The End of the Suburbs: Where the American Dream Is Moving (11 page)

The distance was punishing, but it was the traffic that was the killer. The trip took an hour and ten minutes with no congestion, but on the clogged freeways during rush hour it took up to three hours each way. To avoid the traffic, Reinbold and her husband—they carpooled since they worked minutes from each other—would set their alarm for 3:50 a.m., leave by 4:00, and arrive at 5:15. With nowhere to go at that hour—it was still pitch black—they would park in the McDonald’s parking lot, recline their seats, and sleep, setting the alarms on their cell phones for 6:00 a.m. when the drive-through window opened. Reinbold’s husband would then drop her off at school, where she’d do her hair and makeup in her classroom and get dressed in the restroom. On the days Reinbold had to drive in without her husband, she felt unsafe sleeping in the McDonald’s parking lot alone, so she would go straight to her classroom and sleep under her desk instead. “I was like George Costanza,” she says, referring to the
Seinfeld
episode where George gets caught by his boss, Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, taking a nap under his desk. As bad as the mornings were, Reinbold’s commute home was worse: three hours of stop-and-go traffic after which she would walk into her house, go straight to her bedroom, and plop on her bed with her arms and legs stretched out while her body decramped. After a year, she still hadn’t found a teaching job near her new home, but rather than face the prospect of signing up for another year of her commute, she gave up. She quit her job, trading the tenured, well-paying position for which she’d earned a master’s degree for a local substitute teaching gig, which she supplemented with a job at a tutoring center in Temecula for $8 an hour. “I just could not live that lifestyle anymore,” she says of the soul-sucking back-and-forth. “It killed my spirit.” Shortly after that, she was hired as a full-time teacher in Menifee, a twenty-minute drive from Temecula.

Reinbold and her husband are unique in that they never intended to make that commute a permanent part of their lives. But many of their friends, and millions of Americans, do; it’s the only way they can afford the houses they live in and the lifestyle they signed up for. None of them needs to be told how miserable commuting can be, but a body of research has emerged in recent years that helps to quantify its toll on our bodies and our psyches.
A 2006 study on happiness
by Princeton cognitive psychologist and Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman and economist Alan Krueger (now chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers) found that commuting was consistently rated the worst part of people’s day (sex was the best).
In 2004, a pair of Swiss economists
found that people with long commutes consistently and systematically report lower overall well-being and calculated that a worker needed to make a 40 percent higher salary to be compensated for a one-hour commute in order to maintain the same level of happiness.
Other studies have linked long commutes
to higher levels of stress, anxiety, annoyance, social isolation, and exhaustion, not to mention a litany of serious physical ailments: higher cholesterol and blood pressure, weight gain, back and neck pain, and adverse effects on cognitive performance.

Since the time spent commuting typically replaces time spent at home, it also has an impact on relationships with friends and family.
Robert Putnam, the Harvard political scientist
and author of
Bowling Alone
, found that every ten minutes of commuting results in 10 percent fewer social connections. Experts have suggested a link between sprawl and the rise of teenage hooliganism in some places because parents commuting longer distances to work are spending less time at home. More recently,
a study from researchers in Sweden
found that couples in which one partner commutes for more than forty-five minutes are more likely to separate.
Another study of commuting couples
in Canada found that manifestations of long commutes frequently included guilt caused by being away from children in their growing years, poor spousal communication, and an “irregular” sex life.

Yet even though we hate commuting, we have continued to seek out housing solutions that require it. Researchers have coined this the “commuting paradox”—people consistently underestimate the wear and tear of a commute and overestimate the benefits of its rewards. It’s become conventional wisdom for people to insist that they’re prioritizing family life and lifestyle when they buy a bigger, nicer home with a bigger yard. Yet if that location requires a long commute, they’re unwittingly doing the opposite, putting their lifestyle—and the time they get to spend with their family—at the bottom of the priority list. One explanation for this irrational behavior is that while a big house is easy to see, the commute’s greatest sacrifice—free time and lost moments with family and friends—is invisible. Another, more practical reason why so many people continue to commute by car is that they don’t have much choice. While big cities like New York, Boston, and Chicago are the exceptions, most U.S. suburbs don’t offer robust public transit.
Nationwide, roughly 40 percent of workers
now commute between suburbs, for which there is often no other option than the car.

