Kotkin’s ‘New Suburbanism’

Joel Kotkin, the highly readable and reasonable futurist, strikes again in this month’s 25th anniversary edition of the architecture and design magazine Metropolis. In an article titled “Toward a New Suburbanism,’ Kotkin suggests that urbanists stop trying to impose urban, particularly New Urbanist, fixes on suburbia and instead look at the solutions being developed in suburbia itself, which, in any case, may not be as broke as some think.

After rolling out data on the shift in population, in density (suburbs are growing denser faster than cities) and in diversity (including, he points out, more and better ethnic restaurants), Kotkin points out that these factors are giving suburbs a more urban texture without the help of planners, thanks much. (Social texture too: suburbanites are also more involved in their communities than city dwellers.) Even the bane of suburban life, traffic, is providing its own solution: “suburbanites increasingly prefer to locate their businesses, and find their essential amenities, close to home.”

He then identifies three “New Suburban” models that are occurring naturally: the revived Main Streets of older, first-ring burbs; the manufactured town centers springing up in former industrial sites and other wastelands to tie centerless Levittowns together; and most encouraging, planned nature parks, arts centers and shopping districts in spanking new exburbs where bucolic forest and field can be preserved as a community feature.

Kotkin has faith, in sum, that if civilization moves to the suburbs, so, logically, will its creative energy. After reminding readers that the suburban experiment is only now being refined, Kotkin writes, “we might view the current builders of suburban villages as modern equivalents of those who in previous eras created our great cities.”

Metropolis hides Kotkin’s article behind a fence passable only by subscribers—call it “Old Mediaism”—but Kotkin graciously posts the piece on his site here.

Burbs Eat Barns

As farms fall to developers—and flat out fall down—“barn huggers” are mobilizing to preserve classic wood barns. "Can you imagine an America without a barn on the landscape? Is that the America we want?" Iowa contractor and barn enthusiast Rod Scott asks the Associated Press. New York Gov. George Pataki, who hails from Poughkeepsie, hard on the barn/burb border, has supported state funds for barn preservation, as have legislators in Vermont. But individuals like Scott and officials at the National Trust for Historic Preservation say time is running out on these staples of rural America.

Better Living Among the Better Off

Hearings begin today in Baltimore to decide whether some 3,000 poor residents of the Maryland city would be better off in the suburbs—and the better-off burbs at that. Federal judge Marvin J. Garbis will be parsing not just housing law but assumptions about the modern suburbs, and what living in them can do for you.

The sessions, expected to run a couple of weeks, aim to resolve an 11-year-old case brought by the ACLU against the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The ACLU that claims the department’s public housing policy creates ghettoes by building low-income units only in urban areas. "We're asking HUD to not do business as usual," ACLU executive Susan Goering told The Washington Post, but instead "to let families go where the jobs and the safe streets and the good schools are."

Logically, that means the posh towns closest to the city. The ACLU proposal specifically excludes working-class suburbs that have their own poor, the Post report says. And one assumes that the distant suburbs would take city transplants too far from their jobs, families and places of worship.

Experiments with regional approaches to public housing have shown positive results in Minneapolis, Chicago and elsewhere. But the burden of welcoming city transplants will likely fall not directly on country-club communities (whose high lawyers-per-capita rate yield high rates of success in fighting off intrustions), but on county governments that already have their hands full. “I have thousands of people on waiting list for affordable housing of all kinds," says the executive of Anne Arundel County, adjacent to Baltimore County. Other kinds include affordable housing for middle-income workers, like firefighters and teachers.

Baltimore has greatly improved its public housing since the lawsuit began, tearing down 1960s-era high-rises and replacing them with garden apartments, which, according Mayor Martin O’Malley, shows things can get better in the city. The ACLU proposal, he told the Baltimore Sun recently, represents the "old bigotry that the city is by its nature a bad place."

In the end, how low-income residents are placed is usually more important than where. As John Cassidy point out in this week’s New Yorker, thousands of Chicago inner-city residents relocated to housing in middle-class suburbs in the ‘80s and ‘90s were more likely to find and keep jobs and see their children graduate from high school, than those they left behind. But when participants in a federal housing voucher program huddled together in the suburbs, their lives showed little improvement.

