Tag Archives: suburbs

Reasons for saving “Modern homes” in New Canaan, Connecticut

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Teardowns often raise a furor in a community when they result in the razing of significant older homes. Regulations developed by a New England preservationist group have helped protect Modern houses built by Marcel Breuer, the rationale for saving the New Canaan homes is interesting:

New Canaan became a center for Modern houses when the Hungarian-born Breuer — a product of the Bauhaus school of design in pre-Nazi Germany — and four other architects moved to the town in the 1940s and used it as a canvas for their creations. Breuer adapted new designs to American architecture, such as a flat or nearly flat roof and cantilever construction.

Other Modern characteristics include muted colors, the lack of ornamentation and the emphasis on structural systems. The homes have since become a New Canaan tourist attraction. The town’s zoning rules do not forbid razing the homes but require 90-day notice for tear-downs.

“People come from as far away as Japan on a routine basis,” First Selectman Jeb Walker said.

Modern homes also serve as models for today’s new energy-efficient houses. Their modest size, overhangs that provide shade and features that take advantage of sunlight for solar power are old features suddenly new again.

The article suggests several possible reasons for saving these homes:

1. One involved person said “the preservation effort is “a way for America to keep its architectural memory.””

2. The homes are older and older homes deserve some recognition. Too many new homes at one time can radically alter the character of a community.

3. The homes were designed by an important architect and were part of an important style (Modernism).

4. The houses draw visitors which adds up to tourist dollars. This also helps make New Canaan distinct from other communities.

5. The Modern homes were the opening wave of environmentally-friendly homes.

Of course, there could be counterarguments to these five arguments. But this particular community has decided that these Modern homes are worth saving. Interestingly, another community (the article hints at a case in Westport, Connecticut) might choose otherwise. I suspect Reason #4 above, the fact that New Canaan is known for these homes, goes a long way in protecting these homes. The Wikipedia entry for the community says about 80 modern homes were built after World War II, something few suburbs could boast of.

Declining rural population in US

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While the percentage of Americans living in the suburbs has hit a high of 51 percent and 33 percent of Americans live in cities, an all-time low of 16 percent of the population now lives in rural areas:

The latest 2010 census numbers hint at an emerging America where, by midcentury, city boundaries become indistinct and rural areas grow ever less relevant. Many communities could shrink to virtual ghost towns as they shutter businesses and close down schools, demographers say.

More metro areas are booming into sprawling megalopolises. Barring fresh investment that could bring jobs, however, large swaths of the Great Plains and Appalachia, along with parts of Arkansas, Mississippi and North Texas, could face significant population declines…

The share of people in rural areas over the past decade fell to 16 percent, passing the previous low of 20 percent in 2000. The rural share is expected to drop further as the U.S. population balloons from 309 million to 400 million by midcentury, leading people to crowd cities and suburbs and fill in the open spaces around them.

In 1910, the population share of rural America was 72 percent. Such areas remained home to a majority of Americans until 1950, amid post-World War II economic expansion and the baby boom.

If people were asked to think about the biggest changes in the last 100 years, few might cite this important change: America has shifted from a majority rural population to a majority suburban/urban population. The reasons for this have been well-documented but it is still a large shift away from small towns and farms to suburbs and cities. This has impacted all areas of life: politics, economics, housing, workplaces, families, schools, and more.

It will be interesting to see how rural areas and communities are able or not able to hold on. For example, one area where this gets interesting is healthcare: with more hospitals and organizations consolidating and new regulations coming, who will want to continue to offer rural care?

Photos of “unique” Lakewood, California

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The New York Times takes a look at some of the photographs Tom M. Johnson has taken of his hometown, Lakewood, California. Here is how Johnson describes his pictures:

At a workshop in Santa Fe, N.M., Mr. Johnson learned of three steps for becoming a successful artist, ascribed to Horton Foote: Be competent at your medium, understand the history of your medium and come from a place.

“I thought about that driving on the way home,” he said. “I started thinking about Lakewood. This is sort of a unique suburb. I started to appreciate the qualities.”

Mr. Johnson’s parents moved to Lakewood in the 1950s. It was his mother’s dream home. At that time, he said, Lakewood was largely composed of a single middle-class stratum. Now, he said, even as the definition of “middle class” has broadened, so has the mix in Lakewood, where you can find run-down homes as well as manicured lawns.

Mr. Johnson is changing, too. “I see different types of pictures than I did before,” he said. “It’s probably something I’ll continue to work on forever.”

