In St. Louis, an old abandoned: These look pretty great. See www.warehouse7lofts.com.
In Boston, a West Coast development firm: Casey Ross, “West Coast Firm Takes on Fort Point,” Boston Globe, October 20, 2011.
In 1975, the New York Daily News: New York Daily News front-page headline, “Ford to City: Drop Dead,” October 30, 1975.
In Philadelphia, much of the population increase: U.S. Census Bureau; also, “Philadelphia: The State of the City, a 2012 Update,” Pew Charitable Trusts and the Philadelphia Research Initiative, 2012.
She listed ten more benefits: Daily’s full list of things she likes most about living in Boston is here, verbatim:
-Access to museums for quick visits (kid-length)
-Fun, quick access to free events—fireworks, free music, cliff diving (Red Bull sponsored a contest last weekend where people dove off the top of the Institute of Contemporary Art into Boston Harbor)
-People visiting town—easier to see extended network of people
-I’m still living my life—e.g., restaurants, music
-Access to sports—friends with tickets they can’t use for professional sports are frequently offered to us b/c we can use them on a last-minute basis
-More time by not having to take care of a house
-Not more expensive, just a trade-off of space (vs. a house in the suburbs)
-kids get a lot of activity—lot of walking, parks, even in winter
-Internet shopping makes things much easier (can’t imagine not having that!)
-Can get groceries delivered (I don’t do this all the time)
Walmart has said it is planning “hundreds”: Laura Heller, “Hundreds of Small Walmarts Are Coming Soon,” Daily Finance, March 11, 2011, and Tom Ryan, “Walmart’s View from 15,000 Square Feet,” Retailwire.com, March 14, 2011; store info at corporate.walmart.com.
By 2016 Best Buy plans: Zach Honig, “Best Buy to Close 50 Big Box U.S. Retail Stores, Open 100 Mobile Stand-Alone Outlets in 2013,” engadget.com, March 29, 2012.
Even Target: Matt Townsend, “Target’s City Ambitions,” Bloomberg Businessweek, May 31, 2012.
“You have a massive rush throughout retail”: Miguel Bustillo, “As Big Boxes Shrink, They Also Rethink,” Wall Street Journal, March 3, 2011.
As of this writing, JCPenney: Lois Weiss, “Penney Shines Images with Lafayette Lease,” New York Post, May 2, 2012.
in 2007, United Airlines left: “United Airlines Moving Its Headquarters to the Willis Tower,” Chicago Tribune, August 13, 2012.
This year, Hillshire Brands: Hillshire Brands 10K report.
Motorola Mobility is shuttering: Sandra Guy, “Motorola Mobility Leaving Libertyville for Merchandise Mart,” suntimes.com, July 26, 2012.
“The whole corporate campus seems”: Eddie Baeb, “Crain’s Special Report: Corporate Campuses in Twilight,” Crain’s Chicago Business, May 30, 2011.
In New York City, UBS: Charles V. Bagli, “Regretting Move, Bank May Return to Manhattan,” New York Times, June 8, 2011.
Twitter, Zynga, Airbnb, Dropbox: A notable exception to the tech moguls’ fascination with cities is Steve Jobs, who lived and worked his whole life in the suburbs (he lived in a Tudor house in Palo Alto, and Apple’s headquarters were in nearby Cupertino). But when Apple-owned Pixar moved to a new headquarters in Emeryville, California, Jobs pushed the designers to emphasize central locations where employees could mingle with one another with the hope of fostering creativity. Another exception is Mark Zuckerberg, who has built Facebook’s headquarters into a massive campus in Menlo Park, but one that attempts to approximate urbanism, with a walkable commercial strip that includes a dry cleaner, gym, doctor’s office, and various eateries.
Zappos, the online shoe giant: Leigh Gallagher, “Tony Hsieh’s New $350 Million Startup,” Fortune.com, January 23, 2012.
In keeping with the findings of: Glaeser found that, for example, that innovation happens faster in cities because proximity to others breeds creativity. Ideas, Glaeser said in his book Triumph of the City, “cross corridors and streets more easily than continents and seas.” He writes of a contagion or osmosis effect that occurs when people work in close physical proximity to others in their field. He writes that studies of patents bear this out, showing that patents have a tendency to cite other patents that are geographically close. Productivity is higher in cities, too: doubling density rates, Glaeser found, raises overall productivity anywhere from 6 to 28 percent.
