The Suburbs Will Die: One Man's Fight to Fix the American Dream

http://time.com/3031079/suburbs-will-die-sprawl/

by e15ctr0n • 12 years ago

138 187 12 years ago

time.com

cwal373• 12 years ago

Reading on the topic:

The Geography of Nowhere: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Geography_of_Nowhere

The City in History: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_City_in_History

humanrebar• 12 years ago

Here's an hour of an economics professor talking to Charles Marohn about Strong Towns: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2014/05/charles_marohn.html

CalRobert4• 12 years ago

Unfortunately if you don't want to live in an environment like the one this person helped build, it seems necessary to be either extremely rich or comfortable with high crime rates, or willing to leave the country entirely.

Pxtl• 12 years ago

Nonsense. There's plenty of middle-ground between Detroit and Manhattan.

_dark_matter_• 12 years ago

I don't think that's true at all. I can think if several areas in the cities I've lived in that have densely packed houses, condos, or apartments within walking distance of some stores and public transportation. There is a huge swath of possibilities that lie between downtown and the suburbs. You may have to give up that one acre property, though.

CalRobert4• 12 years ago

And they were affordable? I am genuinely interested. I think when I wrote that I was unfairly thinking of SF, LA (well, Santa Monica and Venice), NYC, DC, etc.

cwal373• 12 years ago

That's not really accurate. Suburbs have a lower overall amount of crime, but you need to think about relative rates of crime based on the number of people living in an area.

Here's a simple study that discusses a lot of that: http://proceedings.esri.com/library/userconf/proc00/professi...

Personally, I found it pretty easy to live in two different college towns (less than 100k pop), not own a car, and enjoy relatively walkable areas. Then I moved to TN for work and got laughs in the interview when I asked about public transportation. I imagine the suburban reflex kicks in strongly for some people once they have a kid or two.

enjo4• 12 years ago

Crime rates and school rankings are the two places where the general populations inability to understand statistics really come home to roost.

ch4s35• 12 years ago

@enjo Especially since the best marker for performance in school is parent involvement, if you're a really involved parent the school your child is in ends up having a lot less effect than people think.

SilasX2• 12 years ago

While I'm on board with the suburb criticism, I'm not sure that "per capita" is the relevant metric here. I'm concerned with the number of crime incidents per unit area, over the areas where I will most be. Is there a reason I should prefer one metric over another?

CalRobert4• 12 years ago

My experience was with Oakland, which probably skewed my data, to be fair. I also have only lived in CA (or outside the US entirely) so perhaps that has biased me towards thinking walkable areas like Berkeley, SF, and Santa Monica are incredibly expensive.

TheIronYuppie• 12 years ago

I'm not sure I follow your middle point. Per capita, density does not necessarily equal worse crime rates.

E.g. NYC (Dense - http://www.city-data.com/city/New-York-New-York.html) vs. Houston (Sprawl - http://www.city-data.com/crime/crime-Houston-Texas.html)

akgerber3• 12 years ago

That's maybe true in California, but not in the Midwest, or even in a lot of the older railroad suburbs on the East Coast.

zavulon2• 12 years ago

I read the entire article, and I guess I missed it - what's the proposed solution?

ghouse• 12 years ago

Quit subsidizing sprawl?

zavulon2• 12 years ago

Right, I got that part.. but then what? Small towns die out, and everyone moves to the big city?

bryanlarsen• 12 years ago

The article mentions that property taxes only cover between 4 and 65% of the costs of the suburban infrastructure. Raising property taxes 50% to 2000%(!) would simultaneously cover that revenue shortfall, discourage suburban sprawl and encourage infill.

Obviously such a large tax increase could not happen overnight, but it does seem the obvious solution, or at least part of it.

avn21092• 12 years ago

Time magazine doesn't mention much of a solution, but [0] was on HN a few days ago and might fit the bill.

FWIW I was a bit of a skeptic before reading this, but now I'm pretty convinced that we've been Doing It Wrong for many years now.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8090190

akgerber3• 12 years ago

Traditional, walkable development on a grid with narrower streets, smaller lots, and less emphasis in the zoning code on unlimited free parking and huge setbacks on the lots.

This: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Brainerd,+MN/@46.3536312,-... instead of this: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Brainerd,+MN/@46.3543623,-...

And, in the former, redevelopment of huge block-sized parking lots with a business behind them into multiple small storefronts.

rayiner2• 12 years ago

One of the things that isn't talked about, my guess is because urbanists also tend to be liberals, is reforming welfare policy. States have largely succeeded in, and the federal government has condoned, treating cities as the primary welfare distribution organ. Public housing is mostly built in the cities, most federal school aid goes into the cities, etc. This concentrates the social problems which welfare attempts to remedy in the cities, and has the impact of driving families out of the city when they have kids.

