by Joel Garreau
To the west, there is 128 and the Mass Pike, the largest Edge City in the Boston area and one of the oldest in the country, dating back thirty years. This is the one that really made 128 “America’s Technology Road,” as the highway signs read. It sprawls around some of the oldest suburbs in the world. Bostonians commuted by rail in 1850. There were three railroads into Boston before the first locomotive pulled into London. Brook-line in 1873 became the first place in America to reject annexation by a major city, thereby creating the concept of suburb. Those who view suburbs as not progressive may take heart in learning that George McGovern got more votes in one election there than Ronald Reagan got in two. A vote was recently taken in Brookline on whether the annual town meeting should be opened with the pledge of allegiance to the flag. The flag lost.
Just a few miles up the beltway, in the northwest, is an Edge City in the area where 128 is met by Routes 3 and I-93 north. It is among the most dense of any Edge City in the Boston region. It is centered on the Burlington Mall and the famed Lahey Medical Center.
Then there is the Peabody-Danvers area in the northeast quadrant of 128, where America’s East Coast freeway, I-95, resumes its path straight up the coast toward Maine.
Beyond 128, there are two Edge Cities emerging, and they are both on the same spokelike road: the Massachusetts Turnpike heading west toward the Berkshires and Albany. One is located where that highway crosses the outer beltway, at 495 and the Pike, sometimes also known by the name of the nearby town of Westborough. Data General is headquartered there. The other emerging Mass Pike Edge City is between the first and second beltways, near Framingham.
Two other Edge Cities are inside the beltways, in Cambridge. These, growing on top of a pre-existing settlement in the orbit of an old downtown, are comparable to Washington’s Bethesda-Chevy Chase or Atlanta’s Buckhead. One is near MIT and Kendall Square, right across the Charles River from downtown. The other is at the far end of Cambridge, around that Alewife T.*
Some apparently great locations for Edge Cities, though, have not panned out—in central Cambridge near Harvard, for example, or where I-95 meets 128 to the south. Others, meanwhile, are still in their embryonic stage—I-495 at southern I-95 near Foxboro, or the Golden Triangle area of southern New Hampshire by Manchester, Nashua, and Portsmouth.
For the spread of Edge Cities is hardly random. Nor is it infinite. The critics of Edge Cities who describe them as a cancer on the land are wrong. Cancer is life without laws. Edge City is more rational. It has not only patterns and rules but limits to its growth.
The five Edge City limits are:
• Insurmountability,
• Affordability,
• Mobility,
• Accessibility, and
• Nice.
In Boston, the first limit you have to contend with is Insurmountability.
Boston’s beltways would work a lot better if they had an eastern half. But they don’t. And they won’t. Because east of downtown Boston is a whole lot of deep Insurmountability—Boston Harbor. Other places have similar fixes, simply less well understood.
It is no news that Los Angeles has the Pacific to the west and rugged mountains in almost every other direction. They don’t call it the Los Angeles Basin for nothing; it’s built like a sink. That’s why it captures smog as well as it does. But less widely comprehended, until John McPhee memorably explained it in The Control of Nature, is that in Los Angeles, the mountains are not standing still, waiting to be built on. The ten thousand-foot San Gabriels are the steepest and highest mountain range abutting any major metropolitan area in the world, and they’re getting taller every day. The tectonic plates are still pushing them up. That’s why Los Angeles has earthquakes.
Mountains that fight back are a prime example of planetary Insurmountability. They really do limit your options. So do excessive snows in the industrial Northeast, or floodplains in the Gulf of Mexico, or lack of water in the intermountain West. Miami has dolphins on one side and alligators on the other. That’s a problem. In the Chesapeake Bay area, one novel piece of Insurmountability is jellyfish. There is considerable development on the shores of that beautiful and fragile estuary. But it would have been far greater and doubtless more high-rise had not the region’s most popular resorts ended up three hours farther east, all the way to the Atlantic Coast. That’s because people won’t swim in waters where they get stung.
