The End of the Suburbs: Where the American Dream Is Moving (28 page)

Some 3.5 million Americans
:
Transportation Research Board of the National Academies, “Commuting in America III.”

A few years ago local television news stations
:
Brian Stelter, “TV News for Early Risers (or Late-to-Bedders),”
New York Times
, August 31, 2010.

more than 40 percent of Riverside and San Bernardino county residents commute
:
“An In-Depth Look at Inland Southern California Commuters,” Beacon Economics for the University of California, Riverside School of Business Administration, March 10, 2011.

A 2006 study on happiness
:
Daniel Kahneman and Alan B. Krueger, “Developments in the Measurement of Subjective Well-Being,”
Journal of Economic Perspectives
20, no. 1 (Winter 2006): 3–24.

In 2004, a pair of Swiss economists
:
Alois Stutzer and Bruno S. Frey, “Stress That Doesn’t Pay: The Commuting Paradox,” Institute for Empirical Research in Economics, University of Zurich, 2004.

Other studies have linked long commutes
:
Annie Lowrey, “Your Commute Is Killing You,” Slate.com, May 26, 2011.

Robert Putnam, the Harvard political scientist
:
Nick Paumgarten, “There and Back Again,”
New Yorker
, April 16, 2007.

a study from researchers in Sweden
:
Erika Sandow, “On the Road: Social Aspects of Commuting Long Distances to Work,” Department of Social and Economic Geography, Umea University, Sweden, 2011.

Another study of commuting couples
:
Meni Koslowski, Avraham N. Kluger, Mordechai Reich,
Commuting Stress: Causes, Effects and Methods of Coping
(Springer, 1995), p. 94

Nationwide, roughly 40 percent of workers
:
Alan E. Pisarski, “Commuting in America III,” Transportation Research Board, p. 47.

the amount of time we spend stuck in traffic . . . more than sixty hours a year stuck in traffic
:
David Schrank, Bill Eisele, and Tim Lomax, Texas Transportation Institute 2012 Urban Mobility Report. The report found that the average urban auto commuter spent thirty-eight hours of extra time in traffic, the equivalent to almost five vacation days. The 2011 report found that rush hour (which it called “possibly the most misnamed period ever”) lasted six hours in the largest cities.

$120 billion a year
:
Ibid.

A study by the American Automobile Association
:
Nancy Bartley, “‘Road Rage’ Takes Deadly Detour—More Traffic Incidents Lethal as Drivers’ Stress Goes Up,”
Seattle Times
, April 1, 1997.

In 2003, the average suburban household spent
:
Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Bernstein and his team found
:
Barbara J. Lipman et al., “A Heavy Load: The Combined Housing and Transportation Burdens of Working Families,” Center for Housing Policy, October 2006.

in Kankakee County
:
View and use the H+T Affordability Index at htaindex.cnt.org.

From 2000 to 2008
:
All gas prices from the U.S. Energy Information Association.

That year, one hundred schools
:
Rebekah Kebede, “Schools Eye Four-Day Week to Cut Fuel Costs,” Reuters, July 24, 2008.

“Exurb homeowners accepted long drives”
:
Christopher Steiner,
$20 Per Gallon: How the Inevitable Rise in the Price of Gasoline Will Change Our Lives for the Better
(Grand Central Publishing, 2010), p. 130.

the lauded oil economist Daniel Yergin
:
“How Long Will Fossil Fuels Dominate?”
Wall Street Journal
, May 25, 2012.

“The various tech industries are full of”
:
James Howard Kunstler, “Forecast for 2009,” Kunstler.com, December 29, 2008. As is per usual with Kunstler, the rest of the passage is worth including here: “The environmental movement, especially at the elite levels found in places like Aspen, is full of Harvard graduates who believe that all the drive-in espresso stations in America can be run on a combination of solar and wind power. I quarrel with these people incessantly. It seems especially tragic to me that some of the brightest people I meet are bent on mounting the tragic campaign to sustain the unsustainable in one way or another.”

158 million
:
U.S. Census Bureau.

“driving to the supermarket becomes”
:
Steiner,
$20 Per Gallon
, p. 120.

For his part, Rubin envisions
:
Jeff Rubin,
Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller: Oil and the End of Globalization
(Random House, 2009).

The total number of miles driven peaked in 2007
:
Benjamin Davis, Tony Dutzik, and Phineas Baxandall, “Transportation and the New Generation: Why Young People Are Driving Less and What It Means for Transportation Policy,” Frontier Group and U.S. PIRG Education Fund, April 2012.

The total number of registered automobiles
:
Federal Highway Administration state motor-vehicle registrations.

In April 2012
:
Davis, Dutzik, and Baxandall, “Transportation and the New Generation,” p. 7.

When measured per capita
:
Ibid, p. 7.

in addition to miles driven
:
U.S. Department of Transportation, 2009 National Household Travel Survey.

Rachel Meeks
:
“Living as a One-Car Family in the Suburbs,” small notebook.org, May 24, 2012.

According to FHA data
:
Federal Highway Administration, Highway Statistics, Distribution of Licensed Drivers, 1980 and 2010.

the average American aged sixteen to thirty-four
:
Davis, Dutzik, and Baxandall, “Transportation and the New Generation,” p. 7.

In a study done by MTV Scratch
:
Amy Chozick, “As Young Lose Interest in Cars, G.M. Turns to MTV for Help,”
New York Times
, March 22, 2012.

while people between twenty-one and thirty-four purchased 38 percent
:
Patrick S. Duffy, “Marketing to the Millennial Generation,”
Builder & Developer
(October 2012).

“Gen Y Eschewing V-8 for 4G”
:
Hasan Dudar and Jeff Green, “Gen Y Eschewing V-8 for 4G Threatens Auto Demand,” businessweek.com, August 7, 2012.