For example, until very recently, San Francisco had a policy of randomized school assignments. The idea was to limit the economic segregation of schools. Such policies are ultimately counter productive, because all they do is drive wealthier families, and their tax dollars, out into the suburbs. Peoples' egalitarian ideas tend to come crashing down when their kids are involved.

jtzhou• 12 years ago

until very recently, San Francisco had a policy of randomized school assignments

San Francisco still does and middle class families continue to move away (not just due to public schools but housing prices) -- the others spend $25k-40k per year per kid on private schools. SFUSD uses a lottery approach and at one elementary school, 1210 children applied for 22 open slots -- a 1.8% acceptance rate. One of the major critiques of the city is how many of the tech workers in the city wouldn't be there today if they had gone through the SF public school system.

Until the US has a tiered system like Germany which allows high-achieving students to be challenged for the university and regular students to go through an extensive apprenticeship program guaranteeing well-paid jobs, people will continue to move to the suburbs for better schools.

tptacek2• 12 years ago

I'm dubious. Urban centers suck down huge welfare dollars, but that's what you'd expect because they have huge populations.

If you read a list of all the federal welfare programs, the only one that sticks out as predominantly "urban" is Section 8. Section 8 is a big program, but it's a rounding error compared to Medicaid, SSDI, and the EITC, which all flow equally to rural areas. Even the food stamp program, which benefits rural households, eclipses HUD and Section 8.

As for education benefits: if you break Title 1 grants down per pupil, it's not the case that the urban states uniformly get more money than the rural ones. North Dakota, for instance, appears to get almost twice as much per pupil as California.

imgabe• 12 years ago

Higher density communities built around public transportation rather than driving. It even says that towards the end of the article.

VLM• 12 years ago

Massive authoritarianism via social engineering and taxpayer funded government coercion to force people to live the right way, at least as defined by certain people, rather than being permitted by big brother (oh the irony) to live freely, the way they want to live.

I don't know if the ends are all that bad. The means being proposed is just horrific.

To some extent its inevitable, if decades of persuasion and experimentation have had little effect and prove very few people want to live that way, you're going to have to send in cops and lawyers, bankrupt some people, destroy some healthy and stable communities. Otherwise you'll never get the rush of "fixing" them.

I believe a lot of it is jealousy and/or corrupt real estate churn proposals. A couple blocks from company HQ there's a nice slum where I could buy an entire city block of crack houses for the cost of my one suburban house. There's people who aren't happy about that and want to make money off some real estate churn. Have .gov force the sales price of my house down to 10K and they can buy it, while I forcing me to move into the slum and pay $250K to them to buy their $10K house from them. I'm not interested in participating in that business model.

If real estate transaction volume is low and declining, and the purpose of .gov is to enforce the continuation of all dead/dying business models, and people are pretty much living where they want to right now, it makes sense to have .gov start forcing them to move, get some commissions, bust some blocks and redevelop some others (all with .gov funds funneled to the right people of course), etc.

bayesianhorse• 12 years ago

If you want to live the American dream, go create a start up in Europe...

ufmace4• 12 years ago

My skepticism of suburbs has mostly been about how the long distance and personal car dependence they create tends to isolate people and households.

Build a suburban "gated community" for safety, give everyone a huge lawn that they're obligated to constantly maintain, don't allow any commercial buildings in because they're considered ugly, and you get an environment where it's pretty tough to get anywhere without a car. Add in the poor pedestrian infrastructure, intimidating high-speed traffic, and some irrational fear of how anybody under 18 out of eyesight of a parent for a second is about to be kidnapped, and you get a neighborhood where everyone seems actively discouraged from knowing anything about their neighbors. Seems to me that this is what creates the unsafe environment that everyone was trying so hard to get away from.

It's interesting to read that many suburbs may also be logistically unsustainable.

modoc3• 12 years ago

Your vision of a suburb has very little to do with the reality of my suburban existence. It's like someone from the country talking about the horribly dangerous ugly city with its filthy air, roving gangs shooting strangers, and huge rats running in the streets.

I'm not saying suburbs are perfect, but you've basically thrown up a stack of strawmen here.

pnathan9• 12 years ago

IME of suburbia, the grandparent's comment is spot-on.

I live in a city, and it's kind of ugly, kind of dangerous in many places, there are random shootings of strangers. The air, thankfully, is good. The rats in the streets would be kind of awesome! :)

lliwta5• 12 years ago

I generally agree, except that the not being able to get around without a car bit is really True in my experience.

edit: It's easy to know your neighbors in suburbia if you're outgoing, and things vary from street to street. But there generally is way less interaction than if you were to have a neighborhood pub at the end of your street, or side-to-side porches everyone lounges on during summer nights.

It tends to be that you know the neighbors you get along with and ignore everyone else. In city environments, it's more like you interact with everyone because, well, no choice.

chrisweekly2• 12 years ago

Couldn't agree more, modoc.

