American Suburbs Swell Again as a New Generation Escapes the City
wsj.com
wsj.com
My old house was 900sf, perfect for 1 to 2 people, but it got cramped when my son was born. We looked into expanding but for the cost of adding a room with a bathroom ($100k) we decided that it wasn't worth it.
With schools we got lucky, the elementary school was just recently built and looked great. But there was an issue, the schools that my son would be going after grade school were rated very poor. This was a concern.
Traffic bad and seemingly only getting worse. Traffic projects have been in endless gridlock between car commuters and the bicycle community.
Not sure about other large cities, but mine (Portland, OR) has a pretty big homeless and crime issues as of lately. Gone are the days of how clean our city is and now it's just littered with trash and tent communities. It's not uncommon to see a heroine needle if walking in a city park. In the last year, we had somebody try to break into my shed and my wife and 4 years old Son were confronted in our driveway by a homeless individual, who said that he was considering suicide.
I still have a soft spot for PDX and I think it's a great place, but we decided get out.
ha ha sounds like I'm repeating the same story of earlier genereations, ha ha nothing new.
https://www.kgw.com/article/news/local/homeless/our-city-has...
That is 80m2. I grew up in a 75m2 apartment (810sf) with my parents and two brothers.
I guess that "cramped" is a matter of perspective. :)
> Not sure about other large cities, but mine (Portland, OR) has a pretty big homeless and crime issues as of lately.
It makes me sad to hear about that. We are in the XXI century and we have good ways of helping homeless people and reduce crime. I understand that you leave to a better place, but that does not solve the problem.
> confronted in our driveway by a homeless individual, who said that he was considering suicide.
I hope that you have find a good place for you and your family but do not forget the people that you left behind. Their lives are a tragedy that can be averted.
I agree partly.
In most European cities there is a lot of planning and regulations to follow. Barcelona Example (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eixample) is an example of 19th-century planning.
In most Europe, you can't build a tall building in a rural town, a skyscraper without the proper open space around it or a factory in a residential neighbourhood. But, those rules have been more sensible to the city needs and have had less pressure from car makers. Old towns are usually compact and easy to walk because they predate cars. Cities have very good public transportation systems as cars were too expensive for most of the population. Living in the city centre has been seen as a luxury. At least for me, "suburvio" (a suburb in Spanish) has always had a negative connotation. Nobody wanted to live in the outskirts of a city.
So, I agree that American cities are, in general, poorly designed. And public transportation is almost nonexistent. The problem is not urban planning but that the cities are designed for cars, not for humans. Carmakers had too much power for too long. Urban planning worked really well to achieve its goal: to sell more cars.
That is part of urban planning here. Public transit simply can't be both good and cheap at these densities, which were mandated explicitly by urban planners. You complain about height limits, but there are many places which you can't (or recently couldn't have) house more than one family in a certain amount of space by law.
There are lots of post-car places where you can get around great on foot, it's just that a lot of the post-car places in the U.S. and Canada have many layers of planning and regulation which make you dependent on a car.
Also a matter of layout. The expected amenities in US apartments live little room for living space, particularly pantries and walk-in closets, and large appliances. Large bathrooms are also common. Having just moved to Europe, I am acutely aware of the trade offs; we have a lot of living space, but we also have had to buy wardrobes, get used to a much smaller bathroom, and generally adapt to different expectations.
A walk in robe on the other hand typically wastes space since it (in effect) introduces a new hallway into your house, since that is effectively what the wakling area in your walk-in robe is.
Ironically, if you can afford it, cities are better than suburbs for schools etc. You can have two layers of people in exactly the same place and never have them interact. The richest and poorest schools are just blocks apart.
We can't, that's why we're moving. It's not to get away from "elements", like prior generations. It's simply too expensive to raise a family in the city. Not to mention, if you moved into the city, your family support structure is likely to be back home.
Usually. I live in a semi-rural town (Katoomba) in Australia, about 100km from the biggest city, and we have a lot of homeless people from rural towns, people who have lived their lives in the country. Turns out my town is as close to Sydney as they're comfortable being, there's good services for them with a big hospital, accommodation, a train line etc.
Exactly. In the USA, the downtown area of cities might have a van driving around with meals to distribute to homeless people on the sidewalks. The homeless don't even have to walk to a soup kitchen; the vans bring the food to them. Some downtowns also open a shelter of "last resort" when the winter temperatures drop to inhuman freezing conditions. In downtown Vancouver during a record-breaking winter, I saw a city van driving around asking the homeless if they needed a warm place to sleep for the night.
