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

by Leigh Gallagher

  Sarah Susanka, meanwhile, has expanded her Not So Big franchise to include The Not So Big Life: Making Room for What Really Matters to similarly advocate for a reduction in the amount of clutter. The bigger-is-better mentality that gave us McMansions, Susanka argues, also gave us McLives, her term for an over-obsession with material goods. A few years ago, she says, no one wanted to hear her message about “rightsizing” the amount of clutter in their lives and making room for more meaningful things and experiences. Now, she says, when she tours the country promoting The Not So Big Life, “I could sell hundreds of copies of that book when I speak.”

  • • •

  Given all these shifts, it shouldn’t be a surprise that even the religious revivalist wing of New Urbanism is drawing some unlikely converts. Take John McLinden, a friendly, gregarious Chicago native and, like Sam Sherman in Philadelphia, a veteran conventional builder. (John Norquist, the head of the Congress for the New Urbanism, chided McLinden when he saw him walking the halls of the CNU conference last year. “He’s a former sprawlmeister!” he teased.) But in 2010, in the depths of the housing crisis, McLinden came across an opportunity in his native Libertyville, Illinois, an affluent North Shore suburb thirty-five miles from Chicago. An upscale townhome community on a desirable parcel of land steps from the town’s Main Street had fallen on hard times; just five of a planned thirty-one townhomes had been built before the developer went belly-up.

  McLinden had recently seen Seaside, Florida, and had connected with the “romance” of the old-fashioned town, the front porches, and the narrow streets. He thought this could be the way of the future and saw particular potential in the parcel’s location steps from Libertyville’s bustling Main Street. He bid on the land and won—and began turning School Street into what is essentially a model of New Urbanism: a row of twenty-six arts and crafts–style bungalows nestled right up against one another, each with its own wide front porch. He invited Sarah Susanka, whose ideas had long resonated with him, to design one of the bungalows; the first-ever Not So Big Showhouse now sits at the end of the row. He turned the eponymous historic schoolhouse on the property into fifteen open-plan, loft-style condos.

  McLinden named the community School Street—and his company StreetScape Development, LLC—and started marketing the idea, talking up the accessibility of Libertyville’s Main Street and the coziness of the community he envisioned, where neighbors could get to know one another, hang out on their front porches, and walk less than five hundred feet to Milwaukee Avenue for errands and entertainment. Within a few weeks, with little to show other than rough sketches, he had people lined up. “Off of squiggly drawings, I got six hard contracts with 20 percent down for something that had never been done in the suburbs,” says McLinden. “And we did it in the midst of a housing crisis.” The buyers ranged from young families with children to aging baby boomers empty nesters looking to downsize. One couple moved out from Chicago because the husband, a medical sales rep, spends most of the week on the road and told McLinden all he wanted to do was “ditch his car on the weekends.”

  Within eighteen months, McLinden had sold all the homes. The local news called it an “aberration.” McLinden is now setting his sights on a much more ambitious project, a seventeen-acre development on the other side of Milwaukee Avenue that would include retail, apartment buildings, single-family homes, row homes, and a public pavilion, all built around Libertyville’s train station.

  He’s also taking the same design principles and bringing them to a different market in Skokie, Illinois, a closer-in, older suburb of Chicago. There, McLinden is developing Floral Avenue, a pedestrian-friendly neighborhood adjacent to Skokie’s downtown and public transit, that will include twenty-seven single-family homes. They’ll be priced much lower than the School Street homes—around $300,000 to $500,000 compared with around $500,000 to $800,000 for School Street—but McLinden thinks his company will be able to target a much larger pool of customers in Skokie, not to mention younger millennials who prefer the smaller-scale, pedestrian-friendly layouts of inner-ring suburbs.

  When I sat down with McLinden at the NAHB show (he and I might have been the only two people who attended both the home builders’ show and the New Urbanism conference), his enthusiasm was contagious. “It’s city living in the suburbs,” he says eagerly, sitting so far on the edge of his seat, he was almost falling off it. “This is the way the world’s going, even if no one knows it yet.”

