In 1991, the author and scholar: Joel Garreau, Edge City: Life on the New Frontier (Anchor, 1992). Perhaps the most famous coinage of the U.S. suburbs since the phrase “bedroom community” first appeared.
In places like Atlanta: Demographia.com, U.S. Census Bureau; see also http://www.demographia.com/db-atl1960.htm.
By 2000, metropolitan areas covered: U.S. Census Bureau.
That same year: Russ Lopez, Thirty Years of Urban Sprawl in Metropolitan America: 1970–2000: A Report to the Fannie Mae Foundation.
a massive region where two-thirds of residents: Scott Gold and Massie Ritsch, “Swallowed by Urban Sprawl,” Los Angeles Times, October 18, 2002.
In 2002 a report: Reid Ewing, Rolf Pendall, and Don Chen, Measuring Sprawl and Its Impact, Smart Growth America, 2002.
“There is no ‘there’ there”: Gold and Ritsch, “Swallowed by Urban Sprawl.”
The historian Lewis Mumford: Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, pp. 237, 244; Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities (Mariner Books, 1970).
Her influential 1961 book: Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Random House, 1961). The definitive critique of twentieth-century urban planning. It’s hard to overstate Jacobs’s role in urban planning, and her own artful explanation of the “sidewalk ballet” is worth citing in full here. She wrote that under the seeming disorder of cities, there was a “marvelous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city.” This order, she wrote, is “composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance—not to a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any one place is always replete with new improvisations.”
Raymond Tucker, the mayor of St. Louis: Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, p. 270.
Even Victor Gruen: M. Jeffrey Hardwick, Mall Maker: Victor Gruen, Architect of an American Dream (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). In a speech Gruen gave in London in 1978 called “The Sad Story of Shopping Centres,” he further explained that Americans had corrupted his vision. Speaking of a “tragic downgrading of quality,” he said the American pursuit of profits had derailed his vision and that the public should protest the further construction of shopping centers.
Blue Velvet, Revolutionary Road: These digs at suburbia weren’t always movies or works of art. During the course of my reporting one suburbanite mentioned to me a greeting card she once saw that claimed to teach “the ABCs of suburbia—Adultery, Booze and Crabgrass!”
“Suburbia is . . . hell”: Whether “hell” is the first word that comes up depends on your computer and what Google thinks about you. On mine, the first thing that comes up is “hell”; the second, “boring.” On other people’s computers, boring was first, hell second.
among them the author James Howard Kunstler: James Howard Kunstler, The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape (Simon & Schuster, 1993). To say that Kunstler’s verbal lances are entertaining would be an understatement. In addition to his books, which also include The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-first Century (Grove Press, 2006), and Too Much Magic: Wishful Thinking, Technology, and the Fate of the Nation (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2012), Kunstler weighs in weekly on his blog, Clusterfuck Nation, at Kunstler.com/blog/. A TED talk he gave in 2004 is viewable at ted.com and well worth the nineteen minutes.
CHAPTER TWO: THE MASTER-PLANNED AMERICAN DREAM
“Some rich men came and raped the land”: Words and music by Don Henley and Glenn Frey © 1976 Cass County Music and Red Cloud Music. All rights reserved. Used by permission of Alfred Music Publishing Co., Inc.
“In retrospect, I understand that it was utter insanity”: Charles Marohn, “Confessions of a Recovering Engineer,” strongtowns.org, November 22, 2010.
In 2010 the financial analyst Meredith Whitney: Shawn Tully, “Meredith Whitney’s New Target: The States,” Fortune.com, September 28, 2010.
One study by the Denver Regional Council: “The Fiscal Cost of Sprawl: How Sprawl Contributes to Local Governments’ Budget Woes,” Environment Colorado Research & Policy Center, December 2003. Other states and municipalities have conducted similar studies with similar results.
A 2008 report: Kaid Benfield, “Sprawl Should Pay More for Infrastructure, but Seldom Does,” Switchboard, the staff blog of the National Resources Defense Council, September 26, 2008.