In contrast, the suburbs will not deliver meals nor will suburban residents open their homes to random homeless vagrants. The town councils of suburbs also don't usually vote to spend tax dollars and open up a soup kitchen and shelter in their neighborhood. They don't want their neighborhoods to be attractive to the homeless.
Being homeless is already a hard life but it would be an even harder existence in the suburbs.
As someone who has never been to the city - not 20, 10, or 0 years ago - how should I go about verifying which one is "more true"?
My density today is more than average.
My impression is that the size of suburban districts varies greatly by state. Of those I am acquainted with, in Colorado, Maryland, and Virginia every county or county-equivalent city has one school district. In Pennsylvania there can be several school districts in a county, some small enough to have one high school. I think that New Jersey is very fragmented also.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_districts_in_Wa...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_districts_in_Or...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_districts_in_Ca...
Most people probably buy the maximum they can "afford" (are approved for).
Canada does not have such an interest deduction and has roughly the same home ownership rate as the US.
(What Canada does have is no capital gains tax on one's primary residence, so any profits when selling are tax free.)
The couple found a sprawling five-bedroom house next to a horse farm for $782,000, half the cost they would have paid in the Seattle suburb they left behind.
This implies that the family in the article was shopping for a $1.5M home in a "Seattle suburb" that is most likely in the Bellevue/Redmond area in the year 2015. In that year, the average sale price in the region was between $855K (Bellevue, WA) and $598K (Redmond, WA), implying that they were aspiring to live well above the median lifestyle in two of the richer suburbs in the Seattle area. [1]
I don't know how to square this family's story with the surrounding narrative in the article. This family could afford to live almost anywhere. They could afford to pay taxes to fund schools and other municipal services. They could choose to live somewhere that has none of the problems the article decries, simply by buying in.
Methinks this is a story about false advertising on the part of "Millennial Mayberry", rather than suburban flight.
[1] https://public.tableau.com/shared/9P33834MX?:display_count=y...
Moreover, almost everyone is highly leveraged when "buying" a home. Hell, I my wife and I could swing a 1.5m mortgage if we really wanted to. According to mortgage calculator, a 1.5m house would take 60k down-payment and 1.5k/month[1]. That's very reasonable for a large portion of the population.
I've paid triple that amount in rent for apartments.
[1]: 30-year, 60k realtor cut, 4.2% fixed rate, $2400 property taxes/year, average credit
Edit: Yeah I think the calculator is giving wrong results. There's no way that's possible.
Did you miss a zero somewhere or did the calculator have a bug? There's no way 60K down and 1.5k/month is correct. It's much higher than that for a $1.5M home.
Suburbs sort of combine the worst aspects of city and rural life; too many people around that you don't really get space, privacy, or scenery, yet not enough people for there to be any interesting restaurants, farmer's markets, museums, coffee shops, or really just anything to do.
I love the Bay Area because it offers all the amenities of a big city, yet all sorts of natural beauty is within an hour's drive away. One of my relatives visited recently and was shocked at how you can be in downtown SF one minute and then standing in an old-growth forest of redwood trees twenty minutes later.
Unfortunately, I imagine once my wife and I have children, expenses will become rather difficult. I'm not sure how well a tiny apartment will accommodate a growing family, especially if we have two or three kids. So... I'll probably end up back in the suburbs eventually, but I'm not in a hurry, and it certainly isn't my preference to be there.
You may find that your preferences change as a result of having children. Also - there are a lot of different living options falling somewhere between San Francisco and Atlanta suburbs with regards to population density. E.g. a small city with a walkable downtown, restaurants, etc., but affordable enough to own a decent-size house and a car.
I spent a lot of time exploring with my friends, and being independent. I think it would be hard to have this kind of experience in a rural town, but in a suburb, it seems pretty normal.
This is interesting. I live in a suburb and my suburb along with many of those neighboring all have good restaurants, farmer's markets and good coffee. I will admit that we don't have many museums, but the city is only a 20 minute drive if you want to do that.
I will say that we have a plethora of nice parks and a great library system. I've noticed that they are all cleaner and better maintained than that of the city too.