  5

  THE END OF THE NUCLEAR FAMILY

  Monica: “We want a lawn and a swing set and a street where our kids can ride their bikes—”

  Chandler, interrupting: “And maybe an ice cream truck will go by!”

  Ross, deadpans: “So you want to buy a house in the 1950s.”

  FRIENDS, SEASON 10, EPISODE 10, JANUARY 2004

  No one knows when exactly Austintown, Ohio, got “old,” but for the people living there, there’s no denying it. Once the province of young families looking for safe streets and good schools, the population of this middle-class suburb outside Youngstown is now nearly 20 percent senior citizen. And the place is starting to show its age: the library has beefed up its large-print collection; Tuesday night concerts in Township Park feature big band, polka, and groups—Ginny and the Jettz, Sunshine Riders—named for heydays gone by; and like stray gray hairs, a Bob Evans, Perkins, and other franchise purveyors of soft foods and early bird specials have cropped up along the town’s main commercial strip. “Austintown used to be a party town,” says resident Jim Henshaw, age seventy. “We’ve all aged and matured a bit.”

  Henshaw would know. A retired hospital executive, he’s now the executive director of Austintown’s senior center, which, since its founding in October 2010, has become the new hot spot in town. “Too many people were sitting around doing nothing,” says Gary Brant, an active eighty-year-old who moved with his wife, Myra, and two small children to Austintown fifty-two years ago for the schools. With their need for quality education long behind them, Brant still lives in the same house, and he has no plans to leave it. His friends are all there, his son is nearby, and besides, he’s having too much fun. At the senior center, he now calls $7 bingo games three times a week. “The only way I’m moving from this house is in a box,” he says.

  Welcome to the retirement community of the twenty-first century: the cul-de-sac. Those now sixty-five and older were once the generation that fed the subdivision boom in the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s. Now, due to a combination of factors including the housing crisis, longer life spans, and the simple desire to stay in the communities they’ve lived in for most of their lives, they’re staying put. At the same time, younger generations are having fewer children, sending ever more single-person and childless-couple households into the market.

  The U.S. birth rate, which reached a high of 122.7 births per thousand people in 1957, has been dropping ever since, falling particularly sharply in the past few years. In 2011 it hit 63.2 per thousand people, a record low. Meanwhile, as the percent of children has been falling, the overall population is aging. The percent of people 65 and over hit a record 13 percent of the population in 2011. From 2000 to 2010, the ranks of Americans 45 and older grew eighteen times as fast as the population younger than 45, and the median age in the United States is currently 37.2, up from 32.6 in 1990.

  The change is more pronounced in the suburbs, where for the first time, the forty-five to sixty-four age group is larger than adults ages twenty-five to forty-four, and where these days 40 percent of suburban residents are over the age of forty-five, up from 34 percent in 2000. Statistically speaking, baby boomers and seniors are now actually more common in the suburbs than young families. Going forward, this dynamic will only become more exaggerated: one-third of all suburbs saw an absolute decline in child populations from 2000 to 2010; by 2025, an estimated 72 percent of American homes will not contain any children, a figure that could reach 80 percent in the suburbs. “The traditional family structure is really the minority,�
� says Deborah Meyer of home builder Pulte.

  You can see this playing out. Where my father grew up in Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania, a 1920s streetcar suburb outside of Philadelphia, there were forty-one children living in the sixteen or so houses on his block alone: the Janssens (four kids), the Hayeses (three), the McNultys (four), the Lombardos (four), the McDermotts (five), the Hartmans (four), the Bancrofts (three), and, of course, the Gallaghers (seven), among many others. Today there is a fraction of that; an unofficial poll puts the number at twelve to fifteen for the whole block. This trend is happening everywhere, and has been called the “demographic winter,” the “birth dearth,” and the “baby bust.” The decline in the number of children can be partially attributed to economic conditions: from 2007 to 2009, the height of the recession, U.S. births saw the largest drop for any two-year period since the 1970s. But there are larger forces at work as well, and they touch on bigger and deeper changes taking place in our society.

