The End of the Suburbs: Where the American Dream Is Moving (4 page)

Thanks in part to Al Gore, everyone now knows suburban residents pump their houses full of hot and cool air, load gas into the SUV by the tankful, and pour gallons of chemicals onto the lawn. More recently, a powerful “anti-stuff” mentality has emerged, largely as a reaction to the excessive consumption patterns that sparked our financial crisis. Home size has decreased over the past few years, while movements like the “Not So Big House,” which focuses on building slightly smaller homes that offer greater function and higher quality, and “LifeEdited,” which preaches the reduction of posessions, have gained traction. The rise of so-called collaborative consumption, meanwhile, has popularized the mass sharing of cars, homes, clothes, and more. All of these philosophies run counter to the acquisitive lifestyle of suburbia and signal a powerful shift in the consumer zeitgeist. Less is now more.

The suburbs were poorly designed to begin with.

While older suburbs were built on a different model, the modern-day American suburbs were designed in a way that went counter to thousands of years of planning theory. They spread people far from each other and their jobs (though many jobs did migrate to the suburbs over the years) and the other places they need to go every day; and they make their residents wholly reliant on their cars. The financial viability of our modern suburbs, meanwhile, was flawed from the start: the lower-density pattern of development doesn’t yield enough tax revenue to pay for the infrastructure needed to support them—one reason many municipalities are struggling or going broke.

•   •   •

P
eople have predicted the demise of the suburbs before.
The author and provocateur
James Howard Kunstler’s 1993 book,
The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-made Landscape
, called suburban development “a landscape of scary places, the geography of nowhere, that has simply ceased to be a credible human habitat.”
In an interview in the late 1990s
, the urbanist Jane Jacobs suggested that sprawling-style suburbs were going out of fashion.
A 2006 documentary,
The End of Suburbia
: Oil Depletion and the Collapse of the American Dream,
explored the potentially disastrous implications of a worldwide oil shortage on the suburban development pattern. But never have so many forces been working against conventional suburban development at the same time. The facts laid out in the pages that follow represent a slow-burning revolution, a realignment of our societal priorities, and a reversal of the fundamental social equation that’s come to define our nation. In the energy world, people talk about peak oil, the moment after which our supply of fossil fuels will begin to dwindle. After more than half a century of expansion and the housing equivalent of gas-guzzling, we may have hit peak suburb. When migration patterns are starting to head in a different direction, when the market has changed its mind on what’s valuable, when Whole Foods opens in Harlem and Toll Brothers takes over Manhattan, it’s hard to deny we’re at the beginning of a serious transformation. “
We’ve reached the limits
of suburban development,” Shaun Donovan, the secretary of Housing and Urban Development, has said.

But to say the suburbs are ending does not imply that everyone will up and relocate to city skyscrapers. Yes, cities are resurgent, but many people still want to live on a tree-lined street, have a front yard, and be able to drive to the grocery store to load up for their family of four. Schools, too, play a big role in making the suburbs attractive, and while this is now less of an issue for a variety of reasons, schools are still a major factor drawing young families to the suburbs.

Besides, some people just like their half, quarter, or whatever portion of an acre and a car. “There are certain segments of the population who would say, ‘Over my dead body am I going to live in a dense situation,’” says Jonathan Smoke, chief economist of housing industry research and publishing firm Hanley Wood, publisher of
Builder
magazine. People tend to have strong opinions about this topic on one side or the other, but of all the people I spoke to for this book, Smoke might be the most measured. A hard-data-driven market analyst, he has a deep knowledge of the mechanics of the housing industry. But Smoke also spent more than a decade working as a consultant to several home builders and as an executive in strategic planning for one of them, Beazer Homes, so he shares the perspective of big builders and understands the realities of what the American home owner wants more than most housing economists. That experience has given him what he likes to say is a more “balanced” view. Yet Smoke, too, says we’ve reached a turning point. “Bottom line, there are going to be changes,” he says.

In my quest to figure out what the future of America might mean for the future of the suburbs, and vice versa, I’ve interviewed people involved in many different aspects of the debate: I’ve talked to home builders, developers, planners, transportation engineers, home buyers, home sellers, residents of suburbs, residents of cities, residents who left the city for the suburbs, and residents who left the suburbs for the city. I’ve grilled academics, economists, architects, and psychologists; I’ve talked to toilet makers, air-conditioning suppliers, and deck builders. In exploring all the nuances of this shift, this book first explores the history of suburbia, because to understand where we’re going, it’s important to understand how we got here. It ponders the origins of the American Dream and how it came to be synonymous with a house and a yard. It seeks to explain the backlash against traditional suburban development and then in great detail lays out the many ways planners, builders, and developers are hard at work creating new kinds of neighborhoods—even within our existing suburbs—that are completely different. Finally, the book analyzes our changing priorities and the new types of homes and lifestyles Americans are looking for—because if our most popular way of life is on the wane, the next logical question is: Where will everybody go?