Also, while prediction is a dangerous game, I foresee the combination of increased investment in public transit, and the advent of affordable driverless cars, adding up to helping suburbs remain a terrific place to grow up. As my hometown (Arlington, MA) was in the 70's and 80's, and as my new adopted town (Duxbury MA) is today.

Related tangent: IMHO quality of life is less about urban/suburban(/rural), than it is about neighborhoods. I posted about this topic earlier this year: http://www.chrisweekly.org/2014/01/22/neighborhoods-matter-h...

ObviousScience4• 12 years ago

I don't like to usually "me too", but the grand parent comment very accurately described my experience of suburbs as well.

We jokingly referred to it as "the suburban cultural wasteland", because you had to walk 2-3 miles to find anything that wasn't more houses, a grocery store with corporate specialty stores attached (Starbucks coffee, various automotive places, etc), or a school.

Most of what you could find in that radius was a mall, which was just a bigger version of the grocery store thing or various pieces of civil infrastructure (parks, community center, etc).

You had to go 4-5 miles to find anything that was even slightly not cookie-cutter, which put it at a fairly impossible distance to walk routinely.

I'm contrasting this with the city I now live in that the suburbs were around, and I'm pretty sure I could hit an oddball business with a baseball from my window.

pessimizer2• 12 years ago

Could you be specific? You're being more specific about pointing out exaggerations in your simile than about your subject.

akgerber3• 12 years ago

There are a lot of different types of suburbs out there. I grew up in an old streetcar suburb in the Midwest where almost all of the kids walked to school (though most people still drove to work, since many jobs had sprawled out to office parks). I could walk to my job at a grocery store and there was a nice bike trail, and once I realized that biking was a practical form of transportation, in addition to recreation, the narrow side streets on the grid made for great biking even without any specific infrastructure. There are bars, restaurant, and a movie theaters, all within a quick walk.

But a lot of newer suburbs make it somewhere between unpleasant and dangerous to walk anywhere.

aniro2• 12 years ago

I live in a suburb of Philadelphia.

I find the original description absurdly accurate.

I don't drive/have a car and it is crippling.

potatolicious• 12 years ago

I dunno, I grew up in the suburbs and ufmace summed it up pretty well. My neighborhood wasn't explicitly gated, but the meandering streets with a million dead-ends may as well have been a wrought iron gate.

It's pretty obvious to everyone that the nonsensical street layout was designed to keep everyone but residents out.

Every house had huge lawns, and because the houses were all built as part of the same subdivision development, they were all roughly the same age. This created a lot of keeping up with the Joneses, where one neighbor getting a new roof meant a cascade of people getting new roofs. One house got a paint job and suddenly the whole damn fuckin' street is painting houses.

Getting anywhere without a car is nigh impossible. The neighborhood, despite being upscale, lacked sidewalks (I guess they never thought anyone would need 'em, the residents ain't poor after all), and once you leave the neighborhood you face a 5-lane arterial where the unofficial speed limit is 50mph and drivers have no conception of pedestrians. The sidewalks are wide enough for one person - if you're unlucky enough to meet someone coming the other direction you get to do a silly dance around each other so nobody has to step into 50mph traffic.

Crossing this street is also nigh impossible until well after I moved out of that place. There are pedestrian crosswalks painted in, but good luck getting any of the drivers to stop for you. Thankfully as of a few years ago they installed a real honest to God traffic signal. Small victories.

Anyways, long rant, but ufmace's "nightmare" suburb does exist. I grew up in one.

HarryHirsch• 12 years ago

Just a random statistic: in 2013 there were 216 homicides in Houston and 188 traffic deaths. It's easy to move away from crime, but in exurban America you cannot not have a car.

ufmace4• 12 years ago

Reading it again, it does come off a bit more ranty than I usually like to be. But it does accurately represent the feel I get from the suburbs I have lived in. I can't say that they're all like that, and it sounds like you have one where most of the bad parts aren't there, and the others are things I dislike that you enjoy.

altcognito• 12 years ago

and you get a neighborhood where everyone seems actively discouraged from knowing anything about their neighbors

This is completely unfair. I can tell you that from living in my suburban home over the past 10 years that over time I have come to know every single person who lives on my street. You have children that play together, that goto school together (and you may serve on the PTO together with those same neighbors), you have trees that you plant, fences that are built together. You see each other at garage sales. If you have an HOA, you likely maintain a common area together (maybe a pool)

On the other hand, there are those who complain how "up in everybody's business" the neighbors are.

All I can say is that everywhere is different, perspective is everything. I've live in major cities and talked to people who in major cities and "knowing your neighbors" is more reflective of who your neighbors are than it is of the geographical layout. (I also have neighbors who I have little interaction with, and that's just fine)

ape4• 12 years ago

But goto is considered harmful!

lliwta5• 12 years ago

For me, this is the biggest difference. When I live in a city, I know my neighbors just because. Running into each other on the bus turns into a beer and a long chat.

