Tag Archives: suburbs

Jesus had a favorite suburb

Posted on by

The forward written by pastor Leith Anderson in The Suburban Church: Practical Advice for Authentic Ministry starts this way:

Bethany was Jesus’ favorite suburb. He often commuted the 1.8 miles into the city of Jerusalem where much of his ministry took place. Bethany was home to three of his best friends – Mary, Martha, and Lazarus. Jesus ate there, slept there, and performed his top miracle in Bethany when he brought Lazarus out of the grave alive. (ix)

This is possibly both incredibly anachronistic – cities outside of Jerusalem in the first century AD did not look like or function like the American suburbs of today – and clever – trying to connect Biblical themes to the places where many American Christians now live. Is this the sort of claim only evangelicals would make?

Getting established suburbs to build denser housing

Posted on by

A new study suggests higher levels of housing density in older suburbs could provide a lot of affordable housing:

But according to a report released today by urban housing economist Issi Romem of Buildzoom, many urban cores are actually developing and densifying. And lots of housing continues to get built at the suburban periphery. Romem argues that America’s real housing problem—and a big part of the solution to it—lie in closer-in single-family-home neighborhoods that were built up during the great suburban boom of the last century, and that have seen little or no new housing construction since they were initially developed…

The reality is that most of the housing stock and most of the land area of America’s metros is made up of relatively low-density suburban homes. And a great deal of it is essentially choked off from any future growth, locked in by outmoded and exclusionary land-use regulations. The end result is that most growth today takes place through sprawl…

But if America’s dormant suburbs are a big part of its housing and growth problem, they can also be part of the solution. Relaxing zoning rules in these neighborhoods would spread population growth more equitably and sustainably across a metro, relieving the pressure of rising housing prices and gentrification around the urban core, and unsustainable growth at the periphery.

“The dormant suburban sea is so vast that if the taboo on densification there were broken,” Romem writes, “even modest gradual redevelopment—tearing down one single-family home at a time and replacing it with a duplex or a small apartment building—could grow the housing stock immensely.” Many of these suburbs are located relatively close to job centers or along major transit lines. They are the natural place to increase density.

While this may be true, I tried to think of the incentives for suburbs in between cities and the growing metropolitan edges to do this. Here is my quick pro/con list:

Pros:

  1. Population growth is often associated with progress or a higher status. More housing means more people.
  2. New residents could help provide a new energy, particularly if they are higher-income residents who can contribute monies to the community.

Cons:

  1. Changing the existing character of a suburb, particularly for denser housing, is often met with opposition by existing residents.
  2. New residents mean new demands for local services.
  3. Denser housing might mean cheaper housing and this means attracting fewer higher-income residents.
  4. Why should we build denser housing if other communities around us are not doing the same?

Based on my quick lists, I do not think too many individual established suburbs will be jumping on this bandwagon. Even higher-income suburbs that would build higher-end dense housing would face opposition from residents who prefer the exclusivity of single-family homes.

The main thing that could break this logjam would be pressure from above – think the federal or state government – or groups of suburbs making decisions together to build denser housing. Still, these efforts will have to overcome those who will want local governments to stay their own course.

If millennials prefer suburbs, what could lead to suburban decline?

Posted on by

Joel Kotkin argues that millennials would rather live in suburbs than big cities:

It has been often asserted that millennials (defined as the generation born between 1982 and 2002) do not want to buy homes or live in suburbia; Fast Company, saw this as “an evolution of consciousness.” The Guardian declares that millennials are refusing to accept “the economic status quo” while Wall Street looked forward to profiting from the idea that millennials will be satisfied to live within a “rentership society” (PDF)…

Meanwhile, the much mocked suburbs have continued to dominate population trends, including among millennials. As people age, they tend, economist Jed Kolko notes, to move out of core cities to suburban locations. Although younger millennials have tended toward core cities more than previous generations had, the website FiveThirtyEight notes that as they age they actually move to suburban locations at a still higher clip than those their age have in the past. We have already passed, in the words of USC demographer Dowell Myers, “peak millennial,” and are seeing the birth of a new suburban wave (PDF).

