Burb

The Suburban Patch: Q&A with Dante Chinni

2010-06-04T15:03:00.013-04:00

Dante Chinni is project director of Patchwork Nation, an effort, sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor and the Knight Foundation, to understand the United States not as a collection of regional or political entities, but as a set of diverse communities. Looking at the 50 states county by county, Chinni has identified 12 broad community types that share demographic and economic traits, regardless of whether they find themselves in the Southwest or the Northeast, Florida, Washington or Arizona.

One of Chinni’s dozen communities is the “Monied Burb.” We had a conversation with him about how he defines suburbia and what he’s found there.

One of the dozen or so community types in Patchwork Nation is the Monied Burb. What makes a county a Monied Burb?
All the types in Patchwork Nation are identified by clustering the counties around a sets of demographic data: income and occupation, religious adherence and racial breakdown, consumer information. For the Monied Burbs, the markers that stand out are income and education. They aren’t terribly diverse places, though they aren’t far off the national averages in their proportion of different kinds of people. And they are not as dense as the big-city counties we call Industrial Metropolis.

How many communities like this are there among the country’s 3,142 counties?
There are 286 of them, and they contain about 69 million people. Mostly they are scattered around big cities, but some are just sprawling counties that cover a medium- or small-sized city and it's burbs.

Obviously, not all burbs are monied.
Not all burbs are monied, but the counties just outside of big cities tend to be wealthier than average than the county the city is in. And there are clearly some suburbanites we miss, in the inner ring burbs in Industrial counties and outer ring burbs in the Boom Towns.

Where did you grow up?
Macomb County, Michigan, and it makes for a good example of why we call them Monied Burbs. The part of Macomb County I grew up in was not Monied, but Macomb stretches very far north from Detroit, and ther are some higher incomes and bigger houses out there. Also, keep in mind that we tend as Americans not to consider ourselves, our environment, well-off. So we look at the town next door and say, "We're okay here, but over there, they are rich ones." Well, yes and no. When you compare your suburb not to the richer one next door but to the statistical "average county," you'd be surprised how well most burbs are doing.

These days you’re looking at how your communities are faring in the recession, and what they've gotten out of federal bailout funds. How are suburban communities doing by these measures?
Last time we looked, on a per capita basis, the Burbs were pretty far down the list -- about $848 per head through January. Seven of the 12 community types did better than that. The big city Industrial Metros scored almost $1200 per head.

But we also looked at where the TARP funds went, which is the bailout. The Burbs scored very highly there. About half of the bank branches in the burbs were affiliated with TARP banks. Those places also took more advantage of government aid to those who lost their homes. So one can't simply say the Burbs didn't get their fair share.

In a recent post on PN, you say that the soccer moms and soccer dads, which are really just euphemisms for the suburban majority, are not on the deciders this election season. What changed?
We'll have to see, of course, but when I look at the numbers—Obama’s approval and anxiety about the economy--the Burbs aren't especially unhappy. The stock market is up. Their 401(k)s look a lot better. They've been teetering between Dems and Republicans for several elections, but fell heavily to Obama in 2008.

I suspect the Republicans will do better in the Monied Burbs in 2010 than they did two years ago, but because those places feel a little better than they did in 2008, they are likely to stay Democratic. Other types, like the Boom Towns and the small own Service Worker Centers, lean Republican and they have a little more to be unhappy about. Of course if Europe collapses and drags the Dow down with it, all bets are off.

Brookings Report: The End of Black-and-White Urban Planning

2010-05-12T11:46:00.008-04:00

White flight may be over. But when it comes to our ideas about suburbs vs. the city, the picture is still all black and white.

The news coming out of Brookings Institution's massive new report, "The State of Metropolitan America," is that young educated, white workers have headed back into the cities in the past decade, looking for job opportunities and a lively social environment. The suburbs, meanwhile, are getting poorer and more diverse.

At least that's the takeaway from urban-based outlets, always ready to pit lily-white suburbs against the true grit of the cities. "Suburbs Losing Young Whites to Cities," crys the headline on the AP story that ran on Huffington Post. "Bright Flight: Affluent Leaving Suburbs, Moving to Cities" seconds the Wall St. Journal's blog "The Juggle." Told this way, the story sounds like the burbs are getting their comeuppance.

The situation the Brookings report describes is somewhat subtler. Young whites have been moving downtown since the 1990s, lured by better infrastructure and the drop in crime. What Brookings says is that the "bright flight" accelerated in the 2000s (to the inner-ring burbs as well as the urban core) because of the recession and the collapse of the housing bubble. The jury's still out on whether the recent migration to the cities is a long-term reorientation or a recession-based "bounce."

Meanwhile, the growing poverty in the burbs is not a white/minority "switcheroo" as the eco-blog Grist has it, but a rechanneling of immigration patterns during the suburban boom of the previous decade: lower-class, unskilled workers have streamed to the suburbs because that's where their jobs were, and for the most part still are, as manufacturing firms left the cities.