In Suburbia, you know a lot of your neighbors, but there's almost always some sort of reason or structure. The social network is the same size, but lots of those relationships are somehow not intrinsic (which isn't to devalue them, even comparatively, but imho there is a qualitative difference).

The latter works great for family life because there are so many more structural incentives to interact; the former is probably preferable for younger or non-child-raising people.

ctdonath3• 12 years ago

You can badmouth any living conditions.

I like my suburban "not-gated but has just one entrance" for safety, a good-sized easy-maintained lawn for the kids to play in, no ugly/noisy commercial buildings, and a quick EV drive to a vast array of options that I don't want to actually live right next to. Pedestrian infrastructure is pointless as it's faster to drive to what you actually want to go to than to walk to what you don't, kids ARE monitored despite survivor bias, and anyone can get to know neighbors to whatever degree they like. Seems to me this is a whole lot better than living stacked on other people, walking being near-compulsory because simple parking is hideously expensive, and traffic is prolific and unavoidable - an unsafe environment I'd rather get away from.

I'd rather be in the country (grew up there), and will likely return.

saosebastiao4• 12 years ago

Its perfectly fine to like that, just as it is perfectly fine to like private jets and caviar. The discussion, at least in this article, is how sustainable it is from a cost perspective.

You are talking about liking something that has tax revenues that cover mere fractions of the costs incurred. How much would you like it if your property taxes were 50% higher? 2000% higher?

personZ4• 12 years ago

As madoc mentioned, sure the strawman you've constructed is a terrible thing.

But most suburbs are entirely unlike that.

Most aren't gated. Only in very wealthy areas are lawns "huge", and most are minutes with an electric mower. There are sidewalks, and indeed most modern suburbs intermix commercial space such that, at my old suburban house, a giant grocery store was a five minute walk.

And where does this "discouraged from knowing about your neighbours" argument keep coming from? In the suburb I knew everyone within several hundred feet of my house. We had street parties, many friendly conversations, and so on. Downtown, in contrast, I knew a couple of people from nodding at them in the lobby.

It's interesting to read that many suburbs may also be logistically unsustainable.

With working at home patterns, suburbs may just be the most sustainable. Heck, I actually live in a rural location now given that I work in my home office 90%+ of the time. The most Earth-friendly commute you can make is no commute at all.

jarek4• 12 years ago

Working at home has been the next big sustainability thing for about 30 years now. Why does 90+% of working population still congregate together in offices? Why does YCombinator insist on having everyone in one geographical area and meeting in person often?

Crito2• 12 years ago

"a neighborhood where everyone seems actively discouraged from knowing anything about their neighbors."

I like the city for exactly the opposite reason. In my experience, it is difficult to both ignore others and be ignored in the suburbs. On the other hand, finding privacy in a city is easy. There are too many people in cities to do the small-town/suburbs "everyone knows everyone, and everyone sticks their noses in everyone's business" thing.

pnathan9• 12 years ago

I don't like suburbs.

Why?

- I don't like the constant driving to get anywhere.

- I don't like the malls, the big box stores, the "clone" button that seems applied across the landscape.

- I don't like the giant roads carving their way around, splitting communities.

- I don't like the squandering of resources on lawns! individual houses! low-density housing!

I can say, with confidence, I'd like to live in a place where I own my house, where I have some property to do with as I please, where children can play nearby on grass, and where I don't sweat getting rent raised. On the other hand, I can easily see own a very small piece of land and having access to some neighborhood commons as part of a community.

binarymax• 12 years ago

The way I differentiate in my brain, because I'm an 80's kid:

I do like "Ferris Beuler's Day Off" style suburbs.

I do not like "Edward Scissorhands" style suburbs.

I grew up in the former, and given the opportunity, I'd like my future kids to do the same.

0xdeadbeefbabe• 12 years ago

I'd like my children to grow up in the "The Burbs" style suburbs.

3pt141593• 12 years ago

I think I'm too young to understand your references. What's the difference between those types of suburbs?

Apofis• 12 years ago

I live in NYC, and recently I spent two weeks in Simi Valley, a city north of Los Angeles, and was shocked that it's basically impossible to get around without a car. Even in LA, it seems as if the public transport system is nearly non-existent.

mtinkerhess• 12 years ago

NYC is one of the only places in the country where it's feasible to live without a car (without major hassle).

Edit: I guess my point was that from my experience visiting New York that's a city where public transit is so good that a car really seems unnecessary. Someone from NYC might be surprised to learn (or be reminded) that it's the exception, and that in most other places in the country it's a hassle not to own a car -- that's not a problem just in LA.

