The End of the Suburbs: Where the American Dream Is Moving (13 page)

When I first connected with Roseman, she happened to answer the phone while she was in her car, driving her kids to a museum. She apologized profusely for even being in it and swore to me it was a rarity—they had only decided to drive because one of her children insisted. She was actually embarrassed. “It’s a rare day that I take the car,” she insisted. And yet despite the headache of buying, then selling their suburban home and relocating four children to new schools, Roseman isn’t regretful of her experience in Westborough; in fact, she thinks it made her more appreciative of her situation now. “In some ways I wish we never had that suburban interlude,” she says. “But I think I always would have wondered.”

4

THE URBAN BURBS

I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass
unless I know there’s a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life.

—FRANK O’HARA

A few months after the National Association of Home Builders’ convention in early May 2012, I am sitting in meeting room 1E of the Palm Beach County Convention Center in West Palm Beach, Florida. I’m here for the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU), the annual gathering of the nation’s leading anti-sprawl movement. For twenty years, the New Urbanists have been promoting the development of smaller-scale, walkable neighborhoods built on traditional town planning methods, and on this warm day in May some eleven hundred developers, architects, planners, engineers, bicycle and pedestrian advocates, and other friends of the movement are gathering to talk about ideas, exchange practices, network, and promote anti-sprawl principles.

This industry gathering couldn’t be a starker contrast to the home builders’ show. Outside the convention center, there are shareable bikes available for use. A temporary bookstore has been set up selling titles like
Live-Work Planning and Design:
Zero-Commute Housing
,
In-laws, Outlaws, and Granny Flats
, and
The Cul-de-Sac Syndrome: Turning Around the Unsustainable American Dream
. Instead of a trade show with aisles of vendors hawking products, this gathering is more of a mind meld, a kind of TED conference meets urban planning graduate program. The schedule is packed with sessions and seminars from the field’s luminaries; attendees can choose from lectures like “The Secret Life of Trees,” “Parking: Planning to Store the Cars Properly, Amid the Pedestrians!” and “Why Did We Stop Walking and How Can We Start Again?” At night, various local CNU chapters gather at informal salons to discuss their ideas in watering holes around West Palm Beach (the Cascadia chapter would be meeting at World of Beer; the Texas group would be holding court at O’Shea’s Irish Pub; CNU Great Lakes would be at Roxy’s). The New Urbanists who gather here are activists as much as they are planners, designers, and developers, and they believe in walkable neighborhoods and mixed-use development with the fervor of religious zealots. They talk about things like live/work spaces, alleys, terminating vistas, and the importance of creating a “sense of place.” The woman sitting next to me in meeting room 1E has an image of a mixed-use pedestrian village as her screen saver.

The Congress for the New Urbanism officially describes itself as “the leading organization promoting walkable, neighborhood-based development as an antidote to formless sprawl.” Organized in the early 1990s, the movement traces its roots to a group of influential designers who had become alarmed by the growth of conventional suburban development and started meeting informally to share their ideas for solutions to it. They included Peter Calthorpe, a pioneer of transit-oriented, walkable residential development, and Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, the husband-and-wife team who had risen to fame by pioneering Miami modernist architecture in the 1980s before shifting gears to focus on more traditional neighborhood development.

These thinkers, along with several other founding members, believed there was a better way to build not just the suburbs but our entire environment, and they were looking to formalize principles they had begun to use in their residential work—mixed-use zoning, pedestrian-friendly village development, more robust public transit, and the incorporation of the kinds of urban design methods that were common before World War II. They established the Congress for the New Urbanism as their organizing body and created a charter outlining their guiding principles. “We stand for the restoration of existing urban centers and towns within coherent metropolitan regions, the reconfiguration of sprawling suburbs into communities of real neighborhoods and diverse districts, the conservation of natural environments, and the preservation of our built legacy,” the CNU charter reads. Over the years, the group has grown to twenty-five hundred members, hundreds of communities, and the well-attended, ambitiously titled congress each year.

