The Death Of Levittown…
I grew up in the suburbs…in various garden apartments my mom moved us to, as her employer relocated from time to time, and as her income level rose marginally. My earliest memories are of living in the city though, in Washington D.C. close to the Northeast freight yards. I used to watch the trains from the screened in porch on our second floor of our apartment. As soon as she could, mom moved us out of the city, so I wouldn’t have to attend city schools which she felt were dangerous. To this day I cannot imagine how much worse it could have been for me in the city, because I was bullied pretty constantly throughout grade school anyway, all the way until my high school years at Woodward, which were heaven by comparison.
I vividly remember the first nice garden apartment we moved to in the suburbs. It had a balcony with large plate glass sliding doors and tons of green spaces between the buildings for kids to play in. And it had Air Conditioning! I thought we’d really moved up in the world. Then I began making friends at school who lived in houses…real houses…with upstairs and downstairs and basements and everything. The suburbs were heaven it seemed. Just…heaven.
Well…their time may be coming to a close. This from Dan Savage over at SLOG…
After years of listening to David Brooks go on and on and on about how real Americans loved the exurbs—we can’t get enough of those big yards, soulless bedroom communities, and long commutes—I was thrilled to read this piece in The Atlantic yesterday.
Pent-up demand for urban living is evident in housing prices. Twenty years ago, urban housing was a bargain in most central cities. Today, it carries an enormous price premium. Per square foot, urban residential neighborhood space goes for 40 percent to 200 percent more than traditional suburban space in areas as diverse as New York City; Portland, Oregon; Seattle; and Washington, D.C….
Author Christopher Leinberger points out that American exurbs are likely to suffer the same fate that American inner cities did from the ’50s to the ’80s: soaring crime rates, deteriorating schools, falling property values…
The experience of cities during the 1950s through the ’80s suggests that the fate of many single-family homes on the metropolitan fringes will be resale, at rock-bottom prices, to lower-income families—and in all likelihood, eventual conversion to apartments….
As the residents of inner-city neighborhoods did before them, suburban homeowners will surely try to prevent the division of neighborhood houses into rental units, which would herald the arrival of the poor. And many will likely succeed, for a time. But eventually, the owners of these fringe houses will have to sell to someone, and they’re not likely to find many buyers; offers from would-be landlords will start to look better, and neighborhood restrictions will relax. Stopping a fundamental market shift by legislation or regulation is generally impossible.
Which suburbs will avoid this fate? According to Leinberger suburbs and exurbs served by commuter rail—particularly those with walkable urban-ish centers (older suburbs with small retail strips in their “downtowns areas” or newer developments with “lifestyle centers”)—may buck the trend. But as gas prices continue to rise and more people choose walkable cities over car-dependent exurbs, the fate of McMansions will be sealed: they will become, Leinberger argues, “the new slums.”
I moved into the city here in Baltimore after I got the staff position at Space Telescope. I am within a short walking distance of work, two nice grocery stores, several drug stores, and some really nice restaurants. I seldom need to drive anywhere most days, unless I need to get something at the Home Depot or Sears. The rising cost of driving anywhere has cut into my lifestyle somewhat, since I love to do cross-country roadtrips. But it’s not critical, other then it drives the price of all the goods and services I buy up too and that’s more the problem for me then the cost of gasoline itself. No…I don’t have all the nice green space around me I did in the suburbs. But my neighborhood is very walkable. City life I’m finding, can be just as nice as life in the suburbs was.
You want to cut this nation’s dependency on oil down? Mass transit isn’t going to do it. The cost of all the service to the entire sprawling suburbs necessary to make suburbanites want to use it will amount to about as much oil consumption as if people just drove their cars anyway. What is needed, is to make the cities livable, so people will move into them, close enough to work to walk it, or a short light rail or bus ride, and close enough to all their routine shopping, like for food, that they won’t need to drive nearly so much.
The suburbs were heaven, but heaven wasn’t sustainable. They were only nice so long as most people lived in the cities and the roads weren’t jammed and the cost of gasoline wasn’t much. As the cost of gasoline keeps rising, the balance of population between the cities and the suburbs may go back to something more like what it was. But it will never be the middle class heaven it once was again. I don’t think they’ll turn into great swaths of slums either though, since so many working poor and poor people will still need to get to and from jobs and various city services and things and that means either driving or public transportation again and I just don’t see public transportation being that widely accessible in the sprawling suburbs. Public transportation will always make more sense in the densely packed cities then in the suburbs. I think the suburbs will eventually go back to being what they once were…either farmland or a place where the rich build their mansions.
You can read Leinberger’s article, Here.
March 4th, 2008 at 4:15 pm
I agree with you that the suburbs won’t become poor – but for slightly different reasons.
If the major US cities go the same way that London’s commuter belt (which has a total population over 3/4 that of California) has then being close to commuter rail will be a liability, not an advantage. Singletons and childless couples (rapidly growing groups here) are much less likely to own cars than families, so need to be closer to mass transport, which pushes up house prices in areas close to tube and mainline stations in and around London – they’re the only areas developers are interested in for conversions to apartments (case in point: a huge amount of land around Bedford station, about an hour from central London, is being redeveloped – almost entirely as apartment blocks). Houses in suburbs without commuter rail won’t end up as flats because there’s no money in it if there aren’t good train links.
Also, because so many more people are able to work from home, only visiting the office once or twice a week (a trend that is accelerating) the distance & cost of commuting is becoming less of an issue so the advantages of living in the cities are becoming less significant.
So while suburbs without commuter rail fall in price and become ghost towns, those suburbs that do have it will become far more densely populated, especially within about 1/2 mile of the station, with only the McMansions on the fringes of these suburbs managing to hold their value without being redeveloped. In time there will be more purpose-built apartments built for families, with play areas & other kid-oriented facilities, similar to continental Europe. Ultimately I don’t think the number of people living in the suburbs will change much – only how much land the suburbs spread over.