Interestingly, the suburban are I live in now if in the middle of a lower income neighborhood and a typical middle-class southern suburb. There is slight walkability, but only towards the poorer area, the sidewalk abruptly ends heading the other way
"there never really was much of a back-to-the-city trend in the first place... With only tiny variances, the suburbs have been gaining population for 70 years relative to cities (and rural areas)..."
Millenials' preferences appear roughly similar to the preferences of other generations.
It's almost as if millenials don't love avocado toast so much as they love defying sweeping stereotypes about cohorts divided by arbitrary birth years.
https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2019/07/millennials-l...
.
The ones that are moving to the suburbs are the ones that are bit traditional, not into fighting for social causes.
Anecdotally I see more families in inner city Melbourne than there was a decade ago, but I also see things like kids sporting events becoming local affairs when they used to involve driving kids around the city a lot more, so some areas are definitely adapting to more inner city parents with no cars.
The suburbs built in the 1930s are being gentrified, and are now considered 'downtown'. The suburbs built in the 1940s-1960s are in now the edge of the city, inhabited by an older generation or retires that vote very conservatively as they try to stop change in their neighborhoods. The suburbs built in the 1970s and 1980s are starting to show their age. They are at the ends of public transit lines where rents in rooming houses are the cheapest. This is the area new immigrants are moving, as it saves money, but the commute is long. The suburbs of the 1990s till now are eating up small towns. This causes some tension between the new burbs and the more redneck locals that have never liked the city.
But of course, if you're in the market for a small apartment, you're not getting a large-lot single family home to yourself. You're getting a roommate situation in one. Five commuting adults in a house is arguably a worse strain on infrastructure than a small apartment building would have been.
Or the hard-fought activist campaigns by city residents to keep their populations from growing have been successful.
As my friends and family form families, they either stay in the city.
After all, having a kid or two and staying in NYC or SF is the ultimate status symbol.
Or they move to more livable cities such as Philadelphia from NYC or Austin from SF or Pittsburgh from Chicago.
The exception is moving back to the suburbs to be close to our boomer parents who of course still live there.
Seriously, no one I know my age (35) willingly moves to the suburbs. Curious if this is my bubble or consistent.
Depends where you live! I’m in Pittsburgh and there is still a culture here of bailing to the well heeled suburbs (cough cough Fox Chapel) when having kids. You couldn’t pay me to leave the city core, but the Midwest still clings to that suburban status symbol life more than the rest of the nation.
I can't speak for all of the Midwest, but to add an anecdatum: I live in a suburb of Minneapolis/St. Paul. As (relatively) nice as those downtowns both are they are both still far noisier, dirtier, and more expensive to live in than the suburb I'm in; further, I look out at wildlife daily at my backyard that extends 1.5 acres, which I find quite pleasant. "Status symbol" has nothing to do with it.
I understand it's expensive but it reads like you're tied to the city, I'm missing the status symbol portion, likely because I'm nowhere near either location.
I've seen some of this, people move out because of schools or sports/events for kids specifically. To your point there are definitely more staying put than I would have initially assumed, I like a bit of each. Many suburban homes are massively oversized and have sprawling neighborhoods. Again, personal anecdote, I am seeing a lot of action in suburban governments focusing on connecting neighborhoods and rectifying some of the massive sprawl issues of the 90s by filling in differently and adding connecting trails/sidewalks.
I’m just anti-suburbs.
I’m pro-livable smaller cities like Philly, Austin, Denver, Nashville, Portland, Pittsburgh, etc.
I’m extremely bullish on even smaller cities as the next wave, but that’s a separate story.
EDIT: I'm curious what you think is a reasonable salary to live in the downtown/midtown areas of the smaller liveable cities.
To be able to swing a suburban lifestyle in SF or NYC, you need to be able to compete with more of the top x% of the population than other places. Or have generational wealth.
My anecdata is the total opposite. Every newly married couple I know that’s looking to have kids has either already left city living or the migration is in progress. The well off ones keep their old spots as a pied-a-terre for a distant future but there’s a universal distain for city life.
I’d argue it’s a lifestyle decision more than anything else. Each couple or family has their own reasoning about why they moved. The attitude in the city is much more keep to yourself. Suburbs are gossipy and people tend to pay attention to everything.
I would argue there are much more ‘mega wealthy’ people outside of the city.
Agreed that it needs to get developed much more.
