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

by Leigh Gallagher

  Over the course of the next two days while in West Palm Beach, I get an indoctrination into New Urbanism principles: I learn there is an inverse relationship between the length of a block and how many people will choose to walk down it, that trolleys are “pedestrian accelerators,” and that the car “disaggregates the complexity of the pedestrian shed” (translation: when developers assume people will drive, things get built farther apart). Over lunch with Peter Calthorpe, the San Francisco–based architect and urbanist, I listen as he discusses the end of Communism, the evolution of the middle class, and the “flywheel” of home builders who, he says, have kept producing the same kind of product even though home owners’ priorities have changed. During the conference’s main stage sessions, Le Corbusier, the French pioneer of modernist architecture who envisioned a high-rise city, is invoked as many times as the movement’s enemy as Jane Jacobs is as their hero.

  The main principles of New Urbanism have not changed much since its founding twenty years ago. New Urbanism is not a rating or rule book like, say, LEED, the third-party green building accreditation that requires structures adhere to a set of specific standards to earn its label; rather, it’s a set of basic principles and guidelines—a sort of neighborhood DNA code—for developers, planners, designers, and policy makers who wish to design neighborhoods based on traditional town planning methods. Most New Urbanism developments have certain identifying characteristics: narrower or more “modest-sized” streets, an easily identifiable town center, a Main Street lined with buildings that mix commercial and residential spaces, and a mixture of housing types throughout the rest of the neighborhood—single-family detached houses, attached town houses, and apartments—all commingled together. New Urbanism is not architecture; New Urbanists are almost agnostic to what the houses’ exteriors look like, or even to the architectural style of the neighborhood. In the same way Clarence Perry, whose neighborhood unit helped transform suburban design, had nothing to do with the design of homes in those neighborhoods, New Urbanism theories relate primarily to a community’s bones, or the design and layout of the neighborhood itself. As it was with Seaside, the goal of New Urbanism is to create neighborhoods whose design serves a social as well as a physical purpose. The mix of housing stock, for instance, ensures that a wide range of economic classes lives in the same neighborhood (which also makes homes easier to sell, since the housing stock appeals to a broader range of the market), while the pleasing, diverse streetscapes are designed to be both safe for foot traffic and also appealing enough to bring people out of their homes and into the public space. Some physical attributes of the dwellings themselves have a social function, too: homes are built close to the street, and porches draw residents to the front of the house, where they might interact with their neighbors passing just a few feet away on the sidewalk. Using these principles, a better-designed community, New Urbanism thinking goes, can result in a richer life.

  All told, there are an estimated five to six hundred New Urbanism villages and neighborhoods built or under construction across the United States, estimates Rob Steuteville, editor of Better! Cities and Towns; DPZ designed the code for many of them. The best known is Seaside, but they include places like NorthWest Crossing in Bend, Oregon; Norton Commons, twenty minutes outside of Louisville in Prospect, Kentucky; and Stapleton, a massive project designed by Peter Calthorpe’s Calthorpe Associates in Colorado that is one of the largest, a 4,700-acre development on the site of the former Stapleton International Airport. Many of these communities build anti-suburban claims in their marketing materials, which can read more like manifestos. Slogans for various New Urbanism developments include “life within walking distance” and “more life per square foot”; others implore home owners to “add the charm that’s missing from suburban living.” I’On, a New Urbanism development just across the Charleston harbor in the South Carolina Lowcountry, makes the specific boast that its porches are eight feet deep or more, “to allow room for rocking chairs to rock; for people to put their feet up; and for dogs to be dogs.” Hampstead, a community near Montgomery, Alabama, points out all the careful thought that has gone into its planning: “Residents may not know we designed a street section to be a specific width,” its Web site says. “They just know it feels right when they walk to the market.”