Mythmaking and Grantmaking

For years, the arts have been moving to the suburbs as patrons of ballet and the symphony, and the deep-pockets who fund their seasons and new concert halls migrate there as well. New arts centers have been proposed or are being built in Cobb County, Ga., Blue Ash, Ohio (near Cincinnati), St. Louis and Mesa, Ariz. According to a 2002 study by the Illinois Arts Alliance, more people were working for arts organizations in Chicago's suburbs than in the that arts-haunted city itself. As this map shows, Washington, D.C. is ringed with performance venues, with more under construction. The pace of arts-flight is likely to quicken. In recent years, those in control of the grants that support many of the most prestigious arts institutions have begun to examine what one report called myths about the suburban art scene (pdf). When it comes to large projects, grantmakers increasingly look at a region as a whole instead of stopping at the city line.

The suburban arts boom is not restricted to major companies. In 2004 the Minnesota-based McKnight Foundation released a study that showed suburbanites in their state had many fewer opportunities to learn or participate in the arts (and were dismissed by artists as vapid and conformist). In response, the foundation began issuing grants to arts organizations to develop branches outside cities.

'The Great Wall of China Next Door'

”Teardown” has become part of the lexicon of the real-estate boom. It refers to a house a builder or family buys with the express purpose of replacing it with a newer, bigger and more valuable home. “Teardown,” it should be noted, has also become an ugly word, and municipalities from Maryland to Atlanta to Texas are coming up with ways to limit the practice. In Miami Beach, Fla., a special permit is required to knock down any home built before 1942, and a group of Atlanta residents moved last year that new homes in existing neighborhoods be less than 33 feet high.

In suburban communities, fighting teardowns can be complicated. In older suburbs, major renovation and infill development can turn a dilapidated area around. And remodeling, not to mention privacy and self-determination, is part of any homeowner's birthright. The look of the community, however, is also paramount. A Bethesda, Md. homeowners association is agitating to impose a six-month moratorium on demolition, hoping to halt the spread of McMansions while town leaders consider how to protect the character of the town---one of the oldest suburbs in the nation, and filled with colonials and ranches locals call “American classics.”

Other suburbs are fighting not just complete teardowns, but extensive remodeling known as “massing”: additions that so maximize the space on a lot—usually by building up as well as out—that they block neighbors’ light. A related bane is infilling, where a builder develops unused space in a subdivision, squeezing as much onto the lot as will fit.

As unpopular as rapacious rebuilding is, the real-estate boom has made the economics of teardowns nearly unresistable. One realty company that specializes in matching sellers and builders looking for teardown properties, Value in Land, even forgoes its commission from the seller to encourage those who might feel the pinch of conscience about the effect of their sale on their neighborhoods.

Zoning rules are the most direct way to limit the size of new houses replacing old ones, or to make sure new homes conform to the look of the neighborhood. In Blue Ash, Ohio, near Cincinnati, the town council is looking at restricting how far a structure can be set back from the street. Other towns, like Highland Park, Ill. has tried taxing tear downs, using the tarrifs to pay for low-income housing.

The trick is to limit aggressive teardowns and massing without quashing the normal remodeling and renovation. In Geneva, Ill., town planners want to revise zoning tables to consider the total volume of a house, rather than just the square footage of a house’s footprint on its lot. Critics of the plan say the new way of calculating house size will discriminate against people with older houses, which usually boast higher ceiling heights. if people want to add a sunroom, or a porch, or a garage, to an older house, the city might turn them down because they already have too much square footage for their lot,” says one critic TK. Rules governing building, he says, “are about property rights, personal investment, neighborhoods, economic development and the future of a community.”

Other communities have actually encouraged teardowns,arguing that they allow growing families to stay in town. Through its “Richfield Rediscovered” program, Richfield, Minn., acquires and demolishes small and unsightly homes, then sells the empty lots to builders for redevelopment. By upgrading its housing stock, Richfield leaders hope to retain their growing families.

Individual homeowners can do their own part to make the best of teardowns, of course. A couple recently bought a 50 year-old home on a half-acre in Tempe, Ariz., that didn’t fit their needs. They donated it to an organization that provides houses for low-income people. The tax deduction they receive will cover most of the cost of demolition and moving. "The house was a solid-block home,” Elizabeth Cling told the Arizona Republic. “We didn't see any reason to tear it down." The Clings say they will replace it with a 5,000-square-foot home.