The sum effect is not a simple reversal of white flight, but a blending of city and suburban reality that's been going on almost since white flight began. For years, Brookings analysts have been calling for a smarter, less balkanized approach to urban planning and management. Says the Brookings report, "governance must begin to transcend the parochial 18th-century administrative borders that frustrate shared approaches to increasingly shared challenges."

Suburban authorities have begun breaking down their municipal barriers, forming regional planning committees to solve common problems. The next step is for cities and suburbs to overcome the mindset neatly summed up by Grist's tidy but insufficient recommendation that "let's half of us fix the cities and half of us fix the suburbs."

Can Car Sharing Fly in the Suburbs?

2010-05-06T09:42:00.008-04:00

Car sharing has made serious inroads in cities, where a lack of parking, plenty of public transportation, and general walkability make renting a car for an hour or a day far more practical than owning. Zipcar and other car sharing companies find their services are economically unsustainable in the suburbs, where conditions are just the opposite: walking is rarely a choice, getting to their cars often requires a car, and there's parking everywhere you look.

A new concept in car sharing makes it possible for suburban car owners to capitalize on their parked cars--literally, by renting them to strangers. Relay Rides, now operating in the Boston area, allows car owners to rent their vehicles during those hours when they aren't using them. Owners post their car's availability and location on a website where renters sign up for drive-away and return times. Relay Rides installs a push-button device in each car that gives the renter access--no key-swapping necessary--and tracks the car. The company also provides insurance for duration of the rental and checks on the driver's safety record.

Environmental advocates love the idea of car sharing because it reduces the number of cars in the world. So far, the personal carsharing model has been limited where it's needed most because in several states, like California, renting a noncommercial vehicle automatically invalidates the owner's insurance. Yesterday, a bill pushed by California assemblyman Dave Jones changed that, clearing the way for Spride Share, a car sharing company in the San Francisco area, ready to jump in with a system similar to Relay Rides.

By matching renters with cars sprinkled across the burbs, instead of at Zipcars central locations, car sharing companies may now map the Internet's fluid, multiple-node network onto the suburbs' troubling traffic patterns. The question now is whether suburbanites are willing to be that democratic--and capitalistic--about their rides.

photo by Andrew Currie

Times Square Bomber Gets a Crumbling Surbuban Facade

2010-05-05T08:46:00.007-04:00

As they grope to make sense of Faisal Shahzad, the alleged failed Times Square car bomber, the newspapers are going with the "suburban time bomb" angle, playing on the fact that Shahzad owned--and left to foreclosure--a house in Shelton, Connnecticut, a former factory town on the Housatonic River north of Bridgeport. (photo by Professor Bop) This narrative line nicely ties together paranoia about the placidity of the suburbs--"it's quiet out here, a little too quiet--with the ravages of the real-estate boom.

The New York Times' front page sets the tone with the headline, "A Suburban Father Who Gave No Warning Sign," though there's little in the way of suburban angst in the story that follows. Instead, realty-obsessed New Yorkers get a rundown on the property's descending fortunes. Shahzad bought his new-construction, single family home in 2004 for $273,000 with a $218,000 mortgage, the Times reports, before kicking at the alleged mass-murderer for trying "to cash in on the real estate boom." Listed for $329,000 in 2006, the house finally sold within the past year for $284,500.

By that time, Shahzad had long since abandoned suburban life. In June of 2009, he stopped paying his mortgage and moved his family to Pakistan, where he may have gotten some terrorist training, according to reports.

This isn't the usual route to the heartbreak of foreclosure, but that doesn't keep The Danbury News Times, presumably with better local sources, from spinning a deeper tale of suburban desuetude: "American Dream faded quickly for accused terrorist" reads the paper's headline.

The NT's contribution to the real-estate story is that Shahzad bought the home four years before he married--just one of the 52 percent of singletons choosing the burbs over city life that Coldwell-Banker has been touting in recent weeks. The local paper also turns up a $65,000 home equity loan taken on the property in February 2009, leading a University of New Haven professor to speculate that Shahzad was struggling to keep up with the Joneses. "Maybe he was starting to see the hopes of living the good life in America die and he began feeling like a failure," says clinical psychologist and criminal-law prof James Monahan.

Maybe. Or perhaps the frame of suburban economic and spiritual shipwreck doesn't fit the picture. Maybe three months before he left for Pakistan, Shahzad was already turning toward terrorist activity and was looking to suck funds out of a property he was intending to walk away from. We'll never know--that's the way it is with these mild-mannered suburban madmen.

