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

by Leigh Gallagher

  It’s important to note that not all of these are New Urbanism developments; New Urbanists, after all, didn’t invent the concept of walkable villages, and the giant urban town centers can be a lot less charming. Salon.com cities columnist Will Doig calls them a “Frankenstein of supermarkets, outdoor dining, parking lots and mock-cobblestone sidewalks.” But it is all part of the same grand effort to bring an injection of urbanization to the suburbs, or to create what the New York Times has referred to as “hipsturbia.” The mainstream home builders and developers, who tend to be hyperaware of what their buyers are looking for—or as Duany calls them, “touchingly responsive”—are simply following the market, and the market is telling them that this is what people want. When you hear the home builders starting to talk about “streetscapes,” “mixed use,” and “sense of place,” the principles Duany and his disciples talk so much about, it’s clear something is afoot. “The pendulum is swinging back toward walkable urban development,” says George Washington University’s Christopher Leinberger. Leinberger calls these new urban-suburban markets Walkable Urban Places, or WalkUPs, and he’s intimately familiar with them. In 2012, he led an effort to define and identify forty-three such neighborhoods in and around Washington, DC, classifying them into seven different archetypes according to degree of walkability. A niche market twenty years ago, he says, this kind of pedestrian-friendly development has become “the market of the future.” Says John McIlwain, senior resident fellow of the Urban Land Institute: “I don’t think people have a clue that we’re creating totally, radically different suburbs than what we have thought of.” Out with a big group of friends one night, I was explaining this change when Neil Vogel, a New York tech entrepreneur and armchair urbanist who grew up in the Philadelphia suburbs, jumped in. “It’s urban suburban,” he said. “That’s what everyone wants. That’s the ideal.”

  Helping things along is an increasing amount of data that suggests that these kinds of communities are more valuable than subdivision-style development. Studies have shown that people are willing to pay more to live in New Urbanism communities than in conventional suburban neighborhoods. A 2001 study that analyzed more than two thousand single-family home transactions found that buyers paid a 15 percent premium for homes in Kentlands over homes of similar age in nearby subdivisions. For other New Urbanism communities the premium was 4.1 percent and 10 percent. The difference is even greater after the Great Recession, as New Urbanism communities have held up better; valuations in Kentlands were less impacted than in nearby areas. Diane Dorney and her husband bought their live/work unit for $450,000 in 2001; six years later similar units were selling for around $1 million.

  Now an increasing body of research is showing that home valuations hold up better in suburban communities that have even the slightest urban-esque features. Kevin Gillen, a housing economist at the University of Pennsylvania’s Fels Institute of Government, drilled down on this with a study of 340 zip codes in the Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New Jersey suburbs. Looking closely at the relationship between the physical design characteristics of a community and its home valuations, Gillen found that housing prices held their value in direct proportion to the presence of urban design elements like mixed-use spaces, access to public transit, and walkable streets. Homes in suburbs that were either in or near pedestrian-friendly town centers, for example, held up 8 percent better than average home values in the area. Homes in higher-density communities held up 20 percent better; homes in communities that had a balanced mix of houses and commerce held up 6.6 percent better; and every additional rail stop in a community, Gillen found, led to prices holding up 9 percent better.

  A separate study of metropolitan Washington, DC, conducted by Leinberger and Mariela Alfonzo for the Brookings Institution, found a similar link between a neighborhood’s “walkability” and its property valuations. On average, the study found that each step up a five-step scale of walkability—measured by factoring in things like density, pedestrian amenities, personal safety, and proximity of needs—added $9 per square foot to annual office rents, $7 per square foot to retail rents, more than $300 per month to apartment rents, and nearly $82 per square foot to home values. Using data from Walk Score, Joe Cortright, who heads the Portland-based economic analysis firm Impresa, studied close to one hundred thousand home sales in fifteen markets and found that on average, a one-point increase in a neighborhood’s Walk Score was correlated with a $700 to $3,000 increase in home values.

  Developers of all stripes are seeing this research play out in the market, and many of real estate’s biggest names are coming closer to the New Urbanism way of thinking. Rick Caruso, the Southern California real estate mogul who built the Grove, a retail, dining, and entertainment complex attached to the historic farmer’s market in West Los Angeles, thinks walkable suburbanism is where the future is headed. His company also operates The Americana at Brand, a massive “lifestyle center” in Glendale, California, which includes retail shops, restaurants, 100 condominiums, and 243 rental apartments. Caruso told me that during the recent real estate downturn—what he called “the worst market in the history of the world”—his company sold all the condos at The Americana at Brand except for the three he kept for himself, and of the 243 apartments, he says there’s rarely a vacancy. “There’s this demand to live in that environment,” he says. “I think people thought that life in suburbia was the perfect life, and it’s got a lot of wonderful aspects to it, but a lot of people also feel bored. People want to connect and be connected a lot more in person.” He thinks another big reason for the shift is that by putting people closer to things they need, the urban-suburban lifestyle grants them the biggest gift of all: more free time. “There’s almost everything in the world you can buy,” says Caruso (and he is among those who would know), “but there’s one thing you can’t buy, and that’s time. There’s an overwhelming desire for people to have more free time, and part of urbanization is just that. It’s so much easier to walk downstairs and walk outside and walk to a restaurant, or grab a bite.”