The night before Aron Ralston spoke at the 2012 builders’ convention, I went to a swanky party put on by Hanley Wood. While guests dined on filet mignon and sushi, recession be damned, I approached the company’s then CEO Frank Anton and asked whether he thought the suburbs were threatened. We chatted for a while; he pointed out that the most expensive real estate has always been in cities, lamenting how he can now say that firsthand after having recently put his twentysomething daughter up in a Manhattan apartment. Then he stopped and looked at me as he fully considered my argument. He gave me an imploring look. “Does the story have a happy ending?” He paused, considered what he asked, and rephrased himself: “Please,” he said, “tell me it has a happy ending.”

This story does have a happy ending. Roughly speaking, we rebuild once or twice a century in this country, and when we do, we have an opportunity to change things for the better. The new homes and communities being planned for the next phase of our development will be better suited to our needs. They will factor in the mistakes of the past to make things better for our future. They will reduce our dependency on the car. They will be developed around places where people can naturally interact with one another. They will be located closer to where we work and closer to the things we need, which will give us more time with our families and friends and more time to pursue all of the things we like to do. These changes won’t happen overnight, but they will ultimately lead to more choice, more freedom, and richer lives. And that will be a happy ending for everyone.

1

THE GREAT URBAN EXODUS

The building of houses constitutes the major architectural work of any civilization.

—LEWIS MUMFORD

People have always wanted to get out of the city. At least they have since the days of ancient Egypt, which is where scholars have traced one of the earliest known references to the suburbs. In the fourteenth century BC, wealthy suburban villas with spacious gardens south of the ancient Egyptian capital of Amarna housed estates of the city’s powerful nobles. Scholars cite later references by Cicero to
suburbani
, big estates outside of Rome, as early as the first century BC.
Historian Kenneth T. Jackson
cites a clay tablet dating from 539 BC on which a resident of the then booming Mesopotamian city-state of Ur, whose residents had started settling in the countryside, marveled to the king of Persia about how his property was “so close to Babylon that we enjoy all the advantages of the city, and yet when we come home we are away from all the noise and dust.” It wasn’t a leafy subdivision, but the appeal—to live outside the metropolis in quieter, more peaceful environs—was the same.

But even though suburbs have been with us for some time, they were, for much of history, primarily the home of the poor. Throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance, cities were the centers of culture, commerce, and the arts; merchants, politicians, and other elite members of society all lived and worked closest to the core, while the poor lived at the edges or outside the city walls (it’s still that way in many countries, like France, India, and Brazil). Of course, the upper crust did not avoid the outer regions altogether, and while the immediate fringe might have been déclassé, pure air and the countryside appealed to the wealthy just as they do today. Throughout European history the privileged classes retreated to rural settings for restoration and contemplation; think of the English manor or the Italian villa, or the wealthy Florentines who fled the plague in the 1300s by retreating to the countryside in Boccaccio’s
The Decameron
.

The modern-day suburban pattern—in which large swaths of the middle class work in the city but make their homes in comfortable neighborhoods outside it—didn’t begin to take hold until the early 1800s, when the burgeoning merchant elite in England began building estates in the countryside outside London and Manchester. After industrialization began, allowing this new upper middle class to amass great fortunes, they began moving there permanently. As wealth started to spread and cities became increasingly polluted, the middle class followed.

While the suburbs have come to symbolize something quintessentially American, early suburban development in the United States actually drew inspiration from this English model. By the early 1800s, the majority of Americans were still living on farms, but the intellectual and cultural elite had begun to cluster in our cities. Merchants, lawyers, manufacturers, and magnates built big town houses on the main thoroughfares in New York and Boston close to where they worked, while the poor lived in back alleys or courtyards nearby or on the city’s outskirts. But while they were the center of the action, cities were also crowded, noisy, and incredibly filthy. Since there was no sewage system, residents would empty chamber pots by throwing their contents out the window (think about that the next time you complain about your neighbors), leading to outbreaks of disease, not to mention stench and grime. A
New York Times
article in 1863 lamented that “the accumulation of garbage, ashes and all pollutions, the choked gutters, the reeking and deadly odors, in most of the back and side streets, is intolerable.” Things got worse as the Industrial Revolution arrived in the United States, and with the increase in population and factory pollution, cities became even grimmer.
By 1910
, the population of Manhattan reached 2.3 million—today it’s about 1.6 million—with most of those people living in tenement buildings. Some ninety thousand windowless rooms were for rent, and immigrants lived in small rooms with as many as ten people. The Lower East Side, now a trendy residential area filled with boutiques, restaurants, and bars, was one of the most crowded places in the country.

