The End of the Suburbs: Where the American Dream Is Moving (18 page)

William Lucy, professor of urban and environmental planning
at the University of Virginia and coauthor of
Tomorrow’s Cities, Tomorrow’s Suburbs
, has studied these numbers closely. From 2000 to 2010, the number of households age fifty-five and over grew by nine million, according to data Lucy studied issued by HUD. Over the same time period, the number of households ages thirty to forty-five and the number of households of married couples with children fell by 3.5 million. That kind of ratio of the older group to the younger group, Lucy says, “is just vastly different from the past.” Even before factoring in shifting demands, he points out, the numbers don’t add up—and that lopsided demographic picture “greatly diminishes” potential demand for the types of housing and locations that fueled suburban sprawl.

Sure enough, after a few months at home in Mt. Lebanon, Pennsylvania, Nicole Miller decided to try to make a go of it and find an apartment with a friend in downtown Pittsburgh. “It’s not worth my youth” to stay in the suburbs, she says. As of this writing, she and a college friend were actively looking for a place.

When the modern-day suburbs were conceived, the majority of households consisted of a husband, a wife, and two or more children. The needs and preferences of those families, and the boomers that grew up out of those households, almost single-handedly drove the development of our landscape and our communities for six decades. But we’re at a demographic crossroads. We are a nation of single-family homes, and yet our families are in decline. We’re getting married later or not at all. We’re having fewer children. Single-person households are multiplying. When 61 percent of households now have just one or two people, and when the two largest demographic bulges—aging boomers and millennials—are childless and attracted to more urban lifestyles where they don’t need to drive, our traditional pattern of development isn’t going to do the trick.

What will replace it is the trillion-dollar question the entire home-building and development industry is trying to figure out. But you can already see seeds of new landscape possibilities forming in pockets around the country. Our population may be splintering along different demographic lines, but the development trends at work mean there will be more choices to fit this increasingly diverse and jumbled-up society. Whatever category or slice of our population individuals or households happen to fit in, they will increasingly be able to choose their own adventure, whether that’s a house in classic suburbia, an urbanized suburb like the ones the New Urbanists and a growing number of traditional developers are creating—or, as ever-increasing numbers of singles, boomers, and even young families are opting for, the urbanized lifestyle of settling down in a big city.

6

WHERE THE WEALTH IS MOVING

I’m going to close my eyes
and when I open them I want to see skyscrapers.

—DON DRAPER,
MAD MEN
, EPISODE 505, APRIL 15, 2012

At first glance, the sleek new condo building at 205 Water Street in the DUMBO neighborhood of Brooklyn doesn’t seem out of the ordinary. It is certainly striking—nine stories high with a rust-colored Corten steel cantilevered penthouse jutting out from the top floor over Plymouth Street. But this slick-looking structure is very much in tune with the industrial chic of the neighborhood, a onetime manufacturing district where factories churned out paper boxes and Brillo pads. The lobby of 205 Water is all exposed concrete, the floors steel-plated. A reflecting garden awaits in the courtyard; there is an indigenously landscaped garden on the roof. All sixty-five apartments are lofts.

But the most striking quality about 205 Water is not obvious from looking at it. The building was conceived, built, and developed by Toll Brothers, the Pennsylvania-based production home builder and the patron saint of the luxury suburban mega-home. You wouldn’t know it from looking at it; the only time the Toll Brothers name appeared on this urban dwelling was during construction when the scaffolding surrounding the site advertised the builder. Even the New York real estate press said the building blends in in an “
unerringly contextual
” way: the angles on the cantilever structure are inspired by the Manhattan Bridge and the walls of the lobby are made of reclaimed boardwalks from Coney Island. But the master home builder is still having a little trouble adapting to the urban landscape. When Toll’s CEO, Douglas Yearley, came to see the property and saw that the concrete floors in the lobby were cracked and the graffiti had been left on the wall of an adjacent building that was viewable in the courtyard, he told his crew these kinds of things were unacceptable—“we’re Toll Brothers,” he insisted—until they gently informed him the floor was cracked on purpose to give it an industrial feel and the graffiti had been left by design, to create urban charm. “I’m a suburban guy.” Yearley shrugs.