  This obsession with “walkable suburban,” it should be noted, does not mean that residents never have to get in their cars again. Only in a very few places in the country is it routine for people to live car-free entirely—New York City being one of them. My neighborhood in Manhattan’s West Village has a Walk Score of 100, making it a “walker’s paradise,” and I would say it fits that bill: in eighteen years of living in various neighborhoods in New York City, I have never owned a car. But my experience is an aberration of the highest order. All “walkable suburban” needs to mean is that a pleasant and walkable center of some kind is accessible nearby. It’s great if it’s within walking distance, but it’s just as useful if a rich, vibrant downtown strip of stores and restaurants is within a few minutes’ drive for most residents of a community. My hometown of Media, Pennsylvania, fits this description; those who live in the downtown area can walk everywhere, but almost everyone else in the zip code can get downtown with a five- or ten-minute drive. (Media’s biggest problem, in fact, is parking, Mayor Bob McMahon told me.) Very rarely does “walkable suburban” mean every single person can walk everywhere for every single thing. But the difference between driving a mile to get a gallon of milk and driving fifteen miles is one that can be transformative. “Maybe it’s that your kids walk to school, or you can walk to a retail area,” says Marianne Cusato, designer and author of The Just Right Home: Buying, Renting, Moving—or Just Dreaming—Find Your Perfect Match!, a book that helps home buyers make sense of the post-housing-crisis home-buying landscape. “You don’t need to have one hundred percent walkability to have your house be that much more valuable and usable.”

  Across the country, developers are increasingly playing up the social aspect of their neighborhoods in the selling and marketing of homes. In Narberth, Pennsylvania, a walkable, historic, working-class enclave surrounded by Philadelphia’s wealthy Main Line suburbs, the development firm Arcadia Land Company took a large single-fam
ily home lot and subdivided it into four lots for luxury single-family homes. The houses had high-end touches on the inside, like double sinks and all the right kinds of green certification, but they were designed to invoke the Old Narberth of the early 1900s, with smaller floor plans, deep front porches, and a close-knit arrangement. The marketing materials specifically touted this social element of the houses, calling them modern and luxurious on the inside but “Narberth neighborly on the outside.” Much in the way “spacious” or “palatial” might have been the marketing message not too long ago, the selling point here was the density and the “neighborly.” The homes, which all went into contract within one month at prices of $900,000 or more, set a record for the highest prices ever paid in Narberth Borough.

  You can even see the demand for more urbanized suburbs reflected in that age-old barometer of what’s desirable and what’s not: the buzzwords real estate agents use to describe things. Narberth shares a border—and a zip code—with Penn Valley, a wealthy, conventional Main Line suburb. Ten years ago, real estate agents looking to up-sell a Narberth property’s appeal would label it “Penn Valley”; it was the dressier address. In the last two years, real estate agents have started cheating in the other direction, calling addresses Narberth even if they lie on the Penn Valley side of the border. “Ten years ago everything was called Penn Valley,” says Jason Duckworth. “Now it’s completely the opposite.”

  The premium that’s now attached to this kind of development, say New Urbanists and conventional developers alike, is simply a result of the basic law of supply and demand. There are plenty of conventional suburban subdivisions out there; there’s hardly any walkable development in the suburbs. “For the last thirty years all we’ve done as a country is build big, ordinary suburban houses,” says Joe Duckworth, cofounder of Arcadia Land Company (and father of Jason) and a longtime home builder who spent nine years at Toll Brothers and thirteen years after that running a Toll competitor, Realen Homes, before forming Arcadia, with Christopher Leinberger and Robert Davis, the developer of Seaside in Florida. “If anybody wants one, there’s a million of them out there. You want one of these things”—a walkable community—“they don’t exist.” Duckworth is an example of a traditional developer who came to New Urbanism ways purely for the business opportunity, not for the activism. “I’m not into the religious revivalism of New Urbanism,” he says. “I think it’s an underserved market niche, not a religion.”

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  This is all part of a bigger shift in priorities that’s impacting not just where Americans want to live but how we want to live. In the wake of the housing boom and bust and the Great Recession, our priorities have changed—bigger is no longer better, credit is no longer limitless, quality is beginning to trump quantity, and less is starting to become more. The housing market is starting to recognize these shifts. The average size of homes, for example, is shrinking, and it has been for a few years now. In 2007, the average square footage of U.S. homes built, which had grown from 983 square feet in 1950 to 2,521 square feet, decreased for the first time since 1995, and it’s been declining since (it rose slightly in 2011, but analysts say that was due to stringent lending standards that constricted sales to wealthier buyers). A 2011 survey of builders by the NAHB found they expected home size to drop to 2,150 by 2015. The median “ideal home size” for Americans, according to a survey by Trulia, was 2,100 square feet, right around what it was in the 1990s. Demand appears to be waning for McMansions. Only 9 percent of respondents in a separate Trulia-Harris interactive survey in 2010 said they wanted homes over 3,000 square feet—which by McMansion standards isn’t even that big. A majority of respondents, 64 percent, said they preferred homes ranging from 800 to 2,000 square feet. In a state-of-the-industry overview at the 2012 home builders’ show, Boyce Thompson, then the editorial director of the Builder group of magazines for publisher Hanley Wood, told the crowd that 56 percent of builders had changed their design strategy within the past two years to build smaller homes.