Suburban Immigrants Feel Arizona Heat

2010-05-03T12:15:00.006-04:00

On Long Island, native residents have an ambivalent attitude toward immigration. Though they employ undocumented workers by the thousands--New York state harbors a greater percentage of illegal aliens than Arizona (five percent versus four percent of the national total from 2000 to 2006)--Long Island has become a flashpoint for anti-immigrant protest.

In 2005, the town of Farmingville was the site of one of the most controversial day-laborer shape-ups that have raised suburbanites' ire. On the exurban frontier of eastern Long Island, a tense court case recently wrapped up with the conviction of a teenager who knifed a man while "beaner hopping"--targeting Latino immigrants as a violent lark. Last week, an SUV was spotted in Nassau County with a homemade bumper sticker that read, "Go Arizona."

Yet Long Islanders who support Arizona's new immigration bill often cite not the current influx of foreigners, but their own family histories. "My grandfather was an illegal from Ulster," someone wrote on a Long Islander's Facebook recently, adding, for the record, "He left and came back legally. Plenty of people wait years to get a green card, why should other be able to cut in line?" A woman with an Italian last name wrote on the same thread about her grandparents. "Not only did they come through this country legally,but they got jobs, contributed to the economy, built lives and raised children who respected the country that afforded their families the opportunities for education and a decent life."

Nevermind that the implication here--that today's immigrants don't contribute to American society--have repeatedly been proven false. The grandparents of today's middle-aged homeowners were for the most part not legal immigrants, at least not in the sense that they secured green cards before stepping ashore.

Before 1924, when the first mass immigration measures were enacted, visas were not necessary to enter the country (unless you were Chinese, in which case you didn't come in). Even after quotas were imposed, those who were allowed in simply showed up. This system lasted until Ellis Island closed in the mid-1950s, and as immigration lawyer and Hofstra Law School professor Patrick Young points out, "If that system was in place today, there would be no illegal immigrants."

Not that second- and third-generation European-Americans shouldn't be proud of their forebears. And they are. The 2000 U.S. Census showed that Italian-Americans in particular are increasingly claiming their heritage. This trend is no doubt the result of the success of their group in American life. Or possibly today's Italian-Americans have finally recovered from the intense prejudice that greeted their grandparents when they arrived half a century ago.

Inside the Beltway Thinking on AIDS

2010-04-29T20:01:00.005-04:00

More than 5,500 individuals in Prince George's County, Maryland are infected with HIV/AIDS, according to a study of AIDs in the Washington, D.C. suburbs, released this week (pdf). Of those, more than 600 are not receiving treatment. The study, which blamed a lack of a coordinated response to the spread of the virus, prompted suburban officials to step up diagnosis and treatment, and promote awareness in schools, as has been done in D.C.

The study didn't focus on Prince George's--it had the same advice for all the Washington burbs, which harbor 46 percent of those in Metro D.C. area. But let's stick for a moment with Prince George's, which is home to nearly a million people in 10 cities, 17 towns, and more than 50 unincorporated areas. Comparing this glut of community types, governing bodies, school districts and legal jurisdcitions to D.C.'s unified hierarchy is not even "comparing apples and oranges," as Dale Schacherer, program manager for HIV client services in neighboring Montgomery County, called it. It's comparing one apple tree to a field of grapes.

The study, funded by the Washington AIDS Partnership, is a followup to a 2005 survey of Washington itself, which proved a critical tool in fighting infection rates in the city. "We were able to provide a blueprint for action," says the partnership's executive director, Channing Wickham. But one blueprint won't serve all of Prince George's County, much less the six counties and four cities that surround our nation's capital.

Photo by wyfurasko

The Art of the Suburban Arts Center

2010-04-23T13:17:00.005-04:00

The proper function of the arts is to impale the bourgeoisie. With the arts thriving in the city centers and the majority of the bourgeoisie living in the suburbs, the arts' ability to scandalize those who need it most has atrophied.

Slowly, however, the arts are making their to the suburbs. The Minneapolis suburbs recently added its third suburban theater and art space, the $20 million Performing Arts Center in Burnsville, joining the Center for the Arts at the Bloomington Civic Plaza and the Center for the Arts in Hopkins.

The key word is "slowly." The Burnsville theater/gallery complex lost more than half a million dollars in its first year, prompting the Star-Tribune to ask, "Is it worth it to have a multi-use arts center in your suburb?"

The answer, according to the centers' directors and local authorities, is yes, but it requires the right mix of public use, stable programs, and patience.

How much patience can vary. After six years in operation, the Bloomington facility is already "active and viibrant, 16, 18 hours a day," says a Bloomington city councilman. The 27-year-ol Phipps Center for the Arts in Hudson, Wis., just east of St. Paul, took "a good 10 years to hit its stride," according to its executive director.

The secrets to success, say experienced programmers, are a stable line-up of resident companies willing to produce a diverse range of events, a size that fits the community (800 to 1,000 seats seems to suit the Minneapolis area), and the willingness to be a community center, including a rental space for weddings and other private functions.