To some extent, the meme about millennials and cities never quite fit reality outside of that observed by journalists in media centers like New York, D.C., and San Francisco. More than 80 percent of 25- to 34-year-olds in major metropolitan areas already live in suburbs and exurbs, according to the latest data—a share that is little changed from 2010 or 2000.

Suburban tastes remain predominant with 4 in 5 people under 45 preferring the single-family detached houses most often in suburban locales (PDF). Surveys such as those from the Conference Board and Neilson consistently find that most millennials see suburbs as the ideal place to live in the long run (PDF). According to a recent National Homebuilders Association report, more than 2 in 3 millennials, including most of those living in cities, would prefer a house in the suburbs.

If these trends continue, the suburbs will live on for quite a while in the United States.

This raises a question that I occasionally think about: what exactly would it take for millennials and other Americans to give up on suburbs? A few possibilities:

  1. Significantly higher gas prices. Apparently, getting up to $3-4 a gallon was not enough.
  2. Ecological disasters in the suburbs. Since there isn’t likely something that would affect all suburban areas at once (and not urban or rural areas), perhaps this would involve incidents in a number of major metropolitan areas.
  3. Another burst housing bubble. If housing it not more attractive in suburbs, this might change a lot of minds.
  4. All major employers move to big cities. I’m not sure why they would all do this is a significant number of workers are still in the suburbs but perhaps many employers needing educated workers would moving to cities, leaving suburban residents with low-wage, low-skill jobs.

Even with one of these scenarios, it would take significant time to see the suburbs on the whole decline and wealthier pockets would hold on for quite a while. Overturning the association between the American Dream and suburban life will be hard to reverse.

Aaron Hernandez’s fall from grace includes owning a McMansion

Posted on by

Author James Patterson discusses why is he is writing about Aaron Hernandez:

You’ve said that Aaron Hernandez’s fall from grace is the story of our times, even bigger than O.J. What is it about this case that you think fascinates people?

“Well, part of it is just that fall from grace. It’s just amazing, and when we did the 48 Hours piece, which was on Saturday, I became even more aware of it: Striking looking guy, Hollywood smile and dimples, $40 million contract, McMansion, opportunity or promise to be one of the best professional football players ever. Beautiful fiancee, they’d been together since high school. Baby girl. And for it all to go up in a puff of smoke is amazing.

I’m intrigued to see the mention of a McMansion in here. Hernandez had multiple other markers of success including winning on the football field, having a large salary, and looks. But, it was still important to have a certain kind of suburban house. This home outside of Boston certainly had some McMansion features:

The 5,647-square-foot residence includes five bedrooms, six bathrooms, a wet bar, a hot tub, a sauna, a finished basement, a theater room and an in-ground pool.

The location was also apparently popular with Patriots players:

It’s a great neighborhood, which certainly has some of North Attleboro’s most expensive homes,” says Boston-area real estate agent and writer David Bates.

“A review of North Attleboro public records reveals that Patriots have been the buyers of six of the 12 million-dollar, single-family sales in that market,” Bates adds.

In contrast, imagine the well-paid sports star who buys an urban home or condo to be near nightlife and work. What pushes a good number of players to McMansions in the suburbs? Here are a few possible reasons:

  1. Suburban homes offer more privacy away from fans and media.
  2. Americans in general like suburban homes so perhaps sports stars are just like other Americans.
  3. It may matter if the athlete has a family and kids as suburbs are widely viewed as offering a better setting for raising kids.

This also reminds me of an earlier post comparing the large homes of Tom Brady and Matt Ryan. Even for the football elite, having an expensive suburban home is important.