Incorporated Seattle, for instance, is truly massive. It includes many, many, many neighborhoods that are really the innermost suburbs rather than the outermost urban neighborhoods. I have lived in the first ring and just outside of it several times, and people farther out would call that 'downtown' but people actually in downtown did not, despite the fact that in 2 cases I could, in a pinch, walk home from downtown while carrying bags.
I think it's heavily dependent on how you grew up and where you currently live. To a city dweller, a dense suburd looks like an urban waste. And to a small town dweller, even a small City feels crowded and messy.
Mainly because it is much better for kids to see a tree from time to time and that they can roam around freely, the air is much better, you don't have to deal with congested traffic, but for most noise was the most important factor.
In the 19th century people outside of cities were looked down as stupid and lacking any culture. Because they had no access to it of course. But it is questionable if that remains true in the age of universal global communication.
Given, this experience is from Europe, where living outside of the city means you can get back to it within about 20 Minutes.
Is that a hyperbole or meant literally? I live in a mid-sized German city (500k inhabitants) and find it hard to come up with any place in the city where you cannot see multiple trees.
If you are within walking distance of vast forests and mountains I would argue you're almost per definition not in the suburbs any more. And ironically in many places living in the city might give you better access to nature. Certainly the suburb where I grew up getting to the 'real' forest required a car, while when I moved to the city the forest was a short walk from the last stop on the subway.
We may be thinking different scales of “vast” here, but where I grew up in the suburbs of Boston, I could walk 5 minutes from my doorstep and be on a pretty much endless network of nature trails running through the forest, along rivers and ponds. I spent a decent portion of my childhood and teenage years goofing off in the woods with friends away from adult supervision. A lot of New England suburbs are like that.
It is of course an allegory for the general lack of nature within cities. Of course there are some parks and German cities tend to be green. But that is all relative and for many people no substitute for "real" nature, where you can leave your kids on their own without needing to worry about traffic or other dangers. That is the thought process of most couples that had kids in my circle.
Of course cities offer more childcare services, but that isn't an argument for people having a certain mobility.
Some lone trees on some boulevard or avenue just doesn't cut it for many people.
The thing about SF and NYC (and Seattle and Chicago) is that most of the nicer, semi-affordable areas with SFH are actually in suburbs: the peninsula, Long Island/Westchester/gold coast, Bel-Red, North shore. There are definitely cities where affordable, nice SFH areas are not in suburbs, but usually they are the smaller ones that don't have/need the same degree of density
The ones I know mostly moved back to near where their parents live, because childcare and housing in SF are expensive. If they could have e.g. taken their rent-control with them from a 1-bedroom to a 2-bedroom apartment, or had better family leave and subsidized daycare, I get the impression a good proportion would have stayed for at least several more years.
I’ve traded cocktails at the Peninsula for, well, cocktails at the Maggianos, but I can park right next to the entrance and not have to drag a stroller around, so that’s pretty great.
My peers and I graduated into the finance boom and were able to ride the paycheck economy before the Great Recession.
Driving to a bar to drink alcohol is great? It's better than being able to walk to a bar or take public transit? How? To me that sounds incredibly reckless.
I have a distinct memory of you taking the other side in a comment a couple years ago (too lazy to dig it out now) talking about how easy it is being in nyc transit with a stroller
The notion that culture is a predominate driver of urban-suburban migration never sat well with me. In nearly every place around the world these migrations are driven predominately by economic factors, particularly employment and housing costs. Except for the relatively wealthy, every other preference necessarily takes a back seat.
The post-WWII generational migration to suburbia beginning in the 1940s is arguably an exception. OTOH, it was clearly driven by the automobile and accelerated by the interstate system opening up cheaper land without losing access to employment. But now traffic and other factors, such as regional industrial and commercial specializations, have made distance relevant again.
The same trends that drove the return to urban areas persist. Because NIMBY suppression of housing development accelerated the rise of housing costs, we very quickly saw counter pressures back out to the suburbs. I'd argue this is still very much inline with an overall trend back toward cities, because the economics of distance and employment continue to favor density now more than ever. Again, the article admits this by explaining that the newly growing suburban cities are conspicuously close to urban centers generally, and employment centers specifically.
Culture, racism, schools... these reasons resonant with people, but all these preferences take a back-seat to economic realities. If you're lucky enough to be able to say that you forwent opportunities for non-economic reasons, you're almost by definition part of a minority because the vast majority of people in this country do not enjoy such privileges of choice, at least not to any substantial degree. To that extent expressed preferences are incapable of explaining the fundamentals of large, national trends. When people give a reason for choosing a city or a suburb, they're often missing the forest for the trees--they're explaining their choice among a small set of options filtered by their means, not the reasons for the set of options they could realistically choose from.
