Christopher Leinberger, the author and scholar and one of the most influential voices in the city-suburb debate, has been called an elitist and a socialist for his pro-urbanist positions. Even rabble-rouser and anti-sprawl proselytizer James Howard Kunstler acknowledges that the suburban status quo is a mighty force. “So many generations of Americans are used to it, and it has become so normal, that there’s going to be a tremendous struggle to maintain it,” he says.
These struggles are already playing out in many places as communities attempt to make changes. The resistance is particularly vocal in the Washington, DC, area, perhaps because the region is leading the country in efforts to urbanize its suburbs. In Maryland, a showdown is going on between not-in-my-backyard suburban residents and the local government, which has approved the construction of a $1.6 billion new light rail line that would connect Bethesda and New Carrollton. In Prince George’s County, residents are fighting a new town center that would include a Whole Foods despite the fact that it would bring hundreds of jobs to the area. In Lower Merion, Pennsylvania, meanwhile, during a debate over rezoning the town’s main commercial strip to accommodate apartment towers, some residents said they objected because it didn’t “fit their image” of suburbia.
A more legitimate argument than any of these might be that we are a free market, and suburban living is what many people choose. Even as the government was putting in place the policy building blocks that would push the country toward a suburban settlement pattern, we devoured and demanded more of it. “This is a free country,” says Leinberger. “We wanted it. This was a market-based trend.” The American home-building industry is perhaps the most responsive consumer-product industry of all, with an uncanny ability to read and deliver what its customers want—and, for the most part (the Wall Street–generated demand of the housing crisis notwithstanding), it builds houses that are in direct response to what Americans are asking them for. So in many ways, like it or not, the suburbs are a reflection of us.
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Besides, if the suburbs as we know them are over, then what on earth will the future look like? It’s hard to tell what the country will do because we are still, as of this writing, only starting to emerge from an epic housing freeze. Household formation is picking up, but it’s still much lower than it needs to be, and for all the talk about where Americans are moving, we’re not moving anywhere right now. New single-family home construction is still way off from its peak. We have the lowest level of migration since the end of World War II.
Even so, after so many false starts, a housing market recovery is beginning to take real shape. Starting in late 2012 and continuing into 2013, sales of both new and existing homes showed signs of rebounding, while inventories have come down significantly and home prices seem to be on their way up from the bottom. The annual builders’ show in 2013 in Las Vegas stood in marked contrast to the show in the dark days of February 2012 when Aron Ralston spooked the crowd. This year, the mood was one of hopeful optimism; the attendees arrived in Las Vegas just as positive data came out showing that single-family housing starts had climbed 18.5 percent in December and new home sales were on track for a 20 percent–plus increase over 2011’s rock bottom. Vendors showed off high-tech gadgetry like hands-free faucets, touch-screen dead bolts, and elevators aimed at multigenerational households. Learning their lesson from last year, the conference organizers went in a sunnier direction, securing Michael Eisner, the former CEO of the Walt Disney Company, as the keynote speaker, and ordering up a comedic performance by the political satire troupe the Capitol Steps.
But things are still far from rosy, and where the market heads when things kick back up again is the billion-dollar question. There is almost unanimous consensus that a higher proportion of building is likely to be closer to centers of jobs, entertainment, and lifestyle needs. You can glean some indication of this by looking at the current bright spots in the housing market. One of the hottest areas is in multifamily construction—the market for apartment and condo buildings and other structures containing four or more housing units, whether in cities or in suburbs. Construction of this kind of housing has more than doubled since the housing crisis set in. Part of this growth is due to a boom in the market for rental housing. The number of renters surged by more than five million in the 2000s, the largest ten-year increase since World War II. Vacancy rates are down and rents are soaring across the country, even in markets with lots of foreclosures. The vast majority of multifamily housing starts these days are rentals, whereas in the height of the housing crisis they were predominantly condos for sale.