Planetary Insurmountability is not an absolute barrier. Civil engineers fight Insurmountability with bridges and tunnels and dams and bulldozers. Enterprising capitalists, if they can get away with it, will cantilever their developments out over oceans. Condominiums built on jetties, offices built on piers, and houseboats tied up to docks are all just extensions of the local real estate market into shallow water. Big pleasure boats tied up to marinas are simply the vacation-home industry flourishing in the absence of dry land. The story is oft told of the Florida speculator newly informed that his land was under water. Came this thoughtful reply: “How deep?”
The filling in of wetlands is a classic example of developers shading Insurmountability. The Back Bay neighborhood of Boston used to be a bay in the back of town—until it was filled in. But wetlands are also an acute example of how Insurmountability can be created by citizen action. It is technically possible to build an Edge City in a marsh. But fertile, precious, and threatened ecologies have become such a cause that George Bush promised in 1989 there would be no net loss of them in his administration. This caused no little consternation among oil drillers, road builders, and developers.
Societal Insurmountability obviously surrounds such places as the Cape Cod National Seashore. No matter how much money is tendered, that sand will never be developed. One presumes. Other societal Insurmountabilities surround reservoirs, wildlife refuges, and parks. Especially in an area like Boston’s, where Paul Revere rode and the Minutemen farmed and Emerson strolled with Hawthorne, Insurmountability surrounds historical sites.
These add up. It is now not uncommon to have more than 50 percent of a metropolitan area off limits to Edge City development because of Insurmountable obstacles that no amount of money will be allowed to overcome. It has been calculated that as much as 88 percent of the land in the San Francisco area is untouchable. This gets us back to the Rubber Band Principle. If your hypothetical metal ring stabilizes right on top of the Buzzards Bay Light or Harvard Yard, forget it. Start over again. Your allegedly ideal location is unavailable.
This issue of planetary, emotional, and class-based Insurmountability shades into the second Edge City limit: Affordability.
Edge City cannot grow unless and until it creates jobs. And it is pointless to create jobs if there are no workers to fill them. Therefore, Edge City rarely leads. Homes generally have to exist first. People have to be able to find a place to live at a price they can afford—given what they are going to be paid—if you want them to fill a job.
As the boom expanded in Boston, this became not possible. In most sane markets the rule of thumb is that people can afford to buy a house whose price is three times greater than their gross annual wage; if the household made $30,000, it could afford a $90,000 place. The typical single-family home in 1987 in the Boston area cost 7.7 times the average annual wage.
The result, predictably enough, was a labor shortage.
“The reasons for the slowdown are clear enough,” the Wall Street Journal wrote. “The median single-family home price in the Boston area rocketed to $167,800 in early 1986—the highest level in the country at the time—from $89,400 in early 1984. Meanwhile, household incomes weren’t rising nearly as fast, despite the region’s healthy economy. By mid-1988, the median family income was $38,652 and the median home price $183,800. In Minneapolis—to take just one contrasting example—the median family income was $40,171, and the median home price was $86,000.”
“The Boston area is possibly the most dramatic example of how a surging economy can boost housing prices to the point where they begin to dam
pen economic growth,” an alarmed Harvard Business Review wrote. “During the 1970s’ oil boom, thousands of families moved to Texas … Today, however, people simply cannot afford to move to Boston. Even Boston’s prestigious teaching hospitals can’t attract enough residents, interns, and nurses.”
Traditionally, in America, the solution to the problem of Affordability has been Farther Out. Find a more distant, thus cheaper, cow pasture, subdivide it into quarter-acre lots, and build a remote but more economical subdivision.
The slightly cheaper cow pasture was crucial. That is because of the North Star of economic certitudes of residential developers. Stated as the Law of Four, it goes: The house that makes a profit for its builder is one that sells for whatever the cost of the land under it is, multiplied by four.
