The End of the Suburbs: Where the American Dream Is Moving Read online

  • • •

  The suburbs have been the dominant pattern of residential growth in America for the last century. There are roughly 132 million homes across the country, the largest percent of them—almost half—in the suburbs, somewhat obtusely defined by the U.S. Census Bureau as the parts of our metropolitan statistical areas that lie outside central cities. Looking at the broadly defined “metropolitan” regions of our country, which is where more than 80 percent of Americans live, the percentage of us living in the suburbs is higher: 61 percent. To get a sense of their scale, consider that there are an estimated 64 million houses in suburbia. Over the past half century, the portion of people living in the suburbs has steadily grown, from 31 percent in 1960 to 51 percent in 2010, which amounts to about 158 million Americans. In terms of sheer size, not for a long time have the suburbs been “sub.”

  Of course, it’s hard to paint the suburbs with one brush. Even the term “suburb” refers to many things. Broadly speaking, it refers to residential neighborhoods on the outskirts of big cities. But the American suburbs are a variegated terrain, a massive amalgam of thousands of different types and vintages. There are older, stately ones in the Northeast with centuries-old stone houses and newer ones all over the country in subdivisions lined with tracts of mass-produced homes. There are wealthy enclaves like the Main Line of Philadelphia or the North Shore of Chicago or Shaker Heights, Ohio, or Atherton, California, and blue-collar mainstays like Yonkers, New York, or Cicero, Illinois. There are big ones and small ones, boroughs and hamlets, inner-ring ones and exurban ones, hilly ones and flat ones. There are large swaths of suburbia, like the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles or New York’s Long Island, that are the size of small countries. Suburbs look different depending where you are: in Las Vegas front yards are filled with pebbles and cacti, in California Mediterranean red-tiled roofs rule the day, and in wealthy suburbs throughout the Northeast regal old homes line leafy streets.

  Despite their differences, the American suburbs share one thing in common—they evoke a certain way of life, one of tranquil, curving streets and cul-de-sacs; marching bands and soccer leagues; bake sales and PTA meetings and center hall colonials. The phrase “the American Dream” immediately brings to mind images of the single-family home with a white picket fence; the suburbs have also provided the setting for so many of our iconic cinematic moments. They are where Macaulay Culkin got left home alone; where Ferris Bueller took the day off; where Jake kissed Samantha in Sixteen Candles; and where Joel Goodsen, therefter remembered only as Tom Cruise, first strutted his stuff in Risky Business.

  The suburbs are innately connected to America because they are a uniquely American phenomenon. No other country has such an enormous percentage of its middle class living at such low densities across such massive amounts of land. As Kenneth T. Jackson put it in his masterful book Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States, widely considered the definitive history of the American suburbs, “affluent and middle-class Americans live in suburban areas that are far from their work places, in homes that they own, and in the center of yards that by urban standards elsewhere are enormous.”

  This might be a good time to mention that even though I’m writing a book about the decline of the suburbs, I don’t have anything against them personally. I currently live in Manhattan’s West Village (the former stomping ground of the legendary urbanist Jane Jacobs), but I had a pretty idyllic childhood growing up in Media, Pennsylvania, a suburb twelve miles southwest of Philadelphia. I lived in an old stone house in a leafy neighborhood called Bowling Green, which had a lot to offer a family like mine: a house with a lawn, a neighborhood full of kids, and the great Wallingford-Swarthmore public school district, of which our slice of Media was a part.

