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

by Leigh Gallagher

  One reason for the change in behavior may be an ever-increasing awareness about the need to be more responsible with energy use. Consider the success of the Prius and other hybrids, or the rise of Zipcar, the car-sharing service that saw membership grow to close to eight hundred thousand before rental car giant Avis bought it in early 2013. The company specifically markets its service as a way to reduce the number of cars on the road. “Less cars on the road mean less congestion, less pollution, less dependence on oil, and cleaner, fresher air to breathe,” its Web site says. Originally born as a service for city residents, it’s seeing more demand come from suburban markets: in early 2012, Zipcar invested in Wheelz, a peer-to-peer car-sharing service, in order to test the concept at lower densities, and it’s been expanding regular Zipcar service to suburban areas like White Plains, New York, and Montgomery County, Maryland. Meanwhile, established car rental businesses like Hertz and Enterprise, and even carmakers like Ford, GM, and BMW, are getting into the car-sharing game.

  More and more suburban residents are experimenting with reducing their car dependency. In suburban Dallas, Rachel Meeks and her husband gave up one of their two cars a year ago and blogged about the effort. “We’ve been living in the suburbs with just one car for over a year, and I must say that it’s been 10% inconvenient and 90% awesome,” Meeks writes. “With two cars, there was always something we had to do: Oil changes, inspections, more gas and new tires. . . . One car is so much easier to take care of, and we drive less in general.” The post got 110 comments. In the summer of 2012, a few transportation agencies in North Texas got together to organize a “Dump the Pump” campaign, part of a nationwide effort to encourage residents to commute by means other than their cars. Commuters could bring a gas receipt to designated destinations in exchange for unlimited bus and rail rides.

  An easy gauge of the heightened interest in car-optional living is the sharp growth of Walk Score, a buzzed-about Seattle-based start-up that quantifies the walkability of almost any neighborhood (its slogan: “Drive less. Live more”). Plug in any address on Walkscore.com and the site, using a blend of proprietary algorithms and publicly available data, calculates how far it is from a school, a restaurant, a store, a coffee shop, and about a dozen or so common destinations and ascribes it a “score” of 1 to 100, with 90 to 100 being the best (a “walker’s paradise”) and 0 to 24 being the worst (“car-dependent”). The site is part utilitarian, part social mission: its founders believe that walkable neighborhoods are one of the simplest and best solutions to the problems facing our environment, our health, and our economy. Messages reminding users of that ethos appear all over the site. (“Save money, get fit and make room for the rest of your life,” reads one.) Walk Score now shows more than nine million scores a day—and it’s also introduced Transit Score and Bike Score ratings—but more telling is the way it has been embraced by the real estate community. Fifteen thousand realtors now build the Walk Score search mechanism into their Web sites sharing housing listings, largely because their house-hunting clients are asking for it.

  There’s another earthquake happening when it comes to our driving habits as well: teens and twentysomethings seem to be expressing a surprising indifference toward cars and driving. Getting a driver’s license used to be a rite of passage for any self-respecting postwar American teenager: it was a ticket to freedom, autonomy, and unchaperoned life with one’s friends. It’s not as significant to today’s youth. According to FHA data, in 1980, 66 percent of all seventeen-year-olds had their driver’s license; by 2010, that had dropped to 47 percent, despite the huge swell in the population of millennials. The PIRG study that tracked overall miles driven, meanwhile, found the decline to be especially pronounced among younger drivers: the average American aged sixteen to thirty-four drove 23 percent fewer miles in 2009 than the average young person in 2001.

  The indifference isn’t just toward cars, it’s toward driving, and it’s sizable. In a study done by MTV Scratch, the network’s in-house millennial research and consulting arm, not a single car brand was mentioned in the top 10 brands preferred by members of this group. This is starting to show up in car purchase figures: while people between twenty-one and thirty-four purchased 38 percent of new cars in 1985, they accounted for just 27 percent of new cars in 2010. “Gen Y Eschewing V-8 for 4G,” read the headline on Bloomberg News when the data came out. “That is inconceivable to me,” the historian Kenneth Jackson said to me in a conversation about the decline in driver’s licenses. “You [used to count] the hours until you got your driver’s license.”