  To see these principles in person, I decided to visit one of the oldest and largest New Urbanism communities, Kentlands in Gaithersburg, Maryland, a 350-acre development built on a former farm estate thirty miles northwest of Washington, DC. Conceived in 1988 by developer Joe Alfandre and designed by DPZ, Kentlands has 2,211 residences, ranging from single-family homes to condominiums and apartments, and a densely packed downtown with a million or so square feet of commercial space (Lakelands, its sister development next door, which was built a few years later, has another 2,000 residences). On a crisp November day, I drive—and drive, and drive, all the way out past conventional suburbia, off the freeway exit ramp and down a big arterial road before I make a left into a big suburban commercial retail center that includes a Giant, Kmart, Party City, Panera Bread, and more. One criticism of New Urbanism is that the communities themselves are often built deep within suburbia on large tracts of land, and by the time I get to Kentlands I am a good forty-five miles from Baltimore and almost thirty miles from Washington, DC. But just on the other side of the shopping center’s parking lot there lies a sort of parallel suburban universe: a dense, tightly woven Main Street and a walkable, sprawl-free community of narrow, tree-lined streets, stately, traditional-style townhomes, handsome single-family homes, sidewalks, and small parks. Once you enter Kentlands, it’s like being in a different world; it is like Park Slope, Brooklyn, or Georgetown has been cut and pasted into the middle of suburbia.

  I meet Diane Dorney, a twenty-year resident and founder of the Town Paper, the first New Urbanism newspaper published out of Kentlands, at the Starbucks in the Kentlands Market Square for a tour. Market Square is composed of two intersecting streets, Market and Main, and a promenade that contains a cinema, several restaurants, and commercial spaces. Heading east, Main Street turns into a narrow village street packed with small storefronts—doctor’s offices, salons, restaurants, and the like. All the commercial spaces on Main Street are in so-called live/work buildings, which means that each storefront has residential units and sometimes office space on top of it. Dorney and her husband, who have three adult children, live in one of these buildings; they rent out the commercial space to a woman who runs a wellness center, and live on the two floors above it. Live/work spaces are a hallmark of New Urbanism; the stores bring the foot traffic, and the presence of residents keeps “eyes on the street,” in Jane Jacobs parlance, making the area safe at night.

  We start to head away from town on Hart Road, a narrow residential street lined with town houses. The densest part of New Urbanism developments is the downtown; the farther away you get, the bigger and more spread out the homes become, but that’s only a matter of degree. Ninety-five percent of lots in Kentlands are eighty-eight feet wide or less. The streets are narrow, with the largest measuring thirty-six feet curb to curb—that includes room for parked cars on each side—and narrower for the many one-way streets in the neighborhood. Dwellings are built close to the curb’s edge; the “setbacks,” or the distance between a home’s front door and the edge of the sidewalk, is as little as six feet and no more than twenty feet. That’s because houses in New Urbanism communities are intended to “pull up” to the public realm, that is, the sidewalk or street. The basic rule of thumb is that the front porch, when there is one, should always be “in conversation distance to the sidewalk,” says Michael Watkins, the former town architect of Kentlands—and former director of town planning for DPZ—who lives there and maintains an architecture practice in town. In addition to promoting conversation, building the houses close to the street forms a wall of sorts and creates a sense of enclosure, or “spatial containment,” that helps make the streets feel intimate. The sidewalks themse
lves are wide and pleasant, and it takes a while before I realize we haven’t walked by any garages. That’s by design, too; almost all auto access has been moved to the rear of the homes, accessible by a network of alleys, another New Urbanist hallmark. By pulling car access to the rear of the house, the sidewalk maintains its “pedestrian priority”; people on foot never have to stop for a car that’s backing out of its driveway. Ninety-five percent of the blocks in Kentlands have alleys, which also double as utility easements so trash collection, recycling, and all metering happens in the back.

