Northeastern suburbs tend to be much older than suburbs in the rest of the country...
Your anecdote seems hardly enough to refute the article. How much do you know about newer suburban developments outside Atlanta, or Dallas, or Phoenix?
I think this article is poorly descriptive of most of the older and most popular Chicago suburbs, but very well describes the Chicago "exurbs" and the Atlanta sprawl suburbs. So to me, it's not that the author is wrong, so much as semantically imprecise with the word "suburb".
> New York suburbs are not the only ones getting somewhat grayer. In three Maryland suburbs outside Washington, Chevy Chase lost 34 percent of its 25- to 34-year-olds, Bethesda 19.2 percent and Potomac 27 percent. The declines were comparable for Kenilworth, Winnetka and Glencoe outside Chicago...
These are all very expensive suburbs. They are "graying" because it takes more time to accumulate the money to live there. The same is happening to my town. A better comparison would be suburbs that younger people can afford vs. cities. I'd bet you find the same trend, but these examples are not informative.
> It (suburbia) is a very convenient place to live
I just wanted to point out that this is missed on a lot of people. City planners in suburbs have come a long way, at least in DFW they have. I live in Oak Cliff which is about 3 miles S/SW of downtown Dallas. The northern suburbs of DFW such as Frisco are not the traditional boring/bland bedroom communities that get associated with suburbs. Well, there is that element but there are many good jobs, good restaurants/entertainment, and other amenities traditionally associated with city centers in the suburbs these days.
I suggest spending some times in a growing a suburb with an open mind. If you're a city person it's not likely to amaze you but it's not that bad either.
What's not talked about so much is the ghettoization of the suburbs.
If you look closely, many of the houses are rooming houses. It's harder to tell because 4 or 5 cars parked in the driveway is not abnormal in the burbs.
The suburbs built in the 1930s are being gentrified, and are now considered 'downtown'.
The suburbs built in the 1940s-1960s are in now the edge of the city, inhabited by an older generation or retires that vote very conservatively as they try to stop change in their neighborhoods.
The suburbs built in the 1970s and 1980s are starting to show their age. They are at the ends of public transit lines where rents in rooming houses are the cheapest. This is the area new immigrants are moving, as it saves money, but the commute is long.
The suburbs of the 1990s till now are eating up small towns. This causes some tension between the new burbs and the more redneck locals that have never liked the city.
Hi, author here. Just wanted to respond to a few broad themes I see in the comments:
1. "My neighbourhood isn't like that at all!"
My criticism was directed at the specific type of vacuous sprawl commonly seen in new Sun Belt development. That's a mouthful to put in an article title, so I tried to make the distinction clear in the article by referring repeatedly to "older" and "traditional" neighbourhoods. I suspect this may be why the term "sprawl" came about, i.e. to more accurately capture the sort of thing I'm referring to.
I would be the first to agree that a lot of the more dense suburban neighbourhoods found in the Northeast and around the older industrial cities of America are more livable than what I'm describing. And certainly, not all kids that grow up in suburban neighbourhoods, in cul-de-sacs or otherwise, have a miserable and isolated experience. At the same time, an awful lot of the USA looks like what I described.
By the same token, rural != suburban to my mind, even though some of the same drawbacks are present in rural layouts. As I see it, suburbia is precisely that which offers none of the advantages of either urban living or the countryside, but the downsides of both.
2. "If you don't like suburbs, don't live there. To each his own."
Yes, but 90%+ of the US looks like this, to varying degrees.
There is a widely disseminated idea out there that this is the organic outcome of widespread social preference, a democratic coming-together of the citizenry in a consensus on how they want to live in the land of the free. As evidence, boosters of the phenomenon point to the fact that the majority of new building embodies the paradigm I lambast.
It's just not true, though. In my experience, a large percentage of Americans simply aren't familiar with what the alternatives would look like. More importantly, there is enormous accumulated evidence that sprawl is an engineered policy outcome to some degree. One need not be a kooky conspiracy theorist to see that it's astronomically easier to get additional road-building approved (and subsidised with matching federal funds) and that there are lots of perverse legal and economic incentives for greenfield cookie-cutter subdivision development versus urban infill.
Does that mean that everyone really clamours to live in urban settings deep down inside? Of course not. Some people genuinely like suburbia as I've described it--one can find abundant evidence of that in this discussion thread. However, I do not at all buy into the notion that there is such an overwhelming consensus in favour of that mode of life that almost all inhabited areas of the US are built to suit. For the most part, there just aren't many alternatives; it's amazing what humans can adapt to and put up with. Zoning committees, planners and government agencies have made sprawl an easy inertial default for a variety of historical reasons.