This sounds like it could be interesting: an artist realizes that his unique hometown has a lot of potential. But, looking at these 13 photos on the NYT website, I don’t really see much of the uniqueness of Lakewood at all. In fact, I think these photos could come from a number of suburbs. Maybe I think this just because of the 13 photos offered here.

Lakewood does have the potential to be an interesting subject. Here is a brief history of the community:

Lakewood is a planned, post-World War II community. Developers Louis Boyar, Mark Taper and Ben Weingart are credited with “altering forever the map of Southern California”. Begun in late 1949, the completion of the developers’ plan in 1953 helped in the transformation of mass-produced working-class housing from its early phases in the 1930s and 1940s to the reality of the 1950s. The feel of this transformation from the point of view of a resident growing up in Lakewood was captured by D. J. Waldie in his award-winning memoir, Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir.

Lakewood’s primary thoroughfares are mostly boulevards with landscaped medians, with frontage roads on either side in residential districts. Unlike in most similar configurations, however, access to the main road from the frontage road is only possible from infrequently spaced collector streets. This arrangement, hailed by urban planners of the day, is a compromise between the traditional urban grid and the arrangement of winding “drives” and culs-de-sac that dominates contemporary suburban and exurban design.

It might be difficult to take photos of “boulevards with landscaped medians” or convey the spirit of “mass-produced working-class housing” but, if this is what sets Lakewood apart, these are the photos I would like to see.

In general, it may be difficult to convey the unique character that individual suburbs have. While residents and community leaders certainly know what sets their community apart from nearby communities, picking this out in photographs may be a challenge.

Back to the burbs

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I usually leave the demographic articles to Brian, but one of my Brooklyn-dwelling friends (and a new father) pointed me to Joel Kotkin’s post at Forbes making the case that “America’s young and restless will abandon cities for suburbs”:

Some demographers claim that “white flight” from the city is declining, replaced by a “bright flight” to the urban core from the suburbs. “Suburbs lose young whites to cities,” crowed one Associated Press headline last year.

Yet evidence from the last Census show the opposite: a marked acceleration of movement not into cities but toward suburban and exurban locations. The simple, usually inexorable effects of maturation may be one reason for this surprising result. Simply put, when 20-somethings get older, they do things like marry, start businesses, settle down and maybe start having kids.

Kotkin also doesn’t think there’s much chance of substantially increasing suburban density (for reasons that long time readers of Legally Sociable have heard before):

[T]he notion of mass suburban densification is likely to meet strong resistance from local residents. This will be particularly marked in attractive, affluent “progressive” areas like the Bay Area’s Marin County, Chicago’s North Shore suburbs and New York’s Hudson Valley. People who move to these places are attracted by their leafy, single-family-home-dominated neighborhoods and village-like shopping streets. Nothing short of economic catastrophe or government diktat would make them accept any intense program of densification.

A life of leisure in the suburbs

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In addition to noting how suburbs began because of religious intentions to pull women out of dirty and immoral cities, this essay looks at how the suburbs were seen as a place for leisure, ultimately exacerbating the divide between work and leisure:

The idea of the bungalow and its compound, the suburb, caught like wildfire, largely because its hidden message was one of leisure, universal and perpetual. The bungalow exists in dozens of different cultures with almost as many definitions – from seaside shack (Britain) to hotel-side pavilion (Germany) to house fit for Europeans (Africa, Mexico and the Caribbean).

The common theme, apart from the sense of a stand-alone single-family dwelling, is the theme of manifest leisure, obvious waste or, in Thorstein Veblen’s term, conspicuous consumption. ”People will undergo a very considerable degree of privation in the comforts or the necessaries of life,” Veblen wrote in his 1899 Theory of the Leisure Class, ”in order to afford what is considered a decent amount of wasteful consumption”.

The idea that this waste-time, or leisure, might be available to everyone quickly made it despised by the upper classes but beloved by the rest. It was as if, in buying a bungalow, you were buying the promise, or at least the possibility, of perpetual vacation.

But there’s an irony here which, like so much of Western modernism, looks set to rebound on us. For excess leisure doesn’t make us healthy or happy. We’re just not that kind of primate.

I wonder how this has changed today for generations that were raised in the suburbs. The contrast between the life of leisure in the city versus the suburbs was probably quite clear for those who lived in the city, particularly industrializing cities in the 1800s and early 1900s, but for those that have only known the suburbs, do the suburbs still operate as a haven for leisure? Is the key to suburban leisure the actual relaxing nature of it or its contrast to alternatives that are perceived as being even worse?

