The End of the Suburbs: Where the American Dream Is Moving (3 page)

Poverty has invaded the burbs.

Americans started moving to the suburbs because they considered them safe, happy enclaves where they could escape the crime and poverty of cities. But this has become an increasingly false characterization.
A series of groundbreaking studies by the Brookings Institution
has shined a light on one of the most striking trends in our society in recent years—the sharp rise of poverty levels in the suburbs. As of 2010, a record 15.3 million suburban residents were living below the poverty line in the largest metropolitan areas, up 11.5 percent from the year prior and 53 percent from 2000. The overall poverty rate is still lower in the suburbs than in cities, but during the decade, the growth rate in the number of poor living in the suburbs studied was more than twice that of cities—and the suburbs are now home to the largest and fastest-growing poor population in the country. Perhaps not surprisingly, crime rates are following similar patterns, with
new data showing
that homicides are falling sharply in cities and rising in suburbs.

Cities are resurgent.

As poverty has invaded the suburbs, wealth has rushed back into cities. If you’ve visited New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, or just about any other American city lately, you don’t need more proof that they are booming. Real estate prices are soaring, development is cranking, and once-blighted neighborhoods are now yuppified. This is well-trod territory; in media and “thought leader” circles, cities have become the equivalent of fashion’s new black, with a torrent of books lauding their resurgence. But it’s a remarkable shift, especially considering the growing ranks of young families—the demographic mainstay of suburbia—now electing to stay in cities. In New York, Tribeca is now called Triburbia, and in Center City Philadelphia,
a former strip club
has been turned into a Daddy Day Care center. In the building world, the construction of “multifamily” housing—apartment and condo buildings—is booming, while the construction of single-family homes still lags.

Retailers, experts when it comes to following moneyed consumers wherever they go, are all over this: hardly any suburban shopping malls have been built in the United States since 2006, and big-box chains are packing up, slimming down, and squeezing smaller versions of themselves into cities and denser communities.
Walmart plans to open
one hundred of its new small-scale Neighborhood Market stores in 2012, triple the pace of 2011.
Target, which for years
relied on the suburbs for its growth, is focusing its efforts on its smaller-concept urban store called City. Whole Foods, meanwhile, that emblem of yuppification, is opening a new location in Harlem. Even PetSmart has a new urban chain, called—wait for it—Unleashed.

The biggest suburban home builders are making a play for cities, too. Toll Brothers, which became one of the nation’s biggest home builders by building luxury homes in suburbia, is in the midst of an aggressive expansion into New York City with dozens of new properties in neighborhoods ranging from the most exclusive blocks of Manhattan’s Upper East Side to hipster enclaves like Brooklyn’s DUMBO (the acronym for the industrial-chic neighborhood named Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass).
New York is “our hottest market by far
,” Toll Brothers CEO Douglas Yearley has said.

While these moves offer solid evidence that we are moving away from the burbs as we’ve known them, other trends indicate the likelihood that this is more than just a cyclical or reactionary fluke.

Our households are shrinking.

Today, only half of all adults
in the United States are married, down from nearly three-quarters in 1960. And fewer people are having kids:
families with children
used to make up more than half of U.S. households, but by 2025 they’ll represent just a quarter, and, strikingly, we’ll have as many single-person households as families. The suburbs are built for life with kids, and we’re not having nearly as many of them. There are a variety of reasons for this that we’ll explore later, but the implication is the same: “The whole Ozzie and Harriet day has passed,” says Peter Calthorpe, the San Francisco–based architect and urban planner who pioneered the notion of transit-oriented development and who, as a cofounder of the New Urbanism movement, is one of the leading thinkers on alternative growth models to conventional suburban development.

Millennials hate the burbs . . .

America’s eighty million so-called millennials
, defined for the purposes of this book as those born between 1977 and 1995, are an enormous group—bigger than the baby boomers. As such, they’re more poked, prodded, and studied than any generation. As of this writing, record numbers of the older segment of them—those that are in their early twenties and older—are still living with their parents, which presents its own problem for the economy since it creates a big logjam in the normal housing cycle. But here’s the bigger problem: studies show that when millennials do leave their parents’ homes, they don’t want anything to do with the kinds of suburbs they grew up in.
Seventy-seven percent
of them prefer to live in an urban area, and whether that means an inner city or an urbanized small town or suburb, one thing it doesn’t mean is the kinds of homes that will be left for them in conventional suburbia.
Arthur C. Nelson
, director of the Metropolitan Research Center at the University of Utah, has forecast that based on these changing demographic forces and a shift in consumer demand, there will be a surplus of as many as forty million large-lot homes—those on a sixth of an acre or more—in the United States by 2020.

. . . And they hate cars even more.

Millennials may also be the first generation of young people since the automobile was invented to be indifferent about cars and driving.
In 1980, 66 percent
of all seventeen-year-olds had their driver’s license. In 2010, the figure was 47 percent, a sharp and perplexing decline that has been discussed and dissected by millennial watchers and carmakers alike. The notion of a teenager opting to not get his driver’s license, to those of us who grew up in a different time, may seem sacrilege. But watch them fawn over their Apple products and you will see that this generation, as Steve Jobs encouraged them to do, “thinks different.” They don’t want cars, and they don’t want cul-de-sacs—two of the pillars on which suburban life depends.

The price of oil is still
rising.

As energy prices have climbed, so has the cost of the suburban commute.
In 2008, the average suburban household spent double on gas
what it did in 2003. Many suburban families now spend half their income on housing and transportation costs. Since houses are cheaper the farther they are from urban centers, lower-income suburban households can very easily spend more on transportation than on their mortgage or rent. Economists say the cost of distance is starting to get baked into housing prices, sending valuations down in remote housing markets. The rising cost of energy is also starting to impact our behavior:
for most of the last fifty years
, the number of miles driven has increased with every year. In 2007, those numbers peaked and have been declining since. Some experts have attributed this to the recession, but the decline started before the recession and before gas prices spiked, and it’s happening even at higher income levels.
This shift is major
, and one
The Atlantic
pointed to in proclaiming “The Beginning of the End for Suburban America.”

We are eco-obsessed.