The most hopeful sign is that the Burnsville's theater group, Chameleon, has been running a successful musical revue titled "Suburbs," an exploration of the rites and rituals of "the world of the lawnmower, the barbecue, and the mall."

Ibsen it may not be, but the impalement of the bourgeoisie always begins with a little light skewering.

Landscaping the Wright Way

2010-04-21T12:39:00.008-04:00

Robert Wright is a smart guy. He writes books, he has spent a lot of time at Princeton University, and no doubt that is why, even when he's talking about lawncare, he explains things like this: "I think it’s possible in principle to engineer a new ethos that allows us to fight chemical negative externalities without creating aesthetic and hence financial ones."

In other words, if suburbanites could learn to love the look of unkempt lawns, we could save a lot of money, and pollute less. Or in fewer words, a little laziness about lawn care might be a good thing.

The tyranny of the suburban lawn has been an issue at least since Rob Petrie, on "The Dick Van Dyke Show," refused to join a vigilante group to rid his neighborhood of crabgrass. Since then, we have more reason to take a live-and-let-live attitude toward weeds: we've become conscious of the environmental cost of a manicured greensward. Chemical fertilizers and herbicides find their way into the water supply, and eventually into the oceans, where they choke sea life. Lawnmowers cause air and noise pollution.

This is how Wright, who lets his lawn go, justifies his weeds. There are, he recognizes, eco-friendly lawncare products (though even some organic weed suppressants contain byproducts of corn, one of the most rapacious crops), but he claims he's too busy to educate himself about "greening" his lawn. Probably best not to bother introducing him to xerophytic landscaping.

Wright's solution, typical of a big thinker, is to tinker with our cultural presumptions. "Maybe someday suburban neighborhoods will consist of lawns that look like mine," he writes, "and everyone will admire them." This isn't an entirely revolutionary thought. As Rob Petrie says in defense of an offending neighbor, "He happens to like the look of crabgrass."

But it's a thought that will take a revolution to promulgate. What many suburbanites don't realize is how much weed control is a matter of simply doing less. Mowing rarely and leaving the blades longer when you do gives grass a competitive advantage over weeds. Planting bushes or ivy that needs trimming once a year or so reduces the size of a thirsty, hungry lawn, and yields more time to laze about.

In Wright's case, Burb recommends a move to a less uptight suburb. Since the dawn of suburbia, lawns have functioned as a kind of code about what kind of people live in a house, a neighborhood, or a town. The sight of grass gone to seed can be a symbol of freethinkers, or long-term illness; the howl of leafblowers toted by phalanx of landscapers is the sound of the American Dream in action.

In other words, Mr. Wright, every homeowner deserves the lawn he's saddled with.

Making Sense of the Cost of the Commute

2010-04-19T12:27:00.003-04:00

Economists have revealed that living in the exurbs costs more, when you count in commuting, than you might save in cheaper housing. A study by the Urban Land Institute shows that exurban commuters in the Boston area pay as much as twice what close-in workers pay in tranportation costs. "The report shows "affordable housing" in the exurbs really isn't--if it also means unaffordable transportation," says an ULI researcher quoted on NECN, a local news channel.

In the Boston area, commuters spend 35 percent of their household income on housing and 19 percent on transportation. But transportation costs range from more than $14,000 in communities along the I-495 beltway, like Billerica and Franklin (above, in a photo by shersteve) to $6,540 for workers hopping across the Charles River from Cambridge.

The Urban Land Institute argues that the difference, put toward a mortgage payment, could allow workers to afford a house worth $40,000 more in Cambridge, say, than, Franklin. One problem with this argument is that the median price for a home in Cambridge is more than $80,000 higher than a home in Franklin, according to Trulia.

Let's say for the sake of argument, however, that a homebuyer can find a place in Cambridge equivalent to a place in an outer-ring burb for just $40,000 more. The economists tells us that, taken as a group, we're all rational actors, even us suburbanites. There must be some reason some Boston area residents prefer coughing up a quarter of their income to sit on a commuter train, which, money aside, takes its own toll in hassle. (The institute has done a similar study on San Francisco that yielded similar differentials, and yet some folks are choosing to commute by air from Portland, Oregon, to beat the Bay Area real-estate prices.)

Do people not do the commuting vs. home price math for themselves? Or is there something else driving people out into the burbs and beyond? The answer to that mystery may be more illuminating than identifying the phenomenon itself.

Rethinking Surburban Seniors

2010-04-15T11:28:00.007-04:00

Marian Knapp got her Ph.D. last year, at the age of 70, in environmental studies. Unlike her fellow students concerned with whales and egrets, Knapp studied the elderly in her hometown of Newton, a suburb of Boston. Her dissertation, "Aging in Place in Suburbia," is a group portrait of Newton women adapting to a new life as elderly residents in a place built for young families. Now a member of Newton's Council on Aging and a consultant to local agencies, Knapp talked to Burb about the issues facing the half of Americans over 65 who live in the burbs.