This essay also hints at how the work-leisure divide can be bridged. One option presented is to construct more mixed-use developments where workers and residents could interact more. But another option would be to construct or rebuild “third places” where people could find a middle ground between home/family and work. Such institutions (commericial or not) could mediate these two realms. Third, I wonder if this problem might dissipate as younger adults may be more willing to mix these two categories as work becomes less of an income-earning activity and more of a passion, vocation, or calling.

Cities and suburbs continuing to converge

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Alan Berube of the Brookings Institution recently gave a talk highlighting how the growing links between cities and suburbs in the United States:

First, the initial results from the 2010 Census signal a continuing demographic convergence within U.S. metropolitan areas, one that is blurring the lines that have long separated cities and suburbs.

Second, this convergence results from a complicated mix of economic, social, and physical changes in metro areas, and raises a host of consequences for suburban communities at the front lines of change.

And third, in light of these growing and shared challenges, we must adopt a metropolitan approach to managing and making the most of demographic change in an increasingly metropolitan world.

We’ll be hearing more about this in the coming years. I am most curious to see how individual municipalities, cities and suburbs, are able to put aside their self interest and sacrifice for metropolitan solutions. People have been pushing metropolitan solutions for a long time but most suburbs (and cities?) that are well off on their own haven’t felt the need to truly cooperate on larger issues.

Gangs in the suburbs

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Suburbanites often dream that they have escaped or avoided the problems of the big city. But some of these issues are no longer just big city problems: gangs have been in the suburbs for some time now.

Gangs, once a threat confined to city streets, began expanding outward two decades ago. Now, suburban and rural communities are the center of a significant and growing gang problem, according to the 2009 National Gang Threat Assessment report.

The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation found that nearly all communities surrounding Nashville have gang activity, including the traditional suburbs of Nashville, such as those around Hickory Hollow Mall, and small towns in Williamson, Rutherford, Sumner and Wilson counties.

These smaller, residential communities offer fresh territory for selling drugs and that increases the gang’s revenue.

“There’s money out in the suburbs,” said Mike Carlie, criminology and sociology professor at Missouri State University. “There are people in the suburbs that want drugs.”

Growing up in a suburb of Chicago, I can recall when local law enforcement and other officials started talking about gangs in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It was something that people in the community weren’t completely prepared for and that threatened the idyllic suburban lifestyle.

I haven’t read much research about suburban gang activity, particularly beyond inner-ring suburbs and in more affluent communities. I would be interested to know how it affects average suburban residents and civic organizations: are they willing to combat the problem and deal with some larger social issues or would they prefer to throw the book at gang members or would they move to further out or more affluent suburbs that don’t have a perceived gang problem?

One of my favorite scenes from Gang Leader for a Day involved the gang leaders meeting at a large suburban house to talk business. While the gang business, mainly involving poor neighborhoods in Chicago, was taking place, their kids were swimming in the pool and acting out the suburban lifestyle. What did the neighbors think? Even a more realistic show like The Wire is set in a place where the public would expect gang activity: run-down areas of Baltimore. Why not put together another show that takes gangs to the suburbs?This would perhaps be too scary for many Americans to consider.

How suburban design may contribute to a lack of union organization

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As part of a larger article about why the large number of unemployed Americans “became invisible,” the suburbs may be part of the problem:

Workers have also become suburbanized. Back in the 1960s or even the 1980s, the unemployed organized around welfare or unemployment offices. It was a fertile environment: people were anxious and tired and waiting for hours in line.

“We stood outside of these offices, with their huge lines, and passed out leaflets that said things like: ‘If you’re upset about what’s happening to you, come to this meeting at this church basement in two weeks. We’ll get together and do something about this,’ ” recalls Barney Oursler, a longtime community organizer and co-founder of the Mon Valley Unemployed Committee in the early 1980s. “The response just made your heart get big. ‘Oh, my God,’ they’d say, ‘I thought I was alone.’ ”

The Mon Valley Unemployed Committee, which is based in Pittsburgh, helped organize workers in 26 cities across five states, simply by hanging around outside unemployment offices and harnessing the frustration.

Today, though, many unemployment offices have closed. Jobless benefits are often handled by phone or online rather than in person. An unemployment call center near Mr. Oursler, for instance, now sits behind two sets of locked doors and frosted windows.

