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

by Leigh Gallagher

  My friends deserve a special mention for understanding why for almost a year I couldn’t see them or talk to them much, and for staying friends with me anyway. You know who you are and I couldn’t have done this without you. Special thanks to Wendi Nix, Joanna Popper, Rachel Shechtman, Peter Kafka, Lauren Winfield, Laura Brounstein, Eva Chopra, Caitlin Magner, and Jeremy Smerd, each of whom contributed material that shows up in these pages. The wise and talented Alison Brower was an early reader, a late-stage editor, and, as she is always, a source of constant counsel on matters large and small. Sylvia and Fred Fogel deserve special mention for their support that knows no bounds, for their generosity of spirit and of real estate, and for not decamping to the suburbs—yet. Deep gratitude goes to Gil Kreiter for reading every word and every note, for untold amounts of patience, and for keeping me calm, centered, and, most of all, loved.

  Stephen King says a writer needs little more than a desk and something to write on to do his or her best work, but a pretty setting sure doesn’t hurt. Joel Greenberg provided the picture-perfect writing cabin in Vinalhaven, Maine, and Allison Storr and Jeff and Sally Booth rented me their very special homes in Sag Harbor. In Media, Pennsylvania, thanks to Emily and Jay Farrell, Nancy Gabel, Leonard Ellis, and the Sutton and Neuspiel families.

  My family has been unbelievably supportive. Thanks to the extended Gallagher, Pelizoto, and Salamanca clans, to Anita Soar and Carl Pelizoto for their smart suggestions, and special thanks to Nana, Grandmom, and Mom-Mom. My brother, Drew, provided encouragement, sharp edits, and his trademark no-sweat attitude; Adrienne Sack showed me her unwavering support. And last but by no means least, thanks to my beloved and wonderful parents, Jack and Joan Gallagher, who are my biggest champions, my best friends, and the source of all of my strength.

  NOTES

  INTRODUCTION

  Churchill quote: House of Commons meeting in the House of Lords, October 28, 1943. In discussing whether and how to rebuild the House of Commons after it was destroyed on May 10, 1941, Churchill spoke in favor of rebuilding it to its old form, which was too small to seat all its members. The House would be mostly empty most of the time, he argued, and during critical votes it would fill beyond capacity, which would give it a “sense of crowd and urgency.” For more, see www.winstonchurchill.org.

  single-family housing starts . . . and new home sales each hit new lows: U.S. Census Bureau, new residential construction and sales monthly and annual data.

  prices that dropped 34 percent nationwide: S&P/Case-Shiller U.S. National Home Price Index, April 30, 2006, to January 31, 2012.

  here in February 2012: CoreLogic, number of residential properties in negative equity, first quarter, 2012.

  312 million people: US Census Bureau, 2011, U.S. population estimate.

  builders erected: U.S. Census Bureau, new residential construction statistics.

  record amounts of farmland: American Farmland Trust, www.farmland.org.

  statistics and articles about the pain: Christopher Leinberger, “The Death of the Fringe Suburb,” New York Times, November 25, 2011; “Struggling in the Suburbs,” New York Times editorial page, July 7, 2012; Steve Yoder, “Housing Crisis Could End Suburbia as We Know It,” Fiscal Times, July 5, 2012.

  Meanwhile, a cache: Edward Glaeser, Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier (Penguin Press, 2011); Hope Yen, “Census Finds Record Low Growth in Outlying Suburbs,” Associated Press, April 5, 2012; Hope Yen and Kristen Wyatt, “Big Cities Boom as Young Adults Shun Suburbs,” Associated Press, June 28, 2012.

  in 2011, for the first time in a hundred years: U.S. Census Bureau, “Texas Dominates List of Fastest-Growing Large Cities Since 2010 Census, Census Bureau Reports,” June 28, 2012.

  Construction permit data shows: Residential Construction Trends in America’s Metropolitan Regions, 2010 ed., Development, Community and Environment Division, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

  Robert Shiller: Yen, “Census Finds Record Low Growth in Outlying Suburbs.” On March 27, 2012, in an interview with Yahoo! Finance’s Aaron Task, Shiller also suggested that dispersed single-family homes are not adequately built for management as rentals, and “that’s one reason why dispersed suburban housing may not do well in decades to come.”