What inspired you to get your degree?
I had a lot of family members who lived to be really old. So part of it was asking myself, what am I going to do with the next 30 years? But I was also influenced by being a caregiver for these older people. When I read what the current literature says about aging at home, I was troubled. If you type "aging in place" into a search engine, it defines staying at home as having services brought in. That was not my life, or my relatives' lives. Their lives were a lot more complicated. I'm trying to reframe the image of elders in suburbia.

How is that image different from reality?
The house is really important to seniors, but it's not their whole life. The women I interviewed talked about nature, about their neighborhoods, about Boston, and about the world, which was still very much a part of their persona, and how they viewed their lives.

So aging in place means being actively involved in the broader community. The image we have is an old person sitting there, very needy, and that the alternative is going to a nursing home. We have to change this idea so we can engage these people in a meaningful way.

How do you do that?
I've been working with the Department of Senior Services here in Newton on a survey of what's going on outside the walls of the senior center. We've produced a demographic map of the town, color coded to show where the elders are, so we can match programs with where they live. We're trying to get the community to focus on needs, but also existing assets. If there are gaps, then we want to fill those gaps.

One challenge here is transportation.
The elderly need transportation not only to get to the doctor, but to stay connected to people. In Newton we've recently restored a transportation system that gets them to appointments, but also to houses of worship, so they can get to religious services. The question with transportation is, who's going to fund it?

You talked earlier about the elderly connecting to nature.
For many people, nature was a very important part of moving out of the city. When they were younger, these people would go walk in the woods. Now some women find a place in their house where they can see the change of the seasons. They feed the birds, or garden. It's a very positive thing we should be paying more attention to.

We think of activities for seniors as playing bingo and cards. Is this what do they really want to do?
The senior center here knows it's in a transition period. So it does have bingo, and serves lunch. They have to maintain those sorts of things. But it also has computer classes. art classes, music, art and French language classes. The next generation of elderly still want to be involved in technology and cultural things.

Do the elderly only want to socialize with other elderly?
Not at all. In fact, there's some self-imposed ageism going on, people who say "I won't go to the senior center. They're all old." There are efforts going on to bring people together in their neighborhoods. I'm not sure how successful they've been. People are wrapped up in their daily lives and they're not thinking about the neighborhood piece.

How do we need to rethink our approach to elderly in the suburbs?
A lot of this work is defined by professionals, so we have these silos of services--transportation and housing and medicine. And even when they get together, they have a clinical perpsective--they ask, "How can we work professionals together?", not, "How can we see the whole person?" Communities need to think about the whole person, and how we can help seniors continue to be a whole person.

Better Homes for Imperfect People

2010-04-14T13:05:00.006-04:00

Marianne Cusato excels at elegantly practical responses to housing dilemmas. Her Katrina Cottage, above, won acclaim as a emergency housing solution for victims of the hurricane in New Orleans, while her Home for a New Economy, a virtual model home she designed for the National Builders Association's 2010 convention, has been dubbed "the most innovative home never built." As a critic of the excesses of the late building boom, Cusato charges that designers forgot to address homely questions, like "Where do I have my morning coffee?"

But ask Cusato for the vision thing, as Forbes did for their recent "Life in 2020" special report, and she loses her footing. We're with Cusato when she gives concrete examples of retrofittting the suburban ring for mixed use, like Stapleton, Colo., where a redundant airport was converted into a walkable downtown. We'll even go along with her point that hard times for the homebuilding industry in the past three years have been a "creative disruption," one that will lead the United States to a sustainable recovery.

But when discussing the future of the single-family home, Cusato resorts to predictions that are more pie-in-the-sky than blue-sky. By 2020, Cusato says, "homeowners will crave fewer symbols of gratuitous wealth. Americans will stop trying to keep up with the Jones [sic]." In her zeal to eradicate superfluously grand entryways and "gables for gables sake"--her code words for McMansions--Cusato has stepped out of futurism into fantasy. We can't revolutionize suburbia by reimagining human nature. Better to design eco-friendly castles than to wish away a man's desire to live in one.

It may be that the symbols of gratuitous wealth ten years from now will be slickly sensible structures--the real-estate's equivalent of the Prius. (On the very high end, where zero-carbon new construction is still in the experimental phase, you could argue this is already the case.)

But the housing stock in the inner-ring won't likely be retrofitted to offer rank-and-file homeowners uniformly efficient, right-sized homes by the end of this decade, even if they wanted them. Even in a world of $5-a-gallon gasoline and electric-bill surcharges, homebuyers will balance space and comfort against how far they can stretch their paychecks.

