Far from Dead, the North American Suburb is Growing Up

Dead malls. Zombie subdivisions. Metastasizing sprawl. Not a horror movie, but the suburbs circa 2014, or at least the media version of them. We’ve all seen the “suburban wasteland” photos from the Great Recession, the parched streets out West, foreclosure signs swinging in their yards. We’ve read about The End of the Suburbs. No wonder the young and the affluent have flocked back to cities: Suburbia’s demise seems imminent, and assured.

Except that it’s not. More than half of Americans live in suburbs, and about 75 percent of postwar construction has happened in the suburbs. That is a lot of people, and a lot of built environment, for urbanists to just wish away. One hundred and fifty million or so suburbanites have to live somewhere, and preferably not too far from their places of work, which are mostly in the ’burbs, too: More than three-quarters of jobs in U.S. metropolitan areas are located outside the urban core, and 43 percent are at least 10 miles away. (City living doesn’t look like such an environmental slam-dunk when you consider the number of jobs that require a long commute from downtown.) In Canada, two-thirds of the population lives in suburbs, according to a new study, and five times as many people are settling on the edges of major cities as they are in their cores.

The truth is that the suburbs aren’t going anywhere, and the vast, varied landscape of suburbia can’t be reduced to stereotypes, be they old – Leave It to Beaver, Revolutionary Road – or new. In fact, North America’s suburbs are growing and changing fast. In the U.S., diverse suburban neighborhoods now outnumber diverse city neighborhoods by more than two to one, and diverse suburbs are growing more rapidly than predominantly white ones.

Nowhere is this more apparent than on the outskirts of two cities, Washington, D.C., and Toronto. Ethnic diversity in both regions has soared, and development is surging. Two progressive suburban municipalities — Maryland’s Montgomery County and Ontario’s York Region — are trying to steer that growth in similar ways. They’re building high-quality public transit to ease traffic congestion, encouraging mixed-use, high-rise construction instead of more single-family housing, and hoping to wrest social equity out of general affluence. The ’burb boom, of course, can’t be isolated from the bigger boom in city living that has made it cheaper for immigrant families to own a two-story house in a subdivision than a two-bedroom apartment downtown. It’s no coincidence that property values in D.C. and Toronto have spiked to unprecedented highs at the same time that density increases on their periphery.

“The city-suburb distinction is falling apart,” says Brookings Institution demographer William Frey, who studies these “melting-pot” suburbs. Back in the 1950s, he notes, if you told someone you lived in the suburbs, they could easily summon a picture of your life: white, married, with kids and a house and a car. Living in the city, on the other hand — “now that was interesting, that was a microcosm of America. Now, it’s almost the other way around.”

With populations passing one million, Montgomery and York are major urban places in their own right. Spending time in them, you feel like you’re watching the suburb of the future emerge, a place where people of all colors and creeds live in apartments as well as houses, bring tres leches cake and samosas to school bake sales, and hop on the bus to run a quick errand instead of taking the minivan. Already, these new suburbs are changing in more fundamental ways than the gentrifying cities they border....Continue Reading

> via Next City