The End of the Suburbs: Where the American Dream Is Moving
Read The End of the Suburbs: Where the American Dream Is Moving Online
Authors: Leigh Gallagher
Tags: #Non-Fiction, #Sociology, #Politics
“I couldn’t put this book down. My readers often ask me, ‘What will happen to suburbia once we’ve all right-sized our homes and communities?’ Leigh Gallagher provides the data that I’ve been looking for, and makes the powerful assertion that our suburbs are permanently changing, not because of the Great Recession, but because of new attitudes about where and how we want to live—which is great news, both for the near term and for generations to come.”
—Sarah Susanka, author of
The Not So Big House
series and
The Not So Big Life
“Through compelling expert interviews, data, and trends analysis, Leigh affirms the notion that we’ve hit ‘peak burb.’ This book presents a strong case for America’s increasing preference for higher density lifestyles and the resulting trend to manage our lives via the information highway, not the paved kind!”
—Scott W. Griffith, chairman and CEO of Zipcar
“This book is a steel fist in a velvet glove. Beneath Leigh Gallagher’s smooth, elegant prose there is a methodical smashing of the suburban paradigm. When all is done, a few shards remain—but only because she is scrupulously fair. This story of rise and ruin avoids the usual storm of statistics, nor is it a tale told with apocalyptic glee—which is most amusing to me but too depressing for most people.
The End of the Suburbs
is the most convincing book yet on the lifestyle changes coming to our
immediate
future.”
—Andres Duany, founding partner of Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company and coauthor of
Suburban Nation
“The book is loaded with fascinating detail wrapped in a vivid story Gallagher creates from behind the scenes of America’s greatest promotion: the suburbs.”
—Meredith Whitney, author of
Fate of the States
and founder of Meredith Whitney Advisory Group
“Leigh Gallagher asks all the right questions and comes up with surprising conclusions in this sweeping discussion of the future of the suburb. Spoiler alert—it’s a bleak future for the burbs, but don’t panic: Gallagher foretells a new world order where the conveniences of the urban lifestyle rewire our understanding of the American Dream. You’ll never look at a cul-de-sac the same way again after you enjoy this book, which is simultaneously entertaining and informative, breezy and analytical.”
—Spencer Rascoff, CEO of Zillow
“
The End of the Suburbs
is a compelling, insightful must read on what author Leigh Gallagher calls the ‘slow-burning revolution’ re-mapping the shape of America and its future. Her masterfully argued case springs to life with both impressive research and empathetic portraits of those seduced and often betrayed by suburbia’s promise of a more livable life. Now, where’s my moving truck? Oh, right. Stuck in commuter traffic.”
—Linda Keenan, author and resident of
Suburgator
y
“No one knows how American residential preferences will change in the twenty-first century. But Leigh Gallagher’s well-researched and provocative
The End of the Suburbs
makes a persuasive argument that is difficult to refute. Required reading for anyone interested in the future of the United States.”
—Kenneth T. Jackson, professor of history, Columbia University, and author of
Crabgrass Frontier
“Have you ever wondered whether the Great Recession will halt the process of gentrification in major American cities? Or what will happen to the empty suburban sprawl that is the result of the housing boom and bust? Or how most of us will live in a world where oil is expensive? Leigh Gallagher’s crisp, entertaining, and fact-filled new book answers these questions and many more.”
—Bethany McLean, coauthor of
The Smartest Guys in the Room
and
All the Devils Are Here
PORTFOLIO / PENGUIN
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Copyright © Leigh Gallagher, 2013
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Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint excerpts from the following copyrighted works:
“The Last Resort,” words and music by Don Henley and Glenn Frey. © 1976 (renewed) Cass County Music and Red Cloud Music. All print rights administered by Warner-Tamerlane Publishing Corp. All rights reserved. Used by permission of Alfred Music Publishing Co., Inc.
“Mad Men,” dialogue from episode no. 505. Courtesy of AMC Network Entertainment LLC.
Oh, The Places You’ll Go!
By Dr. Seuss, TM and copyright © Dr. Seuss Enterprises L.P. 1990.
