The End of the Suburbs: Where the American Dream Is Moving (9 page)

Toll might have popularized the notion of the McMansion, but by the early 2000s nearly every builder was making their own versions of them; soon their two-story foyers, butterfly staircases, and separate media rooms were de rigueur. The houses grew bigger—three to five thousand square feet or larger. They often matched their region—sprawling redbrick colonials outside Washington, DC, adobe castles in Phoenix, French-style chateaux in the suburbs of St. Louis—even if the bricks and adobe were coming off the same assembly line in New Jersey. Builders of these homes saved on costs wherever they could—using synthetic stucco or plywood in place of the real thing, for example, or framing corners with three studs instead of five—and sometimes they didn’t get it quite right: a Palladian window might be under a French gable roof. But most buyers didn’t really care—their purpose was to deliver the signals of wealth if not the actual trappings of it. Provenance and accuracy weren’t as important—it was size and scale and how much it glittered that mattered.

By 2005, there were nearly four million homes with
4,000 square feet of space or more, up 17 percent from 2001.
By 2006, the average home was 2,500 square feet
, more than double what it was fifty years prior. The National Association of Home Builders’ concept home that year was more than 10,000 square feet. As big as McMansions had become, every effort was made to make them look even bigger, with builders employing visual tricks like adding fewer trees and less vegetation, and perching the houses on a man-made hill to make them seem more imposing. The American Dream had morphed from owning a home to owning a palace.

To keep the endless supply of loans coming after the regular mortgage market got tapped out, lenders turned to people who’d never had a mortgage before. These first-timers kept the party going and fueled suburban expansion even more. Thus began what became known as the “drive till you qualify” mania, which meant going as far as you needed in order to afford your dream home. “
Drive 10 miles and save $10,000
,” was one developer’s pitch in Wright County, Minnesota, some fifty miles northwest of Minneapolis.

All told, between 1996 and 2006
, more than eighteen million new houses were built, with nearly no increase in average incomes. It was almost like the housing boom of 1947 all over again, but there was one key difference: there was no increase in natural demand. This time around there was no population boom, no millions of returning soldiers needing jobs and homes. The demand was manufactured by Wall Street, and it played to our deepest desires as a country. The national narrative had become even more fixated on home ownership than it already was.

•   •   •

O
f course, as we now know, it would all soon fall apart.
By the end of 2009, home prices had fallen
29 percent from their peak; that year, the foreclosure process was begun on 2.1 million homes. Each time housing prices hit a new low, experts called it the bottom, only to have prices fall through the floor again.
All told, housing prices fell 34 percent
from peak to trough, compared with roughly 26 percent during the Great Depression. In some places, like Phoenix and Las Vegas, the number was closer to 60 percent. In all, more than 4.5 million homes were lost to foreclosure. “We ended up with far too many [housing] units,” wrote Warren Buffett, who through his company, Berkshire Hathaway, owns modular home manufacturer Clayton Homes, in his 2011 letter to shareholders. “And the bubble popped with a violence that shook the entire economy.”

That violence might have busted sprawl’s march for good—it remains to be seen, and we’ll get to that later. For now, we’re left with an endless array of images of the American Dream in tatters. There are thousands of half-built subdivisions around our country, relics of the days of free-flowing credit and a seemingly endless supply of new home buyers. These empty subdivisions dot our landscape, sometimes little more than subdivided lots marking space for homes that were never built. In many cases the infrastructure has been paid for and teed up, with empty lots ready to pipe water and electricity into homes that will now never come. In many communities, the houses were built but now sit empty, drawing squatters. In places like the Inland Empire, the situation was particularly devastating. In the hardest-hit markets, a cottage industry emerged in companies that would spray-paint brown lawns green to mask the blight.
In Perris, California, owners of ranches
that had foreclosed and couldn’t afford to euthanize their animals left them to starve; officials found forty-one emaciated, abandoned horses wandering the area throughout 2011.

In other places the damage wasn’t as visibly wrenching, but it was still there. One weekday in December 2011, I went on a driving tour of the Las Vegas housing market, one of the hardest hit in the country. Driving through the Desert Shores community in Summerlin, one of the fastest-growing communities during the housing boom, I initially didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary. The sun was shining bright, the streets were tidy, and the rows of stucco ranch homes with stone pebble landscaping all seemed to fit benignly on the gently curving streets and cul-de-sacs. Things were festive, befitting the holiday week; I noticed an inflatable Santa Claus on one house, icicle lights hanging from the shutters of another, and an entire garage door wrapped in a giant red tinsel bow.