If you will have a 2-income family, you'll want to be where multiple jobs are within a commute. The 1-income family or single person can simply move as needed.
If you will have a large family, you'll prefer a location where a large house is affordable. If you won't have a family, that doesn't matter.
Cause and effect go both ways. People following a traditional lifestyle are pushed out of cities by economic factors, and people following other lifestyles are pushed into cities. Meanwhile, city dwellers are discouraged from living traditionally due to economic factors, just as non-city dwellers wanting two incomes have trouble finding that second job.
Move where? I've known plenty of both singles (white collar, blue collar) and married couples and on reflection every single one of them is living and working in a place principally because of job opportunities, not according to their preferred locale. Likewise for families. Many have relocated several times in the past 10 or 20 years.
I think it goes without saying that the unwashed masses the world over will choose larger accommodations (up to some limit), all things being equal. You can't go wrong assuming the masses will choose more for less. I used to think otherwise until I began reading that even the French had begun leaving their small walkable cities for either the major cities or suburbs. That's when I had to face the reality that the French are no different than the Americans, who are no different than the Nigerians.
Given the universal pressure to spread out (at least in the aggregate), if we want to explain trending migration patterns the controlling factors are almost certainly going to relate to the more mundane economics of housing prices and employment opportunities. Those are the relevant variables, everything else is relatively fixed by comparison.
All the other narratives, such as the supposedly unique Millennial preference for urban environments, seem hopelessly tainted by the culture wars. I have my own opinions and anecdotes on the matter, but I've come to think they're largely irrelevant. Why resort to them when the more obvious explanations are not only sufficient to help explain the trends, but also have greater predictive power.
Also, FWIW, I've noticed that our perceptions of suburbia are changing. What constitutes suburban development these days would have been considered overly dense and undesirable by suburbanites 20-30 years ago. I mention that because I think people will rationalize the choices they face and the choices they make. If they prefer suburbia, they're likely to perceive themselves as in suburbia and describe their surrounding as suburban even when their community is better described as more urban. People have preconceived notions of what urban means that don't suffice to explain contemporary patterns of development. I have a two-car garage in the San Francisco Richmond neighborhood in a house that, when built in 1926, would have been squarely considered suburban--presuming the term had been coined at that time. Today most would consider my neighborhood urban, notwithstanding the absence of skyscrapers, but there are plenty of new developments popping up that people describe as suburban but which are not appreciably less dense than many neighborhoods in San Francisco.
But, again, we needn't delve into that minutiae if we instead look to more fundamental and objective qualities, such as cost of housing relative to distance to labor centers. Do I prefer the ideal of the city, where my kids can walk to the neighborhood school, library, movie theater and church, more than the idea of their ability to frolic in open pastures and virgin forest? I realized several years ago that it doesn't matter what I would prefer because the next time we move, if we move, I'll not likely have the privilege of choosing between such stark choices; rather, the reason for moving (i.e new job) will almost certainly narrow my options down not only to a particular city but to a particular neighborhood.
The whole western half of San Francisco is zoned to mostly only allow 1 unit per lot, much of it requiring detached houses. Here’s a map, see the sea of pale yellow low-density residential. http://default.sfplanning.org/zoning/zoning_map.pdf
The Richmond is definitely not “urban” by standards of people living in cities. I would rate it much closer to “sleepy beach town” than “dense cosmopolitan city”. The “most people” in your description must be suburbanites through and through.
(This zoning should change; SF housing would be a lot more affordable if every part of the city were zoned to allow 3–4 story buildings with multiple units per building. We should get rid of RH-1 zones altogether, and upgrade most of the pale yellow part to e.g. RC-3 or NC-2 zoning. The increased density would then support better infrastructure, such as dedicated bus lanes with frequent and reliable service, significantly improving quality of life for people living in those neighborhoods.)
I used to live in Lower Pacific Heights, two blocks from Van Ness, and walked ~1 mile to the Financial District every day. We regularly ate out at North Beach and Chinatown (and still do, as my office is still downtown). There may be more bars downtown and around Japantown, but the Geary corridor all the way up to 25 Ave has a far more diverse and trafficked street scene. The Judah and Irving corridors in the Inner and Outer Sunset even more so. The Mission more so still, but it's not skyscraper-urban, either.
