colleague Pattie Sellers is perhaps on the extreme side, even for New Yorkers: she lives on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, walks to work in midtown and as much as possible when going about the course of her daily life, and usually exceeds ten thousand steps a day (which she tracks using a nifty UP electronic wristband). It’s not at all uncommon for her to clock eight miles or more in a single day.

  The obesity rates are especially alarming for our younger generation. The prevalence of overweight children has doubled since 1980; for teens it’s tripled. Rates of type 2 diabetes have doubled in the past fifteen years, and a growing number of children are now being diagnosed with heart disease and liver disease—conditions once only seen in adults. These numbers parallel a drop in physical activity. In 1969, roughly half of all children walked or biked to school, but today that figure is less than 15 percent. You can almost pinpoint when things started to change: children are four times as likely to walk to schools that were built before 1983, when most students arrived by foot, than after, when schools started to be built farther away from town and were designed to meet the needs of students arriving by car. The number of trips the average child makes each day on foot or by bicycle has plummeted over the years, dropping nearly 40 percent from 1977 to 1995. Jackson says this is directly related to our pace of suburban sprawl. Unless changes are made in the way our neighborhoods are constructed, he says, today’s young people—those born since 1980—may be the first in our country to live shorter lives than their parents. “This is so unbelievably serious,” he says.

  Bolstering Jackson’s argument that our environment is to blame for our weight issues, a telling study came out of the University of Utah in 2008 that found a correlation between the age of residential neighborhoods and obesity levels of their residents. Researchers found that on average, people who lived in walkable neighborhoods—those that were more densely populated and more pedestrian friendly, and tended to be built in earlier times—weighed, on average, six to ten pounds less than those living in less walkable neighborhoods. And they found that adding ten years to the age of the neighborhood decreased obesity rates by 8 percent for women and 13 percent for men, implying that the newer the neighborhood, the less conducive it was to exercise.

  In newer suburbs, people often decline to walk even when they can. One of the tipping points in Diane Roseman’s experience in Westborough came when she suggested that the parents in the neighborhood start walking the children to school, which was about a third of a mile from the neighborhood and accessible through a little-used wooded path that happened to connect to their subdivision. The route entailed an extended walk through an isolated area, so it wasn’t ideal, but Roseman suggested that perhaps the parents could take turns accompanying the kids each morning. She had no takers. “Nobody would do it,” she says. “I was the rabble-rouser for trying to get the kids to walk to school.”

  Because of the lack of serendipitous interaction this kind of residential design fosters, children in many suburbs today tend to play according to a rigorous schedule of coordinated playdates and activities—hence Roseman’s forty- or fifty-mile-per-day after-school shuttle. She says she “had this dream of kids walking up and down the street and knocking on doors” but found that, instead, everything was arranged ahead of time. “Everyone has a play set, but you don’t have access to that play set unless you arrange a playdate,” she says. Of course, some of this is due to a shift in parenting style over the years and to our playdate-centric culture, which is thriving in cities as well. It may have more to do with parents’ busier schedules these days than with the inability of children to roam free. But many people interviewed for this book lamented the lack of free play or serendipitous interaction—whether between adults or children—in today’s suburbs, especially compared with older suburbs many of these parents themselves grew up in.

  The wholesale reliance on the car in today’s suburbs is especially hard on adolescents, who under this setup need to rely on their parents as chauffeurs until they’re sixteen or seventeen. This makes them unnaturally dependent at precisely the moment developmental experts say it’s most important for them to become independent. “When there is nearly nothing within walking distance to interest a young person and it is near-lethal to bicycle,” says Richard Jackson, “he or she must relinquish autonomy—a capacity every creature must develop just as much as strength and endurance.” In this way, even teenagers remain what the urbanist Andres Duany characterizes as “frozen in a form of infancy.” To get a glimpse of the angst brought on by the limitations of suburbia for teenagers, witness any John Hughes movie from the 1980s or what may still be the best example to date, the music video of the 1982 Rush classic “Subdivisions.”