Argument: suburbs are about difference, not sameness

Posted on by

At the end of the volume Making Suburbia: New Histories of Everyday America, a professor of architecture Margaret Crawford argues we need to see American suburbs in a different way:

Charting the complexity, contradictions, and even paradoxes contained within suburbs, these accounts suggest that difference may actually be the defining characteristic of suburbia, rather than the sameness consistently attributed to it. In fact, currently, in an inversion of conventional wisdom, cities are becoming more homogeneous while suburbs grow more diverse. In widely varying circumstances, suburban people of different races, classes, religions, genders, and sexual orientations, acting according to a broad range of politics and values, live highly divergent lives. (382)

I like this argument that scholars should approach suburbs from a different angle. Yet, two issues come to mind:

  1. Crawford goes on to suggest researchers need to collect more stories, oral histories, and ethnographies. We need more granular detail about suburban life. This would indeed likely show more difference across suburbs. And it would also help give voice to more varied experiences across suburban settings. But, I wonder how much this would help us better understand suburbs as a whole. We need in-depth data on the suburbs but we also need to be able to piece these details together to understand patterns.
  2. She ends the chapter suggesting more of this kind of work would help studies of suburbia “move out of the shadow of the city.” (387) This is an open question: can we understand the suburbs separate from the big city? Does the study of suburbs always have to include comparisons to cities? It does not have to but it often does. Is this more due to the fundamental importance of large cities for today’s world or is it tied to how researchers often prefer the city and/or see the suburbs as a sub form of urbanism? I suspect these two reasons are hard to separate and even though a majority of Americans live in suburbs – and roughly 20% more live in suburbs than cities – urban fields will continue to strongly focus on cities.

The two best sociological books on suburbs I know

Posted on by

I recently worked a project that involved looking over a number of studies of suburbs undertaken by sociologists and other scholars. After being immersed in these works for a while, I was reminded of my two favorite sociological books about the suburbs:

#2. Baumgartner, M. P. 1988. The Moral Order of a Suburb. New York: Oxford University Press.

This work is relatively short and simple for an ethnographic study: it examines the social interactions of suburbanites in a New York suburb. The main finding is that suburban community is built around limited interactions as well as interactions that keep the peace. Open conflict is limited. Privacy and autonomy are very important. The residents are fairly transient and mobile but the community is held together by the social norms that limit open or consistent conflict. The study is not comprehensive regarding suburban life yet its insight about what holds suburban communities together is hard to match.

#1. Gans, Herbert J. 1967. The Levittowners. New York: Pantheon Books.

Gans moved into one of the early Levittowns and proceeded to study the community from the inside for several years. His work both provides one of the most comprehensive looks into post-war suburban life (many discussions about schools, interacting with neighbors, raising kids) as well as interacts with common critiques and stereotypes of such suburbs (some of which have some validity while others are not true). I have not found another sociological study of suburbs of this magnitude.

Calculating and using the Gini index for suburbs

Posted on by

The Gini index is often invoked for countries but it would be interesting to see it regularly utilized for suburban communities:

There are multi-million dollar McMansions and blue-collar families just trying to make ends meet. Across New Jersey, the gap between the rich and the poor continues to get wider.

But how are things changing in your town?

The Census calculates income inequality using a measure called the Gini index, which assigns a value between 0, which would mean complete equality, and 1. The closer a score is to 1, the more wealth is concentrated among fewer people and the bigger the income inequality.

My first thought is that I wonder how much income hetereogeneity suburbs have. There can be quite a bit of income or class segregation across different suburban communities but some of the larger suburbs could have quite the variation.

Then, it would be interesting to see how such information would be used. Would suburbs with less inequality use this as a selling point? Would community groups and activists be able to pressure suburbs into change with this statistic?

Finally, it would probably take a lot of work for this figure to become as widely known for suburbs as it is across countries. Yet, at this point, there is not an agreed-upon figure that works like this in order to compare suburbs. Median household income or the poverty rate can be used in this manner. Population figures probably matter the most for suburbs: it gives a sense of the character of the community and also hints at the growth that may be taking place.