Used by permission of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc. Any third party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited. Interested parties must apply directly to Random House, Inc. for permission.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gallagher, Leigh (Journalist)
The end of the suburbs : where the American dream is moving / Leigh Gallagher.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-101-60818-0
1. Suburbs—United States—History. 2. Suburban life—United States—History. I. Title.
HT352.U6G35 2013
307.740973—dc23
2013017233
For Mom, Dad, and Drew
CONTENTS
PRAISE FOR The End of the Suburbs
2
The Master-Planned American Dream
3
“My Car Knows the Way to Gymnastics”
INTRODUCTION
We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us
.
—WINSTON CHURCHILL
Aron Ralston looks out at the twenty-five hundred people gathered in the Valencia Ballroom at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando. You know Ralston; he’s the guy who got trapped by a boulder for five days while hiking in southeastern Utah in 2003 and cut his arm off with a dull knife to escape. The ordeal made him a celebrity, and a sought-after motivational speaker. On this February day in 2012, Ralston is here to kick off the opening ceremonies at the International Builders’ Show, the annual gathering of the American home-building industry put on by the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB). The theme: overcoming adversity.
“I’m looking at several thousand survivors right now,” Ralston says somberly. He acknowledges that the executives and industry members in the room have just come through the Great Recession, which inflicted epic unprecedented levels of pain on their business. He is here, he tells his audience, to help them see their struggle as a gift; to help them find what he calls the “blessings in your boulders.”
For the next half hour, Ralston tells the story of his own ordeal: how a sunny hike in a remote, undeveloped section of Canyonlands National Park—an area he quips could be “a ripe market for builders”—turned into a life-changing event when an eight-hundred-pound boulder dislodged and landed on top of him, crushing his right forearm and pinning him inside a canyon. He chronicles the events of the following five days—how, after futile attempts to free himself, he sipped his remaining water, drank his own urine, videotaped good-byes to his parents, and carved his presumed date of death into the sandstone. But then he recounts the stroke of joy, the “eureka moment” he felt when he suddenly realized he could break his own bones, sever his arm, and have a chance at surviving. He describes the process in wrenching detail—hitting the nerve was like “liquid metal,” he says—but he emphasizes that the actual act of cutting was a beautiful thing. “I stepped out of my grave,” he says. When he passed out after he was rescued, it wasn’t from pain, he tells the audience; it was from joy.
At this point, a low murmur starts to roll through the crowd. Someone in the back row has himself passed out and needs attention. Soon there is a rustle closer to the stage; another person has fallen faint. Ralston stops his speech for several minutes while emergency crews enter. A third call for help comes from the left section of the audience. Then a fourth. Someone next to me leans over and whispers in concern: Could it be food poisoning? It wasn’t. Ralston’s speeches have incited physical reactions before, but this is the first time he’s ever had to stop his act and the first time more than one person has succumbed. (“It was like a chain reaction,” he said later. “They basically ran out of paramedics.”)
After the ill are revived and wheeled out, Ralston steps forward on the stage and resumes, tactfully acknowledging the intensity of his story. Then he brings the message home: “It might be a challenge to look at this as the greatest thing that’s ever happened to you,” he tells the crowd. But he encourages them to see it that way. “You all have that same strength,” he says, “to make your boulders your blessings.”
The home-building industry circa February 2012 could use some blessings. In the five years since the mortgage bubble burst, setting off the Great Recession and leaving many home owners underwater, the industry has been gutted. Hundreds of companies have gone bankrupt. Attendance at the show this week is around 50,000, half the 100,000 or more at its height in 2006. Three years after the recession officially ended, things are still grim. By the time of this writing the situation would come to improve markedly, but as the attendees sit here listening to Ralston, they are sitting in their own ravine, the bottom of the wrenching housing bust. A fresh set of numbers has just confirmed it:
single-family housing starts
—the number of privately owned housing units on which construction has begun—and new home sales each hit new lows in 2011. More than eleven million home owners are still underwater. And despite rock-bottom interest rates and
prices that dropped 34 percent nationwide
and much more in some areas,
here in February 2012
people still aren’t buying. The Standard & Poor’s index of home-building stocks lost 71 percent of its value between 2006 and 2012, nearly twice as much as other troubled industries like publishing and airlines.