Relative to almost any neighborhood outside San Francisco, the Outer Richmond is absolutely urban.[1] And I can say this because even though my commute takes 45 minutes (30 minutes if I drive, 15 minutes without traffic), it's about on par with almost everybody else in the city and incomparable to those living outside city limits. More concretely, the Outer Richmond has a population density of over 20,000/sq mile--not bad for a sleepy beach town of single family homes.[2] And ultimately that's what I'm getting at--we should be using objective criteria, both to describe existing situations as well as trends.
FWIW, I agree with you that zoning needs to change and that the Outer Richmond could use more density.
[1] I first moved to San Francisco in 2000. My first place was in the Outer Richmond, moving from Foggy Bottom in D.C. My roommate, from Philadelphia, used to say it was too far from downtown. Fast forward 20 years and after having lived in multiple cities and towns around the country, he told me that he changed his mind about the Richmond. His conception of what urban meant has changed, especially after he realized how difficult it was to find a job in a locale as dense as that. I also moved around a bit after that (Arlington, VA, Long Beach, New Haven, and several months in Quito and then Santiago), though I never held the opinion that the Richmond wasn't "urban" enough to be urban.
[2] Which says something about how dense cities and towns can get while still clinging to the ideal of single-family homes.
The Richmond feels significantly more suburban than the Mission (where I live) though.
I don’t think “skyscraper urban” is all that necessary (in SF, my impression is that the skyscraper boom is mostly a result of a few areas with very lax zoning combined with massive demand because everywhere else the zoning is absurdly limiting), but the USA could use a whole lot more low-rise and mid-rise apartment buildings.
Relative to almost every other locale in the United States, and especially according to most Americans' perceptions, it's a stretch to call any neighborhood in San Francisco suburban.
Relative to urbanized areas in the rest of the world, especially Asia, only a few neighborhoods in the U.S. are comparable, and only one or two in SF, if any. (Northbeach/Chinatown has the population density of Manhattan.) But that gets back to my basic point--urbanizing and suburbanizing trends are principally functions of various costs, most importantly those relating to housing and commuting. And whatever we want to call it in the U.S., the trend is still clearly toward greater density after decades of fanning out.
it's a stretch to call any neighborhood in San Francisco suburban
more than 100,000 people
In a typical use case of 1 transfer per direction, 100K trips = 25K riders.
I'm saying that 1-income households can do that. They can go anywhere affordable even if there is only 1 employer with 1 opening. The 2-income households, with notably different culture, can't move unless they find a pair of jobs. Finding a pair of jobs is far easier in a large city. There are plenty of jobs outside the large cities, possibly even most jobs depending on your definition of "large city", but they are too far spread out to select the location first. You select a job, and that may take you somewhere rural. If you first select a specific rural location, you are unlikely to find a job.
So for one culture, with the single-income family, it is no big deal to move for a job. If that fails, you move again. For the other culture, with two incomes, you have to move to a place that has a high probability of having jobs for both people whenever that is needed. Moving is less of an option.
Granted, we don't live on one of the coasts. Part of what makes flight out to the suburbs easy is that public transit and driving in for commuting to work isn't terrible, though about half of us are working remotely now, so it's really more about access to occasional entertainment than anything.
Personally, I moved out to a cabin in the woods, though I'm still close enough to the big city if something comes up. It does crimp my job opportunities since I don't want to commute in on a daily basis- I'm now limited to remote work, which has a much larger talent pool to compete with. Even still, there's nothing I would trade it for. Maybe when I'm old and senile, but until then, you won't catch me moving back.
Plus your savings on rent would buy you a very nice "status symbol" car and pool.
[EDIT] I take back the 100%: a few former co-workers without kids are urban-dwellers, and exactly one who took a chance on the charter school lottery and would surely have moved out if it'd gone the wrong way.
My personal anecdotal experience is that it was pretty much 50/50. Half stayed and half left as soon as they could afford it. But even among those that stayed in the city most eventually left 'down town' for more quite and residential parts of the city.
edit: Furthermore I'd say that of those that left half did so gladly and half did so reluctantly.
> Glendale, Mo., which is hobbled by the loss of such St. Louis corporate anchors as Anheuser-Busch."