  The car-centric arrangement can
be just as isolating for well-adjusted adults. A 2010 study by researchers at the University of California, Davis, found that neighborhood satisfaction was higher among residents of older, more traditional neighborhoods than conventional suburban neighborhoods, even after controlling for sociodemographics and other characteristics, largely because of a perception of “liveliness.” The lack of interaction grew more exaggerated over the years, due to the creep of sprawl, commutes that grew longer and resulted in less time spent at home, and the housing boom, which built new communities farther away from one another in increasingly remote places. “I live within 500 meters of ten neighbors,” one suburban resident posted on Amazon.com in a review of Kenneth T. Jackson’s Crabgrass Frontier, “and I know more about the last guy I sat next to on a plane than the neighbors I have resided by for over five years.”

  When she and her husband left New York City for Westchester County in 2004 and then settled in the Boston suburb of Wellesley in 2007, Linda Erin Keenan found herself unprepared for the isolation she felt. She ended up writing a series of humorous blog posts about her experience, which became a book proposal, which then became the ABC sitcom Suburgatory (and then a book of laugh-out-loud humor essays, Suburgatory: Twisted Tales from Darkest Suburbia). Keenan, a former producer for CNN, says she knew she was truly lonely when she found herself missing even the overly inquisitive doorman in New York she used to go out of her way to avoid. “I started missing not just my urban friends and job,” she writes, “but especially Rob, my go-to conversation machine, and all the other random faces I would bump into, sometimes literally, going about my city life.” To combat the “crushing loneliness,” Keenan soon started talking to anyone who would listen. “I began talking to everyone, anywhere, anytime, all the time,” she writes. “Were people’s facial cues telling me to back the fuck off, you crazy mommy? I didn’t care.” She immersed herself in Facebook, she says, both to have some kind of communication and to connect with people on current events. Roseman, too, found her life in suburbia to be surprisingly solitary. After dropping her children off at school, she would be alone in her house for much of the day. “I would have six hours in an empty house,” she says, which she says was “fine, but a little weird.”

  This isn’t to say modern suburbanites are inherently antisocial—on the contrary, many suburbs have exceptionally close-knit communities, and even residents on individual cul-de-sacs can form their own kind of tight neighborly unit. But with people spending so much time in their cars and in their houses, and with many communities lacking a walkable town center or pleasantly walkable residential streets, the spontaneous interaction that comes from, for example, walking down a Main Street or a central square or even down the block is harder to come by. And that spontaneous interaction is important, as a growing body of research has shown. Researchers have found that when people bump into each other, good things happen. Both the Harvard economist and urban scholar Edward Glaeser and the urban theorist Richard Florida have linked higher-density or pedestrian-friendly places to higher levels of innovation. Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos.com, is moving his company from suburban Henderson, Nevada, to downtown Las Vegas precisely because he believes the “serendipitous collisions” that happen when people are freer to walk between the office and local cafés, restaurants, and other public places will make his employees happier, help them forge closer relationships with one another, and lead to the faster cultivation of new ideas.

  Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that walking has become en vogue with the biggest tech minds in Silicon Valley. The late Apple CEO Steve Jobs loved to go for walks with friends and business colleagues to discuss ideas, and getting asked to go on a walk in the woods of Palo Alto with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was at one point a rite of passage among Valley stars and potential employees. Twitter cofounder and Square founder Jack Dorsey is also an outspoken believer in the benefits of going for walks. “The best thinking time is just walking,” he has said.

  He’s not wrong. Studies have shown that the act of walking itself delivers physiological benefits of a higher order, or at least a different kind, than other kinds of physical activity. Jeffrey Tumlin, a transportation planner and author of the book Sustainable Transportation Planning: Tools for Creating Vibrant, Healthy, and Resilient Communities, has spent the past few years studying the social and evolutionary importance of walking and its effect on our bodies and brains. “We’re bipedal social primates,” he says; every aspect of our body systems needs not just the exercise, but the pattern and physical motion of walking itself in order to work well. The rhythmic aspect of walking helps our lymphatics function, which impacts our immune system; as the most common weight-bearing activity, walking helps bone strength. There is a socially and psychologically therapeutic dimension to walking as well; it’s “the reset button for our psychology,” Tumlin says, noting there’s a chemical basis for people who say, “I’m going for a walk” after a tense situation. Being able to walk to a Main Street or other locus of activity, meanwhile, gives people a jolt simply by creating the anticipation of a social interaction. “There’s possibility—of life, or a work connection, or a little flirtation,” he says.