  There are roughly 132 million: U.S. Census Bureau, 2011 American Housing Survey. For growth of suburbs 1910–2000: U.S. Census Bureau, Demographic Trends in the 20th Century, Census 2000 Special Reports, November 2002.

  As Kenneth T. Jackson put it in his masterful book: Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 6.

  former stomping ground: Jane Jacobs’s former residence is located at 555 Hudson Street in Manhattan’s West Village. A two-story mixed-use building with an apartment above a storefront, it sold for $3.3 million in 2009. In recent years, another Jacobs has taken over the rest of the neighborhood: there are at least six separate Marc Jacobs boutiques in the small neighborhood, prompting graphic designer Mike Joyce to start a guerrilla campaign calling for “More Jane Jacobs Less Marc Jacobs.”

  More than twenty years later: Thanks goes to my high school English teacher, Emily Farrell. Some of the works appearing on her 2012 reading list: We Had It So Good by Linda Grant, State of Wonder by Anne Patchett, The Cat’s Table by Michael Ondaatje, The Brooklyn Follies by Paul Auster, The Newlyweds by Nell Freudenberger.

  most Americans live in communities built: U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and U.S. Census Bureau, American Housing Survey, 2011. While people who live in older regions of the country, like the Northeast, may be used to seeing homes built in the 1920s and earlier, suburbs in the rest of the country look a lot different. The average age of all housing stock in the United States is 1974, and homes built before 1940 make up less than 15 percent of U.S. housing units. In places like Loudoun County, Virginia, more than 40 percent of the housing stock was built between 2000 and 2009.

  overall miles traveled per household: Federal Highway Administration, 2009 National Household Travel Survey.

  Ridgecrest is located 112 miles: Research conducted by Jonathan Smoke, chief economist, Hanley Wood.

  According to census data: William H. Frey, “The Demographic Lull Continues, Especially in Exurbia,” Brookings Institution, April 6, 2012, and William H. Frey, “Demographic Reversal: Cities Thrive, Suburbs Sputter,” Brookings Institution, State of Metropolitan America series, June 29, 2012.

  One such study comes from: Justin B. Hollander et al., “The New American Ghost Towns,” Land Lines, Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, April 2011.

  During and after the downturn: Kevin C. Gillen, PhD, “The Correlates of House Price Changes with Geography, Density, Design and Use: Evidence from Philadelphia,” Congress for the New Urbanism, October 2012.

  Studying more than ninety thousand home sales: Joe Cortright, Impresa Inc., for the organization CEOs for Cities, “Walking the Walk: How Walkability Raises Home Values in U.S. Cities,” August 2009.

  In New York City in the early 1990s: Residential Construction Trends in America’s Metropolitan Regions, 2010 ed., U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

  A series of groundbreaking studies by the Brookings Institution: Emily Garr and Elizabeth Kneebone, “The Suburbanization of Poverty: Trends in Metropolitan America, 2000 to 2008,” Brookings Institution, January 20, 2010; Elizabeth Kneebone, “The Great Recession and Poverty in Metropolitan America,” Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings Institution, October 2010.

  new data showing: Cameron McWhirter and Gary Fields, “Crime Migrates to Suburbs,” Wall Street Journal, December 30, 2012.

  a former strip club: Lisa Thomas-Laury, “Three Fathers Solve Their Day-Care Dilemma with ‘Nest,’” abclocal.go.com, January 19, 2012.

  Walmart plans to open: Laura Heller, “Hundreds of Small Walmarts Are Coming Soon,” Daily Finance, March 11, 2011, and Tom Ryan, “Walmart’s View from 15,000 Squar
e Feet,” Retailwire.com, March 14, 2011; store information, corporate.walmart.com.

  Target . . . is focusing its efforts: Matt Townsend, “Target’s City Ambitions,” Bloomberg Businessweek, May 31, 2012.

  New York is “our hottest market by far”: Oshrat Carmiel, “Toll Brothers CEO Sees NYC as Best Home Market in 2012,” Bloomberg, January 11, 2012.