It is these statistics that have brought me to Orlando. Although the entire housing market, and indeed, the entire country, has felt the pain of the recession, I’m here to explore the effect it has had on one specific area: our suburbs, that broad, catchall descriptor for the vast landscape of leafy, low-density, residential enclaves that house the majority of our
312 million people
. Because more Americans live in the suburbs than anywhere else, it is where the builders in the room do the overwhelming majority of their business. The housing crisis, in which the binging on residential mortgages led to the overbuilding of millions of homes, hit the suburbs especially hard:
builders erected
more single-family houses than at almost any time in history and covered
record amounts of farmland
with new subdivisions. Many of those houses now sit empty.
Anyone who has read a newspaper over the past couple of years might reasonably deduce that the suburbs have been in some trouble lately:
statistics and articles about the pain
being inflicted on our bedroom communities have been appearing almost since the financial crisis began, citing not just the number of foreclosures among American home owners but related issues like the rise in crime and poverty in suburban communities. (“The Death of the Fringe Suburb,” read one recent headline; “Struggling in the Suburbs,” said another; a third declared, “The Housing Crisis Could End Suburbia as We Know It.”)
Meanwhile, a cache
of articles, papers, and popular books has heralded the resurgence of cities.
But what the headlines miss is that while much of the hurt can be blamed on the recent recession and its immediate effects, there are larger trends at work. Many of the suburbs affected by the housing crisis are not experiencing a temporary setback but a permanent one, the result of a powerful tectonic shift whose forces have been grinding away for quite some time.
• • •
W
hen I set out to write a book in the spring of 2011, I originally planned to explore the future of our economy and how the aftereffects of the financial crisis would bring permanent changes to various aspects of our lives. But the more I researched, the more I discovered that the most dramatic shift involved where and how we choose to live—and it wasn’t a result of the Great Recession at all. Rather, the housing crisis only concealed something deeper and more profound happening to what we have come to know as American suburbia. Simply speaking, more and more Americans don’t want to live there anymore.
The reasons are varied, but several disparate factors all point to a decrease in demand for traditional suburban living: many Americans are tiring of the physical aspect of the suburbs, the design of which has changed dramatically over the years to gradually spread people farther and farther apart from one another and the things they like to do, making them increasingly reliant on their cars and, increasingly, on
Thelma and Louise
–length commutes. Big demographic shifts are seeing our population grow older, younger, and more diverse seemingly all at once, while powerful social trends are shrinking and transforming the American nuclear family, long the dominant driver of suburbia. An epic financial crisis coupled with the rising cost of energy has made punishing commutes also unaffordable, while a newfound hyperawareness of environmental issues has shaken up and reordered our priorities in ways that stand in direct conflict to the suburban way of life.
This has all been happening for years, but it’s now being backed up by data. The rate of suburban population growth has outpaced that of urban centers in every decade since the invention of the automobile, but
in 2011, for the first time in a hundred years
, that trend reversed.
Construction permit data shows
that in several cities, building activity that was once concentrated in the suburban fringe has now shifted primarily to cities, or what planners call the “urban core.” At the same time, demand for the large, single-family homes that characterize the suburbs is dwindling, and big suburban home builders like Toll Brothers are saying their best markets are now cities.
Many of the builders present at the NAHB show in Orlando know this and have started changing the way they do business. Like Ralston, they’ve started breaking their own bones by tearing up old floor plans, adjusting land acquisition strategies, and shifting their focus to include smaller houses and more urban developments. “Gone are the master bathrooms you can land planes in,” said Boyce Thompson, the editorial director of the
Builder
group of magazines at the housing research and publishing firm Hanley Wood, during a presentation on market trends. Many of the attendees took part in educational sessions on “multifamily” housing units, design strategies for a shifting market, and the changing preferences of the new home buyer. During one such session, the audience watched an ad for builder Shea Homes’ new “Spaces” line in which pleasant-looking suburbanites talked about what they wanted in their new homes. “A typical home in the suburbs for
me
?” one housewife asks. “It’s just not the way things are done anymore.” The 2012 annual
Builder
magazine “concept home,” at the show, always an important barometer of where housing trends are headed, was instead a series of three different homes targeted to three different generations, all featuring smaller—or “right-sized,” since “small” is still a word that goes unsaid by this group—floor plans and more efficient use of space. “Change is the only path to tomorrow,” Larry Swank, chairman of the NAHB’s conventions and meetings committee and a leading builder in Indiana, advised an audience in a breakout session.