That's how this has turned into a broad quality of life issue that merits broad, nationally scoped criticism. If suburban sprawl were confined to a relative niche of enthusiasts, I wouldn't have a problem with it.
3. "You're comparing ordinary towns with exceptionally beautiful and historic European capitals!"
No, I'm not. My experience has been, however, that on their worst day, profoundly second and third-tier European cities and towns are infinitely more navigable and livable than the vast majority of the US.
4. I would never dispute that European cities bring their own problems and developmental antipatterns.
5. For those who say I don't understand because I'm too young or don't have kids: I'm 30 and have a 4 year-old, a 3 year-old, and a newborn.
Wonder how/if this correlates with current trends of newer generations preferring to move from suburbs back to cities. Maybe it is becoming more advantageous to renovate an older home in the city than to build new in a suburb?
Many of the counterarguments in these comments (especially that smaller cities, or rural areas, are fine even when American suburbs are not) are actually reasonable, and Jacobs covers them in her book.
Since it's from 1961, you might think the insights would be dated, but they're not. She was complaining even as these mistakes were being made, and it's fascinating to read so many of her predictions that we can now say clearly came true.
What about how economically inefficient most suburbs are? I'm no expert on this, but I have seen some videos and articles about how expensive maintaining the typical suburban infrastructure is [1][2] versus more dense development.
I have zero nostalgia for where I grew up (Salem, MA), which wasn't even fully a suburb in the way that most of America is developed. I could actually walk downtown and there were sidewalks the entire way, whereas a couple weeks ago I was in suburban Maryland for a client meeting and I couldn't even walk to the Walgreens near my hotel that I could see from the property. Not to say I don't have good memories of where I grew up, but I definitely felt like I was biding my time until I could either move to the woods or to a city. All my friends that grew up here in NYC just had so many more opportunities as kids, particularly around arts and encountering great teachers that mentored them.
> It's pretty telling that no evidence whatsoever is provided for this claim.
FWIW, I'm technically a Millennial (born in 1984, Millennials are born 1982-2004), and I'm a living counter-example to the article's claims.
I love living in the suburbs, and I have no problems whatsoever with "visial monotony and social conformity". Really, I'd love to just be an anonymous cog in the machine. I want lots of space and no noise, and I'm visually in love with with the look and feel of sprawl.
The only demand I make is that I strongly prefer living in southwestern and some midwestern suburbs that make use of an arterial grid (e.g. Dallas, Detroit, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Columbus), and I despise the loosey-goosey layout of northeastern suburbs (I have family in NY... the suburbs there feel rural, and I just don't like that). Cities that use an arterial grid tend to place shopping centers at every intersection of arterials, and I like living close enough to one of those intersections that I can walk to the supermarket if I need to. That is the only kind of "walkability" I care about.
Interestingly enough, a recent local tragedy actually brought to light just how much of my age group in my area prefers suburban living. Last weekend, there was a mass shooting at a football watch party in a suburban home in Plano, TX. The shooter and the victims were all fairly close in age to me, leaning younger (the shooter was my age exactly, one other victim was a year older than me, four were 1-5 years younger than me, and three were 7-10 years younger than me). All of them are Millennial suburbanites living in a pretty conservative, sprawling suburb. Furthermore, as I found out after the shooting I have multiple friends who live in that neighborhood, all of whom are within two years of my age. Whatever this alleged trend in suburbs is, it didn't seem to affect Millennials who attended UTD in the mid-to-late '00s.
(As an aside, this has been pretty devastating--the suburbs of Dallas are tight-knit enough that everyone knows each other, I have mutual friends with almost every single person involved, we all went to the same university, and I'd met one of the victims before. Part of the reason I'm writing about this at all is to help me process what happened. And my friends who live there are seriously freaked because their neighbors just got murdered and there are cops and tourists all over their neighborhood now.)
Kevin Drum's rebuttal, citing census data and Brookings estimates:
"there never really was much of a back-to-the-city trend in the first place... With only tiny variances, the suburbs have been gaining population for 70 years relative to cities (and rural areas)..."
Millenials' preferences appear roughly similar to the preferences of other generations.
It's almost as if millenials don't love avocado toast so much as they love defying sweeping stereotypes about cohorts divided by arbitrary birth years.
That is my experience in the East coast US. Here, the suburbs are very spread out, with amenities 15-20 minutes away by car. There are older suburbs where that is not true, but that's more of an exception. Housing in those older suburbs costs more than the newer more spread out developments and there are fewer of them than the newer more spread out ones.
