The End of the Suburbs: Where the American Dream Is Moving (23 page)

But there’s still some of what Chuck Marohn of Minnesota would call “lobster-eating” going on. Driving around the far reaches of Summerlin, Nevada, after my visit with Zappos’s Tony Hsieh, I found myself at what seemed like the end of the earth. It was really just a small subdivision up a hill right off Paseo Breeze Drive, but as I drove up the half-developed street, it seemed like the final frontier, the edge of the developed United States itself. Soon the pavement turned to dirt road, and I pulled over when the road ended and got out of my rental car. There was a chain-link fence with alarming
DANGER/NO TRESPASSING!
signs. All I could see in front of me were vast acres of arid land and mountains in the distance.

And yet as I faced the empty desert I heard a familiar sound ring out, that of a single spare hammer hitting away, its familiar echo reverberating across the neighborhood and signaling new home construction. On one side of the street behind me a few new homes were going up, and crews were toiling away on top of the roof working in the hot sun. This was Barcelona, a sign soon told me, a new upscale community from Toll Brothers. I walked inside the completed showhouse across the street and toured the thirty-three-hundred-or-so-square-foot home, which had all the trappings of suburban Toll: a two-story foyer, a great room, gourmet kitchen with a large island, dual vanities in the master suite. The house was opulently decorated and highly staged, complete with fictitious handwritten notes on the bulletin board in the girl’s bedroom (“don’t forget! sleepover @ Emily’s”). It was high quality: walls were thick, doors heavy, carpeting lush; all the touches seemed just right for the upscale buyer. “The ideal destination for moving up,” the materials advertised. But
were
there any upscale buyers anymore, especially here in housing’s post-bust wasteland? I asked the real estate agent why they were building new homes when there was still so much for sale. The foreclosure glut had actually only increased the demand for new construction, she told me. If you buy a foreclosed home, she pointed out, you don’t know if the insides will still be there; your money could be held in escrow for six months, only to have an all-cash buyer come in and pull it out from under you. New homes were safer. I signed the guest book, and when I got home, I got a nice thank-you card from Toll Brothers for taking the time to view its exciting new community. Less than one year later, all seventeen Barcelona homes had sold out.

But what gets built in Vegas might very well stay in Vegas. Elsewhere in the country, the market, consumer demand, demographics, and consumer preferences are all pointing in a different direction. “The notion that we’re all going to be living in cities is wrong,” says Diana Lind, editor of
Next City
. “But the idea that we’ll have suburbs that have a different kind of lifestyle than we have right now is just inevitable.” Even Toll Brothers’ CEO, Douglas Yearley, says there will be a broader mix of choices available to meet the demands of an increasingly diverse population. The urbanist and architect Peter Calthorpe likens the discussion to the debate over gay marriage. “We’re not saying that the suburbs are wrong or should go away,” he says. “Just like we’re not asking to stop heterosexual marriage just because we want gay marriage. We just want to have a choice.” There will still be exurbs for people who like to live that way and can afford to do so. But the changes afoot mean that there will be many more options.

•   •   •

N
one of this will happen overnight. Right now it’s a challenge to build anything when the economy is stalled and incomes are stagnant. But like most big changes, the reconstitution of our landscape will happen a little bit at a time. “It doesn’t mean that all of a sudden there will be these huge wagon trains moving in and deserts in the cul-de-sacs,” says the Urban Land Institute’s John McIlwain. It’s a shift that’s just beginning, he and others point out, and we won’t know until we look back, census by census, to see how it played out.

If the changes suggested in this book sound extreme, that’s because they are. But consider other transformations that have happened over the course of our nation’s history. In 1910, no one could have looked forward and imagined cities turning into the slums they did in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s, just as in today’s city-as-Disneyland era, we can’t now imagine them that way, either. Or imagine the 1950s, when most women didn’t work; now, that’s hard to fathom. Or similary, imagine the ’80s and ’90s, when smoking was considered cool. That same kind of reversal can happen again when it comes to how and where we choose to live. The suburbs as we know them had an exceptionally long run, remaining basically unchanged for more than half a century. “We’re turning what happened in cities fifty and sixty years ago on its head,” says Sam Sherman, the urban developer in Philadelphia. “Don’t ever say it can’t happen. It happened before.”

Besides, it’s when trends are just beginning that they’re the hardest to spot. “When a strong trend is in its early stage, it doesn’t look strong,” says the University of Virginia’s William Lucy. The 1950 census, he points out, did not contain clear evidence proclaiming what would happen during the next half century. And yet a slightly visible trend soon became a wave, which became a movement, which became a contagion, which became our suburban-majority country. “In ten years,” says housing economist Jonathan Smoke, “we’ll know what happened.”

Whatever things look like in ten years—or twenty, or fifty, or more—there’s one thing everyone agrees on: there will be more options. The government in the past created one American Dream at the expense of almost all others: the dream of a house, a lawn, a picket fence, two or more children, and a car. But there is no single American Dream anymore; there are multiple American Dreams, and multiple American Dreamers. The good news is that the entrepreneurs, academics, planners, home builders, and thinkers who plan and build the places we live in are hard at work trying to find space for all of them.

©Bill Westheimer, courtesy Llewellyn Park Historical Society

Built in the mid-1850s, the communities of Llewellyn Park, in West Orange, New Jersey (
above
), and Riverside, Illinois (
next image
), designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, were the first suburbs designed specifically to mimic the bucolic feel of country life.

Courtesy of the Riverside Historical Museum, Riverside, Illinois

©Meyer Leibowitz/
The New York Times
/Redux

The history of the modern-day suburbs begins with Levittown, the massive development on Long Island built immediately after World War II.

©Superstock/Everett Collection

By the mid-1950s, the suburban way was the only way.

©Michelle Wolfe Photography

The earliest U.S. suburbs sprouted organically around railroad stations. With their village-oriented town centers, these suburbs are better positioned for the future than their more modern, subdivision-style counterparts. Here, the Village of Scarsdale, New York, in April 2013.

©Michael Valdez/istockphoto.com

Tract housing developments like these in Las Vegas now blanket much of the country.

©Michelle Wolfe Photography

The strip mall is one of the most identifiable elements of modern-day suburbia. Instead of a centralized downtown, commercial activity takes place in a series of shopping centers like this one on Route 59 in Rockland County, New York.