Meanwhile, the urbanization of the suburbs has only just begun. It’s not just New Urbanists and other urban or “green” activists that are preaching this idea. Traditional planners, academics, and even home builders and real estate developers are coming to this way of thinking, too, as evidenced by the hundreds of walkable developments going up around the country—many being planned and developed by the biggest traditional home builders. Whether it’s a massive town center complex like Rick Caruso’s mega-centers in Los Angeles, or traditional villages based on 1800s town planning principles, or Toll Brothers’ recent plans to build a seven-story luxury condo building in downtown Bethesda, Maryland, three blocks from the train station, there has been a shift in the residential development world away from distance and toward proximity. Even though almost no one walks everywhere and you will likely still have to get in the car, in places like these it becomes a matter of driving a mile or two instead of ten or twenty; or maybe it means a household can own one car instead of two. Shyam Kannan, formerly a principal at real estate consultancy Robert Charles Lesser & Co. and now managing director of planning at the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA), describes this as an entire paradigm shift in real estate. “We’re moving from location, location, location in terms of the most important factor to access, access, access,” he says. People in the industry insist this is more than a trend; it is a lasting transformation.
Indeed, one of the biggest challenges going forward is likely to be that there aren’t enough places with these characteristics to suit the coming demand. Christopher Leinberger estimates that “drivable” suburbia still represents as much as 95 percent of the housing market. But he has found that, surprisingly, a minority of the “walkable urban” housing inventory is in central cities; the majority of it is in the suburbs already, and that, he says, is where the bulk of the change will take place.
Demand for these kinds of neighborhoods within the suburbs is indeed surging. You can see it in real estate prices, which are falling in remote, car-dependent suburbs but holding steady in those that are more compact. Studies explored in the previous pages have demonstrated a link between neighborhood walkability and stronger housing prices. Real estate agents now tend to play up these attributes, talking up Walk Scores and “community” and in many cases focusing on selling in the very neighborhoods that were passé during the heyday of the sprawling 1990s and early 2000s. “What was perceived as a niche market has become the market,” says Leinberger.
William Lucy, the professor of urban and environmental planning at the University of Virginia who studied the housing market’s demographic imbalances, has also conducted research establishing a telling connection between real estate prices and the age of a neighborhood’s housing stock. Traditionally, newer housing has held up better and maintained a higher value, while the market has historically tended to assign lower values to older housing. (There are many reasons why Americans prefer new construction, but those of us who think old stone homes are the most charming are in the very small minority.) Lucy found that in the mid-1990s, during the height of suburban expansion, in half of the thirty-two metropolitan areas he studied, the oldest houses—those built before 1940—were also the least valued ones. But in 2010, that was true only in three out of thirty-five markets—and in six markets, including Washington, DC, and Seattle, the oldest houses were the most valuable. Along with a s
hift in priorities that has led more people to see the virtues in smaller homes and less stuff, Lucy’s research shows a similar reversal in value between old and new; older has taken on greater worth. Lucy argues that this is driven not by these houses’ charming older bones and better construction, but by their location, since older homes tend to be located in older, closer-in, village-oriented suburbs. This, Lucy argues, is what the market wants now.
The simple ability to walk to town is a big reason why Denise Gibson and her family are moving from a sixty-two-hundred-square-foot house on a one-acre lot in Long Grove, Illinois, to School Street, John McLinden’s innovative new suburban village in nearby Libertyville. Gibson and her husband were “on the McMansion track,” she says, living in a house with six bedrooms, a three-car garage, a circular driveway, and a two-story great room. But over time, Gibson, a retired telecommunications CEO, came to feel that everything about her living situation was a bit unnatural: the scale of the homes, the distance between them, and the fact that she had to get in her car for everything. “You drive absolutely everywhere,” she says. “And your children don’t play with other children unless you schedule playdates.”
