The End of the Suburbs: Where the American Dream Is Moving (5 page)

Combined, these moves were effectively like throwing a match on a pile of drywall.
Housing starts jumped from
142,000 in 1944 to more than a million in 1946 to almost two million in 1950, figures we wouldn’t again come close to until the housing boom of the 2000s.
The percentage of American families who owned their homes
soared, rising from 44 percent in 1940 to 64.4 percent in 1980. By 1950 the national suburban growth rate was ten times that of central cities.
The suburban surge continued
for the next two decades, what would later be known as suburbia’s heyday and becoming, as Kenneth Jackson called it, “a demographic phenomenon as important as the movement of eastern and southern Europeans to Ellis Island or the migration of American blacks to northern cities.”
By 1970, 38 percent
of the metropolitan population was living in suburbs, up from 23 percent in 1950
,
and more Americans lived in suburban areas than anywhere else. “Everything had been on ice for twenty years, and at the same time everyone thought cities were deeply flawed for various reasons,” says Jason Duckworth, president of Arcadia Land Company, a Philadelphia-area developer of walkable residential communities. “So all of a sudden, everything—twenty years of pent-up demand, the sentiment against the city, and the newfound adoration of the automobile—it all gets unleashed into the 1950s.”

The economy was booming, too.
From 1950 to 1970 Americans’ incomes nearly doubled
and the middle class ballooned, growth that translated into the purchase of more new houses—not to mention the sofas, TVs, dining-room tables, kitchen appliances, washers and dryers, lawn mowers, and everything else needed to fill them. Television helped reinforce the image of this new utopian suburbia, with shows like
The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet
,
Father Knows Best
, and
Leave It to Beaver
depicting this new, happy, middle-class life in its full splendor.

The homes themselves were also very different from their predecessors in earlier suburbs. Previously, residential development typically took the form of either custom-built homes for the wealthy or lower-income rental housing. But the post–World War II era brought with it new developments in materials and mass production that lowered costs dramatically and enabled the commoditization of the home-building process.

The popularization of these techniques is credited largely to William Levitt, the enterprising young seaman from Long Island who returned after the war to Levitt & Sons, the building company started by his father, Abraham. A successful operation before the war, Levitt & Sons had mostly built custom homes for the upper middle class on Long Island, developing now well-established places like Rockville Centre and Manhasset. But young William returned from the navy armed with two things: the knowledge of new mass-production capabilities he’d learned from building military barracks, and the utter conviction there was about to be a massive surge in demand for housing. He convinced his father and brother, Alfred, to embark on a new development concept they called Levittown, the now iconic four-thousand-acre development in the center of Long Island’s Nassau County composed of mass-produced “tract” houses designed for returning veterans and their families.

The genius of the Levittown houses was their simplicity and uniformity: the structures were little more than a rectangular floor plan atop a concrete slab, an unfinished attic, and few variations. But they featured practical layouts that were easily expandable and adaptable, and thanks to the Levitts’ pioneering use of assembly-line and mass-production techniques, they were cheap. Originally available only to rent, by 1949 they were for sale, costing between $7,990 and $9,500, with a washing machine included. For this generation, many of whom grew up in the Depression, the opportunity to purchase a brand-new home was impossible to pass up.
On a single day in March 1949
, Levitt & Sons drew up fourteen hundred contracts, some for families that had been in line for four days. Levittowns in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and even Puerto Rico would follow, but Long Island was the biggest, ultimately housing eighty-two thousand residents.