CHAPTER FOUR: THE URBAN BURBS

O’Hara quote
:
From
Meditations in an Emergency
(Grove Press, 1957).

All told, there are an estimated five to six hundred
:
Estimate provided by Rob Steuteville, ed.,
Better! Cities and Towns.
Steuteville estimates that there are another thousand-plus neighborhoods or more that have been revitalized in the last ten to twenty years in which New Urbanism thinking has played a part in the vision, building design, codes, street design, public design, or all of the above.

one blogger described New Urbanism
:
Chris DeWolf, “Why New Urbanism Fails,” Planetizen.com, February 18, 2002.

celebrity author and urban theorist Richard Florida
:
Florida continues this theme in the foreword to Ellen Dunham-Jones and June Williamson’s
Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs
(Wiley, 2011): “It’s happening everywhere. Suburbia isn’t as suburban as it used to be.”

there are by some estimates as many as four hundred “city replicas”
:
Jonathan O’Connell, “Can City Life Be Exported to the Suburbs?” Washingtonpost.com, September 7, 2012.

Morristown, New Jersey
: Jamie Duffy, “A Suburban Town Sees Housing Where Retail Rules,”
New York Times
, August 16, 2011.

last year, two of its penthouse apartments
: “Two New Penthouse Sales Just Days Apart at 40 Park Reflect Limited Collection’s Sensational Appeal,” blognj.com, March 1, 2012.

Salon.com cities columnist Will Doig
:
Will Doig, “Invasion of the Faux Cities,” Salon.com, September 22, 2012.

what the
New York Times
has referred to as “hipsturbia”
:
Alex Williams, “Creating Hipsturbia,”
New York Times
, February 15, 2013.

calls these new urban-suburban markets
: Christopher B. Leinberger, “DC: The WalkUP Wake-Up Call: The Nation’s Capital as a National Model for Walkable Urban Places,” Center for Real Estate and Urban Analysis, George Washington University School of Business, 2012.

A 2001 study that analyzed
:
Charles C. Tu and Mark Eppli, “An Empirical Examination of Traditional Neighborhood Development,” Marquette University, October 1, 2001.

Kevin Gillen, a housing economist
:
Kevin C. Gillen, PhD, “The Correlates of House Price Changes with Geography, Density, Design and Use: Evidence from Philadelphia,” Congress for the New Urbanism, October 2012.

A separate study of metropolitan Washington, DC
:
Christopher B. Leinberger and Mariela Alfonzo, “Walk This Way: The Economic Promise of Walkable Places in Metropolitan Washington, D.C.,” Brookings Institution, May 2012.

Using data from Walk Score
:
Joe Cortright, Impresa Inc. for CEOs for Cities, “Walking the Walk: How Walkability Raises Home Values in U.S. Cities,” August 2009.

Media, Pennsylvania, fits this description
:
As close as it is to Media’s downtown, the Walk Score of my childhood house is 48, making it “car-dependent.”

Marianne Cusato, designer and author
:
Marianne Cusato with Daniel DiClerico,
The Just Right Home: Buying, Renting, Moving—Or Just Dreaming—Find Your Perfect Match!
(Workman Publishing, 2012). According to Cusato, homes can sacrifice more square footage when they are located in close proximity to a walkable “public realm.” The closer you are to cafés and movie theaters, the smaller your house can be because it doesn’t need to “do everything for you”: when a commuter comes home fresh off the freeway from a long drive, the last thing he or she wants to do is get back in the car; dinner is much more likely to be had at home, which requires more space. But if there is more to do nearby, Cusato maintains, the house has to carry less of the “entertainment burden.” (An extreme version of this theory is routinely channeled by New York City real estate brokers when they try to sell you a two-hundred-square-foot studio: “Manhattan is your living room!”)

In 2007, the average square footage of U.S. homes built
:
U.S. Census Bureau.

983 square feet
:
U.S. Department of Labor, “New Housing and Its Materials 1940–56,” Bureau of Labor Statistics Bulletin no. 1231.

NAHB found they expected home size to drop
:
Rose Quint, NAHB, “The New Home in 2015,” Housingeconomics.com, March 2, 2011; “NAHB Predicts Average Home Size Will Shrink over the Next Few Years,” Trilogybuilds.com, April 13, 2011.

The median “ideal home size”
:
Kaid Benfield, “What’s Going On with New Home Sizes—Is the Madness Finally Over?”
Switchboard
, February 9, 2012.

Only 9 percent of respondents
:
“The McMansion Era Is Over: Trulia’s Latest Data About American Attitudes Toward Home Sizes,” Trulia.com, August 20, 2010.

Two-thirds of new homes built in 2011 had one
:
Haya El Nasser and Paul Overberg, “Front Porches Making a Big Comeback,”
USA Today
, September 19, 2012.

The percentage of homes built without a garage
:
Ibid.

the so-called Tiny House movement
:
Alec Wilkinson, “Let’s Get Small,”
New Yorker
,
July 25, 2011.

In a TED talk
:
See Graham Hill’s talk at ted.com. For a hilarious take on the same topic, watch George Carlin’s classic bit on “stuff.”

CHAPTER FIVE: THE END OF THE NUCLEAR FAMILY

Friends
quote
:
Used with permission from Warner Bros.

The U.S. birth rate
:
All birth rate data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics, National Vital Statistics System.

The percent of people 65 and over hit a record 13 percent
:
U.S. Census Bureau.

From 2000 to 2010, the ranks of
:
William H. Frey, “The Uneven Aging and ‘Younging’ of America: State and Metropolitan Trends in the 2010 Census,” Brookings Institution Metropolitan Policy Program, June 2011, p. 1.