Gradually, those who could afford it started moving away from the dense and dirty downtown, and in our biggest cities pockets of nicer neighborhoods started to spring up—Greenwich Village or Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, Cambridge and Beacon Hill in Boston, Germantown in Philadelphia.
In 1814
in New York, the arrival of the steam ferry soon led to the colonization of Brooklyn Heights, just across the East River, considered the first large-scale commuter suburb.

As they would over the course of suburbia’s history, advances in transportation technology soon delivered us at faster speeds to farther-flung places, each innovation enabling a new phase of development. Stagecoaches and ferries gave way to horse-drawn streetcars, then horse-drawn railroads, and by the 1830s the first steam-powered railroads. Gradually, in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, and San Francisco, the wealthy began settling in enclaves that formed around these railroad stations.
By 1849
there were fifty-nine commuter trains running from Boston. The population of New York City’s Westchester County doubled between 1850 and 1870, then doubled again by 1890, and again by 1910. This was, of course, thanks in large part to Grand Central Station, which opened in 1871 as Grand Central Depot and granted easy access to midtown Manhattan from its northern suburbs. Suburbs were blossoming in Chicago, too, where a local newspaper hailed the opportunity for businessmen to “avail themselves of the beautiful quiet of a country residence without shortening the number of hours usually devoted to their daily avocations.”

Soon the railroad gave way to electric-powered streetcars, which were easier and cheaper to build, so they spread out wider and faster. Towns started to emerge around streetcar stations, forming now-iconic places like Medford outside Boston, Oakland outside San Francisco, Shaker Heights outside Cleveland, and thousands of other communities. Each of these early railroad and streetcar suburbs was unique, but they were similar in one important way: their design was compact. In the pre-automobile era, suburban residents had to walk once they disembarked from the railroad or streetcar, so houses needed to be located within a reasonable distance to the station. So while these early suburbanites lived in individual, single-family houses—that was, after all, the whole appeal of leaving the city—homes were built close together. Entrepreneurial shopkeepers and service providers set up their storefronts around the station, where pedestrian traffic was likely to be highest. The result was a village center with a grid-shaped street pattern that emerged organically around the day-to-day needs and walking patterns of the people who lived there. Urban planners describe these neighborhoods as having “vibrancy” or “experiential richness” because, without even trying, their design promoted activity, foot traffic, commerce, and socializing.

Even while these suburbs replicated urban villages, a separate vision was emerging that saw the suburbs as tranquil, pastoral places that more closely represented the country. Two seminal developments in the mid-1800s broke the gridded village mold in search of this new, more romanticized ideal: Llewellyn Park in West Orange, New Jersey, conceived by New York businessman Llewellyn Haskell and designed by Alexander Jackson Davis, and Riverside outside Chicago, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, the well-known landscape architect who had just designed New York City’s Central Park. Both developments were railroad-accessible suburbs meant to be bedroom communities for the ultra wealthy, but bearing the more bucolic imprint of landscape architects as opposed to the rigidity of urban planners, both rejected the right angles of conventional planning in favor of winding streets and hilly, natural terrain.
Riverside’s streets were specifically designed
, as Olmsted put it, with “gracefully curved lines, generous spaces and the absence of sharp corners . . . the idea being to suggest and imply leisure, contemplativeness and happy tranquility.”

But with these and other country-inspired enclaves, social and intellectual life was still rooted in the city. Most suburban residents not only worked in the cities but socialized, shopped, and dined there. So while a natural village life did emerge in new residential areas, the city was still the heart of the community; the suburbs were its limbs.

It wasn’t until Henry Ford gave the middle class wheels that everything changed. The first Model T rolled off the line in 1908 for $850 ($22,000 in today’s dollars); four years later its price dropped to less than $700. This newfound mobility was like a drug; once people tried it, they were hooked.
Automobile registrations
went from eight thousand in 1905 to more than seventeen million by 1925.
Even during the Great Depression
, many Americans were more likely to part with some other necessity than give up their car. As one farm woman famously told an inspector from the U.S. Department of Agriculture who’d inquired why she had a car but no running water in her house: “You can’t get to town in a bathtub.”

