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

by Leigh Gallagher

  A 2006 study on happiness: Daniel Kahneman and Alan B. Krueger, “Developments in the Measurement of Subjective Well-Being,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 20, no. 1 (Winter 2006): 3–24.

  In 2004, a pair of Swiss economists: Alois Stutzer and Bruno S. Frey, “Stress That Doesn’t Pay: The Commuting Paradox,” Institute for Empirical Research in Economics, University of Zurich, 2004.

  Other studies have linked long commutes: Annie Lowrey, “Your Commute Is Killing You,” Slate.com, May 26, 2011.

  Robert Putnam, the Harvard political scientist: Nick Paumgarten, “There and Back Again,” New Yorker, April 16, 2007.

  a study from researchers in Sweden: Erika Sandow, “On the Road: Social Aspects of Commuting Long Distances to Work,” Department of Social and Economic Geography, Umea University, Sweden, 2011.

  Another study of commuting couples: Meni Koslowski, Avraham N. Kluger, Mordechai Reich, Commuting Stress: Causes, Effects and Methods of Coping (Springer, 1995), p. 94

  Nationwide, roughly 40 percent of workers: Alan E. Pisarski, “Commuting in America III,” Transportation Research Board, p. 47.

  the amount of time we spend stuck in traffic . . . more than sixty hours a year stuck in traffic: David Schrank, Bill Eisele, and Tim Lomax, Texas Transportation Institute 2012 Urban Mobility Report. The report found that the average urban auto commuter spent thirty-eight hours of extra time in traffic, the equivalent to almost five vacation days. The 2011 report found that rush hour (which it called “possibly the most misnamed period ever”) lasted six hours in the largest cities.

  $120 billion a year: Ibid.

  A study by the American Automobile Association: Nancy Bartley, “‘Road Rage’ Takes Deadly Detour—More Traffic Incidents Lethal as Drivers’ Stress Goes Up,” Seattle Times, April 1, 1997.

  In 2003, the average suburban household spent: Bureau of Labor Statistics.

  Bernstein and his team found: Barbara J. Lipman et al., “A Heavy Load: The Combined Housing and Transportation Burdens of Working Families,” Center for Housing Policy, October 2006.

  in Kankakee County: View and use the H+T Affordability Index at htaindex.cnt.org.

  From 2000 to 2008: All gas prices from the U.S. Energy Information Association.

  That year, one hundred schools: Rebekah Kebede, “Schools Eye Four-Day Week to Cut Fuel Costs,” Reuters, July 24, 2008.

  “Exurb homeowners accepted long drives”: Christopher Steiner, $20 Per Gallon: How the Inevitable Rise in the Price of Gasoline Will Change Our Lives for the Better (Grand Central Publishing, 2010), p. 130.

  the lauded oil economist Daniel Yergin: “How Long Will Fossil Fuels Dominate?” Wall Street Journal, May 25, 2012.

  “The various tech industries are full of”: James Howard Kunstler, “Forecast for 2009,” Kunstler.com, December 29, 2008. As is per usual with Kunstler, the rest of the passage is worth including here: “The environmental movement, especially at the elite levels found in places like Aspen, is full of Harvard graduates who believe that all the drive-in espresso stations in America can be run on a combination of solar and wind power. I quarrel with these people incessantly. It seems especially tragic to me that some of the brightest people I meet are bent on mounting the tragic campaign to sustain the unsustainable in one way or another.”

  158 million: U.S. Census Bureau.

  “driving to the supermarket becomes”: Steiner, $20 Per Gallon, p. 120.

  For his part, Rubin envisions: Jeff Rubin, Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller: Oil and the End of Globalization (Random House, 2009).

  The total number of miles driven peaked in 2007: Benjamin Davis, Tony Dutzik, and Phineas Baxandall, “Transportation and the New Generation: Why Young People Are Driving Less and What It Means for Transportation Policy,” Frontier Group and U.S. PIRG Education Fund, April 2012.

  The total number of registered automobiles: Federal Highway Administration state motor-vehicle registrations.

  In April 2012: Davis, Dutzik, and Baxandall, “Transportation and the New Generation,” p. 7.

  When measured per capita: Ibid, p. 7.

  in addition to miles driven: U.S. Department of Transportation, 2009 National Household Travel Survey.

  Rachel Meeks: “Living as a One-Car Family in the Suburbs,” small notebook.org, May 24, 2012.