Gibson and her husband decided they would move to downtown Libertyville, to a home where they could walk to the town’s Main Street. She’d heard about McLinden’s development but thought it seemed too “radical” since the homes didn’t have full yards. But when her realtor showed her the community of bungalow-style homes right next to one another, she was intrigued, and when she and her husband toured one of the houses more seriously a few days later, she was sold. One of the things that clinched the deal for Gibson was when one of the neighborhood’s residents invited her into her kitchen after their tour. “In ten years I can count on one hand how many times I’ve stood in a neighbor’s kitchen” in Long Grove, Gibson says.
A growing number of suburban Americans are craving more of those kind of moments. Stories like Gibson’s and others suggest that the future of our suburbs might come down to a survival of the fittest. There are, after all, plenty of livelier suburbs out there. In 2010, Travel and Leisure magazine published a list of the nation’s twenty-six “coolest suburbs,” towns like Evanston, Illinois; Montclair, New Jersey; Lakewood, Ohio; Bellevue, Washington; Alameda, California; La Jolla, California; West Hartford, Connecticut; Birmingham, Michigan; and more. Every one of them had a thriving Main Street and all its requisite components: coffeehouses, cool bookstores, restaurants, indie movie theaters. In a recent travel section write-up, the New York Daily News called my hometown of Media, Pennsylvania, “as lively as a pop-up book,” which is indeed an apt description and probably would apply to many of these “cool” suburbs, too—as the New York Times has called them, “hipsturbias.”
You can also see a glimpse of the future in our “first ring” suburbs, the older suburbs that fell out of favor during the sprawl boom of the ’80s, ’90s, and 2000s as migration kept moving outward. These suburbs, many now populated by blue-collar workers after the wealthy headed out, are seeing a second life in many markets as millennials—those who are starting off on their own—flock to them. They’re attracted to these neighborhoods’ smaller-scale houses, more intimate feel, sidewalks, and traditional street grids (think the neighborhood Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper lived in in the movie Silver Linings Playbook). “Millennials want my childhood without my immigrant-accented grandparents,” one boomer parent wrote in a comment to a Wall Street Journal article on the trend, “. . . art deco–inspired small homes within walking distance to the grocer, the ice cream shop, hardware store and local movie theater all owned by my neighbors. It was a special time.” In Pittsburgh, the former rust belt inner-ring suburbs like Lawrenceville and Dormont are seeing a second life as enclaves for twenty- and thirtysomethings. One of Pittsburgh’s first middle-class suburbs, Dormont has a housing stock of attached row houses and small single-family homes, all within walking distance to a downtown that is getting filled with eateries, cafés, and services. It’s a fifteen-minute commute to downtown Pittsburgh by the T. Pittsburgh magazine proclaimed it as “where hipsters go to have kids.” Los Angeles and Detroit’s inner rings are seeing similar gentrification among this demographic.
These communities, right down to their street width, mix of housing stock, and setback distances, are precisely what the New Urbanists take great care to study and re-create. “The good news is, we have the model,” says the developer Jonathan Rose, who helped redevelop Morristown, New Jersey, and modeled the project after the components of historic streetcar and railroad suburbs. “We don’t need to reinvent it. We know it. The model is Shaker Heights, Ohio, and Garden City, New York, and Stamford, Connecticut. The model is the streetcar.”
As the country resettles along more urbanized lines, some suggest the future may look more like a patchwork of nodes: mini urban areas all over the country connected to one another with a range of public transit options. It’s not unlike the dense settlement of the Northeast already, where city-suburbs like Stamford, Greenwich, West Hartford, and others exist in relatively close proximity. “The differences between cities and suburbs are diminishing ,” says Brookings’ Metropolitan Policy Program director Bruce Katz, noting that cities and suburbs are also becoming more alike racially, ethically, and socioeconomically. Katz sees the sea change hitting the suburbs as a long-overdue correction. “The United States was so completely out of balance,” he says. “We were so pro-sprawl, pro-decentralization, and so auto-dependent,” he points out, that the development pattern was unsustainable from an energy perspective. “What’s happening now is that we’re becoming more in balance,” he says, citing the increased prevalence of the “urban form” in many suburbs.