But soon I noticed that the shutters on most of the homes were closed on the inside, even though it was the middle of the day. There were no people around, anywhere. Newspapers had piled up in a few driveways. Many of the houses had Christmas wreaths on the door and pumpkins on the porch at the same time, a sort of bipolar holiday still life that hinted at the work of lazy real estate agents attempting to mask the fact that the home was empty. I soon realized that all the homes were using the same exact type of wreath and the same exact brand of inflatable Santas, also evidence of realtors at work. In several cases, the Santas had lost their loft and lay deflated on the ground, sad-looking polyester pools that seemed representative of the burst housing bubble itself.

This blight wasn’t only in places that were created by the housing boom. In Berkeley, California, a city councilman wrote to the mayor asking for help for individual home owners facing foreclosure.
In Atlanta, the city’s outer suburban ring
, which was particularly hard hit with foreclosures, was coined the “ring of death.”
In December 2011, one foreclosure “heat map
” showed tony Westchester County, New York, as “white hot” among New York counties for the number of homes entering foreclosure, with seventeen hundred homes listed under payment default status.

The way Chuck Marohn sees it, this carnage actually has very little to do with our housing boom and everything to do with a gluttonous way of life that never made any sense to begin with. “If I could choose what to eat every day, I’d have lobster every day,” he says. “But I can’t afford it, so I end up eating a lot of hot dogs and hamburgers.” On the other hand, he says, if someone else was subsidizing the lobster, the way the government subsidizes suburban development, “I would eat lobster every day.”

As our country’s fiscal issues come to a head, many policy makers are eyeing some of the governmental support for the housing market as a possible area for cutbacks. The mortgage interest deduction is seen by many as a particularly juicy target. Policy experts and economists increasingly think it should go, and there’s plenty of evidence supporting their argument. Critics have long pointed out that the deduction benefits the rich disproportionately: because its cap is a high $1 million, the more expensive the house, the bigger the deduction a home owner gets to claim.
The economist Edward Glaeser
has said that in this way, the policy essentially “bribes” the wealthy to segregate themselves. Glaeser and others have pointed out that the deduction also artificially inflates home prices by encouraging people to buy more house than they would otherwise be able to afford. “We have a tax code that says ‘hey, let’s build a lot of homes for really wealthy people that cost a lot of money,’” says Bruce Katz, the founding director of the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program. “That’s really ass backwards.”

A former chief of staff of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and one of the country’s leading thinkers on housing policy, Katz thinks we should take that funding and plow it into innovation instead. The problem with the American Dream, he says, is that it led Americans to see home ownership not only as symbolic of good citizenship but also as a source of wealth creation itself, as millions of Americans came to expect their home to make them rich. But if we take that same funding and use it to subsidize the right kind of economic growth, he says, housing would become a by-product of a strong economy rather than the driver of it. And it would help us play up our strengths in intellectual capital and innovation on an increasingly competitive global stage. “Will we be better off? Damn yeah,” he says. “No one will be able to come close to us.”

In the spring of 2011, Katz was invited to present this idea to the home-building industry. It didn’t go so well. “There were about seven hundred people there,” Katz says. “And about five hundred of them went berserk.” He now refers to the incident as his “food fight” with the home builders, but it’s an example of just how entrenched the notion of home ownership has become. The real estate industry tends to look at any suggestion of scaling it back as an attack on their livelihood, while American home owners see it as an all-out attack on the American Dream.

Therein lies the reason why the generous federal support for home ownership has lasted all these years. All the incentives and backstops provided to suburban development solved a key problem when we were coming out of the Great Depression. But you can’t just yank those things away once the shortage ends; they become ingrained in citizens’ expectations. And the momentum that suburban development gathered both on the ground and in our psyche made it an unstoppable force. No matter how much economic sense it makes to eliminate the mortgage interest deduction, no elected politician is likely to touch it.

Americans, too, remain fiercely protective of their dream, even after the housing bust.
A recent study by the National Association of Home Builders
found that 74 percent of respondents said owning a home is still worth the risk of the fluctuations in the market, and 96 percent of home owners said they are happy with their decision to own a home. Eighty-four percent of home owners who were “underwater,” or owe more than their house is worth, said they felt the same way.
A recent study by the real estate Web site Trulia
showed that 70 percent of Americans still consider home ownership a central part of the American Dream.