Glendale is a very tiny municipality (1 of 88) in St. Louis county with a population of 5,924 in 2010 and 5,886 in 2017. Over the same time period, median home prices are up from about $340k to $390k. Hardly what I'd call "hobbled."
In fact, St. Louis County as a whole (which doesn't include the city but does include some rather dense urban "suburbs") has remained relatively flat and St. Charles County, the next ring out, has seen steady growth.[0]
[0] https://www.stltoday.com/news/local/metro/census-st-louis-ci...
And I haven't a clue how they make a connection between Anheuser-Busch--which is just as active in the city of St. Louis--and Glendale down the street from me.
The urban design of a region dictates what "suburb" means. A New England suburb is vastly different from a Florida suburb.
The zoning laws and building regulations of the past few generations dictate what older housing stock is available. In most cities this means the housing stock is overwhelmingly suburban thanks to the sprawling postwar housing policy.
Today's zoning laws and regulations decide the same but for the newer and nicer end of the housing stock. Some cities have moved to more density-friendly policy for new construction, some cities are still sprawling, and California is largely frozen in amber.
The composition of the housing stock as discussed above play a large part in the pricing of suburban vs urban living.
Another confounding factor is what the commute looks like, which again is dictated by the past century+ of public policy. A driving commute in greater Boston is generally worse than in your average midsized American city. But rail commutes are viable in many greater Boston towns, and demand trends upwards near rail lines.
Finally, as always, education is a big factor in housing for anyone with children. If all the urban schools suck I expect that pushes some families out of the city.
It’d be nice if they had done data to back up their demographic trend other than just claiming it based on anecdotal stories.
Although the general sentiment is agreeable, there's nothing relaxed about maintaining a $400k home. I like to think of it as a different class of stress that's decoupled from work that pays the bills.
I do sometimes think about moving back to have nicer housing, but our net income is much higher here despite the cost of living, so the option to “retire back” someday will probably always be there.
> In the early 2010s, after the financial crisis walloped the housing market, average growth rates in cities with populations greater than 250,000 outpaced the suburbs. But over the past five years, the average annual growth in America’s big cities has slowed by 40%, to 0.69%, according to census estimates.
I think it’s no coincidence that when prices dropped significantly, Millennials flocked to cities. That’s where the jobs are, and they could afford it.
Since most cities are not really accommodating growth, prices have ballooned, and people are being priced out.
I used to live in Raleigh and I knew a few people who moved to Apex. It was always the same story: “I’d rather stay in Raleigh but we can afford Apex.” That’s not to knock on Apex, it is a cute town, but the migration was driven much more by the simple price tag than anything else.
Meanwhile what’s happening in Apex now is pretty much the definition of the Growth Ponzi Scheme (ref: https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme).
The thing that blows my mind the most is how easy it is to accommodate massive growth by simply requiring a connected street grid — what almost every American town and city did before WW2 and the suburban design social engineering projects of the FDR and Eisenhower eras. A grid can scale. The stupid cul-de-sac design is literally engineered to create traffic congestion. How much more land are we going to inflict that abomination on?
Really that’s what this all comes down to: there are straightforward, known solutions to scale urban populations well beyond the relatively modest growth that we have in the US, but as long as we refuse to pull our heads out of the sand and grow intentionally we will continue to have this phenomenon where growth ruins places - first in quality of life, and fiscally in a generation when Apex is not the hot new suburb any more but is saddled with the maintenance cost for hundreds of miles of unproductive infrastructure.
Cul-de-sac design (and the related 3-leaf clover design where you have multiple cul-de-sacs all emptying into a single artery, allow for more private front porch experiences and kid-play areas.
It was a reaction to the inability of most residential towns to keep out the gangs, racers and high-speed commuters (ie, bad combo with pedestrians, kids playing in the street).
How do cul-de-sac designs cause congestion?
> where you have multiple cul-de-sacs all emptying into a single artery
The fears of gangs etc that you cite are the common defenses of why people left specific inner cities in the 60s, but small towns (like Apex, in the source article) don’t have that problem and they do have the grids.
The main issue affecting safety is simply traffic speed and street width. It’s quite easy to design a safe street for children by making it hard for cars to go fast, the best example of this being the Dutch “voonerf,” (https://youtu.be/bSBdshn2tUM). You can accomplish the same thing with more spread out garden style homes as well.
For a more length explanation of the problems with the dendritic street pattern (pdf): http://www.urbanstudio.sala.ubc.ca/urbanstudio%202008/studen...