The mortgage interest tax deduction: Internal Revenue Service, Statistics of Income Bulletin, Winter 2012.
This subsidy amounts to nearly $200 billion a year: Federal Highway Administration Office of Highway Policy Information, “Our Nation’s Highways: 2011.”
it sparked outrage among conservatives: Joel Kotkin, “California Wages War on Single-Family Homes,” forbes.com, July 26, 2011; Wendell Cox, “California Declares War on Suburbia,” Wall Street Journal, April 9, 2012.
“The suburbs are a big government handout”: William Upski Wimsatt, “Five Myths About the Suburbs,” washingtonpost.com, February 11, 2011.
The city of Long Beach: Jonathan Hiskes, “Tell Me Again Why We Mandate Parking at Bars?” Grist.org, June 24, 2010.
In the delightfully entertaining: 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. 163n. This book, a seminal tome in the anti-sprawl canon, is a rollicking guide to the history, makeup, and implications of U.S. sprawl-based development. It is chock-full of similarly colorful phrasing: the automobile is “a private space as well as a potentially sociopathic device”; the NAHB convention is described as a place where “Sixty-five thousand people, mostly men, all eat lunch under large tents pitched on parking lots, where the choice of entrée ranges from beef barbecue to pork barbecue.”
in 1931, the author James Truslow Adams simply wrote: James Truslow Adams, The Epic of America (Little, Brown, and Company, 1931), p. 415.
“No man who owns his own house and lot”: Thomas Sugrue, “The New American Dream: Renting,” Wall Street Journal, August 14, 2009.
“Strengthening families, establishing communities”: William J. Clinton, “Proclamation 6807, National Homeownership Day, 1995,” June 2, 1995. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project.
In his remarks: William J. Clinton, “Remarks on the National Homeownership Strategy,” June 5, 1995. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project.
in 2004, George W. Bush: President’s Remarks to the National Association of Home Builders, Greater Columbus Convention Center, Columbus, Ohio, October 2, 2004, available at georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov.
Prices rose nearly 200 percent: S&P/Case-Shiller Composite 10 home price index.
A Fortune article: Grainger David, “Riding the Boom,” Fortune, May 30, 2005.
The home-building industry exploded: U.S. Census Bureau, new residential construction statistics.
From 2000 to 2007: American Farmland Trust, www.farmland.org. During that time, the site says, we were losing more than an acre of farmland per minute to development.
A New York Times Magazine profile: Jon Gertner, “Chasing Ground,” New York Times Magazine, October 16, 2005.
By 2009, three million Americans: U.S. Census Bureau, 2009 American Community Survey.
In the span of eleven years: U.S. Census Bureau.
By 2005, there were nearly four million homes with: U.S. Census Bureau, American Housing Survey for the United States, 2001 and 2005.
By 2006, the average home was 2,500 square feet: U.S. Census Bureau.
“Drive 10 mil
es and save $10,000”: Chris Serres, Jim Buchta, and Glenn Howatt, “Minnesota’s New Ghost Towns,” Minneapolis Star Tribune, April 21, 2008.
All told, between 1996 and 2006: U.S. Census Bureau, new single-family unit completions.
By the end of 2009, home prices had fallen: S&P/Case-Shiller Composite 20 home price index.
All told, housing prices fell 34 percent: Ibid.
In Perris, California, owners of ranches: “Another Skinny, Abandoned Horse Found in Inland Empire,” Los Angeles Times, September 16, 2011.
In Atlanta, the city’s outer suburban ring: “Real Estate Expert Dubs Area ‘Ring of Death,’” wsbtv.com, June 2, 2011.
In December 2011, one foreclosure “heat map”: Alexander Soule, “Feds Consider Changes for Seized Foreclosures,” Westchester County Business Journal, January 23, 2012.
