Ho-hum, another prediction that “suburbs are dead,” this time from Fortune magazine assistant editor Leigh Gallagher. Her just-released book, The End of the Suburbs, argues that Americans no longer dream of owning a house with a yard and driving to work and everywhere else.
“All the studies show” that the millenials “want to live where they can walk, whether that’s the city or an urban suburb,” she tells Washington Post reporter Paul Windle. Gallaher herself lives in New York City’s West Village, while Windle lives in inner Washington, DC, so their own personal anecdotal evidence easily confirms what “all the studies show.”
As it turns out, however, all the studies don’t show that. Take, for example, the Census Bureau report (previously noted here) that new homes are larger than ever or this survey, which found that three out four millennials aspire to live in a house of their own–and many of them are working hard to achieve that.
What someone says in a poll, of course, is less important than what they actually do. If you had asked the Antiplanner at 35 whether he aspired to own a home, he would have said “No!” At the time, I lived in an apartment a couple of blocks from downtown and cycled almost everywhere I went. Yet two years later I had purchased a home in the suburbs and never wanted to go to an inner-city area again. (I still cycled almost everywhere I went, at least until I got my first dog.) Anyway, my own anecdotal experience tells me something quite different from Gallagher’s and Windle’s.
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Gallagher replies that people “like living in houses that are not that expensive, but a lot of the drivey-drivey areas are really expensive because of the cost you put into getting around.” But, as previously noted here, that’s not true either: the savings on housing more than compensate for increased transport costs. Beside, the increased mobility people gain by having cars far outweighs the costs, especially when you consider that transit is both more expensive and far more heavily subsidized, per passenger mile, than driving.
Suburbs need to re-invent themselves, says Gallagher, by providing “A place people want to walk around. Organic, village-type environments that are how the suburbs started to begin with. Public transit also. People want out of their cars, especially millennials.” Again, the verdict is still out about whether millennials “want” out of their cars; somehow, I suspect US DOT researcher Don Pickrell is correct (as previously noted here) that high unemployment rates have more to do with the reduced amount of driving they do at the moment.
Let’s say Gallagher is right and young people will prefer to live in mixed-use developments and use transit over driving. Gallagher’s solution is to turn the suburbs into West Villages (or, going back to the real founder of the New Urbanist movement, Jane Jacobs, Greenwich Villages). That’s an invitation for urban planners to do all sorts of expensive and intrusive meddling into people’s lives.
If you really want the suburbs to evolve, the real solution is to reduce the costs of such evolution. This means ending zoning; minimizing permitting costs and times; and giving residents an opportunity to create homeowner associations that write and modify their own protective covenants so that people can feel secure in their own neighborhoods but allow them to change as tastes change. Then developers can reinvent the suburbs as often as the market demands at a far lower cost than planners want to spend on their New Urban dreams.
You hit the nail on the head: “.. the real solution is to reduce the costs of such evolution. This means ending zoning; minimizing permitting costs and times; and giving residents an opportunity to create homeowner associations that write and modify their own protective covenants “.
Except that these solutions will never happen as it means that people will choose how to live rather than government (and the myriad types of planners that exist through government) and the governments are not about to allow any reduction in power.
The Antiplanner points to a common mistake in policy debates, though he could hit it a lot harder.
Often people will take survey results and argue that the younger people’s views are the views that will take over in the future. But that has many possible faults in it, the largest being that effect does not equal cause. People’s needs and opinions change as they get older, and desired housing and transportation has to be one of the most obvious things that change. Living above a bar and cycling to work can be exciting in your 20s, but much different when you have kids.
You all see this error all the time in election political commentary. Commentators will often say that Republican voters are much older and Democrat voters are much younger, thus the Democrats will grow in the future as the older Republicans die off. They forget that all those hippies and radical 1960s generation are now those old people who vote Republican.
I’d be willing to wager that in the last 5 years that Culpepper County VA has added more households than all of DC
As long as there are black and hispanic gangs rampaging through our cities, no white or Asian person with a family will move there. The whites and Asians who do live in the city are single or couples without children who have upper class incomes and who can afford what amounts to gated homes.
“the savings on housing more than compensate for increased transport costs. Beside, the increased mobility people gain by having cars far outweighs the costs”
Does it? What about time? I certainly value my time, especially when I work 50+ hours a week, and when I was commuting 50 miles per day round-trip, I spent a minimum of an hour in the car; several days a week, due to accidents and/or construction, I spent two hours a day in the car. My time is worth about $30 an hour, making the cost of my commute in time alone $600-$750 a month.