Not every home builder is hurting. Floating around at the NAHB show were people like John McLinden, a longtime builder in Chicago who had spent the past few years developing a kind of replacement for the conventional subdivision: a neighborhood of compact, upscale bungalows steps from the train station in the middle of Libertyville, Illinois. His sales were going gangbusters. “Nothing exists like this—certainly not in the suburbs,” he told me eagerly. “And we did it in the midst of a housing crisis.” Indeed, one of the biggest trends in home building right now is remaking our suburbs to look more, well, urban. Like McLinden, developers in suburbs from Morristown, New Jersey, to Leesburg, Virginia, to Lakewood, Colorado, are rebuilding their downtowns as urbanized centers with streets that combine stores, restaurants, and apartments, while nearly every home builder now has a town house or condo division. Even Toll Brothers, the Horsham, Pennsylvania–based home builder that rose to fame on the wings of the suburban mega-home, says what it calls its “suburban move-up” houses are now roughly 50 percent of what it builds and sells, down from 70 to 80 percent just a few years ago.
This brings me to an important point: when I talk about the “end of the suburbs,” I do not mean to suggest that all suburban communities are going to vaporize. Plenty of older suburbs are going strong for reasons we’ll explore later, and many newer suburbs are reinventing themselves to adapt to the times. But when the people who have delivered the same kind of one-size-fits-all suburban subdivisions over the past few decades are tearing up their blueprints, venturing gingerly into urban markets, and actually fainting at the thought of what the future holds, something big is afoot. The reliable expansion of our suburbs, the steady growth of the housing industry, and the seemingly unending supply of new single-family homes—and home owners—that we became used to over the past several decades may well be a thing of the past.
Robert Shiller
, a Yale University economist, founder of the Case-Shiller Home Price Indices, and the forecaster who predicted both the dot-com and housing bubbles, has said we may be in for a new normal. According to Shiller, U.S. suburban development since the 1950s was “unusual” in its reliance on the automobile and the highway system; the bursting of the bubble may result in a bigger, more structural change. “The heyday of exurbs may well be behind us,” he has said. “Suburban prices may not recover in our lifetime.”
• • •
T
he suburbs have been the dominant pattern of residential growth in America for the last century.
There are roughly 132 million
homes across the country, the largest percent of them—almost half—in the suburbs, somewhat obtusely defined by the U.S. Census Bureau as the parts of our metropolitan statistical areas that lie outside central cities. Looking at the broadly defined “metropolitan” regions of our country, which is where more than 80 percent of Americans live, the percentage of us living in the suburbs is higher: 61 percent. To get a sense of their scale, consider that there are an estimated 64 million houses in suburbia. Over the past half century, the portion of people living in the suburbs has steadily grown, from 31 percent in 1960 to 51 percent in 2010, which amounts to about 158 million Americans. In terms of sheer size, not for a long time have the suburbs been “sub.”
Of course, it’s hard to paint the suburbs with one brush. Even the term “suburb” refers to many things. Broadly speaking, it refers to residential neighborhoods on the outskirts of big cities. But the American suburbs are a variegated terrain, a massive amalgam of thousands of different types and vintages. There are older, stately ones in the Northeast with centuries-old stone houses and newer ones all over the country in subdivisions lined with tracts of mass-produced homes. There are wealthy enclaves like the Main Line of Philadelphia or the North Shore of Chicago or Shaker Heights, Ohio, or Atherton, California, and blue-collar mainstays like Yonkers, New York, or Cicero, Illinois. There are big ones and small ones, boroughs and hamlets, inner-ring ones and exurban ones, hilly ones and flat ones. There are large swaths of suburbia, like the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles or New York’s Long Island, that are the size of small countries. Suburbs look different depending where you are: in Las Vegas front yards are filled with pebbles and cacti, in California Mediterranean red-tiled roofs rule the day, and in wealthy suburbs throughout the Northeast regal old homes line leafy streets.