As sprawl has gotten worse, of course, so has road congestion nationwide,
the amount of time we spend stuck in traffic
has more than doubled in the past thirty years. In badly clogged areas, like Washington, DC, and Los Angeles, commuters spend more than sixty hours a year stuck in traffic. That in turn has led to health problems like increased rates of pollution and asthma, not to mention some $
120 billion a year
in lost productivity and wasted fuel. It’s also led to a spike in reported incidents of “auto-induced maladaptive behavior,” otherwise known as road rage. Officially given its own medical diagnosis in 2006, incidents of road rage have climbed steadily over the years.
A study by the American Automobile Association
concluded that the episodes were rarely the result of a single incident but of the “accumulation of stress in the motorist’s life.”

•   •   •

A
ll this driving doesn’t just make us overweight, sick, angry, and stressed out. It also makes us poor. The building of the suburbs took place when oil was cheap and relied on the assumption that it would remain so. But oil didn’t keep its end of the bargain.
In 2003, the average suburban household spent
$1,422 on gasoline, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. By 2008, that had risen to nearly $3,000. That’s expensive for any household, but for a middle-to-lower-income family, it can be the difference between making ends meet and not. A major flaw with “drive till you qualify” is the cost of all the driving. That shiny new four-bedroom in the hinterlands is cheap. Getting there and back is not.

Scott Bernstein, who heads the Center for Neighborhood Technology (CNT), a Chicago research outfit that studies ways to make neighborhoods more sustainable, has spent the past several years trying to convince people just how quickly the gallons of gas can add up at suburban and exurban distances. A transportation engineer with a quick wit and a modesty that belies a lustrous résumé, Bernstein is an expert on the role transportation costs play in household budgets, and his opinions have been widely sought in the wake of the financial crisis. In 2008 he testified in front of the House Committee on Financial Services, and he was later one of five experts to present papers to a White House panel to discuss ways to recover from the housing-led financial crisis.

Early in the 2000s, Bernstein began examining the true role transportation plays in housing costs on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood level. Studying the average cost of transportation in hundreds of metropolitan areas, and using a formula that takes into account gas prices as well as the cost of the car, insurance, maintenance, and repairs,
Bernstein and his team found
that the average family spends 48 percent of its income on the combined costs of housing and transportation. For working families with incomes of $20,000 to $50,000, the figure was almost 60 percent. This lower end of income earners, he found, was spending slightly
more
of their income (29 percent) on transportation than on housing itself (28 percent).

This counters the generally accepted rule of thumb that housing costs alone should represent 30 percent of household income. It also counters the notion that housing is cheaper if you travel farther distances. Most people think about their housing costs without factoring in transportation, but the two are inextricably linked. Plus, it’s the people who can least afford it who buy at the costliest distances. For example,
in Kankakee County
, sixty miles south of Chicago, Bernstein’s index calculated that housing costs amount to 22.5 percent of the typical household’s income, but transportation costs come to nearly 30 percent. In Peachtree City, Georgia, a master-planned community thirty miles south of Atlanta, 32 percent of the average household’s income goes to housing costs alone, but almost 60 percent goes to housing and transportation combined.

Bernstein and his team indexed housing and transportation costs for more than nine hundred metropolitan areas and plotted it onto a color-coded map, which they named the H+T Affordability Index. They coded the map in two colors: yellow for areas where housing and transportation together consume less than 45 percent of household income, and blue for neighborhoods where housing and transportation made up more than 45 percent. Using the conventional definition of housing affordability, where housing comprises 30 percent or less of total income, 76 percent of communities would have been considered affordable. But using the new definition—in other words, factoring transportation costs into the total housing outlay—only 28 percent of communities were considered affordable.

