We've written before about the idea that suburbs are the slums of the future. I've also touched on Christopher B. Leinberger's The Option of Urbanism (though I have yet to receive my review copy, ahem). But now the two have come together in a great Atlantic essay you should sprint to get your hands on:
Arthur C. Nelson, director of the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech, has looked carefully at trends in American demographics, construction, house prices, and consumer preferences. In 2006, using recent consumer research, housing supply data, and population growth rates, he modeled future demand for various types of housing. The results were bracing: Nelson forecasts a likely surplus of 22 million large-lot homes (houses built on a sixth of an acre or more) by 2025—that’s roughly 40 percent of the large-lot homes in existence today.For 60 years, Americans have pushed steadily into the suburbs, transforming the landscape and (until recently) leaving cities behind. But today the pendulum is swinging back toward urban living, and there are many reasons to believe this swing will continue. As it does, many low-density suburbs and McMansion subdivisions, including some that are lovely and affluent today, may become what inner cities became in the 1960s and ’70s—slums characterized by poverty, crime, and decay.
And the suburbs we're building no longer even reflect what people want or how we live:
In most metropolitan areas, only 5 to 10 percent of the housing stock is located in walkable urban places (including places like downtown White Plains and Belmar). Yet recent consumer research by Jonathan Levine of the University of Michigan and Lawrence Frank of the University of British Columbia suggests that roughly one in three homeowners would prefer to live in these types of places. In one study, for instance, Levine and his colleagues asked more than 1,600 mostly suburban residents of the Atlanta and Boston metro areas to hypothetically trade off typical suburban amenities (such as large living spaces) against typical urban ones (like living within walking distance of retail districts). All in all, they found that only about a third of the people surveyed solidly preferred traditional suburban lifestyles, featuring large houses and lots of driving. Another third, roughly, had mixed feelings. The final third wanted to live in mixed-use, walkable urban areas—but most had no way to do so at an affordable price. Over time, as urban and faux-urban building continues, that will change.Demographic changes in the United States also are working against conventional suburban growth, and are likely to further weaken preferences for car-based suburban living. When the Baby Boomers were young, families with children made up more than half of all households; by 2000, they were only a third of households; and by 2025, they will be closer to a quarter. Young people are starting families later than earlier generations did, and having fewer children. The Boomers themselves are becoming empty-nesters, and many have voiced a preference for urban living. By 2025, the U.S. will contain about as many single-person households as families with children.
There's a giant opportunity here to forge a new market preference, a demographic shift, new technologies and a historical opportunity into cities which are machines for living bright green lives.
Cities outperform suburbs on nearly every measure of environmental well-being, and, though it may sound surprising to 20th century ears, social well-being, even in most cases health. Compact communities are so much better than sprawling ones that a quite credible argument can be made that land use reform is the most important environmental policy in the North America. We ought to be practically paying people to live in cities.
Of course, as Harvard economics prof Edward Glaeser notes, that's not what we're doing today:
While we should be encouraging development in dense, urban areas that use less energy, many of our policies work exactly in the wrong direction. Our land use restrictions push development away from dense areas, with plenty of NIMBY-ist neighbors, toward empty spaces with fewer noisy abutters. Our transportation policies fail to charge people for the full social costs of driving long distances on crowded highways. Our localized school system encourages prosperous parents to flee urban poverty. Just think of how the 1974 Supreme Court decision that limited busing to within city boundaries encouraged mass suburbanization to get beyond those city borders.
Urbanists tend to be great eliders: we look at the parts of cities which fit our desires or theories or confirm our prejudices, and conveniently do not see the rest of the urban fabric. That is a privilege we're going to have to give up. For the new cities of the bright green future, with their new forms of infrastructure and new types of commerce and industry, will only function well if they are much more integrated and fully woven than the cities of the last century. In part, that will demand that they be much denser, but even more, it demands that urban land be used intelligently, and intensively, and that policies, codes and taxes push that sort of use.
But what about the suburbs we leave behind in our wake as we create these green and gleaming cities?
"The ruins of the unsustainable are the 21st century's frontier." The decline of sprawl of written: the kinds of demographic and cultural shifts we're seeing are unlikely to reverse themselves, and even without carbon pricing, oil is going to continue its march towards the sea of in-affordability. It's what we do with the ruins left behind that's interesting.
Might the next generation's suburban pioneers (the Berliners call their urban pioneers taikonauts, a word I like) find ways of taking the housing bubble sprawl housing that today sits rotting on its cul-de-sacs, and making something extraordinary out of it?
I'm often asked to suggest topics for competitions and charrettes and such. Sustainability retrofits for low-income abandoned sprawl would be a damn fine place to apply some wild creativity.
(photo credit: Cory Doctorow, Creative Commons)