  There are eight different “neighborhoods” in Kentlands, but they all include a range of housing types and lot sizes. This variety is critical in New Urbanism, as an alternative to the formula-based identical lots of conventional subdivisions. On Selby Street, we walk by a larger colonial house that’s right next to a home that’s half its width and sits on a much smaller lot. A stately mansion on the corner has a “granny flat” or in-law apartment behind it, common terms for a separate living space on the same lot that is either attached or detached from a main house. The industry calls these “accessory dwelling units,” and they are prohibited by most conventional suburban zoning laws. But New Urbanists love them because they add to the diversity of the housing mix; they also put more “feet on the street” by adding to the neighborhood’s population density.

  Instead of the closed-off loops of conventional suburban development, the streets in Kentlands form a connected network so there are a variety of routes through the neighborhood and traffic is easily dispersed. There are paved sidewalks between some of the houses. There are backyards, but they’re small, which frees up much more space for public parks, of which there are several, some big, some small. Before they moved to their current live/work unit, Dorney and her husband raised their children in a single-family home here, but she says they almost never used their backyard. There are three lakes, a church, a swimming pool (the swim team has grown to 220 kids), and a few clubhouses. There’s an award-winning elementary school at one end of the neighborhood; everyone walks to drop their kids off except those who come by bike, by unicycle as one family does, or in Dorney’s case, by a red Radio Flyer wagon, which she uses to pick up her granddaughter every day.

  Walking around on a beautiful fall day, we pass a handful of residents jogging, pushing strollers, or out for walks. I’d pictured something that looked a little more Disney-ish, but it all does seem authentic. New Urbanists talk a lot about building at the “human scale,” and it strikes me as we stroll through the neighborhood that this is what they mean. It actually doesn’t look too different from any older town; at a few points along our tour, I stopped in my tracks because I was struck by how much the neighborhood looked and felt like my hometown of Media, Pennsylvania. The difference is everything has been carefully designed, plotted, and placed to feel that way.

  Dorney and her husband were pioneers, moving to Kentlands in 1993 as some of the original residents. Prior to that they lived in a suburb of Pittsburgh, where they lived on a cul-de-sac and where Dorney, a stay-at-home mom with a newborn, was miserable. She says she had never spent much time alone and was surprised that no one in the cul-de-sac was home during the day. “It was hell,” she says. They relocated to Maryland for her husband’s job, moving first to a town house community nearby until her husband saw the construction for Kentlands while he was out on a run. When they moved in, she says, “it was like heaven.”

  New Urbanists are not without their critics, many of whom label them as sellers of a kind of fakified nostalgia. (New Urbanists would counter that claim by saying that everything—even old historic places like Georgetown—was master-planned and brand-new at some point.) Others say they aren’t solving the problems posed by the suburbs because they build on large plots often in the middle of nowhere, which has led to the nickname “New Suburbanism” (one blogger described New Urbanism as a “pretty veil over common suburbia”). New Urbanism communities can be expensive to build and their homes expensive to buy. Getting over conventional zoning codes is often problematic and requires lots of patience, and often compromise: FHA loan rules still limit the percentage of commercial real estate in vertical apartment units, making it hard for New Urbanism developers to secure financing for the mixed-use buildings they say are a critical ingredient in their neighborhoods.

  Nevertheless, New Urbanism principles have been followed and copied over the years. In 1996, Disney opened Celebration, Florida, its five-thousand-acre master-planned community near Orlando, largely on New Urbanism principles, though it did not bill it a New Urbanist community. In the mid-1990s, the Department of Housing and Urban Development adopted New Urbanist design criteria in its program to build public housing projects. The Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Learning now offers a master’s in architecture and New Urbanism. And there is some indication that when the opportunity to rebuild from scratch presents itself, the New Urbanists get called in. After Hurricane Katrina, 170 New Urbanists, led by Andres Duany, prepared redevelopment plans for eleven Mississippi Gulf Coast communities; as this book was being written, staffers from New Jersey governor Chris Christie’s office had started calling DPZ for ideas about how to rebuild the Jersey Shore after Hurricane Sandy. Membership in CNU is growing, and there is a new offshoot group for the movement’s younger generation.