For his part, Chuck Marohn is still spreading his message and is gaining cult hero status within the New Urbanism movement and the broader planning community. He’s now a Delta Gold member who’s logged over one hundred thousand air miles in the past twelve months as he travels the country spreading his message. Strong towns.org gets ten thousand unique visitors each month. A video of a talk he gave for a regional branch of TED, the ideas conference, has been viewed fifteen thousand times. The highlight of the talk comes when Marohn puts up a slide of a picture of his hometown of Brainerd, Minnesota, in 1894. It’s a charming sepia photo of a vibrant, densely packed Main Street chockablock with pedestrians and horse-drawn carriages. “I love this street,” he says. “This place totally rocks, doesn’t it?” He then shows a picture of Brainerd today, a strip mall surrounded by parking lots, to show the difference. The 1894 version, he implores the audience, is what we need to go back to. “We built this before the interstate highway act, before the home mortgage interest deduction . . . before zoning, before the thirty-year mortgage,” he says. “We built places that rocked back when we had to build them to be financially sound.”

Marohn has not been immune from the pain of the housing crisis. His house, which he and his wife had built in 1995 and refinanced a few times, has lost value; it was assessed at $272,000 a few years ago and he thinks it would sell today for $200,000. But he’s more concerned for his brother, Brent, who lives forty-five minutes from Minneapolis in the exurb of Rogers, Minnesota—an area that, as Marohn puts it, “got very caught up in the entire growth Ponzi scheme”—and commutes to an inner-ring suburb. Brent’s house has dropped “tremendously” in value, Marohn says. He worries about his brother’s situation; the more gas prices go up, the fewer people there will be that can afford his house, forcing prices to drop further and further. At that point, Marohn believes, one of two things will happen: either a local economy will spring up in his brother’s town to provide jobs for its people so they don’t have to commute, or his brother’s house is going to continue to lose value until it’s ultimately worth nothing and sold for salvage. As far as Marohn sees it, the government-enabled sprawl as we have known it for sixty-plus years was finally and effectively killed off by the housing bust. “The sprawl demon is dead,” he says. “It’s not coming back.”

3

“MY CAR KNOWS THE WAY TO GYMNASTICS”

First they built the road
, then they built the town that’s why we’re still driving round and round and all we see are kids in buses longing to be free.

—ARCADE FIRE, “WASTED HOURS,”
THE SUBURBS

Diane Roseman and her husband, Steven Spitz, had lived all over the world by the time they decided to settle in Westborough, Massachusetts, in 2002. Roseman grew up in the suburbs of Morris County, New Jersey, but she and Spitz had had their first child while living in South Pasadena, California. They then moved to Jerusalem, where they had their second, a girl. By the ti me they came back to the United States to live in the Boston area—where Spitz, a computer engineer, had been transferred to an office in nearby Marlborough—Roseman had three children under five years old and coveted the space and ease of life the suburbs would provide. “I wanted the minivan and the big house,” she says. “I wanted to try the whole American Dream.”

They looked at Newton, a wealthy, older suburb, but prices were high, so they started looking farther out. “You get into this mind-set that if I’m spending five hundred thousand dollars, I should get a big house, it shouldn’t be a little house,” she says. In Westborough, a suburb thirty miles west of Boston, they found a three-thousand-square-foot center hall colonial built in 1985 in a subdivision that was brimming with other young families. The schools were excellent. It was all going to be great. Their fourth child, a girl named Ella, was born three weeks after they moved in.

It didn’t take Roseman long to realize the life she’d signed up for was not the one she wanted. “If you want to live in a suburb, it’s a fine suburb,” she says. “But I slowly realized it was not the kind of life I wanted to lead.” She missed being surrounded by people of a wide range of ages and life stages; most people in her immediate neighborhood were couples in their thirties to fifties raising children. She didn’t realize how much work would go into keeping up the house; her husband spent almost every weekend shoveling snow or taking care of the lawn. But her biggest issue was the one that surprised her most: she had no idea how much time she would be spending in her car.

Of course, Roseman was well aware that she and her husband had opted for a bedroom community, and she had long ago embraced the role of stay-at-home mom. (On her LinkedIn profile, Roseman calls herself “CEO, CFO, Engineer at Roseman/Spitz Household” and cheekily describes her job as “required to plan the schedules of 5 individuals, provide clean and well-designed surroundings, prepare 3 meals/day, and be available in the evenings and night when some hugs, kisses and ego-soothing are necessary.”) She was extremely grateful that they could afford both a big house and for her to stay home full-time to take care of their children. But she was surprised to discover that she would have to do more driving than her husband just to get herself and her children around each day. Contrary to what she expected, kids didn’t really run around outside and play in the subdivision. Instead, everything was coordinated by scheduled activity and playdate, so every day she would spend the hours from 3:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. shuttling her children to and from all the places they needed to be: swimming, chess, ballet, Hebrew school, jazz, soccer, music lessons, and more—what Roseman describes as “all the ridiculous things you sign them up for because they can’t just go outside and do something with their friends for three hours.” She estimates she was putting forty to fifty miles on her car each weekday. “I’m in my car from morning till night,” she says. “My car knows the way to gymnastics.”