Also factor in the cost the commute’s tremendous stress. Here’s one of my status updates on a day when it took me nearly three hours to get home: “my commute was so rough today that when i pulled up to a stop sign, the guy with the sign asking for money saw the look on my face and gave ME a dollar. he told me to go buy a soda. no kidding.” Now that I live less than a mile from work, my stress level has decreased dramatically. Plus, I’m not putting my life at risk from texters, “drifting”-style Asian drivers, small Asian women texting while driving SUVs , semi-trucks in the dark with no taillights with steel beams protruding from their trailers, nearly getting rear ended in heavy traffic by impatient/distracted drivers, hydroplaning, blizzards, etc. And I don’t have to live with images like the raccoon I saw that had been hit by a car and was paralyzed but was dragging itself along the freeway shoulder with its front two feet.
The commute is hell and there’s no way in hell I will go back to that. It’s simply not worth any supposed savings on housing.
I can appreciate what you say except the part about home owner associations. Those groups like to violate civil rights laws and a future governmed by home owner associations sounds a bit scary less there are appropriate civil liberties/ civil rights checks.
mattdpalm – care to expound on how a HOA can violate civil rights. 1) Houses are sold individual to individual with no involvement by the HOA. 2) Most states have statutory regulation of HOAs so there are serious limits on the powers of the HOA. 3) Buying a house in an HOA is voluntary and the seller is required to make full disclosure of the HOA rules and regulations long before closing.
HOAs are not for everybody, but they do have their place in society.
Frank.
You said “The commute is hell and there’s no way in hell I will go back to that. It’s simply not worth any supposed savings on housing.”
If you could have something else do the driving (this removing the hell and cutting your time behind a wheel to zero), and by elevating most of your commute above the traffic (this cutting your commute time by 80% , and the time saved allowing you do make enough money to buy that house), would you ‘go back’?
Frank, you raise a good point. I may be misunderstanding you but you are saying that you lived in the suburbs but worked in the central city? Either way, the thing we need to keep in mind is that for the majority of Americans, living close to work means living in the suburbs. If they moved to the core city of the metro, they would likely be making their commute longer. That is, unless they also found a new job that was also in the central city.
Dave, not on public transit. First, it would have taken about 1.5 hours on buses with several transfers, raising my minimum time commuting to three hours a day. Second, the buses can travel in HOV lanes but are subject to the same delays in accidents and construction. My preference is to live in the country, not the central city (where I now live) or the suburbs (where I lived briefly). I grew up on a farm and spent my twenties living in national parks. I require peace and quiet and lots of space, something urban or suburban areas cannot provide. If driverless car technology were available, I’d move tomorrow.
Prk166, I lived centrally and commuted to a suburb. My wife works in the central area, so one of us had to commute. The suburb where I worked was a ghetto, riddled with crime and gangs, and totally lacking originality, so it wasn’t really an option to live there. After two years, I found work in the same neighborhood as my wife’s job, so we moved to that neighborhood. In addition to the time saving and lower stress, we are saving $350 a month in gas by living and working in the same neighborhood. When I lived in Portland, however, all my employers were located in the suburbs, supporting your point. In my line of work (education), most jobs are in the suburbs because that’s where most of the children live.
A guy at the Brookings Institute, Bruce Katz, made a similar argument (suburbs suck, cities are the engines of growth) in a book and also in an article focusing on Portland Oregon (http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/07/weird-is-good-what-portlands-economy-can-teach-every-city-in-the-world/277477/)
The article on Portland has disgraceful factual errors that neither the authors nor the Atlantic have remedied. For instance, Katz situates the Silicon Forest in Portland when everyone knows that the Silicon Forest stretches from suburban Beaverton to rural Hillsboro. This map-reading error guts his argument about Portland’s weirdness attracting great high-tech jobs. Hillsboro, land of single family homes and farms, is not “weird,” yet movie studios (Laikka) and high tech manufacturers are settling there and avoiding Portland.
It’s hard to quantify convenience, but suburban life (with car) is simply more convenient for many people, especially with kids — lugging children and their gear to soccer games, picking up the dry-cleaning and stopping at the pharmacy, etc., etc. I love cities when I’m on vacation and can wait for transit or decide whether to walk or take a cab (on vacation, who counts the cost?), but in my complicated real life, nothing beats being able to have at least some control over my travels. And having actual green stuff around me, and privacy — that’s priceless. It’s time for planners to acknowledge that there are many different lifestyles to choose among, and some of us will choose one now (young, single) and another later (married and settled, with our without kids) and maybe another one for retirement. One size does not fit all.