The End of the Suburbs: Where the American Dream Is Moving (26 page)

Between 1923 and 1927, new homes were built
:
U.S. Bureau of the Census,
Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970
, part 2.

from 1920 to 1930
:
Jackson,
Crabgrass Frontier
, p. 175.

For twenty years, housing starts averaged
:
U.S. Bureau of the Census,
Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970
, part 2.

The housing shortage was so severe
:
Jackson,
Crabgrass Frontier
, p. 232. Jackson’s quote about sleeping in his grandparents’ dining room comes from a transcript of the PBS series
The First Measured Century
, 2000.

The mortgage interest tax deduction, a by-product
:
Lost in the current political debate over the mortgage interest tax deduction is the fact that the Revenue Act of 1913 didn’t refer to mortgage interest at all; rather, it simply provided a deduction for “all interest paid within the year by a taxable person on indebtedness.” More on this can be found in Dennis J. Ventry Jr., “The Accidental Deduction: A History and Critique of the Tax Subsidy for Mortgage Interest,”
Law and Contemporary Problems
73 (Winter 2010): 233–84.

Housing starts jumped from
:
U.S. Bureau of the Census,
Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970
,
part 2.

The percentage of American families who owned their homes
:
U.S. Census Bureau.

The suburban surge continued
: T
he Jackson quote comes from
Crabgrass Frontier
, p. 190.

By 1970, 38 percent
:
U.S. Census Bureau,
Demographic Trends in the 20th Century
, Census 2000 Special Reports, November 2002.

From 1950 to 1970 Americans’ incomes nearly doubled
:
U.S. Census Bureau.

On a single day in March 1949
:
Jackson,
Crabgrass Frontier
, p. 237.

In 1950, a builder in Fullerton, California
:
fullertonheritage.org.

Lakewood, California, the fastest-growing community that same year
:
The Lakewood Story: History, Tradition, Values
(City of Lakewood, 2004).

In 1957, first-time author
:
John Keats,
The Crack in the Picture Window
(Houghton Mifflin, 1956)

That year, the Urban Land Institute
:
Community Growth: Crisis and Challenge
, 1959, National Association of Home Builders and Urban Land Institute. This video is fascinating to watch.

likens this setup to an “unmade omelet”
:
Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck,
Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream
(North Point Press, 2000), p. 10. The authors also describe the difference between traditional neighborhood design and the sprawl-style designs that replaced it in terms of how they could be drawn: the latter can be drawn as a bubble diagram with a “fat marker pen,” whereas the drafting of the dense, intricate layouts of traditional towns requires a fine-point writing instrument.

Robert Putnam, a Harvard professor
:
This particular quote comes from Putnam’s appearance in the PBS documentary
Designing Healthy Communities
, a four-part series produced by the Media Policy Center that aired on public television stations in January 2012. But the relation between the size of one’s triangle—the distance between where a person shops, sleeps, and works—and his or her happiness is a major tenet of Putnam’s and one he explores in his book,
Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community
(Simon & Schuster, 2000), cited elsewhere in these notes. Putnam posits that when we lived in villages long ago, the distances among those three points were very small; now it might be thirty or forty miles or more. He suggests that the smaller the triangle, the happier the person, as long as there are social interactions. (He also suggests you can judge how small your triangle is by the size of your refrigerator since people with small fridges are usually able to frequent stores more often, and posits “the bigger the refrigerator, the lonelier the soul.”)

The nationwide home ownership rate . . . the rate for blacks was 44.1 percent
:
U.S. Census Bureau. These stark differences in home ownership rates by race are almost never mentioned in the discussion of the benefits widespread home ownership has brought to our society.

For one, cities all but crumbled, seeing a net out-migration of
thirteen million
:
Robert Fishman,
Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia
(Basic Books, 1987), p. 182.

By 1981, half of office space
:
Rodney Jennings, “Dynamics of the Suburban Activity Center: Retrofitting for Pedestrian/Transit Use,” Portland State University, June 1989.

By the end of the 1990s
:
Terry Christensen and Tom Hogen-Esch,
Local Politics: A Practical Guide to Governing at the Grassroots
, 2nd ed. (M. E. Sharpe, 2006), p. 52.

dwarfed only by the size
:
Many big-box store parking lots are so large, they sublease sections of their asphalt to fast-food chains.

Whether called “technoburbs”
:
The term “technoburbs” was coined by Robert Fishman in
Bourgeois Utopias
. “Boomburbs” was coined by the demographer Robert E. Lang in a 2001 report for the Fannie Mae Foundation that identified fifty-three boomburbs, defined as incorporated places in the top fifty metropolitan areas in the United States with more than one hundred thousand residents that are not the core cities in their metropolitan areas and that maintained double-digit population growth over consecutive censuses between 1970 and 2010. See also: Robert E. Lang and Jennifer B. LeFurgy,
Boomburgs: The Rise of America’s Accidental Cities
(Brookings Institution Press, 2007).

In 1991, the author and scholar
:
Joel Garreau,
Edge City: Life on the New Frontier
(Anchor, 1992). Perhaps the most famous coinage of the U.S. suburbs since the phrase “bedroom community” first appeared.

In places like Atlanta
:
Demographia.com, U.S. Census Bureau; see also http://www.demographia.com/db-atl1960.htm.

By 2000, metropolitan areas covered
:
U.S. Census Bureau.