For most of the 1970s, the trend in stadium construction: David Dobkin, “Fair or Foul?: Ballparks and Their Impact on Urban Revitalization,” Panorama, 2011. All of the information in this paragraph comes from Dobkin, including the informal list he put together for me of ballparks built since 1990.
It was a seminal moment in sports: Mark Byrnes, “The Islanders’ Move: A Harbinger of Suburban Decline?” theatlanticcities.com, November 9, 2012.
as early as 2005, the suburban poor: Alan Berube and Elizabeth Kneebone, “Two Steps Back: City and Suburban Poverty Trends, 1999–2005,” Brookings Institution, 2006.
“We think of poverty as a really urban phenomenon”: Tami Luhby, “Poverty Pervades the Suburbs,” CNNMoney.com, September 23, 2011. Elizabeth Kneebone and Alan Berube, Confronting Suburban Poverty in America (Brookings Institution Press, 2013).
nearly three-quarters of suburban nonprofits: Scott W. Allard and Benjamin Roth, “Strained Suburbs: The Social Service Challenges of Rising Suburban Poverty,” Brookings Institution, October 7, 2010.
In Grand Rapids, Michigan: Theresa Everline, “Surviving Suburbia,” Next American City, no. 27, 2010.
In Long Island’s Suffolk County: “Struggling in the Suburbs,” New York Times, July 7, 2012.
“Soaring poverty rates threaten”: Lisa McGirr, “The New Suburban Poverty,” nytimes.com, March 19, 2012.
In 2012 federal prosecutors in northern Virginia: Pierre Thomas and Marisa Taylor, “Gang Members Arrested on Charges of Sex Trafficking Suburban Teens,” abcnews.go.com, March 31, 2012.
After a tragic gang rape: Aliyah Shahid, “Girl, 11, Lured into Park Bathroom in Moreno Valley, Calif. and Gang Raped by 7 Teens: Cops,” New York Daily News, March 29, 2011.
While overall homicides: Cameron McWhirter and Gary Fields, “Crime Migrates to Suburbs,” Wall Street Journal, December 30, 2012. Many of the nation’s highest-profile shootings have occurred in the suburbs as well, from Columbine to Aurora, Colorado, to, of course, the horrific shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, on December 14, 2012. The urban scholar Richard Florida studied data from mass shootings in recent years and found that, while the data does not cover every single episode and the geographic information is limited, the “wide majority” of such shootings, and especially mass school killings, have occurred not in urban centers of large cities but in the “small towns, burgs and villages of our suburban and rural areas.” (See “Gun Violence Is an Everywhere Issue,” theatlanticcities.com, December 15, 2012.) The data shows that like other kinds of crime, gun violence is as much a suburban problem as an urban one.
Only one enclosed indoor shopping mall has opened in the United States since 2006: Kris Hudson and Vanessa O’Connell, “Recession Turns Malls into Ghost Towns,” Wall Street Journal, May 22, 2009.
Cleveland’s Galleria at Erieview: Stephanie Clifford, “How about Gardening or Golfing at the Mall?” New York Times, February 5, 2012.
Ellen Dunham-Jones: See Ellen Dunham-Jones and June Williamson, Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs (Wiley, 2011). Also see Dunham-Jones’s TED talk on the subject at ted.com.
The number of restaurants: William Neuman, “Slicing Costs, and Still Serving,” New York Times, December 27, 2011.
crop prices had soared . . . Don England Jr.: Robbie Whelan, “U.S. Farmers Reclaim Land from Developers,” Wall Street Journal, November 14, 2011.
In a seminal article published in 1987, the Poppers argued: Deborah Epstein Popper and Frank J. Popper, “The Great Plai
ns: From Dust to Dust,” Planning magazine, December 1987.
The controversy around their idea inspired: Richard S. Wheeler, The Buffalo Commons (Tor Books, 2000); Anne Matthews, Where the Buffalo Roam: Restoring America’s Great Plains (University of Chicago Press, 2002); The Fate of the Plains (Nebraska Educational Television, 1995); Facing the Storm: Story of the American Bison (PBS, 2010).
started endorsing their idea: “New National Park Could Save High Plains in Kansas,” Kansas City Star, November 15, 2009.
Now the Poppers also study shrinkage: Deborah E. Popper and Frank J. Popper, “New England and the Subtracted City,” Communities & Banking, Spring 2011; Deborah E. Popper and Frank J. Popper, “Planning on Shrinking,” Shelterforce, Spring 2011.