Construction of apartments increases in the Chicago suburbs

Posted on by

The pace of apartment construction is at the highest in the Chicago region since 2004:

Rental construction reached its highest level in more than a decade last year in the Chicago suburbs, and 2018 is shaping up as another busy year. More than 4,200 units were completed in 2017, and about 3,900 more units are projected for this year, according to data from Marcus & Millichap and MPF Research…

The rental resurgence is the result of several factors, including a rising disparity between suburban and downtown rents, pent-up demand after little new construction over the past decade, and declining home ownership, industry experts say…

Unlike downtown Chicago, where much of the development is clustered together, many suburban projects are miles from another new development, meaning they face minimal competition for new renters…

“Now, with condo development just about going away, you’re seeing towns and cities giving building permits to apartment projects they wouldn’t have considered a few years ago. Also, I think apartments have lost some of their stigma because now they’re so damn nice.”

Three quick thoughts:

  1. While this may be an increase in apartment units, this is still behind the construction of single-family homes. For example, the Chicago region had 6,000+ new housing starts for single-family homes in 2016.
  2. It is interesting to note where the apartments are being built: probably in desirable communities (relatively wealthy, close to jobs and amenities) and often in downtown areas (this is cited in this same article). To flip this around, apartments are not desired everywhere or by all suburban communities.
  3. Will the trend toward apartments in the suburbs continue to increase? This might be a correction to a lack of apartment construction in the last decade or it might represent an enduring change as suburban residents desire more rental units.

Overall, apartments in the suburbs are relatively unique compared to the overwhelming preference for owner-occupied units. Thus, the numbers regarding apartment construction in the suburbs bears watching.

Many Americans are in the muddled political middle of the suburbs

Posted on by

A CNN digital vice president describes how the American suburbs defy easy categorization:

Most Americans are neither coastal elites nor inhabitants of flyover country (both objectionable tropes on their face). Most Americans live in the suburbs, a geographic term the US government is curiously loath to define. But suburbanites are not; a survey by an economist at Trulia, the online real-estate site, finds that 53% of Americans say they live in one. The suburbs mirror US demographic trends; minorities represent 35% of suburban residents, and in 2010, the share of blacks in large metro areas living in the suburbs surpassed 51%, meaning the majority of black Americans are suburbanites, according to Brookings.…

Political scientists talk about the rural-urban divide as the defining issue of the 20th century, but the suburbs in America defy this simple categorization. Some areas exhibit the same traits of cities, where neighbors don’t know each others’ names, let alone their politics. Schools in urban areas are more segregated than ever, some worse than before Brown vs. Board of Education. Suburbs, in contrast, have created more diverse spaces, from schools to soccer leagues to the local Olive Garden…

But America does not live on Facebook, even if it sometimes feels that way. Americans live in places that care about jobs and schools and taxes. Issues such as health care and anti-corruption efforts seem to matter to suburban voters more than immigration. Brookings also reports the suburbs are growing faster than urban areas, partly because of the lack of affordable housing in cities, making them younger, more diverse. Their outlook — and values — feel increasingly cosmopolitan.

The implication at the end of this is that suburbanites are a reasonable lot who just want good things for themselves and their communities. But, although they are a majority of Americans, they are stuck between polarized far-right/left groups that dominate the conversations.

Is this true? My quick answer is yes and no. Indeed, American suburbs are quite different from the stereotype of white nuclear families living in the 1950s mass-produced housing. The demographic changes have been impressive. At the same time, the suburbs are not an ideal landscape where residents always want the best for others: they are often marked by limited interactions and relationships, hoarding of resources, and exclusion.

There is little doubt that the suburbs are the battleground for American politics right now. But which way they will lean, which parties and candidates will be able to appeal to them, and how they will continue to change remains to be seen.