Soon builders all around the country were laying out tract after tract of simple, mass-produced houses as fast as they could to keep up with the demand.
In 1950, a builder in Fullerton, California
, set a record by assembling a two-bedroom house in fifty-seven hours and fifty-seven minutes.
Lakewood, California, the fastest-growing community that same year
, on one day sold 107 houses in an hour. Styles varied slightly by region, and the wealthy still opted for custom-built houses, but tract housing became the norm. The homes went up on cheap farmland that had no access to public transportation, but thanks to the car that didn’t matter. In 1956, President Dwight Eisenhower signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act, paving the way for another forty-one thousand miles of highway and making it possible to build suburbs farther and farther away. New developments started covering our landscape at a breakneck pace. “We pushed the pendulum all the way over,” says Christopher Leinberger, founder of the real estate consultancy Robert Charles Lesser & Co., who is now a professor at George Washington University, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a leading land-use strategist, and the author of
The Option of Urbanism: Investing in a New American Dream
. “The market wanted it, we in real estate built it, starting out with Old Man Levitt, and we reoriented the entire society around this drivable suburban vision.”

And yet as early as the 1950s, authors, critics, and other social observers found reason to ridicule the new suburban lifestyle.
In 1957, first-time author
John Keats wrote the book
The Crack in the Picture Window
, which excoriated suburbia for creating stultifying communities and blighting the landscape with mass-produced housing. “For literally nothing down—other than a simple two percent and promise to pay, you too can find a box of your own in one of the fresh-air slums we’re building around the edges of American cities,” he wrote. In 1962, the songwriter Malvina Reynolds wrote “Little Boxes,” the now-famous satire of conformist middle-class America and houses made out of “ticky tacky,” the slang term for the materials used in commoditized construction. (The song would much later gain a second life in the mid-2000s as the opening theme song for the Showtime series
Weeds
.)

Pop culture wasn’t the only early critic of suburbia. As early as 1959, land-use experts started to raise concerns about the breakneck pace of development.
That year, the Urban Land Institute
and the National Association of Home Builders released a sixteen-minute film called
Community Growth, Crisis and Challenge
, which warned of the negative impacts of what had become known as sprawl. “Once, the land seemed inexhaustible,” a deep-voiced narrator explained as the camera panned across wide-angle shots of lush farmland to the peaceful sounds of birds chirping. Then his tone became dark and foreboding: “Today the land surrounding our metropolitan areas is being swallowed up at the rate of one million acres a year, by factories, shopping centers, highways, housing developments, and more housing developments. How did it happen in the span of a single generation?”

What the somber-toned narrator didn’t know was that we were just getting started.

•   •   •

B
oth the car and the government made possible one other critical building block of modern-day suburbia: single-use zoning. In 1926, the Supreme Court ruled in a landmark case that the town of Euclid, Ohio, an otherwise unassuming Cleveland suburb, had the right to prohibit a local developer from developing land for industrial use. The ruling itself was well-meaning enough; it was an attempt to prevent the building of noxious waste-spewing factories next door to people’s houses and to preserve the character of the neighborhood. But it also made it constitutional for the first time for municipalities to separate the use of their land into buckets, designating certain areas for residential use, others for commerce, and others for industrial purposes. Later, when the FHA required single-use zoning as a condition for granting mortgages, this separation became baked into most new developments. More than almost anything else, single-use zoning permanently altered the look, feel, and overall DNA of our modern suburbs.

Even now, single-use zoning is the easiest way to distinguish modern suburbs from their older counterparts. Instead of having a single downtown core with stores, apartments, and offices mixed together in one place, postwar suburbs typically separate everything: subdivisions are off in one area, stores in another, and office space and industrial spaces in others. Andres Duany, a renowned architect and planner, and, as a founder of the New Urbanism movement, one of the leading critics of sprawl,
likens this setup to an “unmade omelet
,” with “eggs, cheese, vegetables, a pinch of salt, but each consumed in turn, raw.” Consumed separately, these things aren’t very pleasing, but when they’re mixed together and cooked, the result is much more satisfying.