Typically, those old suburbs were originally built around train stations or street car lines, which influenced their design. The newer ones were designed around access by car and zoning prevents any non residential land uses nearby.
So usually people who talk about suburbs refer more to the sprawling burbs of like late 60s+. What you’re referring to sounds like a “streetcar suburb”, which urbanists usually like
> In American suburbs it's typical for there to be nothing but houses within a 3 to 5 mile area.
Can you name a few examples of suburbs where that is the case? Nothing but houses for 3-5 miles?
I've lived in the US east coast and west coast, always in suburban areas, and I've never seen that. It would take an immense neighborhood of houses to cover 5 miles. Do such ones exist? Let alone common enough to be called "typical"?
In every suburb I've lived, there has been at least a supermarket less than 3 miles away. In my current suburban house, there are two supermarkets within a 5 minute walking distance.
> In my metro (DFW), the neighborhoods of houses built in the 60s/70s/80s are dwindling because nobody will buy them. There are neighborhoods of perfectly fine ~200k houses just sitting on the market for months because "ewww, I don't want to live in Grand Prairie/Garland/Irving". Then those same people pine over the newly built $500k mcmansions in Frisco or the $2m mansions in Highland Park and lament about how they'll never be able to afford being a homeowner. Do you see the disconnect?
An alternative hypothesis would be that suburban development patterns don't work generally. I don't know anything about the DFW area specifically, but it's possible people don't want to live in those cheaper areas because they are poorly laid out and the infrastructure maintenance is higher than the revenue the area can generate. This may manifest itself in different ways (poorer schools, sidewalks, amenities), but one way or another, these neighborhoods are signaling decline.
Many first and second generation suburbs are in death spirals because of this problem. Buyers who can afford it chase newer development because the areas have an optimistic future and no obvious maintenance problem. Unfortunately, many of those areas will be in the same spot 30 years down the line.
> But these days, millennials seem to think that they are automatically entitled to live downtown in a 4 bedroom, newly renovated/constructed house with full amenities next to the main park and hip shopping center and zero crime while on an entry level salary.
I'm not saying there aren't some entitled people, but I haven't encountered this attitude very often - it seems like there are plenty of other reasonable explanations for what is driving consumer choices without stereotyping.
It's amazing all the people posting comments here who completely missed the point of the article.
The author is NOT saying that suburbs are bad. The author is saying that American suburbs are bad. There is a difference, and that difference is the entire point of the article.
The title is somewhat misleading. The suburbs are not dying; in fact they are growing [1][2][3][4] and this article makes no claim to the contrary.
The article is saying that suburbs are becoming more like urban areas.
I like the author's evidence that housing prices are falling:
> In that same city in 2012, a typical McMansion would be valued at $477,000, about 274% more than the area's other homes. Today, a McMansion would be valued at $611,000, or 190% above the rest of the market.
As the other poster said, there's a lot of variation in "suburbs" in America. I recently lived a township in northern NJ, which effectively was a "suburb" in the NYC metro area. There was a convenience store just down the street (a 1-minute walk away), a high school right next door, a small river and a park a few minutes away, a "downtown" area less than 10 minutes' walk away, etc. A bug stop at the end of my little street took me to Manhattan in less than 60 minutes. If I wanted to go to other nearby towns, however, I needed a car because the buses were too slow, though a fair number of (poorer) people did use them for that. The houses were really close together and typically quite old; mine was built in 1930. Heating costs were high though because those old houses aren't well-insulated (and that house had been renovated with new windows so it wasn't too horrible, unlike some others). There were lots of sidewalks everywhere, though they tended to be in rough shape in places because of all the salt in the winter; they had to replace them a lot.
I also lived in the Phoenix metro area for quite a while. That was totally different. No shopping within walking distance at all, if you were lucky there might be some kind of park near your development, but older neighborhoods usually didn't have that. HOAs were commonplace and horribly run. There were sidewalks everywhere, but they were only good for walking around the neighborhood to get some exercise, not for actually going anywhere. Any place you might want to go required a car, and public transit was really awful. There were buses, but they tended to go to major destinations, and suburban housing developments weren't among them.
Honestly, I think we'd all be a lot better off if we had much higher-density housing with mixed commercial/residential areas so it was easy to walk to nearby eateries and convenience stores. The problem is the rent prices are always much too high, and I'd like to see some kind of political action to deal with that. I suspect the culprit is a combination of real estate speculation and insufficient supply caused by zoning laws.
Your anecdote seems hardly enough to refute the article. How much do you know about newer suburban developments outside Atlanta, or Dallas, or Phoenix?
reply