The End of the Suburbs: Where the American Dream Is Moving (27 page)

in 1931, the author James Truslow Adams simply wrote
:
James Truslow Adams,
The Epic of America
(Little, Brown, and Company, 1931), p. 415.

“No man who owns his own house and lot”
:
Thomas Sugrue, “The New American Dream: Renting,”
Wall Street Journal
, August 14, 2009.

“Strengthening families, establishing communities”
:
William J. Clinton, “Proclamation 6807, National Homeownership Day, 1995,” June 2, 1995. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley,
The American Presidency Project.

In his remarks
:
William J. Clinton, “Remarks on the National Homeownership Strategy,” June 5, 1995. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley,
The American Presidency Project.

in 2004, George W. Bush
:
President’s Remarks to the National Association of Home Builders, Greater Columbus Convention Center, Columbus, Ohio, October 2, 2004, available at georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov.

Prices rose nearly 200 percent
:
S&P/Case-Shiller Composite 10 home price index.

A
Fortune
article
:
Grainger David, “Riding the Boom,”
Fortune
, May 30, 2005.

The home-building industry exploded
:
U.S. Census Bureau, new residential construction statistics.

From 2000 to 2007
:
American Farmland Trust, www.farmland.org. During that time, the site says, we were losing more than an acre of farmland per minute to development.

A
New York Times Magazine
profile
:
Jon Gertner, “Chasing Ground,”
New York Times Magazine
, October 16, 2005.

By 2009, three million Americans
:
U.S. Census Bureau, 2009 American Community Survey.

In the span of eleven years
:
U.S. Census Bureau.

By 2005, there were nearly four million homes with
:
U.S. Census Bureau, American Housing Survey for the United States, 2001 and 2005.

By 2006, the average home was 2,500 square feet
:
U.S. Census Bureau.

“Drive 10 miles and save $10,000”
:
Chris Serres, Jim Buchta, and Glenn Howatt, “Minnesota’s New Ghost Towns,”
Minneapolis Star Tribune
, April 21, 2008.

All told, between 1996 and 2006
:
U.S. Census Bureau, new single-family unit completions.

By the end of 2009, home prices had fallen
:
S&P/Case-Shiller Composite 20 home price index.

All told, housing prices fell 34 percent
:
Ibid.

In Perris, California, owners of ranches
:
“Another Skinny, Abandoned Horse Found in Inland Empire,”
Los Angeles Times
, September 16, 2011.

In Atlanta, the city’s outer suburban ring
:
“Real Estate Expert Dubs Area ‘Ring of Death,’” wsbtv.com, June 2, 2011.

In December 2011, one foreclosure “heat map”
:
Alexander Soule, “Feds Consider Changes for Seized Foreclosures,”
Westchester County Business Journal
, January 23, 2012.

The economist Edward Glaeser
:
Edward L. Glaeser, Harvard University and the National Bureau of Economic Research, “Rethinking the Federal Bias Toward Homeownership,”
Cityscape: A Journal of Policy Development and Research
13, no. 2 (2011): 5–37. Also see “Ed Glaeser on Why Cities Matter,” video produced by CEOs for Cities, December 27, 2011. Glaeser points out that by pushing people toward single-family homes at the expense of higher-density types of living (since most single-family dwellings are owner-occupied while most multifamily dwellings are rented), the mortgage interest deduction encourages people to buy bigger homes, farther away from urban centers, which has a number of negative implications: it diminishes productivity; it increases commuting distances, energy expenses, and therefore level of damage to the environment; and, by increasing the physical distance between the rich and poor, Glaeser suggests it might also increase the social distance between them, reducing levels of empathy. Glaeser also points out that as we learned during the “housing convulsion,” subsidized borrowing can lead to a “‘foreclosure’ rather than an ‘ownership’ society.”

A recent study by the National Association of Home Builders
:
National Association of Home Builders, “Voters Place High Value on Homeownership, Oppose Policies That Make It More Difficult to Own a Home,” January 11, 2012.

A recent study by the real estate Web site Trulia
:
Trulia biannual American Dream survey, September 20, 2011.

CHAPTER THREE: “MY CAR KNOWS THE WAY TO GYMNASTICS”

“First they built the road”
:
By Arcade Fire. Used here with artists’ permission.

In the United States, 83 percent
:
Federal Highway Administration, National Household Travel Survey, 2009. Europe: Erik Olin Wright and Joel Rogers,
American Society: How It Really Works
(W. W. Norton, 2011); John Pulcher, “Public Transportation,” in Susan Hanson and Genevieve Giuliano,
The Geography of Urban Transportation
, 3rd ed. (Guilford Press, 2004).

We have the highest per capita
:
World Bank statistics.

One study found a nearly 500 percent
:
Peter Swift, “Residential Street Typology and Injury Accident Frequency,” June 1997; updated 2002, 2006.

Jeff Speck, a renowned city planner
:
Jeff Speck,
Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), p. 172.

Specifically, Dumbaugh found
:
Eric Dumbaugh and Robert Rae, “Safe Urban Form: Revisiting the Relationship Between Community Design and Traffic Safety,”
Journal of the American Planning Association
75, no. 3 (Summer 2009): 309–29.

A recent report authored by experts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found
:
Richard J. Jackson, MD, MPH, and Chris Kochtitzky, MSP, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Creating a Healthy Environment: The Impact of the Built Environment on Public Health,” Sprawl Watch Clearinghouse, sprawlwatch.org, p. 11.