Agree with you on the unintentional growth at the root of all this. Even the article calls out the schools not funded/steered by the city itself. I wouldn't be surprised if more folly lies in municipal codes near Apex.
[1] https://public.tableau.com/shared/WHYKRP88W?:display_count=y...
Definitely still depends on the area within the town/city, but Apex in general is still cheaper than Raleigh comparing neighborhoods of similar demographics.
E.g., $500K gets you 6bed/4bath 3700sf in this neighborhood of relatively new homes in Apex: https://www.redfin.com/NC/Apex/2851-Lumber-River-Trl-27502/h...
vs. close to $1Mil for 3500sf in North Hills, one of the most desirable suburban-ish neighborhoods within the Raleigh city limits: https://www.redfin.com/NC/Raleigh/118-Lake-Boone-Trl-27608/h...
$700K is definitely at the upper range of new construction in Apex. That new house will also have a lot of upgrades. There's also a particular part of Apex (the parts that are basically Cary) where you'll see those prices. Move further south away from Cary and Raleigh and the prices in Apex drop very quickly.
I think where you'll also see the "We could afford Apex but not Raleigh" also has to do with the age of the home. ~$450K will get you a nice new home in Apex in a community with amenities (e.g. a pool, clubhouse, etc). In Raleigh you may end up in a smaller older home that needs a substantial amount of renovation.
There are 1000 other nuances of course, but hopefully you get the idea.
Go inland an hour or two, hundreds (thousands?) of listings with 3, 4, or 5 bedrooms and 2.5k+ sqft at the same or more affordable prices. You are literally going to double or more your housing costs by being in the city close to work.
I decided to go full remote and moved to the middle of beautiful nowhere. I'm closer to the grocery and restaurants (limited as they are) than before. My commute is going across the hallway to my own office space. My three kids all have their own rooms. Unfortunately, they will probably have to move closer to some city when they look for careers.
Also, electrification and renewables threaten future demand (though that may be taken up by plastics).
At some point between now and the heat death of the universe, the Earth will stop pumping oil. I wouldn't bet that peak oil is super imminent though.
That does not mean suburbs are going to thrive long term. But, it does give them more sustainability.
A much larger change imo is developers are no longer heavily promoting the lifestyle which is changing how people think about them. Older suburbs are basically left to stand on their own which means some thrive and other die off.
I live in the suburbs. I do not want to ever live in the city.
* Roads can be built to last 15 years before needing additional work (routine maintenance extends this to 20 years), same with sidewalks.
* New sewer and water pipes will last ~50 years.
* Copper electrical cabling will last at least 100 years, but lets be conservative and assume only a 50 year service life before you have to pull new wire through underground conduit/concrete channels. Let's also assume more solar goes on suburban roofs (and batteries in garages) as the cost continues to decline, taking load off of the traditional electrical distribution network
* Estimated service life of fiber optic cabling is 25 years (fiber to the home)
* The suburbs will never be dense enough to satiate transit demands using busses or light rail exclusively; it's EVs most of the way (sustainably powered by either distributed or utility generated renewables). I am a huge proponent of electric busses and dedicated lanes for them in high density areas whenever possible. Faster and cheaper to deploy than light rail, and more versatile for changing needs.
Nothing above seems unsustainable to me, but I also agree the suburbs should not be subsidized.
If you believe in peak oil, you probably nod along and find this really insightful.
If you're a peak oil skeptic, it feels like watching a video by a bunch of flat earthers.
I'm not even sure any discussion could bridge these two positions. It might be the dress or laurel-yanny at the memetic level.
Every time I look at real estate, the HOA fees pretty much make condo living a no-go. I'm somehow supposed to believe that it takes $800/mo to service a small 2-br apartment? In many cases that doesn't even include utilities.
But: do you live in a house? I assume you haven’t had to maintain it much yet...new roof, new heating, new sewer line, renovations, etc. all cost tons of money. I’d be surprised if for a house > 50 years old, you’re paying less than a few hundred a month on maintenance on average.
Landscaping was about $500 for the whole year. Either way, that's only $2100, compared to something like $10,000 I would have paid in HOA fees in an older condo around the same area.
Renovations are not-at-all comparable, as they are strictly an improvement. I don't know of a single HOA that came in and renovated someone's condo for free.
1% of house/land value is still cheaper than HOA fees in 90% of cases.