  The big home builders, meanwhile, are starting to incorporate the kinds of details that New Urbanists love. Porches, for example, which draw people out in front of the house, are making a comeback. Two-thirds of new homes built in 2011 had one, and the number of new homes with porches has grown from 42 percent in 1992 to 65 percent in 2011. The pace of new homes with decks and patios, meanwhile, which are typically located in the rear of the house, has plateaued. The percentage of homes built without a garage or carport is the highest since the late 1990s. And demand is growing for more responsibly designed homes that make more effective use of space, so while the home may be smaller, its inhabitants end up using more of it. The Not So Big House movement, for example, pioneered by architect Sarah Susanka, advocates an approach for designing homes that are a third or so smaller than conventional homes but in a manner such that a greater percentage of their square footage is used every single day. A home built on Susanka’s plans, for instance, might have no large entry foyer and no formal living room or dining room, since her research has told her that 85 percent of people never use their formal living room and 75 percent never use their formal dining room. But it will have an oversize family room with an alcove that fits a dining table—which gets borrowed from the kitchen when it’s really needed. “A lot of people have sentimental attachment to their dining room, but when you get right down to it, they don’t use it,” she says. Susanka’s “design language” also includes specific sleight of hand touches, details designed to play visual tricks to make the space feel larger: light placed strategically at the end of a hall to give a feeling of depth, reflecting surfaces to make a room feel bigger, a variety of ceiling heights. Susanka first published The Not So Big House: A Blueprint for the Way We Really Live in 2001, and it has spawned a Not So Big franchise, including the Not So Big Remodeling, the Not So Big Solutions for Your Home, and the Not So Big Life. All told, her books have sold 1.5 million copies.

  The big home builders are now focusing on more efficient use of space, too, designing more “right-sized” floor plans and adding flexible rooms and open floor layouts where space does double duty. “The living room and the dining room are an endangered species,” says Stephen Melman, director of economic services for the National Association of Home Builders, noting that more people are willing to give up those traditional spaces in exchange for a “great room” that they can use on more of an everyday basis.

  On the more extreme side, the so-called Tiny House movement has emerged in the past few years as a subculture of ascetics who take immense pride in their ability to live in spaces as small as 100 or 130 square feet. Blogs like littlediggs.com, which serves people who live in 500 square feet or less, and tinyhouseblog.com, have seen traffic skyrocket. The Small House Society, a “voice for the small house movement,” now has eighteen hundred subscribers, up from three hundred in 2005. These groups are small in sheer numbers and so extreme in their ways as to represent an almost cartoonish way of living, but their vision of large homes as environmentally wasteful, excessively large “debtor’s prisons” that keep us from doing other things with our lives and our time, has struck an outsize chord.

  Smaller homes fit less stuff, of course, and there’s a major shift in the zeitgeist taking place here, too. While the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s saw an explosion in conspicuous consumption, the Great Recession and the housing bust and the ensuing reset that has taken place have tempered our collective materialism and ushered in a small but growing “anti-stuff” mentality. A cottage industry is emerging around Web sites and movements that promote this so-called minimalism. Take, for example, LifeEdited, a Web site and product design and real estate development firm anchored by a philosophy that advocates for reducing clutter, extra space, and extra material goods (its slogan: “Design your life to include more money, health and happiness with less stuff, space and energy”). The company’s founder, Graham Hill, previously founded Treehugger.com, one of the earliest Web sites to focus on what would become
the “green” movement, and for the past few years has turned his focus on this new venture. In a TED talk introducing the LifeEdited philosophy, Hill explains our obsession with stuff (while sitting on a box of stuff) and asks the audience to “consider the benefits of an edited life.” We have triple the amount of space per person we did fifty years ago, he points out, and a $22 billion, 2.2-billion-square-foot storage industry for all our stuff—and it’s time to pare it back. The talk has been viewed more than 1.3 million times. The laboratory for Hill’s less-space-less-stuff movement is a 420-square-foot apartment in Manhattan’s Soho that he has turned into a modular exercise in sparsity: a coffee table expands into a dining table that seats twelve; a bed springs out of the wall with two fingers; a pull-out desk turns a wall into a home office. A wall can be moved to make the room bigger, or divide it when guests stay over (two more beds flip down from another wall). Hill is now developing an entire New York City apartment building based on this concept, where residents live in hyper-small spaces and, through a program he calls a “product lending library,” share bikes, cars, tools, and even appliances like popcorn makers—anything they don’t need every day.