  During the housing crisis, New Urbanism communities around the country held up better than traditional suburban communities, performance that won the attention of policy makers and the conventional home-building community and led the movement to some important victories. The FHA recently loosened the restrictions on the percentage of commercial space that can be attached to residential units. Certain municipalities are starting to bake New Urbanism tenets into their planning methods—even in Texas, of all places. El Paso recently became the first city in the United States to require that architects working on city projects be accredited in New Urbanism, while the Texas Department of Transportation has adopted the rule book that guides New Urbanism street design as recommended practice. “The dynamic is changing,” says Benjamin Schulman, former communications director for CNU who is now with the Chicago chapter of the American Institute of Architects. Delivering the closing night keynote speech at the CNU conference in West Palm Beach, celebrity author and urban theorist Richard Florida acknowledges these recent successes. “Isn’t it interesting,” he says, “that the world has come to us?”

  Perhaps the biggest proof of the growing adoption of New Urbanism theories is that the large home builders, who don’t tend to care much for the social aspect of the movement or the well-intended principles behind it, are starting to build New Urbanism–style communities themselves. They’re not calling them that, of course, and many may not even be familiar with New Urbanism, but there are by some estimates as many as four hundred “city replicas” already built or going up in suburban America, ranging from small-scale, intimate walkable villages to giant, ambitious “lifestyle centers” that combine retail, apartments, restaurants, and sometimes high-rise apartment buildings. In one of the brightest spots in the housing market, nearly every major home builder these days is working on some effort to effectively urbanize the suburbs.

  In Glenview, Illinois, a North Shore suburb of Chicago, Pulte Homes, the largest U.S. builder, is building The Glen, a master-planned community of several hundred town houses built around a town center with a movie theater, spa, comedy club, pub, and coffee shop. (You can “leave the car keys at home,” the Web site says.) Not far away, it also has Arlington Crossings, a community of sixty-six stately-looking town houses from fourteen hundred to seventeen hundred square feet. In the Washington, DC, area, the company recently opened MetroWest, a transit-oriented, mixed-use community of three hundred condominiums and town houses next to the Vienna metro station. “We’re seeing more of a demand for the evolution of suburbia and a desire for community centers where walking areas and retail areas are more accessible,” says Deborah Meyer, senior vice pres
ident and chief marketing officer of Pulte, “where you don’t have to get on a highway to get a cup of coffee.”

  Older suburbs are beefing up their downtowns, too. Morristown, New Jersey, a leafy railroad suburb thirty miles west of New York City, is in the middle of a $300 million redevelopment of its historic town center that has seen the construction of more than five hundred new residential units in the past few years. They include 40 Park, a seven-story luxury apartment building that went up where the old Epstein’s Department Store used to be and whose loft-style apartments have Brazilian hardwood floors, open kitchens, iPod docks, and walk-in closets; the building’s seventy thousand square feet of ground-floor retail space means that tenants are steps from a Starbucks and a yoga studio. The building won the “Best Mid-Rise Condominium Community” award from the National Association of Home Builders a few years ago; last year, two of its penthouse apartments sold within days of each other for $1 million to $2 million.

  Many of these developments are deliberately playing up their urban design elements. The shiny new Village at Leesburg, a massive fifty-seven-acre urban development just off Route 7 not far from the famous Leesburg outlet mall, advertises its “carefully designed streetscapes” and “traditional Main Street feel.” It has shopping, apartments, and work space, the very “mixed use” style of development the New Urbanists talk so much about. On a parcel of land some thirty miles from Philadelphia in suburban Bucks County, Pennsylvania, Toll Brothers has built Newtown Station, a collection of forty-seven federalist-style town houses and condos built at higher density in a grid-style, walking neighborhood. “Echoing the style and grace of Society Hill and Boston’s Back Bay,” the marketing materials describe, Newtown Station was a “quiet enclave of city homes reminiscent of an earlier time.” In Conyers, Georgia, outside Atlanta, Arab developers who had bought up six hundred acres in the 1980s for a shopping mall have adjusted their original plans and are building a massive New Urbanist community instead.