The Suburb of the Future, Almost Here
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
The only way, I can see this being built, is if new cities are created. These cities need to be populated by employers first: once that's there, most people that works there will find housing there too.
I wish these articles would stop pretending like everyone has a plethora of housing choices available - talking about what millenials "want" ~ our so called housing preferences. Our housing preference, first and foremost is to have a roof over our head without it costing more than 60% of our paycheck.
People go where the jobs go, there's no choice - this will always be the case as long as people need money, at least until remote work becomes possible
You can't in SF, NY, LA... other areas don't have this problem.
If your biggest desire is to have your housing not cost more than 60% of your paycheck, move to the suburbs of somewhere like Dallas. You'll be shocked at how many millennials can afford to have nice apartments or even buy homes without spending close to that, percentage-wise. Sure, they're doing it on a later schedule than the baby boomers, but in a lot of places that's a separate discussion of higher education requirements, student loan situations, etc, not terribly inflated housing costs.
But long-term-wealth-wise it might be better to land a top-tier job in an expensive city making $100K more a year in some combo of cash and equity and plowing that back into some of that expensive housing. Bit of a gamble, though. But if you aren't making more than (rough first guess, I feel on the too-low side with what I'm seeing rent-wise these days) $120K early in your career in one of the super-expensive cities, or have a clear path to well eclipsing that, you'd probably be much more comfortable making $70-100K in one of the cheaper, more southern, booming-yet-still-building-housing regions.
My guess is that the difference is that more of those spaces in Atlanta had become more abandoned residentially in the past since there was room to expand outwards, opening them up for redevelopment now, whereas in LA or SF much of the old-construction lower-density stuff has remained in continual high demand because people have already gone outward just about as far as currently possible (1-2hr each way commutes) so NIMBYism kicks in hard. Plus things like "environmental impact studies" concluding traffic will be worse, etc—I'm very skeptical of the idea that keeping density low so everyone has to commute from further away really helps the environment.
This is entirely true of the area. Affordability of nice housing is easily in-budget, even on a single income.
If you don't mind a commute, multiple acres of land is also an option. I just recevied an ad in the mail today for 5+ acre lots on a lake, 30 minutes from Dallas starting at $189k.
We moved from Dallas to Seattle 4 years ago for family. We moved back to Dallas after 18 months due to housing costs. Our house cost about 60% of what we would have spent for a dump half the size in the Seattle area.
Sure it's pricey in the city centers but not outrageous. It's only my California friends who are complaing, and to some extent Seattle.
If you're spending 60% of your income on housing you can easily find work elsewhere, take a pay cut, and still make out ahead. I spend 20% of my net pay on rent after taxes, insurance and 401k.
Every big city has mass transit to at some degree. IDK what your specific requirements are though.
I did a look in Zillow, and there are a few houses within 30 minute commute for under 300k. Most seem above 350k and further than 30 min, though. Which still isn't bad. But, assuming around $2,000 / month for mortgage and taxes, I'd have to make $120k+, gross, to have it be 20% of my income. Are there a lot of jobs there that pay that much? Sounds nice.
Also, I bought my first house in 2015. 2k sq ft, 0.2 acre, 2 was car garage, built 1976, 25min from SLC city center, for under $200k. Prices have gone up 10% since.
My wife and there kids and I live quite
Consider that since even in the US houshold medien income is $59k (gross) per year, spending 10% for housing (unless you already outright own) is not tenable for most families.
If your household income is 60k gross, your net should be north of 50k (figure at least 2 adults, maybe some kids, your tax burden will be lowish). 10% of 50k gives you $416 a month. Where I live (Indiana), that can get you a mortgage payment on a house that cost about 110k (say 15-20k down). That is totally reasonable. In my town you can get a solid 3 bedroom house with a yard
(First random result I pulled up from my city: https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/2612-Southridge-Dr-South-... )
I think most people spend far too high a % of their money on housing. Sometimes you can't help it (say, fresh out of college, moved to NYC for a big job). But a lot of people can, and still make bad choices.
But you're right that even here once you get far enough to not be reasonably commutable to one of the big cities prices plummet, just not sure which situation better represent the median family.
You can find rural/urban divides online but it's not quite the same if you consider people living in smaller towns are still being counted as urban...The biggest divide is probably between the super in-demand major cities (and their peripheries) vs everyone else.
This is further exaggerated here as Germany has the lowest birth rates in the world and one of the highest inbound immigration rates - which means the big cities are growing (as that's where immigrants are going) and the rest are deflating.
