Millennials like the suburbs

It is a habit of haters of the suburbs to regularly predict the imminent demise of the quarter-acre tract home good life.

These predictions date to the post-World War II housing boom, from Lewis Mumford’s distaste of Levittown and places like it (“An encapsulated life spent more and more either in a motor car or within the cabin of darkness before a television set,” he wrote in 1963), or James Howard Kunstler’s 1993 book “The Geography of Nowhere” in which he calls the ’burbs “depressing, brutal, ugly, unhealthy and spiritually degrading.”

Always, the prediction is that the ’burbs will collapse within the next 20 years. The reasons for collapse vary. “Peak oil” was the most popular meme of the last 60 years, though. Suburbs rely on oil, and the world’s oil supply is finite, and is now at its “peak,” the meme went. As oil runs out, the suburbs and the car-crazy, climate-controlled lifestyles that Americans love will end.

“Peak oil” prognosticators have had the American suburbs collapsing in every decade since the 1950s. So far, nothing’s happened. Maybe the peak oil people use the same forecasting tools as the climate-change people.

A new meme has gone viral among the smart set. What will kill the suburbs is that the millennial generation (born after 1983) is leaving the uncultured suburbs for the urbane cities. Rot and ruin will come to the ’burbs, with abandoned tract houses and mosquito infested swimming pools as emblematic of epic failure as healthcare.gov.

Books such as New York journalist Leigh Gallagher’s “The End of the Suburbs” make the case why we are doomed. “Millennials hate the suburbs,” Gallagher writes, because they prefer a hip, eco-friendly, “singleton” urban lifestyle.

Other writers, like Claire Thompson at the enviro ’zine Grist, declares that millennials define the “good life” differently from their parents’ four-bedrooms-on-an-acre. Millennials desire “experiences” over materialism; they want out of the rat race that consumed their parents’ lives; they have tempered ambitions. Thompson writes that they want:

“Infrastructure that supports the kind of smaller-footprint, sustainable lifestyles we’re already creating for ourselves: compact housing in vibrant, walkable communities; functioning public transportation; streetscapes that prioritize cyclists and pedestrians over cars; urban gardens and farmers markets; regulatory room for sharing communities to thrive.”

They will be a “hero generation” that leaves the vast tract housing wasteland for nifty cities. Buh-bye, ’burbs.

Except, not really.

This week, Forbes magazine, crunching government data, reported that the oldest millennials are choosing to live in the suburbs in numbers no different than any other U.S. demographic group. True, some millennials are moving to “core cities” (which Forbes defines as having populations of 1 million or more.) But these millennials have not left the suburbs – they left rural areas that have “lower economic opportunity,” the magazine reports.

Poorer country folk moving to the big city for better opportunities. It’s as old as the Republic.

“To be sure,” the magazine states, “core urban areas do attract the young more than other age cohorts. Among people age 15 to 29 in 2007, there is clear movement to the core cities five years later in 2012 – roughly a net gain of two million. However, that’s only three percent of the 60 million people in the (millennial) age group.”

The reason the suburbs are not in danger of collapse is that the millennials, an exceptionally well-educated generation, sees what everyone else sees: it’s a good place to live and raise kids, with less crime and better schools than cities. Culture is not absent, and neither is the concern to be good stewards of the environment.

In the suburbs, you can live how you please. Want to live big? Buy a Toll Brothers McMansion in Upper Makefield. Want to live small? Buy a Levittowner in Falls. Want a “walkable” community? Bristol and New Hope beckon.

The suburbs win, again. Welcome, millennials.

the intell

6 Comments on "Millennials like the suburbs"

J-Gav on Fri, 13th Dec 2013 12:03 am 



“In the suburbs you can live how you please.”

There have been any number of absurd statements in articles on this website but that one comes pretty close to taking the cake. Try walking to your “local” supermarket when it’s 6 miles away …

BillT on Fri, 13th Dec 2013 12:58 am 



This whole article is a joke. Without constant money input for maintenance, most suburb houses will not be livable. EVERYTHING in them has a life expectancy of less than 20 years and many less than 10. With a 30 year mortgage, you will need to replace them often. Price a new roof for your home and be sitting when the roofer giver you the quote. Have you had to call a plumber or electrician lately?

“… an exceptionally well-educated generation, …” Well, yes, the best college educated burger flippers the fast food chains have ever hired so cheap. At least, those who can find a job. There are over five million in that age group that are unemployed and that number is not getting better.

Many more ‘assumptions’ that are not valid. Too many to name.

GregT on Fri, 13th Dec 2013 1:03 am 



In a post collapse scenario, living in the suburbs would be a much better option. Too bad most of them are located within a day or two walk from the cities.
When the city people get hungry enough, that is exactly the direction that they will be headed.

DC on Fri, 13th Dec 2013 1:15 am 



Just another cheerleader for cars-only status-quo. Suburban houses are built like shyt, and this writer probably knows it. As for this fools assertion that people have been ‘predicting’ the suburbs demise, well. It wasnt a prediction with a due date, just an observation that the whole suburban mess was slowly going to fail. It is a failed system even as new shacks are being built. Its already happening. Articles in the MSM about poverty growing fastest in the ‘burbs’ are starting to appear. In the US, millions of foreclosed or unsold suburban shacks are being kept off the books in order to pump up prices and avert another housing collapse.

Yea, life in the suburbs has never been better sure…

Arthur on Fri, 13th Dec 2013 9:36 am 



When I think of suburbs, I have to fall back on impressions from movies, where little boys on bicycles deliver the newspaper by throwing it on a lawn that is too big to bring it too the doorstep. You can say what you want about suburbs, but at least there is enough soil to grow a potatoe or two. Admittedly you need a car to drive to Wallmart or your cubicle, but maybe Walmart will not be around that much longer and your cubicle will be located in a spare bedroom upstairs, with computer, headset and webcam and an internet connection.

BillT on Fri, 13th Dec 2013 4:10 pm 



You may be right Arthur, but I wouldn’t count on the internet part. And, here in the US, contractors scrape off the top soil before they build and then only replace a few inches to grow grass. The rest is clay and rock. Not going to grow much there. The topsoil was sold to landscaping companies.