Of all the many complaints about the modern, postwar American suburbs, most of them can be traced in some way to the suburbs’ relationship with the car. There would be no suburbs without the car; and conversely, Americans would not be so completely dependent on the car were we not so uniquely suburban. The history of the suburbs has been entirely dependent on the automobile—not just because people need cars to commute between cities and suburbs (or between suburbs) but because the very design of the suburbs, in which millions of houses are spread out at low densities across the country, doesn’t lend itself to any other type of transportation. “The suburbs as we knew them were a petroleum-derived derivative,” says Victor Dover, a leading New Urbanism architect and planner. George Washington University’s Christopher Leinberger puts it another way: “We social engineered the system to where you only have one choice to get around. It’s your car. You can have any color you want, as long as it’s black,” he says, suggesting an alternate meaning to Henry Ford’s famous quote about the Model T.

Americans are, of course, a car-loving country. Transportation planners like to talk about “mode split,” the breakdown of the type of transportation people use in a society.
In the United States, 83 percent
of our trips are taken by car, more than in any other country (in Europe, by contrast, transportation by automobile represents only around half of trips taken).
We have the highest per capita
gasoline consumption rates in the world. As sprawl has grown over the years and as we’ve grown farther and farther apart, our reliance on the automobile has intensified. That in turn has led to a number of complicated, unintended consequences: it’s impacted our health, our relationships, our finances, and the way our children grow up. Nowhere is this truer than in the suburbs. And like Roseman, a growing number of suburban residents are starting to initiate changes in their lives to make themselves less auto-dependent. They are finding other options, shifting their behavior, or, increasingly, seeking out less car-dependent ways of living. As they do, the most car-dependent suburbs will become less and less desirable.

•   •   •

T
here are many downsides to the car-oriented design of the modern suburbs. One of the biggest is that they often make walking more dangerous. The “hierarchical” street design model we explored in chapter 1—that system of curving, looping streets, cul-de-sacs, and connector and arterial roads—was designed so that cars could move smoothly and easily around and between them. But that often means it’s hard for people to do the same.

This kind of design makes it easier to navigate a car, but it also sends subtle signals to the driver that make his or her driving more reckless. Streets tend to be wider in more modern suburbs, for instance, and a wider street typically encourages drivers to go faster.
One study found a nearly 500 percent
increase in accident rates between traditional twenty-four-foot-wide streets and newer thirty-six-foot-wide streets. Curving roads, too, encourage drivers to take curves at higher speeds than right-angle turns; think of the difference when you drive down a street that curves gently—you can take the turns with just one finger on the wheel—while corners that form right angles, like those in cities and many prewar suburbs, require a driver to slow almost to a full stop. “Curvature causes people to accelerate,” says Eric Dumbaugh, PhD, associate professor and director of the School of Urban and Regional Planning at Florida Atlantic University and a leading expert on street design.

The amount of open space on either side of the street matters, too. When the buildings or houses that line the street are set far back and spaced wide apart, it creates an atmosphere of more open road—less “lateral friction,” in transportation engineerspeak—which encourages speed; when buildings or homes are built closer to the road and closer to one another, it creates a sense of “spatial enclosure” and encourages drivers to go slower. “The wider the street and the less lateral friction a motorist has, the faster a motorist is going to go,” says Dumbaugh.
Jeff Speck, a renowned city planner
and author of
Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time
, puts it another way: “Most motorists drive the speed at which they feel comfortable, which is the speed to which the road has been engineered.”

Some of the most dangerous roads in all of suburbia are the arterial roads, the faster-moving commercial thoroughfares that connect suburbs to one another. Because these roads combine fast-moving through traffic—the cars whizzing from town to town at forty miles an hour or more—with slow-moving “access traffic”—the cars that slow down and put on their blinker to turn left or right into the Best Buy or Home Depot—they can easily cause pileup accidents. Introduce pedestrians who cross at crosswalks, or, worse, dart out in the absence of one, and these roads are “one of the more dangerous elements of modern-day suburbia,” says Dumbaugh, whose research shows that rates of fatal crashes are higher on these roads than other kinds of roads.
Specifically, Dumbaugh found
that every additional mile of arterial roadway increases a community’s fatal crashes by 20 percent.