Are the inversions in SLC as bad as I've heard? How would life be for an asthmatic there?
There were studies done on this and they found a pattern of housing problems in the more progressive cities - because they often clamp down on housing, reducing the supply, in the name of progess.
> Its fun to dream about the future. But, a dream is all it'll ever be.
So for a long time the 'way' was zoning commercial or zoning residential, never in between. But the 'future' became mixed use, and new projects started getting zoned that way, and now 20 years later we've got lots of places where there are shops below and condos or apartments above. I even saw a proposal for connected residents where the owner of a shop can live right over their business which could be leased at the same time, mitigating issues with living far away from your office.
And with most things as you move forward in a direction you learn things and then those things affect your direction. To the extent that new modalities of employment (working 'remotely' in high tech as an example) it also opens up development options. Imagine a chunk of Missouri converted into a 'town' with really nice Internet service so that folks living there could work from their 'home' or maybe a community 'office' but otherwise exploit low land and building costs of the different areas.
I think you need to consider that while you're top priority is a "roof over [your] head without it costing 60% of your paycheck" there is someone trying imagine what part of the equation they can change so that they can offer that to you while accommodating the way in which you acquire that paycheck.
It is very affordable here, and there is plenty of housing to boot. I was able to buy a house my first year out of school. It was about 25% of my paycheck at the time and I've since paid off the place.
It seems, US population is not cratering. According to this population projection, it will continue to increase all the way to 2060 and beyond: https://www2.gwu.edu/~forcpgm/Ortman.pdf .
I want my own backyard so that I can go and enjoy sitting by a fire with music I like without ever needing to worry that I might have to compete with others on a cool Friday night in Autumn.
I want my own driveway so that I can go play basketball whenever I feel like, without needing to feel pressured to play nice with others.
I want my own car so that I can drive to and from work in peace, and so that I can do whatever I want in my car, like smoke a cigar. What's the likelihood that my friendly neighborhood ride sharing service will let me do that? Zero. My car is just about the only place left I can smoke in Massachusetts when I'm not at home, and I'm happy to pay for that privilege.
Even if I were OK with all of that, there are numerous dubious claims made in this article about how this new style of living would benefit the environment and would presumably save people from flooding. Really? Would it? How did you figure that? Or does it just sound like it makes sense?
Many signs point to me being stranger than my generational cohorts, but I like the suburbs precisely because I viscerally dislike living in shared spaces.
I refuse to live anywhere that isn't well-connected/dense enough to provide a good lifestyle completely car-free (i.e. all travel is quick, ubiquitous and convenient on foot/bike/public transportation). I do not ever wish to drive and this is not possible in any suburban development.
The only reason I drove anywhere with my son was because our region wasn't easily walk-able. That, and travel sports (though if the immediate area was walkable, that would have been reduced to weekend games).
He's since moved out, and we've traded our single-family for a TH in a denser area (though still suburban). I walk to work, walk to the park, have access to many trails, and only drive on the weekends to run errands. It was more QOL-improving than I ever imagined.
Anyway, I've grown to hate suburban sprawl. I find dense suburb packed around transit to be much better from a QOL perspective.
I have lots of carless friends with kids in NYC, and they seem to get by no problem.
When we looked at places I gave an immediate veto if there wasn't a sidewalk or if there wasn't a trolley stop a within 10min - 15 min walk, or a bus within 5min. Our elementary school is an 8min walk, the middle and high schools are about 20min. We only drive when public transit would more than double the amount of time it would take or if we need to go where there isn't transit. My wife will also drive for the large grocery runs each month, but the week-to-week is put in the stroller and carried home.
We enjoy this. Cars drive us nuts, not to mention the hassle of parking.
I'm not sure what you'd call this if not a suburb. The exurban areas are the ones from the 50s on that are nothing but houses arranged in the worst way possible.
Honestly, a lot of the first and second ring suburbs are like this. The Mon Valley (suburbs and towns along one of our rivers to the south east) is set up like this, but has been decimated by the loss of industry.
(Mt Lebanon is a township so part of it does go down the super low density route, but not the older sections.)
Do kids still play outside these days? I'm only 27, but from what I've seen of the 6-18 crowd they tend to be stuck in front of a screen most of the day.
So this is nothing new. People have always preferred one thing, and changed their minds when having kids.
I imagine I'll be going back to my previous lifestyle (Urban instead of suburban) when the kids can take care of themselves.
(1) It's nice to see food first, especially produce and to a lesser extend meat.
(2) "Buy X for me every week" is where delivery shines, but you can't adjust for deals.