Libraries: the Anti-Sprawl

Driving south recently on Maryland’s Route 4, the last spoke of Washington D.C.’s wheel of avenues to yield to sprawl, we spotted an enormous brick building with an aeronautically bowed roof and modernist glass front: certainly the most interesting new structure amid the still sprouting strip malls and subdivisions. “What’s that? Second WalMart?.” No, came the answer, the new library. In rapidly suburbanizing places like Calvert County, libraries are being discovered as an antidote to sprawl, bringing neighbors together not only to read but lounge online and gather socially, even run into their teenagers. What’s most remarkable about the phenomenon is that politicians are willing to horsetrade to get the funds for these increasingly hi-tech, big ticket items inserted into the budget. An article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution explains why: “Libraries in sprawling suburban areas have become community centers and, for politicians, an important place to meet with constituents.” As a result, the piece says, “deluxe new libraries are a popular form of political currency at the state Capitol.”

Reports of Our Spiritual Death Greatly Exaggerated

Ray Keating, a columnist for Long Island’s Newsday, provides a service by exposing Dan Goetz’s book “Death by Suburb” for the vacuous cheap shot that it is; we’d like to pile on. Goetz, a Christian writer whose subtitle is “How to Keep the Suburbs from Killing Your Soul,” describes the spirit-wasting effects of consumerism, materialism, superficiality and the general feeling that one is trapped. Keating objects that none of these phenomena are restricted to the suburbs, quoting from St. Paul and other Biblical writers to show that envy and greed “predated the suburbs.” Here’s another problem: isn’t Christianity—and particularly Goetz’s brand of spiritually authentic evangelicalism—growing most steroidally in the suburban megachurches? One almost suspects Goetz was thinking of all those Christian suburban buyers when he came up with his title.

Househunting from Space

When the first great suburban expansion occurred after World War II, Sputnik had yet to fly. Soon, though, came satellites that could read license plates on cars parked outside the Chinese embassy and aerial photography that could tote up Russian missiles. With the end of the Cold War, this eye-in-the-sky technology was released for commercial use—just in time for the current real-estate boom. Thanks to a rash of Internet sites that use satellite photography, prospective homebuyers can check out not just asking prices, but how "close to all" a home really is, the traffic out front, even the number of pickup trucks rusting in the driveway next door. The sites also make playing the “How Much Is My House Worth?” parlor game a lot more fun.

All of the sites combine real-estate listings and recent sales with Yahoo maps or Google's satellite photography feature to provide serious intelligence for house shoppers. Some cater to buyers who already know want they want, where, and to real-estate pros who want to reach them with beefed up listings. Trulia, one of our favorites, is a California-based site that has recently expanded to the East Coast. Besides the satmap, Trulia offers little more than an agency’s own site would, including photos and classified-ad chat about each property. But of all the realty sites, Trulia is the fastest, easiest to navigate and has nothing up its sleeve. HomePages, an offshoot of the home appraisal site HomeValues, is oriented to those trying to acquaint themselves with new turf; shoppers can load up the bird’s eye view of a targeted town with virtual thumbtacks locating public schools and school-district borders, post offices and other amenities.

Another class of site attempts to nail down the perfect price for your home. Zillow claims it can calculate the value of your home within a median margin of error of 7.2 percent, using not only recent local sales but tax numbers and other government data. Zillow needs some coaching and sometimes can’t get it right: Our guinea pig “Zestimate” repeatedly put the market value of a home we’re familiar with at $2,714, off by approximately the entire worth of the place. Similarly, Property Shark had lots of bells and whistles, but we couldn’t get it to price a home at all—though one suspects better service could be had if we ponied up for the pay-only subscriber information.

None of these sites purports to do a better job than your local real-estate office, and most point you directly to the agent who can help you best. But the Internet (another Pentagon invention turned over to civilian use) is clearly going to be a major avenue for home sales soon and forever. Doubters need only register that NewsCorp, Rupert Murdoch’s multinational media company, is busily acquiring real-estate sites back home in Australia.

