Yahoo Autos 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.