Agreed. However the only reason I have to make "family-sized weekly grocery trip" is because there is nowhere within easy walking distance for quick daily grocery trips.
Also some things are far apart by definition. Going fishing, to the forest, or just the Sunday morning hockey practice etc is part of "the package" of stuff you can do with a house and car. I Wouldn't trade those for a situation where my house was much closer to work and the area more dense, but I'd have no car.
The one thing that could revolutionize this is rental car pools with self driving cars. In the urban areas where parking is a hassle and the shared cars are always parked nearby, shared cars is becoming more common. That doesn't work in the suburb though. If I could summon a shared car when I need it, I wouldn't need a car of my own. That would mean the suburbs could be denser and have less cars.
I don't think my age is salient, as I know plenty of young people who claim they'd love to live like I do. So, I guess what I'm trying to say is that there's lots of different desires, and they encompass all age groups.
I used to live in cities. I'm so happy to be out. Then again, I do love driving.
then a few sentences later
> Existing suburbs were developed to maximize house and lot sizes,
There is an important piece of info they brushed right past: Existing suburbs were developed to maximize house and lot sizes within a single development, but optimize for that development to be as tightly clustered as possible.
This is obvious if you travel through the outskirts of a major metro area. Loudon VA years ago (DC) or Gig Harbor (Seattle). There will be a bunch of nothing for 20 miles, then 40 houses with about 20 feet between each of them, and then a bunch of nothing.
I think it's lazy and shortsighted of NYT to write this off as disdain for "visual monotony and social conformity".
It's about peace and quiet. The next generation of suburbs needs to be optimized for a bunch of tired sacks aching for reprieve from a world that seems to always be poking at them for something. That means not being elbow to elbow with your neighbors and their shitty, shitty kids.
I like that we dug a pump well for fresh water.
I like that I can go outside with my daughter and watch wildlife walk by. I don't need to get a streaming service that puts an image of wild things on a 40" screen. My daughter is going to have memories for a lifetime of her and dad naming the pretty cougars and foxes that walked in her backyard. She'll always remember and be able to come back to her own woods with trails and chirping, the stream by the house, and her very own lake Elizabeth with little jumping fishies.
I already get things delivered to my door same day from Amazon, so I don't need drop off locations at town central, where I would need to get my packages. But, I can go into town, whenever I want. It's not far.
If people want to keep building ever more expensive housing that is constantly more and more interdependent with other systems and people, then go right ahead. Meanwhile, life is waiting to be lived right now.
Let me ask you a question similar to what you just asked me, "Do you enjoy letting your family breathe the smog and pollution infested air that you live in? If they don't breathe the outside air, are they aware of the pollution and climate change that is killing the planet, caused by your car?" See how silly the kind of assumptions are that you made?
Of course, if you really do the math, even beyond being unsustainable from an economic and infrastructure/governance standpoint, on a personal level, owning and maintaining a house in the suburbs has many hidden costs.
If we lived in the city, it'd take ~2-2.5x as much money to buy a house with one fewer bedrooms than our current 'burbs house has (two of our kids could have bunk-beds I guess) and probably 500-100sqft smaller overall and in kinda so-so shape, and that's outside the heart of the city and not in a ritzy neighborhood (but also not a slum). Then we'd also have to hope our kids got into one of a couple good waiting-listed charter schools, or else pay another $2-3K/month for private school. We couldn't afford that at all, and even if they got into the charter schools we'd be living like paupers thanks to the much-higher mortgage (or rent).
So, lifeless, boring 'burbs full of seemingly-intentionally-ugly houses it is.
There's also a definitions thing hiding in here: much of San Fransisco is pretty damn suburban, with houses, one or two story buildings, etc. Still expensive as hell, though. And then look at all the towns on the peninsula. I'd argue that the affordability differences are regional much more than urban/suburban driven.
Worth also looking at the costs within those regions of city vs certain suburbs, like SF vs Palo Alto, or LA vs Santa Monica.
[0] such as https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2016/09/13/m... http://www.marketwatch.com/story/do-pets-have-the-potential-...
Suburban or Sustainable, pick one.
Here's Plano, TX, which was mostly developed in the '90s and the 21st century: https://i.imgur.com/TmIlgBh.jpg
Here's Westchester County, NY, developed much earlier than that and not nearly as dense: https://i.imgur.com/pSIettu.jpg
(I used Google Maps zoom level 14 for both screenshots)
Plano is a city of 71 sq miles and ~3800 people per square mile. Westchester is a _county_ of 500 square miles and 2300 people per square mile. In many regards, Westchester may be denser. It also looks like they haven't chopped down every last tree and laid waste to the land with asphalt.