Looking South from Suburbia

The New York Times profiles Teddy Cruz, a Guatemalan-born architect in San Diego who has watched his neighbors in Tijuana, on the Mexican border, adapt American suburbia to local ideas about development. In bustling Tijuana, storefronts and workshops are carved out of homes and front yards and entire houses are piled on top of other buildings to fit businesses below. Cruz sees in Tijuana's reconfigured suburbia a fluid, multilayered antidote to the gated community, which in turn he regards as analogous to our clamped-down border. His own designs include houses pre-stacked above hollow structures for retail space and conjoined, communal housing. His version of border suburbia, says the Times, could be “a humane model for rethinking America's suburbs that could be applied to the new immigrant suburbs of the Midwest or the flood-ruined New Orleans.” With artist Rebecca Solnit, Cruz is also making drawings for converting a 70,000 McMansion in suburban San Francisco into multifamily housing.

A Desperate Man

“Desperate Housewives,” is so over. Get ready for “Desperate Husband.” CBS has cast the pilot for a new half-hour sitcom called “The Angriest Man in Suburbia,” in which a New York City tax attorney is transplanted to the California suburbs to be a minivan-driving stay-at-home dad. About pilots that haven’t yet seen the light of the cathode ray, we must be silent, but the explicit use of the “S” word in the title makes it likely that the show’s creator, Ajay Saghal, patterned his show after ABC’s sitcom phenomenon about five women slowly going crazy on white-picketed Wisteria Lane.

Suburbia has been portrayed on television since before “Leave It to Beaver,” but satirizing suburbia (and with a title like that, we can only hope the new show is intended to be satire) is tricky ground. “Desperate Housewives” succeeded for most of its two hit seasons on creator Marc Cherry’s storytelling, which was so deft that it hid the fact that his critique of suburbia was a retread of a retread. Cherry ‘s “big satirical point,” wrote Matt Feeney last year in Slate, “that nostalgified suburbia is really a hive of hypocrisy and perversion … is old and obvious enough to support its own brand of nostalgia (i.e., ‘’The Stepford Wives,’ ‘American Beauty’).” Cherry himself has said the key to understanding “Desperate Housewives” is that he never intended to critique the suburbs: “The truth is I’m not making fun of the suburbs. I love the suburbs,” he told the Associated Press early in the show’s run.

Indeed, one of the curious facts of “Desperate Housewives” as satire is that it is most popular in among middle-aged men and women in suburban areas. “While college girls still cling nostalgically to their full 6-season DVD sets of Sex and the City, married suburbanites hastily put their kids to bed on Sunday nights and flip to the show that unabashedly pokes fun at their lifestyles,” wrote Gena Gorlin on The Undercurrent, a newsletter of fans of Ayn Rand. This makes perfect sense if it’s understood that Cherry’s show confirms, however backwardly, the basics premises of suburban life. Sahgal, a novelist who lives in California with his wife and a two-year-old, has probably spent his share of days at home looking at the lawn. Here’s hoping it’s left him with a love for his surroundings.

Mow Better

James Bond has an uncharacteristically sentimental moment in one of Ian Fleming's books when he hears Her Majesty's groundskeepers clipping the lawn outside M's office with old-fashioned, engineless "push" mowers. Bond speculates that the sound of their spinning blades--to him the very soul of summer--would soon be replaced by the gutteral grinding of gas-powered mowers.

If Bond had ever heard the blasphemy a leafblower, he might have abandoned the Empire to S.P.E.C.T.R.E. But he would be heartened to hear that sales of reel mowers, as they're officially called, have been increasing over the past decade--sixfold in that timespan according to some estimates--and that was before rising gas prices made their main competition less economical than ever. EPA research on small-engine machines, well advertised by environmental groups over the past few years, exposed gas mowers as an insidious source of pollution. They very ubiquity, it seems, makes them at once nearly invisible and destructive to the ozone layer. (The EPA, for that matter would have you curb your mowing altogether by planting low-maintenance slow-growing grasses as well as more trees and shrubs to decrease lawn area.) Recent attempts to reduce neighborhood noise (including restrictions on leaf blowing) have also promoted the quieter people powered machines, as has the building vogue for retro products.

Reel mowers aren't for the casual groundskeeper. If grass is allowed to grow much above three inches, a reel-mower will barely cut, and will turn your arm-muscles to mush. Electric mowers are cheaper to buy and run than gas, and, though marginally less powerful than gas mowers, will put an overgrown lawn back in trim in no time. Electrics come battery powered or with a cord, which admittedly can flummox expert lariat throwers, but which avoids the cost of replacing (and disposing of) the battery. And if gas is the only type of mower that satisfies, be sure to take a look at new, more efficient models.