There are twists on this idea floating out there in “thought leader” circles, and many experts are attempting to categorize, label, and identify the precise areas the development industry should focus on for the future. Demetri Baches is an urban planner and former director at Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company who now runs a planning consultancy called Metrocology out of Beaufort, South Carolina. Baches argues that 30 to 40 percent of suburban residents will stay where they are while the rest—the people who were “forced into suburbia” because they had children, couldn’t afford cities, and there was nowhere else to go—will move to new kinds of markets. Baches thinks a major potential area of growth for this group is smaller cities, those with populations between ten thousand and three hundred thousand, like Augusta, Georgia, and Charleston and Greenville, South Carolina. He calls these places “Top Tier Towns” because they offer the best of both worlds: a high quality of life and an urbane and connected lifestyle, within a locally grounded place that’s “easy to get one’s arms around.” These places “punch above their weight,” he says—and they are the future.
Others are betting on a reconcentration in the opposite direction: huge cities. In their book Megapolitan America, Arthur C. Nelson and Robert E. Lang point out that America is not as sparse as we think; our population is concentrated in a small number of large urban regions. The authors foresee a reconcentration of the country into twenty-three massive megapolitan areas and argue that those dense areas should claim the lion’s share of planners’ attention and public investment. America 2050, a think tank arm of the Regional Plan Association, takes a similar approach, suggesting new population centers around eleven mega-regions in the United States and Canada, including Piedmont Atlantic, the Texas Triangle, and the Great Lakes region.
What everyone agrees on is that things are going to change. “If demographics hold the course—and nobody can see any reason why they won’t—and the price of energy stays at least as high as it’s been,” says Scott Bernstein, the director of the Chicago-based Center for Neighborhood Technology and pioneer of the location-efficient mortgage, “then we should get serious about building a very different kind of housing stock.”
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That, of course, raises the question: What will happen to all those ext
ra houses we built over the years? The answer has developers, land-use planners, housing economists, and home builders racking their brains. Some foreclosed McMansions in exurbs are finding creative new second lives as things like film collectives, rehab centers, art galleries, or, in Merced, California, dorms for college students. Coeds at the University of California, Merced, have been filling up emptied-out luxury home subdivisions in a trend the New York Times called “Animal House, 2011.” In other pockets of California, foreclosed homes are being used as marijuana grow houses, becoming a life-imitating-art incarnation of the Showtime series Weeds. Some creative underwater owners of multimillion-dollar properties are renting out rooms for the night to help pay the now-inflated mortgage. In still other developments, foreclosed McMansions are being bought up by extended immigrant families in what experts say could become a viable use for many subdivisions if there’s enough demand.
An increasing number of housing experts are coming to believe that the glut of extra homes in the most remote exurbs is simply too large for these clever and creative uses, and that these subdivisions will ultimately become slums. The demand for these vacated homes from traditional buyers, that argument goes, is not likely to come back. It’s possible prices could fall to a point where the homes become so affordable that it would be irrational for any housing consumer not to consider them attractive. But if demand doesn’t pick up even then, they could become the next location of affordable housing, snatched up by landlords and converted into duplexes, triplexes, and apartments. Many zoning laws prohibit the subdivision of single-family homes, but if the demand is great enough, the market may force a change. Ever since the FHA proposed turning this shadow inventory into rentals, private investors have been swooping in and buying up portfolios of hundreds of foreclosed-upon homes with the intent of renting them out. But since so many of these neighborhoods are located far away from urban centers, some say the only way the houses can become inhabitable and therefore financially viable will be if new communities spring up nearby to offer residents local employment.
The End of the Suburbs: Where the American Dream Is Moving Page 19