I'm in Seattle myself (Capitol Hill) and while I could get by day-to-day without a car, it would make my commute to the east side almost twice as long depending on traffic and bus timing, which isn't worth it for me. And while Uber / Lyft are a good alternative, a car is still the most convenient way to visit other parts of the city.

secabeen• 12 years ago

Actually, LA has a very good public transportation system. It's just bus-based, can be slow compared to driving, and is widely considered as only for poor people. Higher-income people have a strong aversion to taking the bus, even while happily taking subways.

mturmon2• 12 years ago

Simi Valley is a special case in LA. It is far from downtown (almost 50 miles), far from Santa Monica even (40 miles), and in a valley of its own, just beyond the farthest reaches of the San Fernando Valley ("the Valley"). It is deliberately isolated from the rest of the LA basin. In general, people live there because they want to be away from anything urban.

If you're into NYC comparatives, its isolation and ethos compares to Staten Island. Lots of cops and firefighters.

CalRobert4• 12 years ago

You were in an especially horrible part of LA. For what it's worth, Venice Beach, Hollywood, Santa Monica, etc. are better (but still atrocious).

aaron-lebo• 12 years ago

I'm a child of the suburbs and have since moved to the city so take this with a grain of salt.

I enjoy the malls, the big box stores, and the clones. Why? I know that pretty much anywhere I go I can get a consistent experience. I can go the local mall and almost anything I can want or imagine is available, which at some level is fascinating. What's more, as cliche as all these places ares, there is a bit of a shared experience for almost everyone.

I enjoy driving on the giant roads, or strolling through the quiet suburbs with headphones on without fear of some incident. I like not hearing people and cars all the time.

I like the city for other reasons; I enjoy the history, the character, the feeling of life, but the suburbs have their place, there is a reason they exist. They aren't perfect and they are the harbingers of some negative social trends, but they aren't as horrible as HN likes to act.

pnathan9• 12 years ago

I enjoy the malls, the big box stores, and the clones. Why? I know that pretty much anywhere I go I can get a consistent experience. I can go the local mall and almost anything I can want or imagine is available, which is some level is fascinating. What's more, as cliche as all these places ares, there is a bit of a shared experience for almost everyone.

I don't understand this. That is not because you're not lucidly explaining it. It simply does not fit into my head how this is desirable. :) But that's ok. I think Different places should look and feel and act different. I think that making a consistent experience absolutely destroys the unique culture and history of places, replaced by "the style from headquarters", and "the history of Walgreenmartsafewayco". It really repels me.

For really getting away from people/cars, I believe that the forests are appropriate. Ideally, no paths, no trails, just.... away.

Anyway. My anti-suburb rant over for the day. :)

bootsnpants• 12 years ago

Can't wait until automated cars and 24/7 same-day delivery make all those things pointless.

Theodores• 12 years ago

"I like walking among glaciers, however, no matter how much I do enjoy that, glaciers are going extinct in certain parts of the world and there is nothing I can do about that. I may wish to believe otherwise and there may not be much of a visible change on a day-to-day basis, however, those glaciers are going extinct, even if there are some years they get bigger."

The point of the article is that suburbs are fundamentally flawed in that the tax base cannot keep up with the costs of the infrastructure once that patch of suburbia has gone past the growth phase. There simply isn't the density of tax payers to pay the bills. Raising taxes is not an option as people are mobile and will move to a more sensible city arrangement if the dream of suburbia is out of their price bracket. The developers will move to the city too.

Not mentioned in the article is the eventual problem of serious resource depletion, i.e. when every bit of America has been fracked, every Arctic wildlife refuge plundered for oil and the Red Sea pumped into the Saudi desert to get the last gasp of light, sweet crude. We no longer talk about 'Peak Oil' any more (wasn't that just grey propaganda put out by the oil companies to make their product worthy of a high price or am I being over cynical there?), however, there is no denying that suburbia can only exist so long as there is cheap and affordable motoring. When motoring starts to get much more expensive that is going to dent those wallets that pay the taxes to maintain suburbia so a lot of America is going to face the same problems of diminishing tax base that Detroit is famous for. I would not be one to bet that everyone will be driving a Tesla in between their teleconferences on the i-glasses by the time we get to that stage of the game.

Anyway, enjoy the suburbs by all means, along with millions of others including myself, but do appreciate that they are not entirely economically viable as the situation stands and, if there is a serious problem with ye-olde-petroleum-reserves, then suburbs will be very different to how they are now.

pouetpouet2• 12 years ago

I totally get that it can be desirable to some. The problem is that sprawling suburbs are not only bad for the environment, they are financially unsustainable with current financing schemes. They will scale back. The nicest ones will stay forever if some are willing to pay for them.

dllthomas4• 12 years ago

"I can go the local mall and almost anything I can want or imagine is available"

I regularly want things I can't find at a suburban mall.

coryrc2• 12 years ago

I agree!

http://cohousing.org is the movement of people looking for exactly what you are looking for.

cpursley2• 12 years ago

The Russians figured this out a long time ago. Have a seperate city aparment and a summer/weekend house: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dacha

superuser24• 12 years ago

I hate suburbs too.

- Complete dependence on car ownership to get anywhere interesting or useful.