That same year
:
Russ Lopez,
Thirty Years of Urban Sprawl in Metropolitan America: 1970–2000: A Report to the Fannie Mae Foundation
.

a massive region where two-thirds of residents
:
Scott Gold and Massie Ritsch, “Swallowed by Urban Sprawl,”
Los Angeles Times
, October 18, 2002.

In 2002 a report
:
Reid Ewing, Rolf Pendall, and Don Chen,
Measuring Sprawl and Its Impact
, Smart Growth America, 2002.

“There is no ‘there’ there”
:
Gold and Ritsch, “Swallowed by Urban Sprawl.”

The historian Lewis Mumford
:
Jackson,
Crabgrass Frontier
, pp. 237, 244; Lewis Mumford,
The Culture of Cities
(Mariner Books, 1970).

Her influential 1961 book
:
Jane Jacobs,
The Death and Life of Great American Cities
(Random House, 1961). The definitive critique of twentieth-century urban planning. It’s hard to overstate Jacobs’s role in urban planning, and her own artful explanation of the “sidewalk ballet” is worth citing in full here. She wrote that under the seeming disorder of cities, there was a “marvelous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city.” This order, she wrote, is “composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance—not to a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any one place is always replete with new improvisations.”

Raymond Tucker, the mayor of St. Louis
:
Jackson,
Crabgrass Frontier
, p. 270.

Even Victor Gruen
:
M. Jeffrey Hardwick,
Mall Maker: Victor Gruen, Architect of an American Dream
(University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). In a speech Gruen gave in London in 1978 called “The Sad Story of Shopping Centres,” he further explained that Americans had corrupted his vision. Speaking of a “tragic downgrading of quality,” he said the American pursuit of profits had derailed his vision and that the public should protest the further construction of shopping centers.

Blue Velvet
,
Revolutionary Road
:
These digs at suburbia weren’t always movies or works of art. During the course of my reporting one suburbanite mentioned to me a greeting card she once saw that claimed to teach “the ABCs of suburbia—Adultery, Booze and Crabgrass!”

“Suburbia is . . . hell”
:
Whether “hell” is the first word that comes up depends on your computer and what Google thinks about you. On mine, the first thing that comes up is “hell”; the second, “boring.” On other people’s computers, boring was first, hell second.

among them the author James Howard Kunstler
:
James Howard Kunstler,
The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape
(Simon & Schuster, 1993). To say that Kunstler’s verbal lances are entertaining would be an understatement. In addition to his books, which also include
The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-first Century
(Grove Press, 2006), and
Too Much Magic: Wishful Thinking, Technology, and the Fate of the Nation
(Atlantic Monthly Press, 2012), Kunstler weighs in weekly on his blog,
Clusterfuck Nation
, at Kunstler.com/blog/. A TED talk he gave in 2004 is viewable at ted.com and well worth the nineteen minutes.

CHAPTER TWO: THE MASTER-PLANNED AMERICAN DREAM

“Some rich men came and raped the land”
:
Words and music by Don Henley and Glenn Frey © 1976 Cass County Music and Red Cloud Music. All rights reserved. Used by permission of Alfred Music Publishing Co., Inc.

“In retrospect, I understand that it was utter insanity”
:
Charles Marohn, “Confessions of a Recovering Engineer,” strongtowns.org, November 22, 2010.

In 2010 the financial analyst Meredith Whitney
:
Shawn Tully, “Meredith Whitney’s New Target: The States,” Fortune.com, September 28, 2010.

One study by the Denver Regional Council
:
“The Fiscal Cost of Sprawl: How Sprawl Contributes to Local Governments’ Budget Woes,” Environment Colorado Research & Policy Center, December 2003. Other states and municipalities have conducted similar studies with similar results.

A 2008 report
:
Kaid Benfield, “Sprawl Should Pay More for Infrastructure, but Seldom Does,”
Switchboard
, the staff blog of the National Resources Defense Council, September 26, 2008.

The mortgage interest tax deduction
:
Internal Revenue Service,
Statistics of Income Bulletin
, Winter 2012.

This subsidy amounts to nearly $200 billion a year
:
Federal Highway Administration Office of Highway Policy Information, “Our Nation’s Highways: 2011.”

it sparked outrage among conservatives
:
Joel Kotkin, “California Wages War on Single-Family Homes,” forbes.com, July 26, 2011; Wendell Cox, “California Declares War on Suburbia,”
Wall Street Journal
, April 9, 2012.

“The suburbs are a big government handout”
:
William Upski Wimsatt, “Five Myths About the Suburbs,” washingtonpost.com, February 11, 2011.

The city of Long Beach
:
Jonathan Hiskes, “Tell Me Again Why We Mandate Parking at Bars?” Grist.org, June 24, 2010.

In the delightfully entertaining
:
Andres
Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck,
Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream
(North Point Press, 2000), p. 163n
.
This book, a seminal tome in the anti-sprawl canon, is a rollicking guide to the history, makeup, and implications of U.S. sprawl-based development. It is chock-full of similarly colorful phrasing: the automobile is “a private space as well as a potentially sociopathic device”; the NAHB convention is described as a place where “Sixty-five thousand people, mostly men, all eat lunch under large tents pitched on parking lots, where the choice of entrée ranges from beef barbecue to pork barbecue.”