The economist Edward Glaeser: Edward L. Glaeser, Harvard University and the National Bureau of Economic Research, “Rethinking the Federal Bias Toward Homeownership,” Cityscape: A Journal of Policy Development and Research 13, no. 2 (2011): 5–37. Also see “Ed Glaeser on Why Cities Matter,” video produced by CEOs for Cities, December 27, 2011. Glaeser points out that by pushing people toward single-family homes at the expense of higher-density types of living (since most single-family dwellings are owner-occupied while most multifamily dwellings are rented), the mortgage interest deduction encourages people to buy bigger homes, farther away from urban centers, which has a number of negative implications: it diminishes productivity; it increases commuting distances, energy expenses, and therefore level of damage to the environment; and, by increasing the physical distance between the rich and poor, Glaeser suggests it might also increase the social distance between them, reducing levels of empathy. Glaeser also points out that as we learned during the “housing convulsion,” subsidized borrowing can lead to a “‘foreclosure’ rather than an ‘ownership’ society.”
A recent study by the National Association of Home Builders: National Association of Home Builders, “Voters Place High Value on Homeownership, Oppose Policies That Make It More Difficult to Own a Home,” January 11, 2012.
A recent study by the real estate Web site Trulia: Trulia biannual American Dream survey, September 20, 2011.
CHAPTER THREE: “MY CAR KNOWS THE WAY TO GYMNASTICS”
“First they built the road”: By Arcade Fire. Used here with artists’ permission.
In the United States, 83 percent: Federal Highway Administration, National Household Travel Survey, 2009. Europe: Erik Olin Wright and Joel Rogers, American Society: How It Really Works (W. W. Norton, 2011); John Pulcher, “Public Transportation,” in Susan Hanson and Genevieve Giuliano, The Geography of Urban Transportation, 3rd ed. (Guilford Press, 2004).
We have the highest per capita: World Bank statistics.
One study found a nearly 500 percent: Peter Swift, “Residential Street Typology and Injury Accident Frequency,” June 1997; updated 2002, 2006.
Jeff Speck, a renowned city planner: Jeff Speck, Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), p. 172.
Specifically, Dumbaugh found: 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.
A recent report authored by experts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found: Richard J. Jackson, MD, MPH, and Chris Kochtitzky, MSP, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Creating a Healthy Environment: The Impact of the Built Environment on Public Health,” Sprawl Watch Clearinghouse, sprawlwatch.org, p. 11.
Another study: Ibid.
Studies using pedometers: David R. Basset Jr. et al., “Pedometer-Measured Physical Activity and Health Behaviors in United States Adults,” National Institutes of Health, October 2010.
In the United States, roughly half of all trips taken by car are three miles or less: 2001 National Household Transportation Survey; also see “Complete Streets Change Travel Patterns,” Smart Growth America.
When it comes to trips under one mile: Edward L. Glaeser and Matthew E. Kahn, “Sprawl and Urban Growth,” National Bureau of Economic Research, May 2003.
more than a third of U.S. adults: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, 2009–2010.
As far back as 2001, a report: Jackson and Kochtitzky, “Creating a Healthy Environment.”
“We have built America in a way”: From the 2012 four-part PBS series Designing Healthy Communities, hosted by Richard J. Jackson, MD, MPH, produced by the Media Policy Center and accompanied by a companion book copublished by the American Public Health Association (Richard J. Jackson with Stacy Sinclair, Designing Healthy Communities [Jossey-Bass, 2011]). The documentary series is one of the most in-depth, comprehensive looks at the social, economic, and health problems associated with sprawl-style development.
The prevalence of overweight children: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention statistics.
Rates of type 2 diabetes have doubled: Jackson and Sinclair, Designing Healthy Communities.