- So much time wasted in cars. I'd happily commute for twice as long on a train if I got to read. (Yes, self-driving cars could change this in a few decades, but living in the city could change it now.)

- The more you drive, the more you are contributing to distasteful regimes in the Middle East and the distasteful US foreign policy intended to secure our oil interests. If you drive an electric vehicle (and aren't covered by nuclear power), you've simply replaced oil with coal.

- Children can't get anywhere other than maybe some friends' houses without you driving them. This is maybe a feature for a 5-year-old, but a soul-crushing bug when a 15-year-old still can't go anywhere without you. The "chauffeur" aspect of parenthood is something that you choose by living in sprawl.

- Teenagers can't realistically hold jobs without having their own cars, either, and at minimum wage, owning a car that starts and might not kill you in a collision will wipe out a good portion of your earnings. (Exception would be if one parent doesn't work or telecommutes but still has a car. I was fortunate enough to be in this situation, but it could have evaporated any day.)

- There is just very little to do as a kid/teenager other than consume media and/or drugs (although I guess that doesn't matter for the hacker types, since all you need is a laptop anyway). If going downtown wasn't a special event, you could have access to a wealth of libraries, bookstores, restaurants, museums, theater, symphony, opera, etc. which often give extremely sweet discounts to K12 students as well as college kids. You're going to experience these things less often if getting to them is onerous (and requires parking at $10+/hour). Instead, social life revolves around the mall and finished basements.

- DUI seems to be more of an issue, not less, since everyone is by default driving everywhere.

- I just get this visceral feeling of isolation. It's like living in a snowglobe. I've seen everything there is to see. I've met everyone (in my age group) there is to meet. I've been through every inch of every building I have access to. There is nothing left to explore. It's horrifying, and not what I want my kids to be experiencing at 15-16-17. In a decent-sized city, there's always more. There's always something you haven't seen or been to or been to in a while. There's something incredibly comforting about knowing you can never exhaust all your options. High school was fine, my parents were fine, but I just couldn't wait to get out of suburbia and never come back. (It seems lots of kids feel this way... the word for it is "ungrateful.")

The big-box stores, cookie-cutter houses, etc. are a matter of aesthetics, and people have different tastes. I personally can't sleep in silence. But the environmental impact and the suffocation of non-drivers is real.

I like cars. I'd love to own a 3-series or a Tesla or something and go drive it fast out in the country, but owning and driving a car shouldn't be a prerequisite for being a functioning member of society.

There might come a time when I want to own rather than rent, but it will be within walking distance of an electric train.

pmorici• 12 years ago

When I think of the suburbs I think of each house having it's own well and septic system. Gas, electric, and phone are the only provided utilities and they come from private companies not a local government. This article seems to be talking about something different more like a low density city with city provided sewer and water.

9999• 12 years ago

I'm not sure why you were downvoted, some suburbs are exactly as you describe. Perhaps the vast majority are not like that in the US?

ch4s35• 12 years ago

The vast majority have sewer systems. When you cluster a lot of houses into a smallish area, septic tanks become problematic.

brixon• 12 years ago

What you call suburbs others would call the country.

But it can be varying degrees. I live in a gated neighborhood in a private planned subdivision with city water, city sewer, natural gas, cable, electric, and phone. Less than a mile from my house is city planned subdivision (blocks) with well water, septic systems, cable, electric, phone and partially paved streets.

Zigurd2• 12 years ago

Recently a researcher at Toyota predicted that self-driving cars would perpetuate suburbia and enable more driving. A door-to-door ride in my own car would be far faster than riding the Boston area commuter rail, which has an inconveniently sparse schedule, and then the Red Line into Cambridge. The only reason to take the commuter rail is to avoid the chore of driving. The diesel locomotives are not cleaner or more efficient.

ghaff• 12 years ago

I fully expect that this is correct if you hypothesize the availability of fully (or even largely) autonomous vehicles--however long they take to make it onto the roads. It's only logical. Make driving a "better" experience in the minds of many people in the sense of allowing them to do things in the car other than watch the road and you'll get more driving. To the degree that autonomous vehicles could perhaps ease urban parking, that would make using them more attractive as well.

I don't think anyone really knows how self-driving + electric cars are going to exactly play out in the coming decades, but I fully expect them to make individual car use more attractive, not less.

pouetpouet2• 12 years ago

Nobody knows. Robotaxis are a bit like carsharing, they change the economics. A private ownership car bears a lot of fixed costs, and each mile get cheaper. Once you own one, you are likely to use it all the time. With pay-as-you-go robotaxis the incentives are different. Going car-free will be easier.

Self driving cars will relieve downtowns/walkable places from dead parking space. That means more destinations reachable by foot/bike. Why use a car when you can use your feet?

Self driving cars also means that roads will be safer for pedestrians and cyclists.

Congestion won't go away. Now you can read/work/play in your car, but that's about it.

Last but not least, sprawl is still unsustainable in terms of infrastructure.

