Suburbia's Future

Does Suburbia Have a Future?
By Daniel G. Jennings
The above question is one that seems to be preoccupying American thinkers both suburban apologists like David Brooks who assure that suburbia is our future and suburban critics like James Kunstler who assure us that suburbia has no future. The Sustainable Futures Society is even crossing the country showing a documentary called “The End of Suburbia: Oil Depletion and the Collapse of the American Dream.”
The proper answer is that suburbia as we know it has no future but some sort of suburbs will remain. The Sustainable Futures Society is right the classic 20th Century suburb where everybody drives everywhere is doomed unless technology can greatly increase the oil supply or offers an workable alternative energy source. Yet suburbs themselves will remain for traditional core cities are simply too small to contain everybody and most middle class Americans won’t want live in the core city anyway.
The answer is that the suburb will change in the next few years to something more akin to the original suburbs of the 19th and early 20th centuries. That is a denser community where most residents commute to work and other destinations by rail.
We see the beginnings of this in places like Denver, Dallas, St. Louis, Houston, Salt Lake City, Phoenix and Portland where local governments are investing vast amounts of money to construct rail lines. Many of these new rail lines are centered around development schemes or designed to serve fast growing suburbs where lots of development is taking place. Transit bus lines are also reaching farther and farther out into suburbia, in Denver the busy 0 bus on Broadway runs all the way to Highlands Ranch, dozens of other buses go out even farther. Long distance express buses connect Downtown Denver with suburbs as far thirty or forty miles away. At the same time we see many suburban communities trying to take on a more urban identity, Lakewood, Colorado, for example is transforming an old shopping mall called Villa Italia into an urban center complete with loft apartments and high density development.
Although the traditional picture of suburbia is rows of ranch houses with a car parked in each driveway. The reality is far more complex, many suburbs have apartment houses, town homes and condos, there are older suburbs built to traditional patterns such as Riverside and Redlands, California. In my hometown of Denver suburban patterns range from traditional small towns like Golden and Littleton, classic 1950s style developments, Lakewood, industrial parks in Aurora, highly urbanized Downtown Englewood and the office parks of the Denver Tech Center.
This of course reveals the true nature of suburbia to us, instead of conformist sprawl you get a massive mish mash of different urban designs and architectural styles. You get a ranch house on a large lot with a corral for horses located just a few blocks from an office park composed of skyscrapers and a trailer park within walking distance of fashionable shops and loft apartments. Empty farmland abutting high density housing developments and office parks and industrial buildings on the edge of National Forest wilderness. You have Wal-Marts in the middle of traditional neighborhoods of Victorian Houses, suburban style office parks in the middle of the core city, and big box stores sprouting everywhere.
To make matters worse Suburbia itself is getting denser and more urban. Recent suburbs like Highlands Ranch, Colorado, and the far south of Orange County, California are composed of extremely densely packed houses. Pictures of these neighborhoods remind one more of the 19th century row housing of Queens or Baltimore than the ranch homes and cul de sacs of the sixties and seventies. Dense urban commercial developments such as that in Highlands Ranch are creating what amounts to Downtowns. Dense office developments like the Denver Tech Center also give suburbia an urban feel.
How do you get order of such a mess? I don’t know, although if automobile usage falls as predicted we’re going to have find out. My guess is it’ll be done in a messy piece by piece way like the development of suburbia itself. Instead of planning we’ll have a groping for answers.
A groping that seems to have begun both by New Urbanists who have questioned suburbia and developers who seem to be open to trying new things. Thousands of new loft condos are going up in Denver and several massive new transit developments are planned in my hometown. Numerous new transit developments are planned all over the country and many developers are interested in downtown and core cities again. Development interests are pushing local and regional governments to invest in rail particularly light rail which is well suited to serve suburbs.
Obviously this change in development patterns reflects widespread uncertainty in the future of traditional suburbia and the automobile on the part of real estate developers. Since developers are hard headed if often flighty business operators this can’t be motivated by idealism or concern for community and the environment but on worries that the traditional model is no longer working.
The massive gridlock facing many American cities shows the failure of the highway system and the automobile. The impending oil shortage will make matters far worse, many Americans won’t be able to operate cars or have to use them less. At the same time many average Americans are trying to limit their car usage out of economy or convenience. Developers are trying to take advantage of these trends.
So what will the suburb of the future look like? It’ll be denser and transit oriented. Far fewer people will drive, more people will take transit and a great many goods and services will be delivered. There will be more delivery trucks on the streets and many more trains and streetcars. People will probably spend more of their money on clothing and recreational activities such as sports or hobbies like the Japanese do. We’ll see crowds of costumed teenagers hanging around on the streets and lots of people taking the train to the NASCAR race. Many Americans will invest their money in electronic gadgets both for home entertainment and entertainment on the bus or train; computers, video games and TVs would be examples of such gizmos. Dining will be a major activity with people going out to all manner of restaurants, and spending vast fortunes on wine, beer and food.
The pace will be more hectic than today’s suburbs yet a little more civilized. There will also be a lot of nostalgia for the good old days of cul de sacs and lawn mowers. The golden age when everybody had a car and teenagers drove to high school.
But yes, folks suburbia does have a future. Suburbia’s future is as a dense, urbanized transit place. A place where a lot of people will pine for the good old days of ranch homes and shopping malls.