  • • •

  If the centerpiece of the suburbs is the car, the central daily activity is the commute. The average suburban resident now drives fifteen to eighteen thousand miles per year; in the exurbs, it’s closer to twenty-five thousand miles or more. Most of that time is spent commuting to and from work, which has been a part of daily life in the suburbs since people started moving there.

  It’s actually hard to know just how long the average commute is. The Census Bureau says the average worker spends fifty-one minutes commuting each day, but it’s a tough figure to accurately gauge because people tend to underreport the amount of time it takes them to get to work. (When we talk about commuting in the United States, we are talking almost exclusively about commuting by car; close to 90 percent of U.S. commuters drive themselves to work, while less than 5 percent take public transit.) And the average doesn’t tell the real story. Some 3.5 million Americans now make grueling “extreme commutes,” defined as daily round-trip travel of three hours or more. A few years ago local television news stations started moving their first morning news broadcast from 5:00 a.m. to 4:30 a.m. or even 4:00 a.m. in some markets to capture the growing percentage of viewers who were leaving for work earlier in the day. “Commutes have increasingly cut into what we usually describe as sleep time,” one television executive quipped to the New York Times.

  As our obsession with housing led us to push out farther along the residential frontier, commutes got longer. Like Diane Roseman, millions of Americans felt that if they were going to spend $200,000, $300,000, or $400,000 on their house, they wanted it to be the best house money could buy, which usually meant the one farthest from the urban job center and out of the range of a public transit system. One of the country’s biggest drive-’til-you-qualify zones is California’s Inland Empire, where over the past decade hundreds of thousands have moved to the far reaches of Riverside and San Bernardino counties for more affordable housing. Towns here are seventy miles or more from Los Angeles or Orange County, to which many residents commute—more than 40 percent of Riverside and San Bernardino county residents commute outside the already remote region. The sheer travel distance is made exponentially worse by traffic: it is one of the most polluted, traffic-clogged corridors of the country.

  One of the worst tales from the commuting trenches I heard while reporting for this book came from this pocket of the country. Maribeth Reinbold is a fifth-grade teacher who lives in Temecula, California, a small city forty miles south of Riverside that saw explosive growth in the 1990s and 2000s. In 2001, Reinbold and her husband, then a university police officer, decided to move from Orange County, where they were paying pricey rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Fullerton, to Temecula, drawn by its quaint “old town” center and the three-bedroom stucco house they were able to buy for $489,000, for which the
mortgage payment was less each month than the rent on their Orange County apartment. They bought the home with the intent of finding jobs near Temecula, too, but the economy had taken a turn and local work was hard to come by. So they committed to another school year in Orange County and decided to make the seventy-five-mile daily commute each way until they could find jobs near their new home.

  The distance was punishing, but it was the traffic that was the killer. The trip took an hour and ten minutes with no congestion, but on the clogged freeways during rush hour it took up to three hours each way. To avoid the traffic, Reinbold and her husband—they carpooled since they worked minutes from each other—would set their alarm for 3:50 a.m., leave by 4:00, and arrive at 5:15. With nowhere to go at that hour—it was still pitch black—they would park in the McDonald’s parking lot, recline their seats, and sleep, setting the alarms on their cell phones for 6:00 a.m. when the drive-through window opened. Reinbold’s husband would then drop her off at school, where she’d do her hair and makeup in her classroom and get dressed in the restroom. On the days Reinbold had to drive in without her husband, she felt unsafe sleeping in the McDonald’s parking lot alone, so she would go straight to her classroom and sleep under her desk instead. “I was like George Costanza,” she says, referring to the Seinfeld episode where George gets caught by his boss, Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, taking a nap under his desk. As bad as the mornings were, Reinbold’s commute home was worse: three hours of stop-and-go traffic after which she would walk into her house, go straight to her bedroom, and plop on her bed with her arms and legs stretched out while her body decramped. After a year, she still hadn’t found a teaching job near her new home, but rather than face the prospect of signing up for another year of her commute, she gave up. She quit her job, trading the tenured, well-paying position for which she’d earned a master’s degree for a local substitute teaching gig, which she supplemented with a job at a tutoring center in Temecula for $8 an hour. “I just could not live that lifestyle anymore,” she says of the soul-sucking back-and-forth. “It killed my spirit.” Shortly after that, she was hired as a full-time teacher in Menifee, a twenty-minute drive from Temecula.