Another study
:
Ibid.

Studies using pedometers
:
David R. Basset Jr. et al., “Pedometer-Measured Physical Activity and Health Behaviors in United States Adults,” National Institutes of Health, October 2010.

In the United States, roughly half of all trips taken by car are three miles or less
:
2001 National Household Transportation Survey; also see “Complete Streets Change Travel Patterns,” Smart Growth America.

When it comes to trips under one mile
:
Edward L. Glaeser and Matthew E. Kahn, “Sprawl and Urban Growth,” National Bureau of Economic Research, May 2003.

more than a third of U.S. adults
:
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, 2009–2010.

As far back as 2001, a report
:
Jackson and Kochtitzky, “Creating a Healthy Environment.”

“We have built America in a way”
:
From the 2012 four-part PBS series
Designing Healthy Communities
, hosted by Richard J. Jackson, MD, MPH, produced by the Media Policy Center and accompanied by a companion book copublished by the American Public Health Association (Richard J. Jackson with Stacy Sinclair,
Designing Healthy Communities
[Jossey-Bass, 2011]). The documentary series is one of the most in-depth, comprehensive looks at the social, economic, and health problems associated with sprawl-style development.

The prevalence of overweight children
:
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention statistics.

Rates of type 2 diabetes have doubled
:
Jackson and Sinclair,
Designing Healthy Communities
.

In 1969, roughly half
:
David Darlington, “Why Johnny Can’t Ride,”
Bicycling
, April 27, 2012 (citing 2009 National Household Travel Survey statistics). This in-depth article focuses on one family’s fight for their son’s right to be able to ride his bike to school, provides keen insight into how our development patterns became so exaggerated over the years and how hard it is to walk or bike in some communities. As Darlington reports, the Council of Education Facility Planners now recommends at least twenty acres of land and another acre for every hundred students, a policy that, according to the NTHP, amounts to “the construction of giant educational facilities in remote, middle-of-nowhere locations that rule out the possibility of anyone walking to school.” As Darlington points out, the remote location is not the only reason children don’t walk: among students who lived within one mile of school, 88 percent walked or bicycled forty-three years ago; today only 38 percent do.

children are four times as likely
:
“Travel and Implications of School Siting,” Environmental Protection Agency, October 2003.

The number of trips the average child makes
:
“Mean Streets,” Surface Transportation Policy Partnership, 2000.

a telling study came out of the University of Utah
:
Ken Smith et al., University of Utah, “Walkability and Body Mass Index: Density, Design and New Diversity Measures,”
American Journal of Preventative Medicine
35, no. 3 (September 2008): 237–44.

“When there is nearly nothing”
:
Jackson and Sinclair,
Designing Healthy Communities
.

“frozen in a form of infancy”
:
Andres
Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck,
Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream
(North Point Press, 2000), p. 117.

the music video of the 1982 Rush classic “Subdivisions
:
” The author highly recommends this diversion, easily found on YouTube.

researchers at the University of California, Davis, found
:
Kristin Lovely et al., “Neighborhood Satisfaction in Suburban Versus Traditional Environments: An Evaluation of Contributing Characteristics in Eight California Neighborhoods,”
Landscape and Urban Planning
97, no. 1 (July 30, 2010): 37–48.

“I started missing not just my urban friends”
:
Linda Erin Keenan,
Suburgatory: Twisted Tales from Darkest Suburbia
(skirt!, 2012).
Suburgatory
the book is really nothing like
Suburgatory
the TV show; it’s a collection of
Onion
-style satirical news dispatches from suburbia as seen through Keenan’s hilariously observant eye. Bite-size chapters are arranged by faux headlines: “Mom Plans School Auction During Dreary Sex”; “Aspergers’ Dad ‘Hot’”; “Dad Forcibly Removed from Mall Massage Chair”; “Mom Unaware of Two American Wars”; “Dad and Hot Nanny Really ‘Just Good Friends.’” Keenan is a talent and the book is uproariously funny—it will not disappoint.

Square founder Jack Dorsey
:
Eric Savitz, “Jack Dorsey: Leadership Secrets from Twitter and Square,”
Forbes
, November 5, 2012.

Studies have shown
:
Jeffrey Tumlin,
Sustainable Transportation Planning: Tools for Creating Vibrant, Healthy, and Resilient Communities
(Wiley, 2012). Tumlin focuses on the physiological and sociological benefits of walking, like how it has been found to trigger oxytocin, the powerful neurotransmitter known as the “love hormone,” but also on the way we have evolved as a walking species. One way we are unique among mammals, Tumlin points out, is that we have a stark contrast between our iris and our sclera, or the whites of our eyes. In most animals, the sclera is camouflaged. That, Tumlin says, is by design, or rather by evolution; that contrast makes our eyes highly visible and our expressions highly readable, and it makes us better able to engage in nonverbal communication with one another at close to moderate distances.

The average suburban resident now drives
:
Jinwon Kim and David Brownstone, “The Impact of Residential Density on Vehicle Usage and Fuel Consumption,” University of California Transportation Center, University of California, Irvine, March 2010.

the average worker spends fifty-one minutes
:
U.S. Census Bureau, 2011 American Community Survey.

close to 90 percent of U.S. commuters
:
U.S. Census Bureau, 2011 American Community Survey.