Cusato seems to have even this basic economic calculation backward. "Cost per square foot will be abandoned as a metric," she writes. "Homeowners will instead weigh the total monthly costs of living in a home."

Outside the urban condo market, of course, most buyers already talk in terms of monthly payments, including mortgage, taxes--and energy costs. ("What's it take to heat that monster?" is the commoner's initial response to a commodious barn he or she can't afford.) That omnibus figure drops when mortgage rates go low, making large, inefficient homes too readily affordable. If we're to make suburbia sustainable and immunize housing from the ills of cheap credit, house shoppers will have to adopt a closer measure, like cost per square foot, to see which homes are truly dreamy.

What's a Better Burb Look Like? Ask the People Who Live There

2010-04-13T11:16:00.008-04:00

Long Island, stretching 125 miles east of Manhattan, has one stresser other suburbs do not: the Atlantic Ocean. Having water on all sides gives the suburban crisis on Long Island the effect of a slow-moving disaster, in which longtime residents are exiting while they can. "The older people are moving to Florida and the younger ones to Dallas," Columbia University urban historian Kenneth T. Jackson told The New York Times in 2005.

Like other suburbs, though, Long Island has another immoveable object: the public. Besieged as they are by their own sprawl, Long Islanders fear that changing the thrust of development will destroy the island's unique character as an overgrown beach community.

Hoping to overcome these fears and foster smart development at the same time, the nonprofit Long Island Index has created the "Build a Better Burb" challenge, which recruits the public to come up with ideas for improving Long Island's 156 mostly underutilized yet highly developed downtowns.

Many of Long Island's downtowns are ideal platforms for suburban hubs. Centered around a Long Island Rail Road station, the majority of town centers boast vast deserts of parking lots, empty big-box stores and other space available for infill development--8,300 acres of it, according to the Build a Better Burb website. By opening the challenge to anyone with a viable plan (though they recommend partnering with a draftsman), the Indexers seem dedicated to reconfiguring hearts and minds as much as the "underperforming asphalt."

Small projects focused on existing transit and shopping centers may serve as a palatable precedent than the large-scale visions put forward by former Nassau County executive Thomas Suozzi. With computer magnate Charles Wang, Suozzi pushed for the creation of a suburban hub in Uniondale, on the edge of the sparely developed Mitchell Field, a former Navy airbase. Suozzi hoped the complex would combine residential and commercial buildings, nestled against a refurbished Nassau Coliseum, owned by Wang. Suozzi lost his re-election bid last year, and the proposal has been assigned for further study by the Town of Hempstead.

Michelle Obama: Desperate Housewife?

2010-04-12T12:00:00.010-04:00

The Burbist doesn't ordinarily rise to defend suburbia. As Gregory Rodriguez's fuzzy broadside in the Los Angeles Times last month shows, attacks on the suburban mindset usually misplace the blame for vaguely defined wrongs, like a guy kicking the cat after a bad day at work.

When Michelle Obama told Fox News in February that her household is "news free," Rodriguez, a Times op-ed columnist, took out his frustrations on the suburbs. "Her statement ... represented the culmination of the suburbanization of the American mind," Rodriguez wrote. Why he thought is so wrongheaded as to invite a reply.

The First Lady's admission, on Mike Huckabee's show, came during a discussion about her "Let's Move" initiative, aimed at raising awareness about children's fitness and diet. After a commercial break, Huckabee asked Mrs. Obama whether she watched Fox News. "I try to keep home kind of a news-free zone," she responded.."When you work above the shop, you can't just bring work home."

Rodriguez doesn't say exactly how the White House is representative of the suburbs--despite its spreading lawns, it stands dead center in our 27th largest city--or of any typical American lifestyle. Rodriguez says that Mrs. Obama's no-news policy exhibits a slightly paranoid suburban tendency to think that "members of the single family unit are their only allies." This nails, no doubt, what it must be like to live in the Washington bubble. But the dynamic has little to do with life in an anonymous suburb, where, if anything, family cohesion is atomized by commitments outside the home, Mom's work schedule and book group included.

Rodriguez's complaint is not only with our emotional state, but with that of our minds. Suburbanites' physical remove from the city, he writes, is paralleled by an intellectual distance. He blames a mentality of "escapism"--a notion he borrowed from a Harper's magazine article from 1946. Ergo, we avoid bad news.

Nevermind that most suburbanites today have escaped from nowhere but are, like Rodriguez, suburban natives; his evidence that we are becoming a "newsless" nation comes from a 2008 Pew Research Center study that found that a third of Americans under 25 get no news during a typical day. There's no indication that Pew's young people are primarily suburban. Indeed, the suburbs, given the predominance of elders among both newspaper readers and homeowners, are likely to consume news at a higher rate than urbanites.

Not that reading the news these days qualifies as an intellectual pursuit--not as long as trash-talking is passed off as serious argument.