That is to say, if the lot costs $50,000, you must put enough house on it for the whole package to sell for $200,000, or you court bankruptcy.*
Here is where the Edge Cities of Boston had the distinction of being the first but by no means the last to hit the wall. No matter how far out you go, the dollars-per-hour of the jobs available within a reasonable commute go down quickly. But the dollars-per-quarter-acre do not.
Developers love to blame this condition on “no growthers”—people devoted to their country homes who value the landscape as it exists. And, indeed, the people of New England have been marvelously inventive in finding means to slow growth. In Hollis, New Hampshire, just west of Nashua, owners of a hundred or more lots can obtain no more than four building permits a year. Other towns have found that just running up a year’s backlog on processing requests is a very effective means of curbing development.
But there is plenty of land equally unavailable because it is held by speculators waiting for the price to go up even further. Or its ownership is chopped up into tracts that big developers view as too small to offer the advantages of scale they seek. Or it is problematic to build on because of terrain or soil composition. Or it is environmentally or historically sensitive and protected.
As a result, only ten thousand home-building permits per year were issued in the Boston area at the height of the boom—the proverbial drop in the bucket in an exploding population area. And much of that was astoundingly high-end. Of the ensuing developer bankruptcies when the bubble collapsed and home prices headed south, one analyst noted brightly, “Guess we found out what the choke point was for $300,000 condos on the waterfront in Lynn.” There are any number of reasons cheaper housing wasn’t built. But one that researchers at Salomon Brothers in New York point to was psychological. Builders looking at a boom in high tech thought of high-paid software designers. Nonetheless, there are always far more families headed by heating and air-conditioning technicians and copying-machine salespeople than there are those headed by chief financial officers.
These limits to growth were not an aberration of the Boston area. They were common in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Washington. But note well that the key here is “available” land. Consider the low population density of the swanky suburb of Wellesley, outside Route 128. Life there is hardly that of the huddled masses yearning to breathe free. The typical house is in the $300,000–$400,000 range. High-end homes are called “estates.” Lord knows the area has its share of land Insurmountably off limits to development. Does that sound like a place with sufficient elbow room to be attractive? Okay, suppose we decided to encourage the use of land such that everybody in the metropolitan area could be housed at that low a density. If we did, half of metropolitan Boston would still be left as complete and utter wilderness, as pristine as the day the Pilgrims landed. Even at that low density, every single one of the Boston area’s four million people could fit into only half the area’s land.
For that matter, if we were to figure out a way for all the people of the Boston area to live at the moderate density of the renowned, bucolic, prosperous, job-laden, planned Edge City of Reston, Virginia, four fifths of the metropolitan area’s land could be left as wilderness. The entire population of the Boston area could be housed on 20 percent of the land.
Instead, of course, from the preservationists to the speculators, we collectively have ended up conspiring either to keep most of our land from being built on densely—or built on at all. The result is urban sprawl challenging yet more distant vistas while not really solving Affordability. This is how strange places like Lordvale get built. Density is accomplished, but in what is invariably described as “the middle of nowhere.” Which gets us back to Gilbert and Caron Merrill.
The Merrills are each in their early thirties. He is a Boston-educated attorney. She, until the baby came, was a market analyst for Prime Computer. While Gilbert was in school, they rented a cramped apartment in Watertown, an unfashionable but solid working-class neighborhood within three miles of downtown Boston.
After he passed the bar and they decided they deserved a home of their own, the Merrills discovered the Boston facts of life. They found nothing within forty miles of downtown that they could imagine living in. A small, two-bedroom, 1950s-standard bungalow that needed major work was as close as they came. It was going for $175,000.
The Merrills are quite a few notches up from typical, but even they began rethinking their position. Caron’s job at Prime was in the Edge City of Framingham, more than twenty miles outside downtown straight out the Mass Pike, about halfway to Worcester. So the Merrills began to look for a place not just beyond Boston’s first beltway, but nine miles beyond its second beltway. There they finally found a $139,000 town house with brand-new construction and appliances.