Buffalo, they point out: Deborah Popper and Frank Popper, “Smart Decline in Post-Carbon Cities: The Buffalo Commons Meets Buffalo, New York,” in The Post Carbon Reader Series: Cities, Towns, and Suburbs, edited by Richard Heinberg and Daniel Lerch (Watershed Media Press, September 2010), p. 3.
Justin Hollander: Justin B. Hollander et al., “The New American Ghost Towns,” Land Lines, Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, April 2011.
In California’s San Bernardino County: “9 Worst Recession Ghost Towns in America,” Thefiscaltimes.com, August 3, 2011.
Wall Street giants like Blackstone Group: Janet Morrissey, “Big Money Bets on a Housing Rebound,” New York Times, December 8, 2012.
As of this writing, we have a 4.4-month supply: National Association of Realtors.
In the late 1990s, when measured per square foot: Christopher B. Leinberger, “Now Coveted: A Walkable, Convenient Place,” New York Times, May 25, 2012.
CHAPTER SEVEN: THE FUTURE
“With your head full of brains . . .”: Used with permission from Random House.
Joel Kotkin: Joel Kotkin, The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050 (Penguin Books, 2011). Also see Kotkin’s writings on the topic of demographics and migration patterns at joelkotkin.com and newgeography.com.
A recent public radio story: “The Changing Face of Suburbia,” The Takeaway, July 14, 2010. To read the many entertaining comments, see thetakeaway.org (or: http://www.thetakeaway.org/2010/jul/14/start-conversation-whats-good-about-suburbs/).
“I can get to the city when I need to”: David Dobkin, a recent urban planning graduate whom I enlisted to read my manuscript, noted in the margins that this benefit is particularly one-sided: “Who ever said, ‘I can get to the suburbs when I need to’?”
In Prince George’s County: Lori Aratani, “Effort to Bring Whole Foods to Prince George’s Highlights Complexity of Process,” Washingtonpost.com, April 28, 2012.
In Lower Merion, Pennsylvania, meanwhile, during a debate: Inga Saffron, “Changing Skyline: Suburbia’s Outer Ring Losing Shine, Some Economists Say,” philly.com, January 6, 2012.
single-family housing starts had climbed: U.S. Census Bureau, new residential construction statistics.
new home sales were on track: National Association of Realtors data.
One of the hottest areas is in multifamily: U.S. Census Bureau, new residential construction statistics.
The number of renters surged by more than five million: “The State of the Nation’s Housing, 2012,” Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University, p. 1.
Toll Brothers’ recent plans: This came from my conversations with Toll, but also see coverage including Jeff Clabaugh, “Toll Brothers Plans Bethesda Condos,” Washington Business Journal, January 16, 2013.
In 2010, Travel and Leisure: Daniel Derouchie, “Coolest Suburbs Worth a Visit,” Travel and Leisure, August 2010.
In a recent travel section write-up: Jeff Heilman, “Road Trip: Delaware County,” New York Daily News, September 30, 2012.
these neighborhoods’ smaller-scale houses: To get an idea of what these suburbs look like, picture the neighborhood where Bradley Cooper romanced Jennifer Lawrence in Silver Linings Playbook, filmed mostly in Ridley Park, an inner-ring Philadelphia suburb not far from where my father grew up in inner-ring, grid-planned Drexel Hill. The Llanerch Diner, where Cooper and Lawrence go on a date, is down the street from my father’s childhood house. After the movie came out, flocks of tourists went to the area on the weekends, visiting sites from the film.
In Pittsburgh, the former rust belt inner-ring suburbs: Mike Madison, “Rust Belt Chic Goes Mainstream, or Hip and Hipsters in Lawrenceville,” Pittsblog.com, August 13, 2011.
Pittsburgh magazine proclaimed it as: Christine H. O’Toole, “City Guide: Best of the ’Burbs,” Pittsburgh magazine, August 2011.
In their book Megapolitan America: Arthur C. Nelson and Robert E. Lang, Megapolitan America: A New Vision for Understanding America’s Metropolitan Geography (American Planning Association/Planners Press, 2011).
America 2050, a think tank arm: See america2050.org under “Megaregions” (don’t skip the maps).