  Today, only half of all adults: U.S. Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States, 2012, and Pew Research Center, “The Decline of Marriage and Rise of New Families,” November 18, 2010.

  families with children: Arthur C. Nelson, “Leadership in a New Era,” Journal of the American Planning Association, Autumn 2006.

  America’s eighty million so-called millennials: Most experts put the number of millennials at seventy-eight million to eighty million. There is no standard definition for the cohort’s age range; experts use beginning birth dates as the late ’70s to the early ’80s and ending dates as late 1990s or the early 2000s.

  Seventy-seven percent: Shyam Kannan, “Suburbia, Soccer Moms, SUVs and Smart Growth,” Robert Charles Lesser & Co., Public Strategies Group, February 2, 2012.

  Arthur C. Nelson: Heather LaVarnway, “The Changing American Dream: Shifting Trends in Who We Are and How We Live,” February 2012; coverage of Nelson’s December 2011 address at Pace University Land Use Law Center’s conference on sustainable development.

  In 1980, 66 percent: Federal Highway Administration statistics.

  In 2008, the average suburban household spent double on gas: Burerau of Labor Statistics.

  for most of the last fifty years: . . . In 2007, those numbers peaked: Federal Highway Administration, Highway Statistics 2010.

  This shift is major: Alexis C. Madrigal, “The Beginning of the End for Suburban America,” The Atlantic, September 14, 2011.

  The author and provocateur: James Howard Kunstler, The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape (Simon & Schuster, 1993).

  In an interview in the late 1990s: Stewart Brand, “Vital Cities: An Interview with Jane Jacobs,” Whole Earth, Winter 1998.

  A 2006 documentary, The End of Suburbia: The End of Suburbia: Oil Depletion and the Collapse of the American Dream, written and directed by Gregory Greene, 2004. A prescient and informative film; see http://www.endofsuburbia.com.

  “We’ve reached the limits”: Joel Connelly, “As Suburbs Reach Limit, People Are Moving Back to the Cities,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, February 4, 2010.

  CHAPTER ONE: THE GREAT URBAN EXODUS

  Mumford quote: Modern Architecture: International Exhibition, exhibit catalog, Museum of Modern Art, 1932.

  Historian Kenneth T. Jackson: Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 12. While the historical facts referenced in this chapter are the result of research from dozens of current and historical sources, books and volumes, this entire book, and this chapter in particular, owes much gratitude to Jackson, whose Crabgrass Frontier is still considered the definitive history of the American suburbs. (Though Jackson himself writes, “I make no claim to comprehensiveness. Any account that covers all important suburbs is certain to be exhausting before it is exhaustive.”) Jackson’s observations about American suburban development and its divergence from residential patterns throughout the rest of the world, and its implications, are as true today as they were in 1985. “This book is about havens,” Jackson writes in his introduction. “It suggests that the space around us—the physical organization of neighborhoods, roads, yards, houses and apartments—sets up living patterns that condition our behavior.”

  By 1910 . . . crowded places in the country: Amy O’Leary, “Everybody Inhale: How Many People Can Manhattan Hold?” New York Times, March 1, 2012.

  In 1814: Jon C. Teaford, The American Suburb: The Basics (Routledge, 2008), p. 2.

  By 1849: Ibid., p. 4.

  Riverside’s streets were specifically designed: www.olmstedsociety.org.

  Automobile registrations: Federal Highway Administration state motor-vehicle registrations.

  Even during the Great Depression . . . bathtub: Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, p. 173.

  In the early 1900s, a planner named Clarence Perry: Eric Dumbaugh and Robert Rae, “Safe Urban Form: Revisiting the Relationship Between Community Design and Traffic Safety,” Journal of the American Planning Association 75, no. 3 (Summer 2009): 309–29.

  As the influential urban historian: Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1961).

  From 1921 to 1936, the “golden age of highway building”: David L. Ames and Linda Flint McClelland, “Historic Residential Suburbs: Guidelines for Evaluation and Documentation for the National Register of Historic Places,” National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior, 2002.

  Between 1923 and 1927, new homes were built: U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970, part 2.

  from 1920 to 1930: Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, p. 175.

  For twenty years, housing starts averaged: U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970, part 2.

  The housing shortage was so severe: Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, p. 232. Jackson’s quote about sleeping in his grandparents’ dining room comes from a transcript of the PBS series The First Measured Century, 2000.