New Jersey's Zero Sum Gamble

2010-04-09T14:15:00.004-04:00

Any real-estate agent can tell you the immutable law of suburban real-estate: the value of a home is directly proportional to the quality of the local public school system.

Don't take my word for it: here is Sharon Alva, an agent in Alameda, Calif., with the relevant studies: "UCLA economist Sandra E. Black calculated that parents are willing to pay 2.5 percent more for housing per 5 percent increase in test scores," Alva wrote in a local paper recently. Nor are test scores the only factor home buyers are willing to pay for. "Proficiency tests, expenditure per pupil, pupil-to-teacher ratio, teacher salary and student attendance rates are 'consistently capitalized' into housing prices," notes Alva.

This fact of suburban life is what makes the current debate in New Jersey over property taxes so painful to watch. In his state budget announced last month, Governor Chris Christie proposed cutting state aid to localities by $800 million, at the same time pushing for a cap on increases to local property taxes.

In New Jersey, some 53 percent of local budgets go to education. Simultaneously cutting back aid to municipalities while boxing out new revenues from homeowners will certainly mean pushing back teacher pay, expanding pupil-to-teacher ratios and lowering expenditures per pupil, as an similar cap in Massachusetts did in the early 1980s, until the state government made up shortfalls with direct aid.

Those who support Christie's plan say there is fat in school budgets that can be trimmed to cover the half-million dollars or so that a typical small town would lose. They point to "extra layers of administration" as well as pay raises for teachers of 4 percent and more in the middle of a recession. Christie has promoted the view that teachers are overpaid by offering to restore some aid to school districts that agree to a salary freeze.

The alternative to the cuts, some New Jersey legislators say, is to restore a special income-tax surcharge on those making $400,000 or more annually that expired last December. Christie has vowed to veto that measure, or any tax hike, saying that wealthy residents will find someplace else to live.

This is not simple read-my-lips Republicanism. Christie's campaign against property-tax increases is a heartfelt response to real pain felt by homeowners: an annual tax bill of $20,000 on a house already costing $800,000 is not uncommon in the northeastern part of the state, near New York City. The question for New Jersey suburbanites is whether they will end up paying anyway--if not in higher taxes, then in lost real-estate values over the longer term.

Photo of Chris Christie by Hoboken Condo

Suburban Baseball: Build It and They'll Commute

2010-04-08T10:47:00.005-04:00

John Branston, writing on the Memphis Flyer's "City Beat" blog yesterday, marked the beginning of a new baseball season by pointing out a sour truth for diehard fans: "basketball and football have better claims than baseball on being the national pastime."

Nothing is more representative of baseball's slide than President Barack Obama's first pitch at the Washington Nationals' home opener, which would have sailed over a left-handed batter's head. That same evening, during the NCAA basketball tournament final, CBS showed Obama looking much more at ease shooting hoop at the White House with basketball broadcaster Clark Kellog.

But there's a caveat for suburban baseballs fans and city planners alike. Basketball and football are king, Branston writes, "unless you are white and live in the suburbs or small towns." In Memphis city high schools, the best athletes play football and basketball, he says; when those schools' baseball teams leave their home turf, "the slaughter rule is usually invoked after three innings."

Branston praises the expense and effort ploughed into AutoZone Park (above, photo by meadowsa), the home stadium of the Memphis Red Birds in downtown Memphis, by its owners, Dean and Kristi Jernigan. After ten years, however, the novelty of the place has worn off and ticket sales are off. Meanwhile, lighted baseball fields have been built in Memphis outliers like Germantown, Collierville, Bartlett, and Cordova. "Somebody is playing," says Branston, concluding, "The people who said a suburban stadium would have drawn better might be right. It certainly would have been closer to the market."

Re-Burb

2010-04-07T16:40:00.005-04:00

The most faithful visitors to this blog will notice that there haven't been any new posts for nearly two years. For nearly all of that time the Burbist has working as a freelancer; ironically, this has meant less time to dedicate to blogging, or to any activity that didn't contribute materially to my suburban existence. Leaving a fulltime job, in other words, left me less time to chronicle the modern suburban lifestyle.

With my imminent return to corporate life, I expect to blog more regularly on the issues that interest me and Burb's readers. Pardon the interruption and thank you for your support.

Photo: Foggy Night in the Suburb by Mikemol

Lower Home Sales, Higher Suburbs

2008-05-12T10:46:00.003-04:00

Your home-energy bills might seem like a crime to you, but that's not why police departments from Florida to Washington state and up into Canada are examining suburban utility bills. The cops are looking for a tip-off that a home is being used as an indoor pot farm.