It was “only” half an hour away from Caron’s job at Prime. But it was an insane commute downtown for Gilbert. Therefore, in classic Edge City fashion, shortly after they moved, Gilbert switched jobs. In order to accommodate his opportunities for housing, he left his Boston practice and joined a firm in Worcester—the old industrial city fifty miles west of downtown that Bostonians have always thought of as halfway to Montana.
And voilà. The Merrills, by using their personal version of the Rubber Band method, successfully organized their lives to live near, and between, their respective downtown-quality jobs. There they sat, waited for son Wyatt to arrive, living “like that, out there” in their late-twentieth-century version of tenement housing for yuppies—Lordvale.
The Merrills are less than thrilled that anybody would want to describe their $139,000 town house as a tenement. But consider the similarities. Tenements were tightly packed three- and four-story buildings in which each family occupied one floor. They were thrown up in a hurry to accommodate the legions of workers who flocked to the dazzlingly high wages of the mills of the industrial Northeast in the nineteenth century. These tenements were the cheapest and most efficient way of getting the highest number of people reasonably close to their jobs.
Brand-new town-house developments at distant locations are Edge Cities trying to do exactly the same thing, a hundred years later. They are worker housing thrown up in a hurry for the mills and factories of the Information Age—Edge City office buildings. These town houses are designed for people like the Merrills, who, just as in the nineteenth-century boomtowns, are making an amazing amount of money by the standards of their parents at the same age. The Merrills are surrounded by amenities the previous generation never dreamed of, from microwaves to VCRs to central air conditioning (in Massachusetts!) to dishwashers to clothes dryers to multiple automobiles.
The price the Merrills have had to pay, however, is measured in land. If the Merrills and their peers did not want to compromise on the size and amenities of their homes, they had to put up with less land. This meant living at relatively high densities, with as many homes as possible put up on every expensive acre.
These densities, in turn, became almost impossible in affluent, close-in suburban Boston areas because of what Miriam Maxian calls “snob zoning.”
Maxian wrote her MIT graduate thesis on affordable housing, which to her means housing for people who make unde
r $100,000 a year. She points out that the older a suburban neighborhood is, the more likely the land in it is zoned only for traditional suburban homes. This means that if a developer wants to develop town houses, much less an apartment building, he must go in for a zoning variance. And this, predictably, brings out all the “abutters,” as Maxian refers to the people living nearby. The overwhelming majority virulently argue that such densities will lower their property values, Maxian says. “There’s a stigma attached to it. It connotes the projects.”
This is why America now finds itself with town houses far from the old downtowns. The land is cheaper there, and the density is politically more palatable in an area where a town house selling for $139,000 is seen as improving the neighborhood.
To complete the analogy to tenements, consider how these town houses are configured. If you look at them closely, you realize that what they are, architecturally, is tenements flipped over on their sides. Instead of stacking single flats one on top of another, now we rotate our worker housing 90 degrees and pack it side by side by side.
Turns out there are a lot of advantages to that. First of all, in such a town-house development everybody gets to enter her home directly from her garage. Ground-level access is a real plus when your arms are laden with babies and groceries. What’s more, out back every one of these town houses has a tiny patio or deck. Good for a little barbecuing. The homeowners’ association would have a fit if you tried to hang a clothesline out there and dry your underwear in the breeze. But the coziness makes it possible to gossip with your neighbors over the pressure-treated wood railings. How different is this from the porches, fire escapes, and social structures that used to grace each floor of a tenement?
Meanwhile, when the neighbors are separated from you by town-house walls—instead of tenement ceilings—living at these densities is inherently more bearable. It is easier to soundproof walls than floors. And think about it. In the old days if you could hear a baby crying in the upstairs apartment, that was maddening. In a town house, being able to hear a baby crying in an upstairs bedroom is a plus.