Before you choose, take a look at all your options, and as with a diet or exercise routine, be realistic. The type of mower you choose depends mostly on what kind of lawn you have, how much you intend to mow and--according to our favorite lawn mowing site--what kind of shape you're in.

New Orleans: The Hole in the Doughnut?

Even before Katrina, the suburbs of New Orleans outdid the city for job growth and even the je ne sais quois analysts call retail vitality. But can places like Jefferson Parish and St. Tammany survive if the urban center is down for the count altogether? An article in the Times-Picayune says they may be about to find out.

Trapped in the Great Outdoors

Residents on the expanding edge of the suburbs are used to wild animals nibbling on their garbage and even bouncing on their kids’ trampolines. Occasionally, a mountain lion or even a deer takes out a pet dog. But last weekend it was a human trapper’s snare that killed the pooch, and it set off a debate about animal control in the least likely of places.

Soccer Fields vs. Tobacco Fields

The twin homunculi of NASCAR dads and soccer moms have stalked the land the last two national elections: recent news has the soccer moms winning out. The Washington Post reported recently that suburban issues have captivated Virginia’s current session of the General Assembly, as legislators read the tea leaves from last fall’s upset election of Gov. Tim Kaine. Kaine stumped hard in suburban areas, focusing on education, sprawl, transportation and gangs. As governor, he has continued to speak suburban. “Our families in Northern Virginia are angry about the traffic gridlock that stops them from living a normal life,” Kaine railed to the assembly in his first major speech as governor.

Curiously, second-hand smoke has emerged has a particular suburban issue in Virginia. In a state that has grown tobacco for four centuries, a recent bill to ban smoking in restaurants split state senators sharply along farming/suburban lines. (The ban later failed in the lower house.)

What policies the suburbs care about aren’t going to get any easier for politicians. A new Brookings Institution report out today supports what’s evident to any suburbanite: the suburbs are becoming more diverse. What does this mean for suburban pols used to representing middle-class whites? In his report, Frey writes, “the wider dispersal of minority populations signifies the broadening relevance of policies aimed at more diverse, including immigrant communities.” Here’s his translation in USA Today: “Politicians are going to have to figure out how to satisfy both groups."

This Week's Dire Prediction of the Real-Estate Crash

USAToday put the cooling of the real-estate boom on its front page at midweek. The telltales, according to McPaper, were the increasing number of homes on the market and the decline in existing homes that sold last month. Also: "Builders are seeing more orders canceled. "Meanwhile, the number of homeowners who are late paying their mortgages has been creeping up."

The story introduces the sad-sack seller Fran Floyd, who pulled her Houston townhome off the market even though she's willing to lose $3,400 on a sale. Developers are making things harder for the Fran Floyds by offering free granite upgrades in their kitchens and built-in swimming pools out back. Those goodies kick the value out of a house in the same area with Corian countertops and a mosquito-breeding aboveground. You don't even have to read between the lines to see that homeowners who aren't in a rush to sell can still expect to build equity at a comfortable pace. The average price for an American home is hanging tough at $211,000, unchanged from December and up 11 percent from a year ago. Economists, says the story, expect existing home prices to continue up some 5 percent, despite the slowdown. Conservative
stock market investors are usually happy with that kind of return on their money.

All throughout the boom, the bouyancy of real-estate prices has been put to the irrepressibly agreeable mortgage rates; because foreign lenders continue to rush into the American debt market, the Feds attempts to drive the prime rate (and therefore the cost of borrowing) up have gone for naught. As long as money was cheap, and mortgage payments low, homebuyers could afford to bid up the price of their dream house. There are longer-term trends at work, however, chiefly the difficulty in finding new land on which to build. As Jon Gertner pointed out in his profile of luxury developer Toll Brothers in The New York Times Magazine last summer, many states and localities are looking to slow development, if not choke it off entirely. That pressure, combined with natural population growth are liable to push housing prices, currently about three times a family's yearly income, closer to European proportions. In England and "Old Europe," a family pays as much as seven times their income for a home.

At some point, American home prices must link up with the reality of diminishing space for new houses. That point may have already come. Some observers will tell you that that ceiling has always pertained. As the realty agents have said for decades to explain the relationship of supply to demand when it comes to real estate, "They ain't making any more of the planet."