How millennials could give the suburbs a much-needed makeover

• The suburbs are home to the vast majority of Americans, including millennials priced out of cities.
• But the car-centrism and separation of homes and commercial hubs exacerbate the worst of suburbia.
• To make suburbs healthier and more sustainable, urban experts say they should look more like towns.

These days, the American suburbs are seeing something of a revival after a few decades of the back-to-the-city movement, in which mostly young people flocked to urban centers. The rise of remote work coupled with the soaring costs of urban housing has pulled, or pushed, lots of millennials and others to the suburbs and even far-flung exurbs. Regardless of whether younger Americans prefer to settle and raise families in the suburbs, it’s often all they can afford.

Most people in the US are suburbanites — and that likely won’t change anytime soon. Ideally, the suburbs offer the best of both the urban and rural worlds: a white picket fence within reach of downtown jobs and culture.

But sprawl has an “inherent geometry problem,” said Andrew Justus, a housing-policy analyst at the Niskanen Center, a nonpartisan think tank. As a suburb or exurb grows to accommodate more homes — which are mostly limited to detached single-family houses — roads grow, cars multiply, and the distance between someone’s house and their job, school, or grocery store stretches.

“You end up with suburbs that are neither close to the outskirts nor close to the city center” and residents are “trapped between” the two worlds,” Justus said. This is how suburbs got their bad reputation as isolating, boring, and unsustainable.

The challenge for urbanists, housing advocates, and anyone who cares about climate change is to figure out how to make the communities most Americans live in healthier for their inhabitants and the planet. This is where a kind of decentralized urbanism comes in. Experts say the solution is to make suburbs denser, more walkable, and more mixed-use — essentially more like traditional towns.

“We’ve got to figure out how to meet people where they live,” said Adie Tomer, an expert in infrastructure policy and urban economics at the Brookings Institution.

Exclusive, isolating, and inconvenient suburbs

The American suburbs have always been flawed in a host of ways. Beginning in the mid-19th century, new suburbs helped white families build wealth, while enforcing racial segregation.

During the civil rights movement of the 1960s and 70s and the early years of integration, suburbs facilitated white flight. While many more people of color live outside cities today, they largely don’t live in the same suburban communities as white people. Racial segregation used to be enforced explicitly by the law. Now, it’s perpetuated by policies like single-family zoning, which makes it illegal to build more affordable multi-family housing in most neighborhoods.

That restrictive zoning is also what separates homes from everything else — making it illegal to put amenities like grocery stores, pharmacies, and restaurants in a residential neighborhood. Car-centric design is isolating, particularly for kids, the elderly, and anyone else who can’t drive. And an overreliance on cars has made vehicles the top emitter of greenhouse gasses in the US for the last several years.

The average American traveled about twice as many miles in 2017 as they did in 1969. The typical American lives seven miles from their local commercial hub. And just 14% of errands the median US resident makes are within a 15-minute walk of where they live, a recent study by MIT researchers found.

In exchange for individual land ownership at a historic scale, American suburbanites sacrifice key freedoms, including the freedom of movement, and the loss of our most valuable asset: time, Tomer said.

The freedom of the small town or ‘15-minute city’

The “15-minute city” is perhaps the buzziest — and most controversial — urban planning concept right now. The idea is to ensure people can work, shop, and play within a 15-minute walk, bike, or transit ride from where they live. But many conservatives have denounced it as a socialist plan to strip people of their freedom and cars.

But 15-minute cities aren’t new. They naturally form in cities that allow for dense, mixed-use development — and they existed in America’s early suburbs, which were built around streetcars, rather than private vehicles. Because streetcars required a certain amount of residential density to have sufficient ridership, those suburbs — places like Somerville, Massachusetts, and Shaker Heights, Ohio — are much more like small cities or large towns.

Both progressive and conservative urban experts can agree on one thing: the suburbs need to change.

Joel Kotkin, a fellow in urban studies at Chapman University who recently expounded on the virtues of sprawl in the conservative National Review, wants to see the country turn into an archipelago of villages or towns. He points to suburbs like Orange, California, Bronxville in Westchester County, and The Woodlands in Texas — a master-planned suburb of Houston founded in the 1970s.

Kotkin says the American suburbs have “won the battle” with cities, reigning as the more economically and demographically dominant place. But “what they haven't done is adjusted to that role,” he said. Suburbs need to reinvent themselves to look more like towns or small cities to better “satisfy the urban appetites of their new residents,” he added.

Retrofitting suburbs to look more like towns “is the opportunity to not have your cake and eat it too but about as close as you can get to it in an American context,” Tomer said.

Progressives agree. “A lot of people think we're trying to limit freedom by saying that we should have more public transit and maybe fewer car-centric developments,” said Tayana Panova, an urban researcher writing a book about suburbia's effects on mental health. “No, we're trying to give you more freedom by giving you more options.”

Urban planners say closer-in, streetcar suburbs with established downtowns are the easiest to transform into dense, walkable communities. But all kinds of suburbs have the potential to free themselves from traffic and long commutes and create more vibrant neighborhoods. Suburbs need to prioritize loosening zoning laws, building more dense housing, and making it easier to get places without a car, experts say.

“There's a core principle, which is start small and use the assets you've already got,” Tomer said. For example, he says, take an underused shopping center and put a market hall in it, build some multi-family housing nearby, and make the roads safer for pedestrians and bicyclists.

Tomer found in his recent study, “Building for Proximity,” that people in the 110 largest US metros who live within three miles of so-called “activity centers” — recreation and shopping hubs — drive much less than their more far-flung counterparts.

Americans want to live in these types of neighborhoods. An analysis published last year found that homebuyers in the 35 biggest American metropolitan areas paid 34% more to live in walkable neighborhoods, while renters paid 41% more.

“What people are wanting these days is walkability,” Panova said. “If developers, if local governments and businesses are wise and are looking at the trends and what people are wanting, then they'll adapt to that.”

In some places, this is already happening. A surge of millennial transplants are bringing their urban sensibilities to the city outskirts. Suburban retail is booming — half of Sweetgreen salad shops are now in the suburbs, up from 35% four years ago.

"There are so many towns that in the last five, six years I've seen huge revitalizations, where all of a sudden restaurants and exercise studios and trendy stores start to pop up," Allison Levine, director of communications for the Suburban Jungle Group, a real-estate advisory firm that specializes in helping New York City dwellers move to surrounding suburbs, told Business Insider in January. "You can move to the suburbs and not feel like you need to go to the city to have a great dinner or to see a show or live music or the arts."

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By: [email protected] (Eliza Relman)
Title: How millennials could give the suburbs a much-needed makeover
Sourced From: www.businessinsider.com/suburbs-millennials-walkable-towns-cities-housing-affordability-loneliness-2024-2
Published Date: Sun, 11 Feb 2024 11:23:01 +0000

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