Some foreclosed McMansions in exurbs are finding: Barbara Kiviat, “Reinventing the McMansion,” Time, September 28, 2009; Patricia Leigh Brown, “Animal McMansion: Students Trade Dorm for Suburban Luxury,” New York Times, November 12, 2011; Norimitu Onishi, “Foreclosed Houses Become Homes for Indoor Marijuana Farms,” New York Times, May 6, 2012.
Some creative underwater owners: Alyssa Abkowitz, “Room for Rent—in a Mansion,” SmartMoney, February 14, 2011.
INDEX
The page numbers in this index refer to the printed version of this book. To find the corresponding locations in the text of this digital version, please use the “search” function on your e-reader. Note that not all terms may be searchable.
Adams, James Truslow, 65
Adolescents
driver’s license decline among, 110–11
limitations of suburbia for, 90, 98
and suburban crime, 179
African Americans
loans/housing discrimination, 43
in redlined areas, 42–43
Aging population
aging-in-place, 148–49
community services to, 148–49
in suburban communities, 143–45, 147–150
Alexandria, Virginia, 41
Alfandre, Joe, 121
Alfonzo, Mariela, 131
Americana at Brand, Glendale, 132
American Dream
of home-ownership, 65–66, 76–77
original concept of, 65
and suburbia, 9–12, 25, 36, 61, 64–69
Anton, Frank, 25
Arcade Fire, 51, 79
Arcadia Land Company, 36, 49, 69, 134, 135
Arlington Crossings, Illinois, 128
Arquitectonica, 116
AT&T Bell Telephone Laboratories, 44
Austintown, Ohio, 143–44, 147, 149
Automobiles. See also Commuting
accidents and suburbs, 82–85
decreased use (2004- ), 107–12
decreased use, future view, 106–7
dependence and health, 86–89
dependence and suburban living, 79–81, 85–86, 89–91
energy efficient, 105, 108
millennials rejection of, 20
pollution and, 46, 99, 108
and suburban design, 32–34
and suburban development, 32–34, 41–42, 81–82
use, beginning of, 32
walkable communities and use, 133–34
Baby boomers, 145, 148, 160
Baby bust, 145
Baches, Demetri, 203–4
Banks, repossessed homes, reuse of, 186–87, 205–6
Barclays Center, 176
Beacon Hill, Boston, 29, 41
Beazer Homes, 24
Belmar, Colorado, 181
Bernstein, Scott, 99–102, 205
Best Buy, 45, 172
Best Buy Mobile, 172
Big-box stores
emergence of, 44–45
scale-down for cities, 18, 172–73
Birth rate, decline of (2011), 144, 158
Blackstone Group,
187
Bloomberg, Michael, 159
Boccaccio, 27
Boston, renewal and growth (2011), 168
Brant, Gary, 144
Brooklyn Heights, 29
Buffalo Commons, 184
Buffett, Warren, 72
Bush, George W., 66
Butler, Win and William, 51
Calthorpe, Peter, 19, 52, 119, 120, 209
Cambridge, Boston, 29, 111–12
Camden Yards Sports Complex, 176
Caruso, Rick, 132, 198
Case-Shiller Home Price Indices, 8
Celebration, Florida, 126
Center City Philadelphia, 17–18
Charleston, South Carolina, 40
Chester County, Pennsylvania, 13
Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia, 41
Chicago
corporation relocations to, 173
early suburbs of, 30
renewal and growth (2011), 167
Children
automobile dependence of, 81, 85–86
cities as enrichment for, 112, 170–71
obesity problem, 88–89
population decline in suburbs, 145–47
street play, lack in suburbs, 81, 90
Cicero, 27
Cities
big-box store formats in, 18, 172–73
children, benefits to, 112, 170–71
corporation relocations to, 173–76
crime, past view, 44, 167, 168, 179
decline (1970s), 44, 168
developments by suburban developers, 6, 18, 23, 163–66
empty nesters return to, 172
exodus from. See History of suburbia
historical view, 28–29
home-building boom in, 6, 16
home value increase in, 15, 188
as millennials’ residence choice, 19–20, 157–59
population growth in, 14
renewal and growth (2011), 167–69
shrinkage, alternatives to, 185
smaller/Top Tier Towns, 204
sports stadiums in, 176–77
urbanism, books in favor of, 166–67
wealth, resurgence in, 17–18, 163–177, 187–88
The End of the Suburbs: Where the American Dream Is Moving Page 24