The Triumph of Suburbia
5th May 2013
Joel Kotkin lays out some inconvenient truth.
A funny thing happened on the way to the long-trumpeted triumph of the city: the suburbs not only survived but have begun to regain their allure as Americans have continued aspiring to single-family homes.
People want their own space, the more the better. That’s why, when people get rich, they buy bigger homes rather than smaller ones. You have to be an intellectual to ignore evidence like that.
Read the actual Brookings report that led to the “Suburbs Lose” headline: it shows that in 91 of America’s 100 biggest metro areas, the share of jobs located within three miles of downtown declined over the 2000s. Only Washington, D.C., saw significant growth.
Your tax dollars at work, that.
Suburbs have never been popular with the chattering classes, whose members tend to cluster in a handful of denser, urban communities—and who tend to assume that place shapes behavior, so that if others are pushed to live in these communities they will also behave in a more enlightened fashion, like the chatterers. This is a fallacy with a long pedigree in planning circles, going back to the housing projects of the 1940s, which were built in no small part on the evidently absurd, and eventually discredited, assumption that if the poor had the same sort of housing stock as the rich, they would behave in the same ways.
The reason we lived close together was because in the Old Days it took time to get information from Point A to Point B, and those who got their information before others tended to have an advantage. Well, information travels a lot more quickly now, as do other things, and so the rationale for living cheek-by-jowl went away — and people responded appropriately.
The new low-cost suburbia, wrote Robert Bruegmann in his compact history of sprawl, “provided the surest way to obtain some of the privacy, mobility and choice that once were available only to the wealthiest and most powerful members of society.”
One of the reasons that the Crust like living in urban cores is that they still have plenty of space because they can afford it, and having plenty of proles around makes the Servant Problem less acute.