  I have gauzy, sepia-toned, Wonder Years–style memories of my childhood in Media. Most of the houses in Bowling Green dated back to the 1920s—ours was a 1923 stone colonial—and the streets were lined with majestic oaks that dated back who knows how long. The epicenter of the neighborhood was a place we called the Triangle, where Mulberry Road and Truepenny Road converged in a T intersection, forming a wider paved area that provided us kids with a place to hang out, to roller-skate, and to hold street hockey tournaments. In the summer, the Triangle also played home to the neighborhood’s annual Fourth of July picnic, an all-day affair during which parents would close the streets to traffic, set up half a dozen picnic tables, and wheel their grills out from their backyards. This was the party to end all parties, as far as I was concerned: there were organized three-legged races and water balloon tosses, Mrs. Desmond’s famous flag cake, and a bicycle parade for which we kids would decorate our bikes and ride them proudly once around the block; I can still remember eagerly threading the spokes of my Schwinn with red, white, and blue streamers in the hope of taking the top prize. The real highlight came at the end of the day, when the professional square dancing caller would arrive. He’d set up a sound system and an elevated stage, the music would start, and everyone would spill into the Triangle, partner up, and dance in one big hoedown. I remember whirling around to the Virginia reel and doing do-si-dos to the caller’s pace until I was dizzy. Later, after the fireworks, we’d stroll home and I’d collapse in bed.

  One of the best things about our neighborhood every other day of the year was that it was within walking distance of downtown Media, a unique little suburban metropolis. Media’s main drag, State Street, is lined with dozens of boutiques, a lively restaurant and bar scene, and not one but two five-and-ten stores. A massive, stately courthouse—Media is the county seat of Delaware County—spans at least four square blocks, anchoring the downtown and bringing a swell of lawyers and workers to the town each day. There’s a 1927 vaudeville theater that’s been restored, a local newspaper—the Town Talk—and even a working trolley. (You can distinguish the locals by how deftly they swerve their cars to avoid it when it glides down State Street.) There are annual events like the Media 5 Mile Race, a tradition since 1979, and Super Sunday, the town’s annual flea market, from which I once procured a T-shirt sporting Media’s slogan, “Everybody’s Hometown.” I went to an excellent public school that was academically rigorous and had a diverse student body. My teenage memories are those of marching band, football games, and sneaking out to drink Keystone Light in the woods behind our house. More than twenty years later, my high school English teacher still sends me her recommended reading list every summer.

  Although I am a city girl now, my parents still live in Media, and I visit them often. It’s rare that I bring a visitor home who doesn’t remark on how central casting it all seems. (In the mid-1990s it actually was central casting: television producers used exterior shots of our house for the opening credits of a short-lived NBC sitcom called Minor Adjustments.) Once, after I invited a former boss over for dinner while he was visiting the area, he chided me about an upbringing that was almost comically idyllic. “How’s everything in Grover’s Corners?” he’d ask from then on whenever I returned to the New York office from a visit home.

  But things have changed. Bowling Green’s Fourth of July picnic has been moved to a block party in September, because people started wanting to go to their beach houses for the holiday instead. The square dance caller has been replaced with an iPod playlist, and food-safety concerns have led to new rules requiring all the dishes be kept on ice. Parents now accompany their kids to the bus stop every morning; I used to walk alone. In the late 1990s, despite a protracted and emotional fight from the residents, a developer turned a big estate that abutted one edge of the neighborhood into a subdivision of forty-three luxury homes. A Starbucks now sits just outside the neighborhood.

  Our country’s suburbs have changed during that time, too. Most of today’s suburbs do not look like Media, and it’s not just because they don’t have a courthouse or a trolley. While people who live in the Northeast are more accustomed to older neighborhoods like Bowling Green, most Americans live in communities built in the last fifty y
ears, and for reasons we’ll explore in detail later, these more prevalent suburbs look a lot different. They are bigger, newer—the average age of all housing stock in this country is just thirty-nine years—and feature a more homogenous style of housing. They’re also more spread out. As development has pushed farther outward from urban areas, we have had to travel ever greater distances to get to all the places we need to go. From 1969 to 2009, overall miles traveled per household annually jumped 60 percent, and today, many suburbs are located so far from their “urbs” that they’re not really a “sub” of anything. Think of developments in the horse country of Chester County, Pennsylvania, or Loudoun County, Virginia, or the subdivision hamlets surrounded by cornfields in Illinois or hanging off freeways all throughout the West. Or consider Ridgecrest, California, the only incorporated town along U.S. 395 in Kern County located halfway between Bakersfield and Death Valley. Ridgecrest is located 112 miles from Bakersfield, the metropolitan area of which it is officially considered a part, giving it the dubious distinction of being the suburb furthest from its “urb.”