A few years ago, Bernstein led an effort to create a new kind of mortgage that would factor transportation costs into the overall cost of owning a home. A more “efficient” location—one that had better access to public transit and life’s daily conveniences—would mean the buyer could qualify for a bigger mortgage and get a nicer house, or put less money down, or borrow at a lower interest rate. Conversely, a borrower buying the same house located far away from his or her place of work and daily needs would need a proportionally higher income to qualify for a loan for that house or would have to accept a more challenging set of terms for the loan. Location, in other words, would be factored in as a measure of risk, just like income and credit score.

The mortgages were a novel idea, and they were favorably received by the housing finance industry. Soon after Bernstein introduced the concept, Fannie Mae agreed to participate in an experimental plan to test them, and bought and underwrote some two thousand of the new “location efficient” mortgages. They performed well: of a random sample CNT studied of three hundred of the mortgages nationally, there was one default, and it never turned into a foreclosure; the home owner was ultimately able to make good.

Similar studies have shown similar patterns, even when incomes vary wildly. “Nobody’s disputed this,” Bernstein says. “Mortgages in location-efficient places perform better.” At the time, the idea for the mortgages was a tough sell to banks because, still recovering from the housing bust, they weren’t financing anything. And in the time since, they’ve been reluctant to lend to anyone, so the idea has languished.

Bernstein has one influential follower, though: Shaun Donovan, the secretary of Housing and Urban Development. Donovan is a longtime proponent of smart growth and a big believer in the benefits of transit-oriented, pedestrian-friendly urban communities (he has said he’s trying to put the “UD” back in “HUD”), and he has long talked of a sort of fuel economy or Energy Star–style rating for homes, a required disclosure of the estimated cost of transportation to would-be buyers. “We don’t have a good system today of understanding, when you buy a house, ‘what is this
really
going to cost me?’” Donovan has said. Bernstein and his team are working with HUD to come up with such a system, an official locational affordability index for homes, by the end of 2013.

But even if all mortgages switch to the location-efficient kind, and even if a new mandatory fuel economy rating gets slapped on every house, it won’t be enough. The suburbs have a bigger problem. They are arranged in a way that makes gasoline as vital to our daily lives as oxygen, and the price of gas is going up.

•   •   •

T
he American suburbs are dependent on cars, and, at least for now, cars are dependent on oil. From their beginning, the suburbs were based on the availability of not just energy but inexpensive energy. And for years, oil was cheap, not just back in the 1950s but for most of postwar history. But starting in 2003 it began a steady climb.
From 2000 to 2008
, oil prices increased almost 80 percent. In 2004, the average price per gallon topped $2 for the first time. In 2007, it crossed $3. In the summer of 2008, oil spiked to $147 a barrel, sending gas prices over $4 per gallon nationwide.

For people who live in the suburbs, especially remote ones, the cost became untenable.
That year, one hundred schools
in sixteen states moved to a four-day week to save on transportation, heating, and cooling costs. Ellen Dunham-Jones, architecture professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, remembers two junior staff members coming into her office and pleading with her to let them shift their schedules; living at the outer reaches of suburban Atlanta (also known as “Sprawlanta”), they could no longer afford to drive in five days a week. “They said, ‘Please, I will work four ten-hour days. I’ll even work four twelve-hour days,’” she says. They went to four ten-hour days, and shortly thereafter, one left for a job closer to her home.

In truth, our gas prices are a lot cheaper than they should be. In Europe, gas prices are closer to $7 and $8 per gallon, or $10 in Norway. Europeans pay more because they pay higher gas taxes to cover things like road pavement, pollution control, accidents, and more—things we in the United States provide drivers and car owners nearly for free. “The most socialistic thing [2012 presidential candidates Rick] Santorum or [Mitt] Romney ever saw is the American transportation system and the private car,” suburban historian Kenneth Jackson told me in a phone conversation that took place during the 2012 election season. The real cost of gas if it were priced to account for things like the building and paving of our roads and oil and gas industry subsidies, he says, would be $20 per gallon; others peg it anywhere from $5 to $15.