  Of course, many teens still do count the hours. But ask around among the teenagers and twentysomethings you know today and you will likely find a decidedly different attitude when it comes to cars and driving. “Young people aren’t enamored with their cars anymore,” says Arcadia Land’s Jason Duckworth. “A small apartment with interesting friends and a good Wi-Fi connection are today’s ’57 Chevy.” I recently chatted with a former colleague of mine whose oldest daughter had turned sixteen several months prior. He said when he asked her if she wanted to get her driver’s license, he was bowled over by her response: “Maybe next year,” she shrugged. “Maybe next year?” he repeated to me as he recounted the story. “I couldn’t believe it.”

  The housing market has started to reflect a change in driving priorities. Far-flung suburban communities are losing their appeal—and their valuations. An analysis of real estate data by Fiserv Lending Solutions shows that home prices have fallen more in towns and neighborhoods far from urban centers than those closer to cities. Homes located in or near walkable neighborhoods held up better in the recession, and, as we’ll explore in the next chapter, new research keeps coming out showing an increase in demand for and higher valuations ascribed to foot-traffic-friendly, less car-dependent communities. “I think cities without adequate public transportation are going to be the ones that are really screwed over in the future,” says Diana Lind, executive director and editor in chief of the urban affairs magazine Next City.

  In the end, after six years in Westborough, Massachusetts, Diane Roseman and her husband decided they couldn’t do it any longer; while they recognized why many people would choose it, the car-dependent, subdivision lifestyle just wasn’t for them. They sold their house and moved their family to an attached row house in Cambridge and they haven’t looked back. It wasn’t easy: they got a deal on a fixer-upper in Cambridge, but they still had to spend more than what they were able to sell their Westborough house for. When they explained their plans to their suburban neighbors, they blamed her husband’s commute for the move. “People really dropped us,” Roseman says. “They took it a little personally.”

  Now in Cambridge, everyone in her household is happy. Her children walk to school, or even to the museum or to cafés. “My kids have so much more freedom than they ever had in the suburbs,” she says. Last year her daughter attended a summer camp at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts and for a week took a bus to the museum on her own. “There’s no way anything like that could ever happen in the suburbs,” Roseman says. “It can’t happen because of the infrastructure.” Her husband works for Google and can choose between a ten-minute walk or a three-minute bike ride to work. “He’s so happy,” she says. Virtually everything the family needs is accessible by walking, biking, or taking the T. They live a mile from the public school. Whole Foods is around the corner. They have a “postage stamp” backyard, Roseman says, but they love it because her husband is free from spending weekends maintaining a big lawn—and if her kids want to play outside, they walk across the street to the park.

  When I first connected with Roseman, she happened to answer the phone while she was in her car, driving her kids to a museum. She apologized profusely for even being in it and swore to me it was a rarity—they had only decided to drive because one of her children insisted. She was actually embarrassed. “It’s a rare day that I take the car,” she insisted. And yet despite the headache of buying, then selling their subur
ban home and relocating four children to new schools, Roseman isn’t regretful of her experience in Westborough; in fact, she thinks it made her more appreciative of her situation now. “In some ways I wish we never had that suburban interlude,” she says. “But I think I always would have wondered.”

  4

  THE URBAN BURBS

  I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life.

  —FRANK O’HARA

  A few months after the National Association of Home Builders’ convention in early May 2012, I am sitting in meeting room 1E of the Palm Beach County Convention Center in West Palm Beach, Florida. I’m here for the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU), the annual gathering of the nation’s leading anti-sprawl movement. For twenty years, the New Urbanists have been promoting the development of smaller-scale, walkable neighborhoods built on traditional town planning methods, and on this warm day in May some eleven hundred developers, architects, planners, engineers, bicycle and pedestrian advocates, and other friends of the movement are gathering to talk about ideas, exchange practices, network, and promote anti-sprawl principles.