  Plenty of books have been written about the negative ramifications of this development and why the suburbs are bad for us. But this book isn’t about why the suburbs ought to end. Rather, it’s about how the suburbs—at least as we know them—are ending. When I started looking into this subject, I knew of some key data points that supported the main thrust of my argument. The more I looked, the more the data from all corners confirmed it. Consider the following:

  Census data reveals a shift.

  After fifty years of outward migration, we’re starting to move in the other direction. According to census data, population growth in outer suburbs, which had been the engine of residential growth for much of the 2000s, ground to a near halt from 2010 to 2011, increasing by just 0.4 percent. Cities and high-density inner suburbs, meanwhile, grew twice as fast, marking the first time in twenty years that city growth surpassed that of the exurbs. Our largest cities, meanwhile, grew at a faster rate than any of their suburbs for the first time in one hundred years. To some degree this is a reaction to our recent housing crisis, which saw so much overexpansion especially in the exurbs. But it’s also the first time since the invention of the automobile that our outward migration pattern has reversed.

  An emerging body of research is starting to bolster the census data. One such study comes from a professor at Tufts University who used data from the U.S. Postal Service to track the number of occupied housing units in the suburbs (as it turns out, whether a house receives mail is one of the only reliable ways to tell whether it’s truly occupied). The data showed occupancy declining in the suburbs and gaining in the cities. We’ll explore these and other results in detail later, but to many policy experts these kinds of changes represent a tipping point.

  Home valuations have inverted.

  In the wake of the Great Recession, housing values have held up far better in cities than in suburbs, a reversal from the way things normally work. During almost every recession in our history, urban home prices have suffered the most. This time, the pain has been concentrated in the suburbs. Kevin Gillen, a housing economist at the University of Pennsylvania’s Fels Institute of Government, has studied this phenomenon closely in the Philadelphia area. During and after the downturn of the early ’90s, home prices in downtown Philadelphia fell 34 percent while prices in the suburbs fell 14 percent. This time around, the opposite happened: prices in the most distant suburbs have fallen 33 percent, while homes downtown fell 20 percent. “The pattern is completely reversed,” says Gillen, using a phrase I would hear repeatedly over the course of my reporting.

  This new pattern is playing out nationwide. Studying more than ninety thousand home sales in fifteen markets across the country, Joe Cortright, president of Impresa, a Portland-based economic consulting firm specializing in regional economic analysis, found that home prices in the urban centers of Chicago, Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, Portland, and Tampa have held up much better than prices in those cities’ suburbs. Other research has shown a distinction in valuation even among different kinds of suburbs: valuations in towns that are considered more walkable and contain more urban elements—things like Main Streets and downtown commercial districts—are holding up better and appreciating faster than those that are in so-called drivable suburban developments.

  Building activity has reversed.

  Since 2000, building activity has picked up in cities and slowed down in suburbs. In New York City in the early 1990s, 7 percent of all residential building permits were in the city limits, while more than 70 percent were in the suburban fringe. By 2008, that had flipped: 9 percent were in the fringe and more than 70 percent were in the city. The city of Portland, Oregon, issued 38 percent of the region’s building permits that same year, compared with 9 percent in the early 1990s. Denver proper accounted for 32 percent of its region’s building activity, up from 5 percent in the early 1990s. The housing crash may have accelerated things, but the shift has been under way for some time. “It’s a complete reversal,” Jonathan Rose, a leading developer of sustainable, mixed-use communities, told me. And while the housing market has started to recover, with home construction and pricing data showing their first signs of prolonged, sustainable momentum, a rebound may not result in a shift in these construction patterns. One of the brightest spots in the industry’s comeback has been so-called multifamily construction, the building of apartments and condominiums more commonly found in cities.

  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.