Zigurd2• 12 years ago

I suspect local economics dominates the issue. Even the ticky tacky hundreds-of-townhouses-all-the-same sprawl into the garlic fields (are there still garlic fields?) south of San Jose will not feel any pinch from... what? San Francisco is full and Silicon Valley spews wealth. San Jose should benefit from higher density and more urban cultural life, but it's not going to make a dent in demand. If the money is there, the sprawl will remain. Conversely, if it isn't, there won't be any urban revitalization.

bane6• 12 years ago

I will absolutely trade my ridiculously sized house in the burbs (within walking distance of a bank, grocery, bike store, gym, Tae Kwon Do school, movie theater, two salons, 3 doctors and 3 dentists and a psychiatrist, a mix of about a dozen local and chain eating options, an optometrist, high-end toy store, dry cleaners, wine store, 2 ice cream parlors, and a 5 minute drive to more local ethnic food than you can shake a stick at soon to get a local library, and dozens of miles of bike and hiking trails and three large swimming pools) for an equivalent sized domicile of my choice in my choice of neighborhoods in Manhattan tomorrow if he wants to make that trade.

After which, I'll probably sell that place in Manhattan for the $30-40 million I can get, buy another house back in my old suburb and a vacation house in Southern Spain and retire/angel fund my choice of startups till I die.

Brakenshire• 12 years ago

If you are in reasonable walking distance of all those things, and it pleasant to walk to them, I would say almost by definition you don't live in a suburb, or rather, that is not the kind of place that people are complaining about. You must be just as horrified as anyone else at the prospect of living in a subdivision where you are miles away from anything apart from houses, or where you literally cannot walk to town, or from one shop to another across the road, because of a lack of pedestrian access.

bane6• 12 years ago

Let's just say modern suburbs are quite different than they used to be. There's been lots of lessons learned and as a buyer, I won't buy in an area that's not at least of this style.

Is it as convenient as a dense city? No, but my standard of living makes the affordable parts of most cities look like tenement housing in comparison.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoy cities as much as the next person. But economics is a major problem that cities have to overcome. Equivalent housing in a city is one or two orders of magnitude more expensive. Cities are great for lots of things but I don't use most of those things more than ever once in a while even while living in a city. May as well live someplace nicer the other 90% of the time and take the the easy access public transport in when I really want to see a museum or go to a concert or whatever.

3pt141593• 12 years ago

Define walking distance. If you're talking about more than 15 or 20 minutes I think we have different definitions.

Most people cannot get more than a grocery store from a walk away if they live in a suburb.

bane6• 12 years ago

5-10 minutes. It's an easy walk. Maybe...2 or 3 long blocks in NYC.

I realize of course that I got "lucky" and live in a really especially great suburb. However, I've noticed most of the developments in my area tend to be similar. A central "town center/shopping mall" surrounded by condos and apartments, surrounded by townhouses, surrounded by single family homes.

wainstead• 12 years ago

Kunstler says it quite well too:

https://www.ted.com/talks/james_howard_kunstler_dissects_sub...

recalibrator• 12 years ago

The only ones who truly profit from urban sprawl are land developers. They wipe out forests and wildlife to make a quick buck on cheap low-density housing.

The taxpayer foots the bill to have the grid and city services extended for these suburbs.

So the taxpayer loses, nature loses, and the losers who bought these ugly disposable houses are losers. Only the land developers profit.

gohrt3• 12 years ago

The taxpayer foots the bill to have the grid and city services extended for these suburbs.

The taxpayer is who gets the services.

bubbleRefuge• 12 years ago

From the perspective of someone who was pushed to the burbs due to better schools and facilities for kids, one thing I notice is that urban apartment complexes here in the states don't have the playground facilities that you find in big cities in developing countries. For example, when I visited the city of Sao Paolo Brazil, I stayed in an upper middle class apartment complex which had land at the base of the building walled off into a private park which had a hybrid soccer/basketball court, playground facilities, pool, and plenty of space for kids to run wild. Don't see that here in the states ( except pool ).

cpwright• 12 years ago

I question the logistical challenges here. If it is truly not that dense, why bother with sewers at all. My little slice of suburbia has no sewers, instead all of it is septic (and where I grew up cesspools). It's 100% on the owner to maintain.

Also, why bother spending money to widen streets. Let the streets stay as they were when they were first built. If you're going to go off trying to bring everything up to code as of now, instead of code when it was built, there will be never ending expenses.

I wonder if really the property taxes are just too low in this particular town. I pay 2-2.5% of my homes value in taxes each year, and my town/school district have to budget prudently, but are able to pay their bills and not rack up unsustainable debt.

The only two departments I really care about are sanitation, and highway. Even sanitation can be eliminated with private garbage as many other towns have. I do however expect the town to pave and plow my street. Beyond that, everything could be accomplished with user fees.

transfire• 12 years ago

1. Require higher standards. Infrastructure needs to last decades, not years. We used to build things that well. There is no reason we can't again. Then the big bucks we pay up front would be worth it. Unfortunately we have been moving in the opposite direction, to fill the coffers of cheap fat cats.