  This industry gathering couldn’t be a starker contrast to the home builders’ show. Outside the convention center, there are shareable bikes available for use. A temporary bookstore has been set up selling titles like Live-Work Planning and Design: Zero-Commute Housing, In-laws, Outlaws, and Granny Flats, and The Cul-de-Sac Syndrome: Turning Around the Unsustainable American Dream. Instead of a trade show with aisles of vendors hawking products, this gathering is more of a mind meld, a kind of TED conference meets urban planning graduate program. The schedule is packed with sessions and seminars from the field’s luminaries; attendees can choose from lectures like “The Secret Life of Trees,” “Parking: Planning to Store the Cars Properly, Amid the Pedestrians!” and “Why Did We Stop Walking and How Can We Start Again?” At night, various local CNU chapters gather at informal salons to discuss their ideas in watering holes around West Palm Beach (the Cascadia chapter would be meeting at World of Beer; the Texas group would be holding court at O’Shea’s Irish Pub; CNU Great Lakes would be at Roxy’s). The New Urbanists who gather here are activists as much as they are planners, designers, and developers, and they believe in walkable neighborhoods and mixed-use development with the fervor of religious zealots. They talk about things like live/work spaces, alleys, terminating vistas, and the importance of creating a “sense of place.” The woman sitting next to me in meeting room 1E has an image of a mixed-use pedestrian village as her screen saver.

  The Congress for the New Urbanism officially describes itself as “the leading organization promoting walkable, neighborhood-based development as an antidote to formless sprawl.” Organized in the early 1990s, the movement traces its roots to a group of influential designers who had become alarmed by the growth of conventional suburban development and started meeting informally to share their ideas for solutions to it. They included Peter Calthorpe, a pioneer of transit-oriented, walkable residential development, and Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, the husband-and-wife team who had risen to fame by pioneering Miami modernist architecture in the 1980s before shifting gears to focus on more traditional neighborhood development.

  These thinkers, along with several other founding members, believed there was a better way to build not just the suburbs but our entire environment, and they were looking to formalize principles they had begun to use in their residential work—mixed-use zoning, pedestrian-friendly village development, more robust public transit, and the incorporation of the kinds of urban design methods that were common before World War II. They established the Congress for the New Urbanism as their organizing body and created a charter outlining their guiding principles. “We stand for the restoration of existing urban centers and towns within coherent metropolitan regions, the reconfiguration of sprawling suburbs into communities of real neighborhoods and diverse districts, the conservation of natural environments, and the preservation of our built legacy,” the CNU charter reads. Over the years, the group has grown to twenty-five hundred members, hundreds of communities, and the well-attended, ambitiously titled congress each year.

  The movement’s unofficial leader is Duany, the charismatic Princeton- and Yale-educated architect and urban planner who became one of the leading modernist architects in the 1980s. Born in New York and raised in Cuba and Barcelona, Duany moved to Coral Gables, Florida, with Plater-Zyberk in the mid-’70s and became influential in the contemporary architecture movement. The Miami-based firm they helped found, Arquitectonica, quickly rose to international fame for its flashy, in-vogue high-rises; one of its most iconic condominium buildings was featured in the opening credits of Miami Vice. But after seeing a lecture by architectural theorist Léon Krier in which Krier talked about the importance of traditional urbanism and the power of physical design to change the social life of a community, Duany—after recovering from the all-out attack Krier had made on everything he stood for— had an epiphany. Duany and Plater-Zyberk soon left to found their own firm, Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company, to start designing communities in the way Krier had described.