  For one thing, fewer people are getting married. Married households now make up a little over 48 percent of the population, down from 83 percent in 1950. Those who do marry are doing so a lot later: in the 1950s, half of men and women who married for the first time were in their early twenties; now, the average age is twenty-eight for men and twenty-six for women. For a number of reasons, marriage no longer holds the same central role in defining people’s lives as it did in the 1950s. Many people delay marriage because they’re focused on building their careers, and that means delaying having children, an option newly available to women thanks to advances in fertility technology. (Between 2007 and 2009, while the birth rate in the United States fell among every other age group, it rose for women over forty.) And more women—especially older women—are opting to have children on their own. This trend, of course, is due in large part to the fact that more women are now working outside the home and can support themselves and a child financially, something that was much less common in the middle of the century. Whether married or unmarried, coupled or not, the later women have children, the fewer they have. It’s also become socially acceptable—and in the case of women more economically feasible—for people to live lives outside of marriage: as an unmarried couple (whether same or opposite sex), a single parent, or alone: a record 27 percent of all households—and as many as 40 percent in some cities—now consist of just one person, the highest level in U.S. history. “The extraordinary rise of living alone is among the greatest social changes since the baby boom,” writes Eric Klinenberg, professor of sociology at New York University, in his book Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone.

  Since marriage and children have for decades been the driving engine behind suburban growth—indeed, practically the whole basis for the suburban existence—these trends suggest that what we have long thought of as the typical American household—a husband, a wife, and 2.3 children living on their own plot of suburban real estate—is receding as the dominant group in suburbia. This explains places like Austintown, where, since opening in 2010, the senior center has expanded its hours, programs, and van fleet, and membership is up by a thousand. All told, the greater Youngstown area, of which Austintown is a part, saw a 24 percent drop in population under the age of forty-five between 2000 and 2010, and it now claims the nation’s highest concentration of seniors outside Florida and Tucson. Meanwhile in Hillsborough, New Jersey, a suburb in Somerset County—one of the wealthiest in the state—the Kids Playway Child Care Center has seen a 40 percent decline in enrollment in the last two years.

  Then there’s Durand, Michigan, a suburb twenty miles from Flint and forty miles from Lansing, where the three-story redbrick building that was once the junior high school has been turned into Sycamore House, a forty-unit senior apartment complex. These days, the worn wooden doors that once led into classrooms now open into one- and two-bedroom apartments, and the old gymnasium is now a community room where residents meet to play board games. In recent years, the gymnasium has also been the venue for the Senior Citizen Prom. Starting promptly at 6:00 p.m., attendees showed up, some men in tuxedos and many women wearing corsages, and danced the night away—or the early evening, anyway—to “Mr. Sandman” under the old class banners that still hang from the ceiling.

  Much of this shift is due to the overwhelming number of today’s seniors who are expected to “age in place,” or live out their golden years in the same homes where they raised their families. According to an AARP survey, nearly 90 percent of seniors want to stay in the same home as long as possible; 80 percent say it’s the only residence they’ll ever live in. One reason for this is the recession, which wiped out many boomers’ retirement savings and made it difficult for them to sell their homes and move into more traditional retirement enclaves. But there’s also been a renewed desire in recent years for seniors to remain in the homes and communities in which they have friends, family, and deep roots. Instead of investing in condos in the Sun Belt, many of them are moving to retirement homes in the same communities where they lived much of their adult lives, or adapting their homes to accommodate the needs they’ll have in their twilight years. And while the AARP study only surveyed current seniors, the association predicts the coming tsunami of baby boomers will express the same desire to stay put. “In some ways, current senior growth is just the lull before the storm,” says William Frey, senior fellow with the Brookings Institution and one of the nation’s leading demographers.