  According to FHA data: Federal Highway Administration, Highway Statistics, Distribution of Licensed Drivers, 1980 and 2010.

  the average American aged sixteen to thirty-four: Davis, Dutzik, and Baxandall, “Transportation and the New Generation,” p. 7.

  In a study done by MTV Scratch: Amy Chozick, “As Young Lose Interest in Cars, G.M. Turns to MTV for Help,” New York Times, March 22, 2012.

  while people between twenty-one and thirty-four purchased 38 percent: Patrick S. Duffy, “Marketing to the Millennial Generation,” Builder & Developer (October 2012).

  “Gen Y Eschewing V-8 for 4G”: Hasan Dudar and Jeff Green, “Gen Y Eschewing V-8 for 4G Threatens Auto Demand,” businessweek.com, August 7, 2012.

  CHAPTER FOUR: THE URBAN BURBS

  O’Hara quote: From Meditations in an Emergency (Grove Press, 1957).

  All told, there are an estimated five to six hundred: Estimate provided by Rob Steuteville, ed., Better! Cities and Towns. Steuteville estimates that there are another thousand-plus neighborhoods or more that have been revitalized in the last ten to twenty years in which New Urbanism thinking has played a part in the vision, building design, codes, street design, public design, or all of the above.

  one blogger described New Urbanism: Chris DeWolf, “Why New Urbanism Fails,” Planetizen.com, February 18, 2002.

  celebrity author and urban theorist Richard Florida: Florida continues this theme in the foreword to Ellen Dunham-Jones and June Williamson’s Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs (Wiley, 2011): “It’s happening everywhere. Suburbia isn’t as suburban as it used to be.”

  there are by some estimates as many as four hundred “city replicas”: Jonathan O’Connell, “Can City Life Be Exported to the Suburbs?” Washingtonpost.com, September 7, 2012.

  Morristown, New Jersey: Jamie Duffy, “A Suburban Town Sees Housing Where Retail Rules,” New York Times, August 16, 2011.

  last year, two of its penthouse apartments: “Two New Penthouse Sales Just Days Apart at 40 Park Reflect Limited Collection’s Sensational Appeal,” blognj.com, March 1, 2012.

  Salon.com cities columnist Will Doig: Will Doig, “Invasion of the Faux Cities,” Salon.com, September 22, 2012.

  what the New York Times has referred to as “hipsturbia”: Alex Williams, “Creating Hipsturbia,” New York Times, February 15, 2013.

  calls these new urban-suburban markets: Christopher B. Leinberger, “DC: The WalkUP Wake-Up Call: The Nation’s Capital as a National Model for Walkable Urban Places,” Center for Real Estate and Urban Analysis, George Washington University School of Business, 2012.

  A 2001 study that analyzed: Charles C. Tu and Mark Eppli, “An Empirical Examination of Traditional Neighborhood Development,” Marquette University, October 1, 2001.

  Kevin Gillen, a housing economist: 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.

  A separate study of metropolitan Washington, DC: Christopher B. Leinberger and Mariela Alfonzo, “Walk This Way: The Economic Promise of Walkable Places in Metropolitan Washington, D.C.,” Brookings Institution, May 2012.

  Using data from Walk Score: Joe Cortright, Impresa Inc. for CEOs for Cities, “Walking the Walk: How Walkability Raises Home Values in U.S. Cities,” August 2009.

  Media, Pennsylvania, fits this description: As close as it is to Media’s downtown, the Walk Score of my childhood house is 48, making it “car-dependent.”

  Marianne Cusato, designer and author: Marianne Cusato with Daniel DiClerico, The Just Right Home: Buying, Renting, Moving—O
r Just Dreaming—Find Your Perfect Match! (Workman Publishing, 2012). According to Cusato, homes can sacrifice more square footage when they are located in close proximity to a walkable “public realm.” The closer you are to cafés and movie theaters, the smaller your house can be because it doesn’t need to “do everything for you”: when a commuter comes home fresh off the freeway from a long drive, the last thing he or she wants to do is get back in the car; dinner is much more likely to be had at home, which requires more space. But if there is more to do nearby, Cusato maintains, the house has to carry less of the “entertainment burden.” (An extreme version of this theory is routinely channeled by New York City real estate brokers when they try to sell you a two-hundred-square-foot studio: “Manhattan is your living room!”)

  In 2007, the average square footage of U.S. homes built: U.S. Census Bureau.

  983 square feet: U.S. Department of Labor, “New Housing and Its Materials 1940–56,” Bureau of Labor Statistics Bulletin no. 1231.