  The mortgage interest tax deduction, a by-product: Lost in the current political debate over the mortgage interest tax deduction is the fact that the Revenue Act of 1913 didn’t refer to mortgage interest at all; rather, it simply provided a deduction for “all interest paid within the year by a taxable person on indebtedness.” More on this can be found in Dennis J. Ventry Jr., “The Accidental Deduction: A History and Critique of the Tax Subsidy for Mortgage Interest,” Law and Contemporary Problems 73 (Winter 2010): 233–84.

  Housing starts jumped from: U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970, part 2.

  The percentage of American families who owned their homes: U.S. Census Bureau.

  The suburban surge continued: The Jackson quote comes from Crabgrass Frontier, p. 190.

  By 1970, 38 percent: U.S. Census Bureau, Demographic Trends in the 20th Century, Census 2000 Special Reports, November 2002.

  From 1950 to 1970 Americans’ incomes nearly doubled: U.S. Census Bureau.

  On a single day in March 1949: Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, p. 237.

  In 1950, a builder in Fullerton, California: fullertonheritage.org.

  Lakewood, California, the fastest-growing community that same year: The Lakewood Story: History, Tradition, Values (City of Lakewood, 2004).

  In 1957, first-time author: John Keats, The Crack in the Picture Window (Houghton Mifflin, 1956)

  That year, the Urban Land Institute: Community Growth: Crisis and Challenge, 1959, National Association of Home Builders and Urban Land Institute. This video is fascinating to watch.

  likens this setup to an “unmade omelet”: Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck, Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream (North Point Press, 2000), p. 10. The authors also describe the difference between traditional neighborhood design and the sprawl-style designs that replaced it in terms of how they could be drawn: the latter can be drawn as a bubble diagram with a “fat marker pen,” whereas the drafting of the dense, intricate layouts of traditional towns requires a fine-point writing instrument.

  Robert Putnam, a Harvard professor: This particular quote comes from Putnam’s appearance in the PBS documentary Designing Healthy Communities, a four-part series produced by the Media Policy Center that aired on public television stations in January 2012. But the relation between the size of one’s triangle—the distance between where a person shops, sleeps, and works—and his or her happiness is a major tenet of Putnam’s and one he explores in his book, B
owling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (Simon & Schuster, 2000), cited elsewhere in these notes. Putnam posits that when we lived in villages long ago, the distances among those three points were very small; now it might be thirty or forty miles or more. He suggests that the smaller the triangle, the happier the person, as long as there are social interactions. (He also suggests you can judge how small your triangle is by the size of your refrigerator since people with small fridges are usually able to frequent stores more often, and posits “the bigger the refrigerator, the lonelier the soul.”)

  The nationwide home ownership rate . . . the rate for blacks was 44.1 percent: U.S. Census Bureau. These stark differences in home ownership rates by race are almost never mentioned in the discussion of the benefits widespread home ownership has brought to our society.

  For one, cities all but crumbled, seeing a net out-migration of thirteen million: Robert Fishman, Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia (Basic Books, 1987), p. 182.

  By 1981, half of office space: Rodney Jennings, “Dynamics of the Suburban Activity Center: Retrofitting for Pedestrian/Transit Use,” Portland State University, June 1989.

  By the end of the 1990s: Terry Christensen and Tom Hogen-Esch, Local Politics: A Practical Guide to Governing at the Grassroots, 2nd ed. (M. E. Sharpe, 2006), p. 52.

  dwarfed only by the size: Many big-box store parking lots are so large, they sublease sections of their asphalt to fast-food chains.

  Whether called “technoburbs”: The term “technoburbs” was coined by Robert Fishman in Bourgeois Utopias. “Boomburbs” was coined by the demographer Robert E. Lang in a 2001 report for the Fannie Mae Foundation that identified fifty-three boomburbs, defined as incorporated places in the top fifty metropolitan areas in the United States with more than one hundred thousand residents that are not the core cities in their metropolitan areas and that maintained double-digit population growth over consecutive censuses between 1970 and 2010. See also: Robert E. Lang and Jennifer B. LeFurgy, Boomburgs: The Rise of America’s Accidental Cities (Brookings Institution Press, 2007).