  One of DPZ’s first major projects was the development of Seaside, an eighty-acre parcel of land on the Florida Panhandle that Duany, Plater-Zyberk, and the developer Robert Davis planned in the style of a classic American beach town. With its narrow streets, front porches, and residences of varying sizes designed specifically to bring people into the community to engage with one another, Seaside was both a commercial success and a revolutionary idea; the social element of the neighborhood was as important in its design as the physical look and character of the houses and structures. Seaside brought DPZ worldwide renown—it made the cover of The Atlantic; Time magazine selected it as one of the ten “Best of the Decade” achievements in design—and established Duany and Plater-Zyberk as leaders of the burgeoning New Urbanism movement. Even now, from its headquarters in Miami, DPZ is like the Apple or Harvard or Goldman Sachs of New Urbanism; it is the sterling name, the firm that draws the best and the brightest.

  If DPZ is akin to Apple, Duany is the movement’s Steve Jobs—a big-picture visionary whose bold ideas upended the status quo and whose conviction, not to mention oratory skills, have given him guru-like status within the architecture and New Urbanist worlds. Outspoken, passionate, and highly opinionated, Duany is prone to bold statements and ideas that hit him at any moment on matters both large and small. (Arcadia Land’s Jason Duckworth recalls Duany at a dinner party some years ago making an “incredibly refined argument” about how to load a dishwasher.) Duany has, over the years, moved from architect to New Urbanist to more general futurist and prognosticator. “The present is not my job,” he likes to say. “The present is a distortion field.”

  The architecture and New Urbanist worlds are filled with people who have been “Duanied,” meaning they saw or heard Duany speak only to have it lead to an epiphany and a reversal of course on their own work. Sam Sherman, a Pennsylvania developer who’s spent the past few years revitalizing the East Passyunk neighborhood of South Philadelphia, is one. Sherman had had a successful career at some of the Philadelphia region’s biggest suburban home builders in the 1980s and 1990s when he happened to hear Duany in a radio interview one afternoon in 2002 while in his car trapped in traffic on Philadelphia’s Schuylkill Expressway. Duany was discussing his book, Suburban Nation, and talking specifically about how the design of suburban sprawl had led to painful commutes for millions of people. Sherman says in that moment, as he sat in his car, he had a revelation. “It was a soul-sucking experience,” Sherman says of his home-building years. “After you build fifteen hundred of those things, it’s not fun anymore—and there I was, literally, trapped in my car,” he says. He went out and bought Duany’s book and a few months later quit his job. “I basically walked in one day and said, ‘Here’s my phone, here’s my pager, here are my keys,’ and just
walked away,” he says. He has been working on urban redevelopment projects ever since; most recently, he’s transformed the neglected East Passyunk area into a thriving district populated by young professionals and drawing some of the city’s hottest restaurants.

  It is Duany, in fact, who I am awaiting, along with my fellow congress attendees, in room 1E in West Palm Beach. He’s running late, and the conference organizers are radioing one another on their headsets. “Has anyone seen Andres?” “Is he here yet?” After ten or fifteen minutes, he arrives, breezing in calm, cool, and debonair in Nantucket reds and a navy blazer. He does not disappoint. The United States has gone through “an orgy of process-based design,” he proclaims to the audience, beginning a discourse against the kind of planning that, he says, has brought us sprawl. In the span of fifteen minutes he invokes Pompeii, the Mormons, the Greeks, the Beaux-Arts movement, Baron Haussmann’s redesign of Paris in the late 1800s, and what he calls the “dendritic” system of suburban cul-de-sacs. After he concludes his sermon, he leaves the rest of the session to his co-panelist and Suburban Nation coauthor Jeff Speck, promising to return at the end to answer questions. He exits as smoothly as he arrived. (Many months later, over dinner in Washington, DC, where Duany had traveled to speak at an event but also because he felt the need to “bask in classicism,” our conversation took a similar tour, traveling from the history of single-use zoning and how municipalities “downloaded the cancer” when they bought standardized development codes, to how Brigham Young was a management and town planning genius.)