In 1969, roughly half: David Darlington, “Why Johnny Can’t Ride,” Bicycling, April 27, 2012 (citing 2009 National Household Travel Survey statistics). This in-depth article focuses on one family’s fight for their son’s right to be able to ride his bike to school, provides keen insight into how our development patterns became so exaggerated over the years and how hard it is to walk or bike in some communities. As Darlington reports, the Council of Education Facility Planners now recommends at least twenty acres of land and another acre for every hundred students, a policy that, according to the NTHP, amounts to “the construction of giant educational facilities in remote, middle-of-nowhere locations that rule out the possibility of anyone walking to school.” As Darlington points out, the remote location is not the only reason children don’t walk: among students who lived within one mile of school, 88 percent walked or bicycled forty-three years ago; today only 38 percent do.
children are four times as likely: “Travel and Implications of School Siting,” Environmental Protection Agency, October 2003.
The number of trips the average child makes: “Mean Streets,” Surface Transportation Policy Partnership, 2000.
a telling study came out of the University of Utah: Ken Smith et al., University of Utah, “Walkability and Body Mass Index: Density, Design and New Diversity Measures,” American Journal of Preventative Medicine 35, no. 3 (September 2008): 237–44.
“When there is nearly nothing”: Jackson and Sinclair, Designing Healthy Communities.
“frozen in a form of infancy”: 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. 117.
the music video of the 1982 Rush classic “Subdivisions:” The author highly recommends this diversion, easily found on YouTube.
researchers at the University of California, Davis, found: Kristin Lovely et al., “Neighborhood Satisfaction in Suburban Versus Traditional Environments: An Evaluation of Contributing Characteristics in Eight California Neighborhoods,” Landscape and Urban Planning 97, no. 1 (July 30, 2010): 37–48.
“I started missing not just my urban friends”: Linda Erin Keenan, Suburgatory: Twisted Tales from Darkest Suburbia (skirt!, 2012). Suburgatory the book is really nothing like Suburgatory the TV show; it’s a collection of Onion-style satirical news dispatches from suburbia as seen through Keenan’s hilariously observant eye. Bite-size chapters are arranged by faux headlines: “Mom Plans School Auction During Dreary Sex”; “Aspergers’ Dad ‘Hot’”; “Dad Forcibly Removed from Mall Massage Chair”; “Mom Unaware of Two American Wars”; “Dad and Hot Nanny Really ‘Just Good Friends.’” Keenan is a talent and the book is uproariously funny—it will not disappoint.
Square founder Jack Dorsey: Eric Savitz, “Jack Dorsey: Leadership Secrets fr
om Twitter and Square,” Forbes, November 5, 2012.
Studies have shown: Jeffrey Tumlin, Sustainable Transportation Planning: Tools for Creating Vibrant, Healthy, and Resilient Communities (Wiley, 2012). Tumlin focuses on the physiological and sociological benefits of walking, like how it has been found to trigger oxytocin, the powerful neurotransmitter known as the “love hormone,” but also on the way we have evolved as a walking species. One way we are unique among mammals, Tumlin points out, is that we have a stark contrast between our iris and our sclera, or the whites of our eyes. In most animals, the sclera is camouflaged. That, Tumlin says, is by design, or rather by evolution; that contrast makes our eyes highly visible and our expressions highly readable, and it makes us better able to engage in nonverbal communication with one another at close to moderate distances.
The average suburban resident now drives: Jinwon Kim and David Brownstone, “The Impact of Residential Density on Vehicle Usage and Fuel Consumption,” University of California Transportation Center, University of California, Irvine, March 2010.
the average worker spends fifty-one minutes: U.S. Census Bureau, 2011 American Community Survey.
close to 90 percent of U.S. commuters: U.S. Census Bureau, 2011 American Community Survey.
Some 3.5 million Americans: Transportation Research Board of the National Academies, “Commuting in America III.”
A few years ago local television news stations: Brian Stelter, “TV News for Early Risers (or Late-to-Bedders),” New York Times, August 31, 2010.
more than 40 percent of Riverside and San Bernardino county residents commute: “An In-Depth Look at Inland Southern California Commuters,” Beacon Economics for the University of California, Riverside School of Business Administration, March 10, 2011.
The End of the Suburbs: Where the American Dream Is Moving Page 22
