Are We Headed For ‘The End Of The Suburbs’?

More millennials are moving from the suburbs into cities, such as Brooklyn, New York. (karlnorling/Flickr)

For many people, cities are becoming the place to live, while sprawling suburbs are losing their appeal.

In her new book, “The End of the Suburbs: Where the American Dream is Moving,” Leigh Gallagher, assistant managing editor of Fortune, says millennials — the next generation of home buyers — are abandoning their suburban roots and choosing to raise their own families in the city.

Along with this shift, suburbs are also experiencing an increase in crime and poverty. Gallagher joins Here & Now’s Jeremy Hobson to discuss her research.

Book Excerpt: ‘The End of the Suburbs’

By Leigh Gallagher

When I set out to write a book in the spring of 2011, I originally planned to explore the future of our economy and how the aftereffects of the financial crisis would bring permanent changes to various aspects of our lives. But the more I researched, the more I discovered that the most dramatic shift involved where and how we choose to live—and it wasn’t a result of the Great Recession at all. Rather, the housing crisis only concealed something deeper and more profound happening to what we have come to know as American suburbia. Simply speaking, more and more Americans don’t want to live there anymore.

The reasons are varied, but several disparate factors all point to a decrease in demand for traditional suburban living: many Americans are tiring of the physical aspect of the suburbs, the design of which has changed dramatically over the years to gradually spread people farther and farther apart from one another and the things they like to do, making them increasingly reliant on their cars and, increasingly, on Thelma and Louise –length commutes. Big demographic shifts are seeing our population grow older, younger, and more diverse seemingly all at once, while powerful social trends are shrinking and transforming the American nuclear family, long the dominant driver of suburbia. An epic financial crisis coupled with the rising cost of energy has made punishing commutes also unaffordable, while a new-found hyperawareness of environmental issues has shaken up and re-ordered our priorities in ways that stand in direct conflict to the suburban way of life.

This has all been happening for years, but it’s now being backed up by data. The rate of suburban population growth has outpaced that of urban centers in every decade since the invention of the automobile, but in 2011, for the first time in a hundred years, that trend reversed. Construction permit data shows that in several cities, building activity that was once concentrated in the suburban fringe has now shifted primarily to cities, or what planners call the “urban core.” At the same time, demand for the large, single-family homes that characterize the suburbs is dwindling, and big suburban home builders like Toll Brothers are saying their best markets are now cities.

Many of the builders present at the NAHB show in Orlando know this and have started changing the way they do business. Like Ralston, they’ve started breaking their own bones by tearing up old floor plans, adjusting land acquisition strategies, and shifting their focus to include smaller houses and more urban developments. “Gone are the master bathrooms you can land planes in,” said Boyce Thompson, the editorial director of the Builder group of magazines at the housing research and publishing firm Hanley Wood, during a presentation on market trends. Many of the attendees took part in educational sessions on “multifamily” housing units, design strategies for a shifting market, and the changing preferences of the new home buyer. During one such session, the audience watched an ad for builder Shea Homes’ new “Spaces” line in which pleasant-looking suburbanites talked about what they wanted in their new homes. “A typical home in the suburbs for me?” one house-wife asks. “It’s just not the way things are done anymore.” The 2012 annual Builder magazine “concept home,” at the show, always an important barometer of where housing trends are headed, was instead a series of three different homes targeted to three different generations, all featuring smaller—or “right-sized,” since “small” is still a word that goes unsaid by this group—floor plans and more efficient use of space. “Change is the only path to tomorrow,” Larry Swank, chairman of the NAHB’s conventions and meetings committee and a leading builder in Indiana, advised an audience in a breakout session.

Not every home builder is hurting. Floating around at the NAHB show were people like John McLinden, a longtime builder in Chicago who had spent the past few years developing a kind of replacement for the conventional subdivision: a neighborhood of compact, upscale bungalows steps from the train station in the middle of Libertyville, Illinois. His sales were going gangbusters. “Nothing exists like this— certainly not in the suburbs,” he told me eagerly. “And we did it in the midst of a housing crisis.” Indeed, one of the biggest trends in home building right now is remaking our suburbs to look more, well, urban. Like McLinden, developers in suburbs from Morristown, New Jersey, to Leesburg, Virginia, to Lakewood, Colorado, are rebuilding their downtowns as urbanized centers with streets that combine stores, restaurants, and apartments, while nearly every home builder now has a town house or condo division. Even Toll Brothers, the Horsham, Pennsylvania–based home builder that rose to fame on the wings of the suburban mega-home, says what it calls its “suburban move-up” houses are now roughly 50 percent of what it builds and sells, down from 70 to 80 percent just a few years ago.