More broadly, this could be attributed to a decrease in geographically-based relationships. With decentralized residences and workplaces, people gather around different features than the neighborhood block.

Interestingly, the next paragraph of the story talks about how workers in other countries have tried to mobilize online. If you don’t live near your former co-workers or if you do but don’t really interact with them, perhaps you would be willing to join a Facebook group or sign an online petition to further your collective interests.

Aging suburbs might change suburban priorities

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The demographic shift in America due to the aging of the Baby Boomers could also affect American suburbs:

Although the entire United States is graying, the 2010 Census showed how much faster the suburbs are growing older when compared with the cities. Thanks largely to the baby-boom generation, four in 10 suburban residents are 45 or older, up from 34 percent just a decade ago. Thirty-five percent of city residents are in that age group, an increase from 31 percent in the last census…

“When people think of suburban voters, it’s going to be different than it was years ago,” Frey said. “They used to be people worried about schools and kids. Now they’re more concerned about their own well-being.”

The nation’s baby boomers — 76 million people born between 1946 and 1964 — were the first generation to grow up in suburbia, and the suburbs is where many chose to rear their own children. Now, as the oldest boomers turn 65, demographers and local planners predict that most of them will not move to retirement areas such as Florida and Arizona. They will stay put…

Local governments are starting to grapple with the implications.

The article then goes on to detail the changes some suburbs have made, primarily in the areas of public safety and civic services. Frankly, I was expecting some bigger changes.

Here are a few predictions about how this might have play out. Some of this has already started.

1. Aging suburbanites will be less likely to favor new development that bring in a lot of children in the community. This comes up primarily as a property tax issue in many communities. With many seniors on more fixed incomes, how can they adjust to rising taxes? And if they are long past supporting school-age children, why should they have to pay more money to schools? While one could argue that more money leading to better schools helps everyone in the form of higher property values, this is still a high price to pay.

This could lead to a shift in many communities away from new homes or multi-family units to a more diversified tax base (more industrial and commercial properties) and developments friendly to seniors. A community like Naperville pursued some of these goals in the 1990s and 2000s: seeing the dwindling supply of open land, Naperville pursued some senior-living communities and more commercial and industrial uses to reduce the strain on the schools and help provide some housing that would enable seniors to stay in the community.

2. They will aim to keep their suburbs similar to way they were when they moved in. As the first generation who primarily grew up in suburbs, they will want to preserve their idyllic nature. How this works itself out in each community may differ but this could be an era of hyper-NIMBYism or at least hyper-vigilance to make sure such uses benefit from the older citizens.

 

To build or not to build a 20-story high-rise in Oak Park

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While a proposed 20-story high-rise in Oak Park is unique in that it would be built just outside the Frank Lloyd Wright historic district, the conversation about whether the building should be constructed or not is one that may be facing more suburbs in the coming years:

She said the building’s size has been the primary complaint, but there has also been grumbling over the modern design looming over the historic Wright district.

“I think, in the end, a lot of people could live with the aesthetics if it weren’t for the height and the density,” she said.

Officials have been trying to attract new business and tourists by making the village more “walkable.” About $15 million in streetscaping improvements has been proposed, with $5 million already approved by the board.

Village Manager Tom Barwin says the building would help visually draw the downtown district together while creating a “Hey, what’s that?” mentality.

In built-out communities like Oak Park that have little or no open space, projects like this are going to become more commonplace. It sounds like the typical criticisms are being raised: the building is too tall, there are too many housing units (is this tied to the type of people who live in apartments or the strain on city services?), and it doesn’t fit with the character of the community. But the city suggests it has a plan to be more “walkable,” a buzzword among many designers (and perhaps started by New Urbanists), which is supposed to reduce congestion and improve neighborhood and community life.

On one hand, it might be easy to look at the criticisms of the project and suggest that some residents would resist almost any kind of change to their community. They know the Oak Park that they like and they will do a lot to try to maintain that. On the other hand, if land-challenged suburbs are going to experience any growth or change, redevelopment is going to be necessary. Of course, communities don’t want too many projects that are completely out of place but they don’t want to remain stagnant either. The trick is going to be how to balance the character of the community with change that is going to happen. Perhaps it doesn’t have to come in the form of 20-story buildings but I suspect more large Chicago suburbs, including places like Naperville, are going to seriously consider high-rise projects in the next few decades.