Motorized transport presented untold opportunity for suburban development, allowing households to spread out wider and faster, but it also posed new challenges—namely, the introduction of car traffic into residential communities.
In the early 1900s, a planner named Clarence Perry
came up with a solution for this, a new design for suburban neighborhoods that would limit the traffic going through them. He replaced the traditional street grid pattern with a network of separate, self-contained, almost pod-like communities, each populated with enough families to support a local elementary school. These discrete “neighborhood units” would contain only houses and schools and therefore draw only local traffic, and their streets were specifically designed to minimize and slow car speed by making use of cul-de-sacs and T intersections. All other traffic would be kept outside the unit on fast-moving arterial roads that would connect the neighborhoods and also host retail and commercial activity. Perry thought this plan would benefit everyone: it would excise fast-moving “cut-through” traffic from residential neighborhoods, while still allowing residents to access stores outside their neighborhoods on their trips to and from work. Retailers and businesses, meanwhile, would be better positioned to serve multiple communities at once from the connector roads that exposed them to higher volumes of traffic.

While Llewellyn Park and Riverside were the first suburbs developed with a deliberate country-like feel, Perry’s neighborhood unit marked the first suburban layout designed specifically around the car. One of the first communities to bear Perry’s imprint was Radburn, New Jersey. Developed in 1929 (by another Clarence, Clarence Stein), Radburn was, as its developers proudly proclaimed, a “town for the motor age.” The purpose of the neighborhood unit and its implementation in places like Radburn was traffic safety, but it represented a radical revision of traditional town planning principles, and it would leave an indelible imprint on American suburbia.

The widespread adoption of the car by the middle class, providing individual mobility to everyone anywhere, anytime, forever transformed the arrangement of our landscape, as developers were finally untethered from the constraints of public transportation.
As the influential urban historian
and sociologist Lewis Mumford would later write in his 1961 book,
The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects
, “As long as the railroad stop and walking distances controlled suburban growth, the suburb had form.” The automobile suddenly unhooked us from the need to keep communities compact, the freeways soon gave us unfettered access, and there was land as far as the eye could see.

From 1921 to 1936, the “golden age of highway building
” saw the construction of more than 420,000 miles of roads in the United States, opening up fresh stretches of land for suburbanization and kick-starting what you could call our first housing boom.
Between 1923 and 1927, new homes were built
at a pace of almost nine hundred thousand per year;
from 1920 to 1930
, according to Jackson in
Crabgrass Frontier
, the suburbs of the nation’s ninety-six largest cities grew twice as fast as the cities themselves. And soon, they would grow even faster.

•   •   •

B
y 1945, America had two big, related problems. The first was a housing market that had been nearly dead for fifteen years. During the Depression, development froze, and during the war, all resources went to the military effort.
For twenty years, housing starts averaged
fewer than 400,000 per year, down from a peak of 937,000 in 1925. The second problem was that as soon as the war ended, thanks to an onslaught of returning veterans and an ensuing surge in the birth rate, Americans needed homes again, and a lot of them.

But because construction had stagnated for so long, there was nowhere for people to go.
The housing shortage was so severe
that by 1947 six million families were doubling up with relatives or friends, and another half million were occupying temporary quarters like mobile homes, barns, and garages. Kenneth Jackson, the historian, remembers his family moving in with his grandparents. “That was our situation, with four kids,” he says. “I remember sleeping in a dining room.”

The crisis was so acute that the government intervened. In 1934, after the Great Depression caused a spike in home foreclosures, the government had created the Federal Housing Administration, a new agency whose purpose was to stimulate lending in order to jump-start the ailing housing market. It did this by insuring long-term mortgage loans made by private lenders, which had a transformative effect. Before the Depression, mortgages were short-term and so expensive, covering only a small percentage of the home purchase price, that only the wealthy could afford paying so much up front for the cost of a home. But with the new government backing, private lenders were suddenly willing to lend on much more generous terms, extending the length of the loan to twenty and then thirty years and ultimately lending more than 90 percent of the cost of the home to buyers. The modern-day long-term fixed-rate mortgage was born, making it possible for almost anyone to get a home loan.
The mortgage interest tax deduction, a by-product
of the 1913 law that established the federal income tax—and still one of the biggest incentives for home ownership to this day—provided a welcome assist. Then in 1944, the government passed the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act, otherwise known as the GI Bill, which provided low-interest, zero-down-payment loans to millions of veterans.