Some of the country’s most charming places are examples of cooked omelets: if you’ve ever been to Nantucket, Massachusetts, or Charleston, South Carolina, or Georgetown in Washington, DC, or Alexandria, Virginia, or Philadelphia’s Chestnut Hill, or Boston’s Beacon Hill, you know what this looks like. Many places like this are on the East Coast because that’s where the bulk of the older suburbs are located, but they exist everywhere, in places like Lake Forest, Illinois, Palo Alto or San Mateo, California, the Country Club district of Kansas City, or Edina, Minnesota. These suburbs predate single-use zoning, so buildings of all uses are mixed together. There’s usually a clearly defined town center, many residents are within walking distance of the necessities of daily life, and the streets are narrow and generally pleasant to walk on. Residents outside the walking zone might need a car, but the design and placement of the streets and their components naturally encourage walking once they get to town. Among homes, there might be big mansions next to town houses next to apartments, so people with different levels of income are mixed together, too.

Most suburbs built after the war look a lot different. While “Euclidean” zoning, as it’s known, became law in 1926, it wasn’t truly adopted and its impact was not truly felt until the post–World War II housing boom. From then on, residential communities were built around a different model entirely, one that abandoned the urban grid pattern in favor of a circular, asymmetrical system made of curving subdivisions, looping streets, and cul-de-sacs. Clarence Perry and the developers of the early automobile suburbs had used this template, but single-use zoning led developers to adopt it as the standard. As they did in Perry’s design, the streets within the system adhere to a specific road hierarchy: cul-de-sacs and other small residential streets feed into larger residential streets, which in turn feed into larger, higher-volume “collector” roads that feed traffic from all the local residential streets and connect the various neighborhoods; those collector roads then feed into “arterial” roads, the giant, high-capacity thoroughfares that connect one town to another.

It’s safe to say that almost all the common complaints about modern-day suburbia relate in some way or another to single-use zoning.
Robert Putnam, a Harvard professor
and author of the 2000 book
Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community
, has said this setup forces people to live their lives in “very large triangles,” with one point being where they sleep, one where they shop, and one where they work—with a good chunk of their free time spent shuttling among these three places. This critique would grow more apt over the years, due to the creep of sprawl, commutes that grew longer, and the housing boom of the mid-2000s, which built new communities made of bigger houses farther away from one another in increasingly remote places. As a result, most suburban residents are not only dependent upon their car but spend an excessive amount of time in it, a ramification we’ll explore in depth later on.

The suburbs have another kind of zoning baked into their DNA: race. During its early days, the FHA used a neighborhood rating system that was developed by the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC), a New Deal agency formed to help prevent foreclosures, to appraise default risk levels and determine who could qualify for a loan. Neighborhoods were colored green for pristine, blue for less so, yellow for declining, and red for slums. The HOLC’s policies weren’t explicitly racist, but they factored in the appraisers’ very real biases of the times. Virtually all black neighborhoods were marked as slums, or “redlined” (some white neighborhoods were also redlined), and affluent white neighborhoods were commonly understood to be the most desirable areas. Since the FHA used HOLC maps to determine where they would direct federal mortgage loans, this made it virtually impossible for residents of black neighborhoods to get a federal loan. At the same time, until the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it was perfectly legal for suburban realtors to refuse to sell or rent to African Americans, and nearly all of them did. Levittown, for instance, contained a clause in its leases prohibiting renting to African Americans for the first few years. The result was a federal policy directing all money away from older urban neighborhoods and toward the suburbs, while at the same time effectively denying federal benefits to blacks that were flowing to whites.

While the suburbs in general are more diverse today, this racial homogeneity still pervades the U.S. housing market.
The nationwide home ownership rate
is 65 percent, but it’s much higher among whites: 73.6 percent. Even at the peak of the recent real estate bubble, the figure for blacks and Latinos was under 50 percent; as of the end of 2012, the rate for blacks was 44.1 percent. While I was researching this book, I had coffee with a writer whose friend was in the process of relocating with her family from Berkeley, California, to Connecticut. House hunting in the wealthy upper-middle-class suburb of Darien—perhaps Berkeley’s ethnocultural polar opposite—she asked her realtor about diversity. Was there any? “Oh, honey,” the realtor replied reassuringly, “you don’t have to worry about that here.”