The movement’s unofficial leader is Duany, the charismatic Princeton- and Yale-educated architect and urban planner who became one of the leading modernist architects in the 1980s. Born in New York and raised in Cuba and Barcelona, Duany moved to Coral Gables, Florida, with Plater-Zyberk in the mid-’70s and became influential in the contemporary architecture movement. The Miami-based firm they helped found, Arquitectonica, quickly rose to international fame for its flashy, in-vogue high-rises; one of its most iconic condominium buildings was featured in the opening credits of
Miami Vice
. But after seeing a lecture by architectural theorist Léon Krier in which Krier talked about the importance of traditional urbanism and the power of physical design to change the social life of a community, Duany—after recovering from the all-out attack Krier had made on everything he stood for— had an epiphany. Duany and Plater-Zyberk soon left to found their own firm, Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company, to start designing communities in the way Krier had described.

One of DPZ’s first major projects was the development of Seaside, an eighty-acre parcel of land on the Florida Panhandle that Duany, Plater-Zyberk, and the developer Robert Davis planned in the style of a classic American beach town. With its narrow streets, front porches, and residences of varying sizes designed specifically to bring people into the community to engage with one another, Seaside was both a commercial success and a revolutionary idea; the social element of the neighborhood was as important in its design as the physical look and character of the houses and structures. Seaside brought DPZ worldwide renown—it made the cover of
The Atlantic
;
Time
magazine selected it as one of the ten “Best of the Decade” achievements in design—and established Duany and Plater-Zyberk as leaders of the burgeoning New Urbanism movement. Even now, from its headquarters in Miami, DPZ is like the Apple or Harvard or Goldman Sachs of New Urbanism; it is the sterling name, the firm that draws the best and the brightest.

If DPZ is akin to Apple, Duany is the movement’s Steve Jobs—a big-picture visionary whose bold ideas upended the status quo and whose conviction, not to mention oratory skills, have given him guru-like status within the architecture and New Urbanist worlds. Outspoken, passionate, and highly opinionated, Duany is prone to bold statements and ideas that hit him at any moment on matters both large and small. (Arcadia Land’s Jason Duckworth recalls Duany at a dinner party some years ago making an “incredibly refined argument” about how to load a dishwasher.) Duany has, over the years, moved from architect to New Urbanist to more general futurist and prognosticator. “The present is not my job,” he likes to say. “The present is a distortion field.”

The architecture and New Urbanist worlds are filled with people who have been “Duanied,” meaning they saw or heard Duany speak only to have it lead to an epiphany and a reversal of course on their own work. Sam Sherman, a Pennsylvania developer who’s spent the past few years revitalizing the East Passyunk neighborhood of South Philadelphia, is one. Sherman had had a successful career at some of the Philadelphia region’s biggest suburban home builders in the 1980s and 1990s when he happened to hear Duany in a radio interview one afternoon in 2002 while in his car trapped in traffic on Philadelphia’s Schuylkill Expressway. Duany was discussing his book,
Suburban Nation
, and talking specifically about how the design of suburban sprawl had led to painful commutes for millions of people. Sherman says in that moment, as he sat in his car, he had a revelation. “It was a soul-sucking experience,” Sherman says of his home-building years. “After you build fifteen hundred of those things, it’s not fun anymore—and there I was, literally, trapped in my car,” he says. He went out and bought Duany’s book and a few months later quit his job. “I basically walked in one day and said, ‘Here’s my phone, here’s my pager, here are my keys,’ and just walked away,” he says. He has been working on urban redevelopment projects ever since; most recently, he’s transformed the neglected East Passyunk area into a thriving district populated by young professionals and drawing some of the city’s hottest restaurants.

It is Duany, in fact, who I am awaiting, along with my fellow congress attendees, in room 1E in West Palm Beach. He’s running late, and the conference organizers are radioing one another on their headsets. “Has anyone seen Andres?” “Is he here yet?” After ten or fifteen minutes, he arrives, breezing in calm, cool, and debonair in Nantucket reds and a navy blazer. He does not disappoint. The United States has gone through “an orgy of process-based design,” he proclaims to the audience, beginning a discourse against the kind of planning that, he says, has brought us sprawl. In the span of fifteen minutes he invokes Pompeii, the Mormons, the Greeks, the Beaux-Arts movement, Baron Haussmann’s redesign of Paris in the late 1800s, and what he calls the “dendritic” system of suburban cul-de-sacs. After he concludes his sermon, he leaves the rest of the session to his co-panelist and
Suburban Nation
coauthor Jeff Speck, promising to return at the end to answer questions. He exits as smoothly as he arrived. (Many months later, over dinner in Washington, DC, where Duany had traveled to speak at an event but also because he felt the need to “bask in classicism,” our conversation took a similar tour, traveling from the history of single-use zoning and how municipalities “downloaded the cancer” when they bought standardized development codes, to how Brigham Young was a management and town planning genius.)