  A cottage industry has emerged in Web sites and consultants offering services to help the elderly stay in their suburban homes, whether it’s delivering meals, providing transportation, or installing senior-friendly tweaks like raised dishwashers and handrails in the bathroom. Many municipalities are adapting to this new reality. Fairfax County, Virginia, has created a “50-plus action plan” that has helped make pedestrian traffic signals more visible, held seminars on how to make kitchens and bathrooms more senior friendly, and set up a course on coping during retirement. The police department has established a unit to investigate financial fraud committed against the elderly. In nearby Montgomery County, officials have developed a Web site listing services for senior citizens and established a “village” system where younger residents make themselves available to drive seniors to appointments. Austintown, Ohio, is rejiggering its services to meet the needs of its aging population, adding new public transit routes and Senior Crime Watch patrols. In Westchester County, New York, dozens of aging-in-place programs have sprung up, grassroots organizations that, for fees of $50 to $400, provide transportation to shopping and appointments, referrals for in-home and medical support, and services like meal delivery and yard work. At Home in Scarsdale Village was formed in 2010; Staying Put in Rye and Environs—affectionately known as SPRYE—has 120 members after launching in October 2011. A group called Gramatan Village services Bronxville, while Staying Put in New Canaan and At Home in Greenwich serve the neighboring Connecticut communities.

  If you’re a parent raising young children, these changes may be hard to see because chances are you live near many other families in the same situation—and if that’s the case, your community may in fact have lots of children. That’s because families with children tend to cluster near one another, so the result is a patchwork of sorts, with some neighborhoods filled with children and others oddly devoid of them. But on the whole, the suburbs are graying, and that will lead to more than just demographic consequences, because young families with children do more than just bring youth and vibrant energy to a town; they bring an economic force. They buy more things, spend more money, and invest more time in building ties to the community. With fewer of them, housing needs change, the retail mix shifts, and more people are free to pick up and leave at any point—unburdened by the need to remain in one place until their children graduate.

  This has a major impact on schools, which are seeing declining enrollments in many suburban communities. In Levittown, Pennsylvania, an elementary school, a middle school, and one of two hig
h schools have closed since the late 1970s and early 1980s, and enrollment has dropped 18 percent during the past decade. The district is considering eliminating full-day kindergarten. The Austintown school district recently shuttered two of its four elementary schools, and in 2009 it opened enrollment to students outside the district and introduced online K–12 education to raise enrollment; students can use their own computers or can go to labs supplied by the district. In Munjoy Hill, a suburb of Portland, Maine, only one elementary school remains where there were once three; the others have been knocked down to build affordable housing.

  The aging of the suburbs is changing the political conversation in many municipalities as well; as older voters become the most powerful base, tax revenue will increasingly get allocated away from schools and toward resources for seniors. “These older folks are going to be politically involved and will have political expenditures go where they want,” says Brookings’ William Frey. The more taxpayer revenue gets allocated away from schools, the more the schools will suffer; and once schools and services for young families start to suffer, those young families will choose to live elsewhere.

  At the same time, more families are doing what Diane Roseman, the stay-at-home mom who briefly experimented with the Massachusetts suburb of Westborough, did (see chapter 3), and are opting to raise their children in cities instead. While this trend can be seen in almost every large city, from Boston to Dallas to San Francisco, New York City is perhaps the most telling example simply because of its extraordinarily high prices and lack of space. The average Manhattan apartment costs $1.4 million to buy, and eight hundred square feet for a one-bedroom is considered roomy. And yet the once-gritty city has become overloaded with young families. There are now twenty-six hundred more married families with children under the age of eighteen living in Manhattan than there were in 2000. Many are settling in the traditionally family-friendly Upper East Side and Upper West Side, but in recent years they have been elbowing into new neighborhoods like Tribeca, the former edgy artists’ haven that now has so many strollers it’s been nicknamed Triburbia, or the financial district, where fifty-seven thousand people—a quarter of them couples with children—now live south of city hall, more than double the figure before 9/11. Luxury condo buildings in lower Manhattan now include playrooms and other amenities to accommodate the number of families moving into the area long dominated by financial institutions, law firms, and the like. Ads for high-end Manhattan condos now target couples with young children: “floor plans that rival many suburban homes in space and grandeur,” claims Extell Development Company in an ad for a new Upper West Side building; a Corcoran Group ad for a nine-room duplex on Central Park West implores young families to “forget the suburbs.” Schools are overcrowded; strollers clog the streets; mommy groups are taking over coffee shops. As a former colleague recently posted on Facebook after getting glared at by a pedestrian while pushing her child in a stroller on the Upper West Side: “That old kid-free New York that was the exclusive domain of singles and childless-by-choicers is dead. Get over it already. And if you don’t like it, YOU move to the suburbs.”