  NAHB found they expected home size to drop: Rose Quint, NAHB, “The New Home in 2015,” Housingeconomics.com, March 2, 2011; “NAHB Predicts Average Home Size Will Shrink over the Next Few Years,” Trilogybuilds.com, April 13, 2011.

  The median “ideal home size”: Kaid Benfield, “What’s Going On with New Home Sizes—Is the Madness Finally Over?” Switchboard, February 9, 2012.

  Only 9 percent of respondents: “The McMansion Era Is Over: Trulia’s Latest Data About American Attitudes Toward Home Sizes,” Trulia.com, August 20, 2010.

  Two-thirds of new homes built in 2011 had one: Haya El Nasser and Paul Overberg, “Front Porches Making a Big Comeback,” USA Today, September 19, 2012.

  The percentage of homes built without a garage: Ibid.

  the so-called Tiny House movement: Alec Wilkinson, “Let’s Get Small,” New Yorker, July 25, 2011.

  In a TED talk: See Graham Hill’s talk at ted.com. For a hilarious take on the same topic, watch George Carlin’s classic bit on “stuff.”

  CHAPTER FIVE: THE END OF THE NUCLEAR FAMILY

  Friends quote: Used with permission from Warner Bros.

  The U.S. birth rate: All birth rate data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics, National Vital Statistics System.

  The percent of people 65 and over hit a record 13 percent: U.S. Census Bureau.

  From 2000 to 2010, the ranks of: William H. Frey, “The Uneven Aging and ‘Younging’ of America: State and Metropolitan Trends in the 2010 Census,” Brookings Institution Metropolitan Policy Program, June 2011, p. 1.

  the median age in the United States: Frey, “Uneven Aging,” p. 4.

  The change is more pronounced in the suburbs: Ibid., pp. 1, 11.

  one-third of all suburbs saw an absolute decline: Ibid., p. 11.

  by 2025, an estimated 72 percent of American homes: Arthur C. Nelson, “Leadership in a New Era,” Journal of the American Planning Association 72, no. 4 (Autumn 2006): 393–409.

  the Janssens (four kids): Names in this sentence have been changed.

  from 2007 to 2009, the height of the recession: Paul D. Sutton, PhD, Brady E. Hamilton, PhD, and T. J. Mathews, MS, “Recent Decline in Births in the United States, 2007–2009,” National Center for Health Statistics Data Brief, March 2011, p. 1.

  Married households now make up: “The Decline of Marriage and Rise of New Families,” Pew Research Center, November 18, 2010.

  in the 1950s, half of men and women who married: U.S. Census Bureau.

  now, the average age is twenty-eight for men: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics.

  Between 2007 and 2009, while the birth rate in the United States fell: Sutton et al., “Recent Decline in Births,” p. 2.

  a record 27 percent of all households: U.S. Census Bureau, America’s Families and Living Arrangements, 2012.

  According to an AARP survey: Nicholas Farber, Douglas Shinkle, et al., “Aging in Place: A State Survey of Livability Policies and Practices,” AARP and the National Conference of State Legislatures, December 2011.

  “In some ways, current senior growth”: Frey, “Uneven Aging,” p. 10.

  Fairfax County, Virginia: Carol Morello, “If Baby Boomers Stay in Suburbia, Analysts Predict Cultural Shift,” Washington Post, June 28, 2011.

  In Levittown, Pennsylvania: Haya El Nasser and Paul Overberg, “Census Reveals Plummeting U.S. Birthrates,” USA Today, June 24, 2011.

  The average Manhattan apartment: The Corcoran Report, 3rd Quarter 2012.

  There are now twenty-six hundred more married families: U.S. Census Bureau.

  the financial district, where fifty-seven thousand people: Downtown Alliance, Lower Manhattan Fact Sheet, Q3 2012.

  In 2011, 22 percent of twenty-five- to thirty-four-year-olds: Kim Parker, “The Boomerang Generation: Feeling OK About Living with Mom and Dad,” Pew Research Social & Demographic Trends, March 15, 2012, p. 2.

  Overall, 53 percent of all adults: Ibid., p. 6.

  best captured by a New Yorker magazine cover: New Yorker, May 24, 2010.

  the Pew Research Center found: “Millennials: A Portrait of Generation Next,” Pew Research Center, 2010. For much of human history, it was actually quite normal and even expected for people to live with their parents until their twenties or thirties—typically, until they got married. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it was even illegal for unmarrieds to live alone in the United States. Until the 1940s it remained common that young adults lived with their parents or other family until they were married.