Over the course of the next two days while in West Palm Beach, I get an indoctrination into New Urbanism principles: I learn there is an inverse relationship between the length of a block and how many people will choose to walk down it, that trolleys are “pedestrian accelerators,” and that the car “disaggregates the complexity of the pedestrian shed” (translation: when developers assume people will drive, things get built farther apart). Over lunch with Peter Calthorpe, the San Francisco–based architect and urbanist, I listen as he discusses the end of Communism, the evolution of the middle class, and the “flywheel” of home builders who, he says, have kept producing the same kind of product even though home owners’ priorities have changed. During the conference’s main stage sessions, Le Corbusier, the French pioneer of modernist architecture who envisioned a high-rise city, is invoked as many times as the movement’s enemy as Jane Jacobs is as their hero.

The main principles of New Urbanism have not changed much since its founding twenty years ago. New Urbanism is not a rating or rule book like, say, LEED, the third-party green building accreditation that requires structures adhere to a set of specific standards to earn its label; rather, it’s a set of basic principles and guidelines—a sort of neighborhood DNA code—for developers, planners, designers, and policy makers who wish to design neighborhoods based on traditional town planning methods. Most New Urbanism developments have certain identifying characteristics: narrower or more “modest-sized” streets, an easily identifiable town center, a Main Street lined with buildings that mix commercial and residential spaces, and a mixture of housing types throughout the rest of the neighborhood—single-family detached houses, attached town houses, and apartments—all commingled together. New Urbanism is not architecture; New Urbanists are almost agnostic to what the houses’ exteriors look like, or even to the architectural style of the neighborhood. In the same way Clarence Perry, whose neighborhood unit helped transform suburban design, had nothing to do with the design of homes in those neighborhoods, New Urbanism theories relate primarily to a community’s bones, or the design and layout of the neighborhood itself. As it was with Seaside, the goal of New Urbanism is to create neighborhoods whose design serves a social as well as a physical purpose. The mix of housing stock, for instance, ensures that a wide range of economic classes lives in the same neighborhood (which also makes homes easier to sell, since the housing stock appeals to a broader range of the market), while the pleasing, diverse streetscapes are designed to be both safe for foot traffic and also appealing enough to bring people out of their homes and into the public space. Some physical attributes of the dwellings themselves have a social function, too: homes are built close to the street, and porches draw residents to the front of the house, where they might interact with their neighbors passing just a few feet away on the sidewalk. Using these principles, a better-designed community, New Urbanism thinking goes, can result in a richer life.

All told, there are an estimated five to six hundred
New Urbanism villages and neighborhoods built or under construction across the United States, estimates Rob Steuteville, editor of
Better! Cities and Towns
;
DPZ designed the code for many of them. The best known is Seaside, but they include places like NorthWest Crossing in Bend, Oregon; Norton Commons, twenty minutes outside of Louisville in Prospect, Kentucky; and Stapleton, a massive project designed by Peter Calthorpe’s Calthorpe Associates in Colorado that is one of the largest, a 4,700-acre development on the site of the former Stapleton International Airport. Many of these communities build anti-suburban claims in their marketing materials, which can read more like manifestos. Slogans for various New Urbanism developments include “life within walking distance” and “more life per square foot”; others implore home owners to “add the charm that’s missing from suburban living.” I’On, a New Urbanism development just across the Charleston harbor in the South Carolina Lowcountry, makes the specific boast that its porches are eight feet deep or more, “to allow room for rocking chairs to rock; for people to put their feet up; and for dogs to be dogs.” Hampstead, a community near Montgomery, Alabama, points out all the careful thought that has gone into its planning: “Residents may not know we designed a street section to be a specific width,” its Web site says. “They just know it feels right when they walk to the market.”