2. Zoning laws must change. It is ridiculous the a suburban family has to drive to the Super Walmart for a gallon of milk. When I was young there was a local convenience store just down every street (and not just crappy junk filled 7-11s).

3. Trains. Apparently they are cheap enough to get immigrants to their jobs, but too expensive for middle America? The B.S. around trains needs to end, and a new age of private passenger rail promoted. If you don't beleive me (b/c you'd rather believe political talking points) you best get a'Googling.

4. To go along with the trains, why is my municipal airport all but useless? Is anyone else getting tired of ever bigger airports and ever smaller seats? Who decided airports needed to be malls and that all flights needed to herd people into a handful of national feed lots? I figure at this rate airports will have indoor roller coasters within the next 20 years. What we need to do instead is transition to point-to-point flights on mass produced jets. Currently jets are all hand made. Good grief!

5. And ditch that 9-5 business. It's time we split the work and go 8 to 2 and 2 to 8. More jobs, business are open longer, and yet fewer people on the roads.

My 5 cents. Penny for your thoughts?

gohrt3• 12 years ago

When I was young there was a local convenience store just down every street (and not just crappy junk filled 7-11s).

Do you think zoning laws prevent 7-11 from selling milk, or do you think 7-11 sells what the market buys?

towski• 12 years ago

It's the economy, stupid.

pavedwalden• 12 years ago

When I imagine this borrowing pattern repeated across every town in America, I start to wonder how this affects the economy. Does anyone know how large a share of the American financial sector all of this municipal borrowing accounts for?

cpursley2• 12 years ago

After having spent a month in Russia, another large country with significant distance between cities, it appears they have solved the problem. Instead of building out, they've built dense vertical cities where everything you need is within close walking distance. And around 40% of Russians have a dacha, or 'summer house', located in enclaves within pubic transit distance from their city where they can stretch their feet and/or work the soil.

My guess at the reasons Russian cities developed this way is due to central planning and costs to build and maintain roads. Now, I'm not advocating central planning. The reasons suburbs exploded were due to the subsidization of once unaccessible land by the federal government via interstates. Take away the pricing distortions from land and we'll have to build up. A solution to this is market based - sell of the interstate system and let users fund them.

Mz• 12 years ago

I am an environmental studies major who wanted to be an urban planner. I gave up my car a few years ago. At the time, I was living in The Deep South. There was a bus stop a ten minute walk from my apartment and another one in front of my office building. No bus went directly from one to the other.

By car, it was a 7 minute drive. On foot, it was a one hour walk. By bus, I think it would have taken about 2 hours. I walked and caught rides and was usually at work in about 15 or 20 minutes.

Our modern concept of suburbs was born just after WW2. We had 4 years of dual income, no kids families saving up to half their income and unable to have kids due to the men being at war overseas. WW2 was immediately preceded by The Great Depression. As their reward for defeating evil, Americans just wanted a house of their own. There wasn't enough housing to meet the demand and the nation came together as a whole to create policies and financing mechanisms whole-clothe and we began throwing up Levittowns all over the place.

Decades later, our demographic has changed and we remain prisoners of policies born overnight to service the preponderance of nuclear families. We have a lot fewer nuclear families with SAHMs and small kids yet our entire world, so to speak, is aimed at creating a dream for a generation that is dying out. (My father fought in WW2 and he died last fall. He was just short of his 89th birthday.)

I now live in San Diego county. Transit and density here make it almost like a little slice of Europe, but with better weather. I think I will eventually be able to get the life I want, without a car.

I wish this man all the best in the world. He has quite the uphill battle ahead of him.

LordKano2• 12 years ago

I like the suburbs.

I like that I have about 1/6 of an acre of land that my house sits on.

I can grow a garden. My children have a safe yard to play in. I have a nice warm and dry garage in which I can perform my automotive repairs. I can barbecue without choking my neighbors with the smoke from my grill. I can play loud music late at night and not bother everyone nearby. I have trees from which we get organic, pesticide free fruits.

Suburbs will never die, as long as there are still people like me.

The author's epiphany seems to have come from the realization that despite his engineering background and his status as an "expert", he still didn't know as much as the hoi polloi about what was best for their neighborhoods but he still didn't learn the correct lesson.

The problem was caused by other "experts", to whom the state deferred for determining the standards in the first place. Every town is different. Every town has different needs. Forcing them to all use the same plan has consequences, even if he was not able to see them.

Widening those streets and removing those trees only encouraged people to drive faster and caused more accidents and deaths. It was a bad idea to help people drive faster through residential neighborhoods. Were he not so enamored with enforcing external standards, he might have been able to see that.

The Suburbs Will Die: One Man's Fight to Fix the American Dream

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