He won’t be able to get away with that line for much longer. Toll is midway through a little-noticed but extremely ambitious push into big-city real estate. The property at 205 Water is one of sixteen in New York City open or in development as of this writing, and the company has slowly but surely been putting up luxury condo buildings at the most desirable addresses in town. Not even Carrie Bradshaw could have done a better job doing the location scouting: in the hipster enclave of Williamsburg, the company has built Northside Piers, two thirty-story all-glass modern luxury condo towers with open floor apartments, a screening room, and a pool. On the tony Upper East Side there’s the Touraine, a twenty-two-unit ode to Old World elegance with modern services including a concierge, gym, rooftop terrace, library, and wine cellar—and an average selling price of some $5 million per unit. A few blocks away, a sixteen-story building is planned for Eighty-ninth and Park, the white-glove epicenter of the
Gossip Girl
set. A few miles south in the Gramercy neighborhood sits 160 East Twenty-second, a modern, twenty-one-story, full-service doorman building aiming for LEED certification that will offer studio, one-, two-, and three-bedroom luxury condos. There’s One Ten Third, a Mondrian-inspired boutique building that opened in the formerly gritty East Village in 2006, and there are three communities in neighboring Hoboken. The company will soon test its limits even more, with a hotel and condo community being developed on Brooklyn’s waterfront in partnership with Starwood Capital Group and with the purchase in 2013 of two new properties on First Avenue and in Soho. And at the corner of Twenty-eighth and Park Avenue South, what is now a massive hole in the ground will soon give way to a forty-story glass skyscraper designed by the award–winning architect Christian de Portzamparc. Developed in partnership with the real estate mogul Sam Zell’s Equity Residential and nicknamed by blogs the “
Fortress of Glassitude
,” the building will house 364 units and will alter the lower Manhattan skyline.

Is it crazy for the suburban home builder to plant such stakes in one of the world’s most cosmopolitan markets—let alone when the overall economy has yet to fully recover from the mortgage meltdown? Not quite. At 205 Water, where prices ranged from $400,000 to $2.5 million, the condos sold out in a year. The Touraine sold twenty-one of its twenty-two units within four months; as of this writing all that remains is the top duplex, which is on the market for $20 million.
Toll’s City Living division
, which it formed in 2003, has grown to become one of the biggest bright spots in the company’s portfolio, making up 10 percent of the company’s revenue by units delivered, a figure that could rise to 15 percent. The division recently established a new branch in Washington, DC, and is now eyeing other cities including Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, and even São Paolo.
Toll Brothers City Living “is our best market
in the country,” Yearley told the
New York Times
in 2011.

Toll is just one of many icons of suburbia pushing into urban markets. Within a mile or two of the Touraine, there are three Whole Foods, and a stone’s throw south there’s the Container Store, Home Depot, Walgreens, Victoria’s Secret, and the Gap. Across the nation, everything from store retail chains to sports stadiums to corporate headquarters to young families have been moving into cities and leaving the suburbs behind.

•   •   •

T
o see that cities are resurgent centers of wealth and culture, all you need to do is set foot in one. Or you can simply set foot in a bookstore. A litany of volumes have come out in the past few years praising cities and urbanism, titles like Richard Florida’s popular
The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life
and
The Great Reset: How the Post-Crash Economy Will Change the Way We Live and Work; Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next
by John Kasarda and Greg Lindsay;
The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City
by Alan Ehrenhalt; and Edward Glaeser’s love letter to cities,
Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier and Happier
.
Highbrow publications
like Salon.com and
The Atlantic
have launched new sections of coverage devoted entirely to cities.

Our nation’s big cities have bloomed in the last decade.
Reversing a ninety-year trend
, in 2011 our largest cities grew more quickly than their combined suburbs.
In many of the biggest cities
, downtown populations grew at double-digit rates from 2000 to 2010. It’s particularly pronounced in
cities like New York, which saw the population within
a two-mile radius of city hall grow by nearly forty thousand people from 2000 to 2010—even in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks—
and where new census numbers show
a net population inflow for the first time in fifty years.
In Philadelphia, the 2010 census revealed
its population grew for the first time in sixty years, with the fastest growth occurring in the eight zip codes that make up its Greater Center City downtown area.
Of all cities, Chicago showed the biggest gain
to its downtown area, with forty-eight thousand people moving in.
The population of the Loop area alone
—Chicago’s central business district—has tripled over the past decade. The influx isn’t stopping:
Manhattan is expected to add
almost three hundred thousand people by 2030, roughly one new neighbor for every six current residents.

The transformation has been particularly remarkable in neighborhoods that were once the grittiest. In Washington, DC, Logan Circle has been transformed from a crime-ridden haven for drugs and prostitution into one of the highest-priced residential areas in the city. A few miles away, H Street NE, a onetime blighted stretch of boarded-up buildings, is now filled with restaurants and bars that draw young revelers at night. Nearby, Fourteenth and U Streets, the very corner where riots erupted in 1968 after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., is now one of the chicest strips in the city, with coffee shops, restaurants, independent fashion boutiques, and a thirty-three-thousand-square-foot Room and Board store.
When it was mulling locations
, the seller of upscale, stylish modern furniture analyzed zip codes to identify where the majority of its wealthy young professional customers were; Fourteenth and U showed up as the epicenter.

Developers have turned many of these neighborhoods into some of the most desirable new enclaves in town.
In St. Louis, an old abandoned
shoe-manufacturing warehouse is being turned into luxury loft apartments. In Denver, the trendy Lower Downtown, “LoDo,” neighborhood has emerged amid what was once a red-light district.
In Boston, a West Coast development firm
is building a twenty-story residential tower in Fort Point, the former industrial district that was the setting for much of the Martin Scorsese movie
The Departed
.