This brings me to an important point: when I talk about the “end of the suburbs,” I do not mean to suggest that all suburban communities are going to vaporize. Plenty of older suburbs are going strong for reasons we’ll explore later, and many newer suburbs are reinventing themselves to adapt to the times. But when the people who have delivered the same kind of one-size-fits-all suburban subdivisions over the past few decades are tearing up their blueprints, venturing gingerly into urban markets, and actually fainting at the thought of what the future holds, something big is afoot. The reliable expansion of our suburbs, the steady growth of the housing industry, and the seemingly unending supply of new single-family homes—and home owners— that we became used to over the past several decades may well be a thing of the past. Robert Shiller, a Yale University economist, founder of the Case-Shiller Home Price Indices, and the forecaster who predicted both the dot-com and housing bubbles, has said we may be in for a new normal. According to Shiller, U.S. suburban development since the 1950s was “unusual” in its reliance on the automobile and the highway system; the bursting of the bubble may result in a bigger, more structural change. “The heyday of exurbs may well be behind us,” he has said. “Suburban prices may not recover in our lifetime.”

WBUR

7 Comments on "Are We Headed For ‘The End Of The Suburbs’?"

J-Gav on Wed, 6th Nov 2013 10:30 pm 



Prices may not recover(and that would be a good thing) but this doesn’t imply that all suburban/exurban areas are just a huge pile of stranded assets (this is my main disagreement with Kunstler by the way, with whom I’m very much in agreement on many things). I’d suggest reading David Holmgren’s ideas on the subject. De-asphalting is possible and, lo and behold, what’s underneath? Soil.

action on Wed, 6th Nov 2013 11:37 pm 



A book about suburbs… sounds enthralling.

BillT on Thu, 7th Nov 2013 12:50 am 



J-Gav, there is likely not much real soil under those lawns. Many developers scrape off all of the topsoil, put a few inches back on the clay and then sell the rest.

As for soil under blacktop, that oil has been draining down through the clay for years, maybe decades. It would be poisoned. Not to mention that it was cut out and most roads and parking lots have a foot or more of crushed stone under them and the asphalt may be 6 inches thick. Ditto for concrete roads and lots except in concrete you are going to get reinforcing wire, rebar and/or steel cables.

No, most of the burbs will NOT be recoverable this century. Mother Nature can slowly undo the damage, but not man. Especially man/machines without oil to do the heavy work. The burbs are dead-men-walking … for now. Come back in a thousand years and you maybe could permaculture enough to live.

rollin on Thu, 7th Nov 2013 1:11 am 



The demographics have changed. Americans are at or below replacement levels for population and any growth in the market is driven by immigration.
Sixty years ago the families were larger and expansion was driven by both internal population growth and immigration. The suburbs grew because there was demand for new housing.

Now growth in housing is only driven by immigration and they are more likely to locate in city or very dense town areas.

Other factors shifted the market, bigger houses. When the suburban movement first started most houses were small, meant for blue collar workers. They grew larger with time until most of the growth was McMansion size. New families and individuals cannot generally afford that much house and the huge taxes that go with them.
Lowering wages and shifts in manufacturing turned some of those old smaller suburban neighborhoods into white collar neighborhoods, prices were way above value and that made taxes higher also.

GregT on Thu, 7th Nov 2013 1:12 am 



The suburbs are far more likely to be sustainable in the long run, than big city centres. The mass exodus to the cities will end, when the economy crumbles, and there isn’t enough food for people to eat.

Oh wait, I forgot, solar panels will solve everything. People will just order food over the internet. 🙂

BillT on Thu, 7th Nov 2013 3:14 am 



LOL GregT, thanks for the humor. Yes, the cities will be abandoned, at least by the kind of people you want for neighbors. Small towns will be the centers in the future. They will be surrounded by farms and maybe a few small low energy industries. But burbs within walking distance of the city will not be a good place to be. When the dust settles, the population will be maybe 10% of today’s. Or less.

DC on Thu, 7th Nov 2013 6:26 am 



Our cities fatal flaw has always been that they dont ‘produce’ the resources they need to exist, they import them, usually over very long distances. But the end goal of our modern cities is to consume resources, something they quite efficient at. The ‘burbs’ are even less self-sustaining than dense urban centres. They are literally toxic wastelands. The ‘burbs’ have nothing to fall back or draw on. The fact that they are physically distant from city centres does nothing to help them.

-Cites are dependant on distance resources to exist.

-Suburbs are totally dependant on the city are ‘attached’ to, to exist.

We can clearly get some glimpses of the suburbs ultimate fate from the US housing crash. A lot of those abandoned houses began to decay with the first YEAR of evicting there dead-beat ‘owners’. I saw no evidence people sticking around and trying to ‘make a go’ of those abandoned PVC and sawdust shacks. Its not hard to understand why, even squatting in a North American suburb would be largely futile. No water, no power, no food-you’d be crazy to stay.

A year or two ago, I was entering Pheonix and you could drive by those remote ‘developments’ far from the ‘city’ itself, that seemed to me to be mostly dark and shuttered. They already had a vaguely shabby look about them, despite also being clear they were fairly new as well.

People need to keep in mind, the rot almost always starts at the outside and works it way inward-not the other way around. The suburbs are that rot.