  William May: Name has been changed at subject’s request.

  From 2009 to 2011, just 9 percent: Ben S. Bernanke, “The U.S. Housing Market: Current Conditions and Policy Considerations,” Federal Reserve white paper sent to the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs.

  the record 30 percent of households: U.S. Census Bureau.

  “21 percent of millennial moms”: “21 Percent of Millennial Moms Use Their Phone in the Bathroom and 12 Percent Use It During Sex,” PR Newswire, May 9, 2012.

  77 percent of millennials: Shyam Kannan, “Suburbia, Soccer Moms, SUVs and Smart Growth,” Robert Charles Lesser & Co., Public Strategies Group, February 2, 2012, p. 11.

  A National Association of Realtors study found: “The 2001 National Community Preference Survey: What Americans are looking for when deciding where to live,” National Association of Realtors, March 18, 2011.

  say they’d rather live in a neighborhood with: G. M. Filisko, “How Millennials Move: The car-less trends,” On Common Ground, National Association of Realtors, Summer 2012.

  many are willing to pay for the ability to walk: S. Mitra Kalita and Robbie Whelan, “No McMansions for Millennials,” Wall Street Journal, January 13, 2011.

  the 2011 figures showed birth rates: “Births: Preliminary Data for 2011,” CDC National Vital Statistics Reports.

  Similar efforts are under way: Vanessa Wong, “Micro-Apartments in the Big City: A Trend Builds,” Bloomberg Businessweek, March 14, 2013.

  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.

  William Lucy, professor of urban and environmental planning: William H. Lucy, Lawrence Lewis Jr. Professor of Urban and Environmental Planning, “A Different Path to a Housing Rebound,” University of Virginia, September 20, 2010.

  CHAPTER SIX: WHERE THE WEALTH IS MOVING

  Mad Men quote: Courtesy of AMC Network Entertainment LLC.

  “unerringly contextual:” Robbie Whelan, “A Departure from McMansions,” Wall Street Journal, August 22, 2011.

  “Fortress of Glassitude”: One sample: Pete Davis, “Fortress of Glassitude Ready to Rise at 400 Park Avenue South,” curbed.com, July 16, 2012.

  Toll’s City Living division: As Toll B
rothers’ Bob Toll wrote in a regulatory filing in 2003: “We see great demand from affluent buyers for dramatic residences in exciting urban locations. The resurgence of American cities, fueled by population growth, increasing affluence and the appeal of bright city lights, is a catalyst.”

  Toll Brothers City Living “is our best market . . .”: Vivian Marino, “Square Feet: Douglas C. Yearley Jr.,” New York Times, March 24, 2011.

  Highbrow publications: See www.theatlanticcities.com and Salon.com’s Dream City column, authored by Will Doig, at salon.com/topic/dream_city/.

  Reversing a ninety-year trend: William H. Frey, “Demographic Reversal: Cities Thrive, Suburbs Sputter,” Brookings Institution, State of Metropolitan America series, June 29, 2012.

  In many of the biggest cities: U.S. Census Bureau.

  cities like New York, which saw the population within: Steven G. Wilson et al., U.S. Census Bureau, “Patterns of Metropolitan and Micropolitan Population Change: 2000 to 2010,” September 2012, p. 28. The exact number was a gain of 37,422 people or 9.3 percent.

  and where new census numbers show: David Seifman, “The Bigger Apple: Population Spike Reverses Exodus,” New York Post, March 15, 2013.

  In Philadelphia, the 2010 census revealed: U.S. Census Bureau; also, “Leading the Way: Population Growth Downtown,” Central Philadelphia Development Corporation and the Center City District, September 2011.

  Of all cities, Chicago showed the biggest gain: Wilson et al., U.S. Census Bureau, “Patterns of Metropolitan and Micropolitan Population Change: 2000 to 2010.”

  The population of the Loop area alone: David Roeder and Art Golab, “Loop Transforms into More Residential Area over Last Decade,” Chicago Sun-Times, February 25, 2011.

  Manhattan is expected to add: “New York City Population Projections by Age/Sex & Borough, 2000–2030,” the City of New York, Department of City Planning, December 2006; also, Amy O’Leary, “Everybody Inhale: How Many People Can Manhattan Hold?” New York Times, March 1, 2012. The current population of Manhattan as of the 2010 census is 1,585,873.

  When it was mulling locations: “Room and Board Buys into 14th Street,” dcmud.com, June 10, 2009.