This is, of course, a stark contrast to the destruction and decay that once plagued our cities, which in the ’60s saw street riots, in the ’70s suffered from white flight, and in the ’80s and ’90s experienced an influx of crime, prostitution, and a crack epidemic that ravaged urban areas across our nation. It’s hard to imagine now, but in New York, it wasn’t all that long ago that Times Square was dangerous, prostitutes trolled the Meatpacking District, and Central Park’s Belvedere Castle was boarded up and covered with graffiti.
In 1975, the
New York Daily News
ran the now-famous headline “Ford to City: Drop Dead,” referring to Gerald Ford’s reluctance to bail the city out from bankruptcy and encapsulating a sentiment that our cities weren’t worth saving.

But over the years lower crime rates and new public works projects, not to mention major reinvestment, have transformed our urban centers. Across the country, cities that were once left to deteriorate now have so many waterfront marinas, multiplexes, loft apartment buildings, convention centers, and sidewalk cafés that they more closely resemble amusement parks than the dangerous places they used to be. In New York, Times Square is now an only slightly more urban version of Disneyland, and the Meatpacking District on weekends fills up with so many dolled-up twentysomethings, it looks like a nationwide casting call for
The Bachelorette
. The Upper West Side has enough multiplexes, gargantuan-size restaurants, and national chain stores that it seems more suburban than some suburbs. (“Put a roof over the whole thing, and you could be at a mall in Iowa,” wrote the
New York Times
about the neighborhood. That was in 1999.) The grit of shows like
Taxi
and
NYPD Blue
gave way to the Jimmy Choo Manhattan of
Sex and the City
and, now its younger, Brooklyn hipsterized progeny, HBO’s
Girls
. One night last summer, walking home by myself down an abandoned block in Tribeca, I felt my guard go up—a rare event—as I saw two figures walking toward me in the shadows. Then I got closer and realized it was two preteens talking about the boarding school Andover. That Toll Brothers had to pay someone to crack the concrete to make its Brooklyn building look appropriately urban perhaps says it all.

Even more striking than the reduction in crime is the fact that cities are attracting and keeping young families with children, a group that in the past almost universally decamped to the suburbs.
In Philadelphia, much of the population increase
over the past decade has come from young households flocking to or staying in its downtown area; the number of adults aged twenty to thirty-four grew 15 percent to nearly four hundred thousand at a time when that age group’s share of the overall population was declining. Similar trends are happening in Providence, Rhode Island, Austin, Texas, Boston, and many other metropolitan areas in the country. Young families are increasingly going out of their way to stay in cities.

Bethany Daily and her husband always thought they would move from their apartment in Boston’s North End to the suburbs once they had their two children, but the longer they stayed, the more friends they made—and the more they realized they didn’t want to leave. So they moved from their cramped one-bedroom apartment to an only slightly less cramped two-bedroom in the financial district, dividing one of the rooms in two to fit both kids. It’s a tight fit—the kids’ bedrooms are seventy square feet apiece—but Daily says she and her husband will squeeze as much as they have to in order to stay in Boston. She loves the vibrancy of the city, and she thinks her children are getting exposed to things they wouldn’t see in the suburbs. “They see architecture and culture and all sorts of people every day,” she says. “I feel like they’ll take life a little more in stride because things won’t shock them.”

Daily also values the extra time she’s able to spend with them. To get to her job as a hospital administrator, she either walks twenty minutes or uses Boston’s bike share and gets there in half the time. “I’m able to pull off my job and still see my kids and still get to work out most days and do all the things that are important for me because I don’t have a commute,” she says. “It’s about how I want to spend my time.” The day after we spoke on the phone, Daily e-mailed me to say that our conversation had got her “brain spinning about how much I love our lifestyle.”
She listed ten more benefits
she’d forgotten to mention, including access to free events like fireworks and “cliff” diving into Boston Harbor; more time because they didn’t have to take care of a big house; and easy access to museums that makes even shorter in-and-out “kid-length” visits worthwhile.

It’s one thing to stay in the city, but it’s another for young families to beat the traditional path to the suburbs only to pull up stakes and move back to the city again. Yet many are doing just that. Jason Duckworth, the Philadelphia developer who appears throughout these pages, and his wife, Angela, settled in Narberth, an old railroad suburb of Philadelphia, just after their second daughter was born in 2003. Duckworth had been working in venture capital in San Francisco, but both their families were in the Philadelphia area, Jason had the opportunity to run Arcadia, and Narberth seemed like the perfect place, with its walkable urban charm: it has a downtown with shops, a five-and-ten store, and a historic movie house, as well as excellent public schools, a gardening group, and even a rugby team. Downtown Philadelphia is a reasonable ten miles away.