Many other studies have demonstrated the danger of modern suburban road design.
A recent report authored by experts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found
that while we make less than 6 percent of our trips on foot, pedestrian injuries account for 13 percent of traffic fatalities, with the most dangerous areas for walkers being “newer, sprawling, southern and western communities where transportation systems are more focused on the automobile.”
Another study
found that 60 percent of pedestrian deaths during the time surveyed happened where no crosswalk was available, and concluded that the most dangerous cities for walkers were newer communities where transportation systems are “focused on the automobile above all else.”

Our modern suburbs feature all of these car-friendly design elements. Suburban subdivisions themselves are often safe cocoons, but only until they empty into a faster connecting road. Because Diane Roseman’s neighborhood was a self-contained subdivision on a closed-off loop, for instance, the loop itself was safe, but since it terminated in a fast-moving connector road, neither she nor her children could leave the subdivision on foot or on bike. Once their street fed into the larger road, the cars went too fast. “[My kids] couldn’t ride their bikes to the library or anything,” she says.

One informal, if unlikely, metric for how car-dependent a suburb is might be how much its residents need to spend on candy on Halloween. Where Annette Lee lives with her husband and five children in Worcester Township, Pennsylvania, lot sizes are so large that she and her husband buy one bag of candy each year and feel lucky if they get a single trick-or-treater. “Nobody wants to walk, and there are no sidewalks,” says Lee, a reproductive endocrinologist, “so the only trick-or-treaters you get are the ones who get driven by their parents who wait in the driveway.” Many kids in the area have taken to decamping for the denser nearby neighborhood of Sunnybrook for more efficient collecting of Halloween loot. There, Lee says, home owners awaiting trick-or-treaters “have to buy $100 in Halloween candy.”

Lee and her family used to live in Boonton Township, New Jersey; there were no sidewalks on their street there, either, and lot sizes were even larger. But there, the township came up with a different solution to the trick-or-treat dilemma: everyone drove to the parking lot of the K-8 school on Halloween night, parked their cars next to one another in tailgate formation, and kids trick-or-treated from car to car. Many families decorated their cars—some went all out, incorporating cobwebs, dry ice, and the like—and given the festive aspect of the event and the easier option for kids, Lee thought this jerry-rigged simulation of a dense “neighborhood” worked well. “It was good for the kids because they got to hit more places,” she says, “and it was social for the adults because they got to walk around and talk to all their friends.” It was nothing like the way she trick-or-treated as a child growing up in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, Lee concedes, but she tries not to get too wistful about the old days, because things were so different all around. “Back then, your parents would kick you out the door in the summer and they’d say, Okay, be back for dinner,” she says. “It was a different world.”

•   •   •

W
hether it’s because everything is so far apart or because it’s not possible for safety reasons or because it’s just not fun, suburban residents, relatively speaking, don’t really walk all that much.
Studies using pedometers
have found the average American takes a little over 5,100 steps a day, compared with 9,700 steps for Australians, 7,200 steps for the Japanese, and 9,650 for the Swiss. That’s because most Americans use their cars for just about everything.
In the United States, roughly half of all trips taken by car are three miles or less
.
When it comes to trips under one mile
, we hop in our car 62 percent of the time; in areas of sprawl, that figure jumps to 78 percent.

This has taken a huge toll on our health. You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to deduce that more time in cars means we are less active. But research has been piling up that establishes a link between the spread of sprawl and the rise of obesity in our country. By now, the obesity problem in the United States is well known:
more than a third of U.S. adults
and 17 percent of children and teens are considered obese. But research by the CDC and others has found that some of the biggest reasons cited for not exercising are lack of structures or facilities—like sidewalks or parks—and fears about safety. Researchers have also found that people get less exercise as the distances among where we live, work, shop, and socialize increase.
As far back as 2001, a report
from the CDC asserted a link between the design of our “built environment” and our increasing rates of chronic diseases like heart disease, diabetes, obesity, asthma, and depression. “There is a connection . . . between the fact that the urban sprawl we live with daily makes no room for sidewalks or bike paths and the fact that we are an overweight, heart disease-ridden society,” wrote the report’s author, Richard Jackson, MD, a pediatrician, chair of Environmental and Health Sciences at UCLA, and former director of the CDC’s National Center for Environmental Health. Jackson has been tracking the impact of environment on health for his entire career, in recent years focusing specifically on the influence of urban planning, including sprawl, on our overall well-being. Jackson has become a fierce advocate for the design of what he calls “healthier” communities—those that have safer places to walk, designated bike lanes, green spaces, better air quality, and the like—elements that draw people out into the environment and get them walking and exercising naturally. “
We have built America
,” he says, “in a way that is fundamentally unhealthy.”