Usually they are referring to the much sparser developments of often large houses, built between the 1960s up to the early naughts.
What you are describing are more like towns, which usually have more sustainable features (smaller houses and lots, ergo less pipes in the ground, a rail corridor connecting them to a major city) because they were built before the car era.
A sustainable development will necessarily have a high number of households per foot of road frontage. This will not have the suburban look and feel of single-family homes with yards. At best it's going to be medium-density townhomes and row-houses to eliminate wasting infrastructure on the space between houses.
Of course, so does the future of the city, just in a denser package, so it has better per-capita figures in many ways - but is there a scenario where we can get enough of it to power cities but not cities + suburbs? That seems unlikely to me.
There are "exurbs" which are just abominations of low density and bad design. There are some lower density suburbs, and yeah, neither of those are sustainable.
That's a hell of a claim, and no evidence whatsoever is provided for it. Could it be that the New York Times writers are projecting their slavish political devotion onto the rest of us?
Once we're all married with school-age kids, we will choose to move out to the plain, boring suburbs just like the generations before us. You might keep wasting your time with composting, but almost nobody is going to let "sustainability" actually detract from their quality of life.
The only reason why people in other countries don't make that same choice is that they're not really allowed to, because of development laws, high fuel taxes, and so forth.
When I moved from my apartment I bought a house (no mortgage). When I add up extra utilities costs, taxes, insurance, and maintenance it comes up to about 75% of what I was paying for rent.
If they instead were unable to take on the debt they would be forced to either raise taxes, cut services, or some combination thereof. The past ~40 years have seen an ever decreasing interest rate environment, which allows municipalities to borrow money by issuing bonds, pay only the interest, then when the principal comes due, they roll it into a new bond that borrows even more. That new bond pays the old one off and then they have some more borrowed money to work with. And because interest rates have gone down more in the years since the previous bond issuance, they can pay the same interest. Basically, they just keep rolling debt over so that the principal is never paid down. Example - in 2000, bond rates were around 6%. In 2010 they were around 4%. In 2000, if a municipality took out $100M to build schools or whatever, they need to pay $6M a year in interest. Ten years later it comes due. Uh oh, they now need $106M this year but only budgeted for 6 of it. Our bureaucrats spend every penny of tax revenue over the last decade and never made allotments of $10M a year to pay back this loan. So what do they do? Thankfully the rate is 4%, so they can borrow a whopping $150M and still pay the same interest! So that's exactly what they do. Now they get to pay the same $6M every year and also have an additional $50M to spend on "growth" and "sustainability". This has happened across the board in nearly every municipality (city, suburb, etc.) across the nation. This is why the Fed hasn't raised rates. It's the same reason why Japan is in the situation they are in...for 30+ years.
Certainly the mortgage market is distorted by the federal government, but I have yet to see any evidence of subsidy for suburban borrowers.
Well, okay. You still haven't made the case it disproportionately benefits the suburbs. People who buy houses in the city pay a lot more money, and presumably get to write off a lot more interest.
>Also any roady that connect your suburb to anywhere are heavily subsidized, to the tune of greater than 60%.
So what you're saying is cities benefit enormously from a subsidy that allows companies to employ people who don't work in the city and import products from other places?
>If your suburb build its sewers with bonds, they too end up receiving various forms of subsidy.
Oh? Do you have some evidence this is true?
>It would be truly unique in the whole of the US if your community's property taxes covered the full cost of local services and weren't partially covered from the state's general fund.
Well, sure, but we pay state taxes. I would expect some of that money to come back.
I expect you're wrong about that.
> Every calculation I've ever seen about the expenses of suburbs ends up with downtown paying for suburban development.
It all depends on who is doing the accounting. Much of the infrastructure built outside cities isn't built for the local residents at all, but it's there to service the cities. As I pointed out above, you can't count a highway between San Francisco and Los Angeles as a subsidy for the Central Valley, and yet that's exactly what academics in at places like CUNY do. How convenient.
>Heavily subsidized suburban residents then go to their city council meetings and complain about property taxes going to mass transit and similar uses. shrug
I mostly see complaining by people who live in cities. People who state confidently how much more efficient cities are and then can't explain why everything they buy is more expensive. Shrug.
Or, in another way: are these just recent calculations? There are a lot of places where downtown cores hollowed and had most of the big-financial-impact businesses move out to the suburbs a few decades ago, and now that reversed more recently, and will probably cycle around a few more times in the future.
FWIW, I'm technically a Millennial (born in 1984, Millennials are born 1982-2004), and I'm a living counter-example to the article's claims.
I love living in the suburbs, and I have no problems whatsoever with "visial monotony and social conformity". Really, I'd love to just be an anonymous cog in the machine. I want lots of space and no noise, and I'm visually in love with with the look and feel of sprawl.
The only demand I make is that I strongly prefer living in southwestern and some midwestern suburbs that make use of an arterial grid (e.g. Dallas, Detroit, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Columbus), and I despise the loosey-goosey layout of northeastern suburbs (I have family in NY... the suburbs there feel rural, and I just don't like that). Cities that use an arterial grid tend to place shopping centers at every intersection of arterials, and I like living close enough to one of those intersections that I can walk to the supermarket if I need to. That is the only kind of "walkability" I care about.
Interestingly enough, a recent local tragedy actually brought to light just how much of my age group in my area prefers suburban living. Last weekend, there was a mass shooting at a football watch party in a suburban home in Plano, TX. The shooter and the victims were all fairly close in age to me, leaning younger (the shooter was my age exactly, one other victim was a year older than me, four were 1-5 years younger than me, and three were 7-10 years younger than me). All of them are Millennial suburbanites living in a pretty conservative, sprawling suburb. Furthermore, as I found out after the shooting I have multiple friends who live in that neighborhood, all of whom are within two years of my age. Whatever this alleged trend in suburbs is, it didn't seem to affect Millennials who attended UTD in the mid-to-late '00s.
(As an aside, this has been pretty devastating--the suburbs of Dallas are tight-knit enough that everyone knows each other, I have mutual friends with almost every single person involved, we all went to the same university, and I'd met one of the victims before. Part of the reason I'm writing about this at all is to help me process what happened. And my friends who live there are seriously freaked because their neighbors just got murdered and there are cops and tourists all over their neighborhood now.)
It is important to note this is in the opinion section. This is written by a professor at MIT, not anyone on the NYTimes staff. ( https://dusp.mit.edu/faculty/alan-berger )
> Once we're all married with school-age kids, we will choose to move out to the plain, boring suburbs just like the generations before us.
You provide no evidence for this, and the evidence is strong against you. Nearly everyone who wants to show "suburb preference" tries to show that "hey, when people turn 30-35, they still tend to move to the suburbs", which is no surprise. And the opinion article in the NYTimes even does this. That is "lifecycle change" and obviously will occur.
But the question is whether there has been generational change. Are a higher percentage of 35 year olds living in the city than there were 15 years ago? Are a higher percentage of families choosing to live in cities than 15 years ago? The answers to these questions is yes, indicating a generational change towards the city. You see new groups popping up pushing for better facilities for strollers. They have become common enough on public transit that Boston tried to ban them. That's an indication that people are no longer fleeing to the suburbs once they have kids.
I don't have a convenient graph for city vs. suburbs, but I do have one for the somewhat related homeownership[0]. What the graph shows is that yes, there is a lifecycle where more people own homes as they get older, but there is also a generational change where 2014's 42 year old is less likely to own a home than 2001's 42 year old. And the same for pretty much every age from 20-65.
Speak for yourself. I could also say the only reason people in the US don't choose to live in the city is because they're not really allowed to, what with it being basically illegal to build nice cities any more (parking minimums, zoning, etc.)
Also, if nobody wants to live in the city it's hard to explain why they're so expensive. Somebody's paying those prices, after all.
Unfortunately capitalism as a concept causes buyers and sellers to only concern themselves with the immediate future. "Can I sell this to someone tomorrow?"
A lot of industries can afford this short-sightedness, but there is only so much physical space (and orders of magnitude less that is livable) on the planet.
> millennials, who, as it turns out, are not a monolithic generation
Then, I feel they go right back to the attitude in a new context:
> Yet millennial suburbanites want a new kind of landscape.
On closer inspection, there is a difference in vision, but they might want to reconsider the sustainability implications of the bird that disappears and is replaced by a drone...
And none of the authors ever seem to indicate any understanding of why the suburban housing development exist in its current form before hand-waving away all those real factors and baking up some pie-in-the-sky nonsense to support whatever their vision of the future may be.
We already know what a sustainable, efficient suburb looks like. It's a city block. But if people who live in suburbs actually wanted that, we'd have more urbs and fewer suburbs.
Apparently the suburb of the future will be powered by magical fairy dust.