Raids of two houses near Miami late last month turned up marijuana operations worth nearly a million dollars a year in annual sales, according to the Associated Press. A coordinated effort by federal and local agents aimed at stamping out house farms is making hay in some top locales. "You can go into any neighborhood, the nicest neighborhood you want, and the person next door could be a marijuana grower," a Drug Enforcement Administration agent told the AP.

Detecting a pot farm isn't easy. Cops often rely on neighbors to notice when an empty house on the block starts to get regular visits from strangers. They also look for telltales like a spike in water or electricity use as pot growers provide their plants with rain-forest levels of moisture and artificial sunlight. In response, farmers tap illegally into electric lines or water mains to evade the meter. Besides running up energy costs for everyone else, these jury-rigged conduits sometimes electrify the ground outside the home.

So far, law-enforcement agencies are concentrating on drug syndicates, like the Cuban gangs behind many farms in the Miami area. But as the subprime crisis empties out houses across the United States and homeowners look for ways to make their mortgage payments, look for amateurs to get into the racket: One suspected grower arrested in Miami is an older woman known in her neighborhood as the lady who drives the ice-cream truck.

No Rush to Reform in Melbourne

2008-05-07T10:50:00.004-04:00

Will the success of the real-estate market endanger smart growth in the suburbs? Outside Australia's city of Melbourne, politicians are siding with developers against the growth management group Melbourne 2030, according to a recent article in The Age, an Australian national newspaper. The capital of Victoria, Melbourne is Australia's second largest city, with a population of 3.2 million that grows by some 1500 people each week. Melbourne also boasts one of the lowest density rates in the world, with less than half the density of London (11 lots per hectare versus 25, but don't ask us what a hectare is.)

The authorities in Victoria have formed a commission to deal with the city's future growth called Melbourne 2030--named for the year by which Melbourne will have added another million people. The commission's goal is to study the best way "to comfortably absorb up to 620,000 extra households ... while protecting and enhancing our existing suburbs." This entails familiar steps like restricting suburban development to 40 percent of new building (from the current 60), and promoting commercial centers in residential areas that will encourage density and discourage the use of cars.

The usual objection to this sort of planning is that Australians--every bit as bent on upward mobility as Americans--won't give up their dream of owning their slice of the homeland and be shoved into apartments. And no less of an Ausssie icon than actor and Melbourne burber Geoffrey Rush (above; photo: Ken Irwin) has joined the opposition group Save Our Suburbs in protesting suburban high-rises. (S.O.S. has proposed that Melbourne 2030 leave posh burbs east of the city alone and direct its do-gooderism to the newer towns to the west.)

But local planning experts say the bigger threat to Melbourne 2030's plans is that politicians have become spoiled by unbridled growth. "The Government’s primary objective is to keep the building industry going because it’s essential to the Victorian economy," observes Bob Birrell, Monash University’s Centre for Population and Urban Research.

Bear this dynamic in mind as the U.S. housing market comes back from the dead in the next few months: its arguable that the building boom here forestalled for nearly two years the downturn we're experiencing now.

Dallas's New (Old) Boomburbs

2008-03-19T09:36:00.004-04:00

Not so long ago, Dallas's inner-ring suburbs were going the way of the dodo bird. Young couples, tired of long exurban commutes and flush with realty-boom dollars were moving downtown, "buying up 60-by-140 foot lots and stacking them with 4,000 square feet of living space," Nathan Halsey, a Dallas-area builder told House & Garden magazine in 2006. Fighting back, residents of suburban redoubts like Lakewood and Vickery Place formed conservation districts to protect early 20th century cottages and Modernist slab houses, many of which had been only recently reclaimed from years of neglect.

So it's nice to see a piece like this weekend feature in the Dallas Morning News, about the centennial celebration happening in Winnetka Heights, a nabe in the Oak Cliff area of the city. Founded in 1908 and sold by developers as "an ideal suburb," Winnetka Heights is a mix of grand homes and Craftsman cottages, earning it an historic designation in the early '80s. (The area was also home to the Southland Ice Company, the first store in a chain that became 7-11.) That vote of confidence from the city encouraged homebuyers to restore the larger dwellings that had been broken into apartments to single-family homes, and A combination of good schools, diverse population and a "live-and-let-live" attitude, according to one resident, make it emblematic of a suburb that's adapted succesfully to urban pressures.

The Crash That Wasn't, Part V

2008-03-18T08:37:00.005-04:00

The argument on this blog, since before the real-estate bubble popped, has been that a collapse of home prices is unlike the collapse in technology stock prices in the early 2000s, or the bubble now being forecast in environmental technology. The difference is pretty simple: a lot of tech-bubble money was invested in startups that promised to deliver unneeded services, or ones already provided efficiently by the offline market. And if a green bubble is indeed brewing, it's because there is more money being aimed at developing carbon-reducing technology than there are legitimate products to fund. Historically, that leads to unrealistic investments, and a crash.

Alex Tabbarok, a economist at George Mason University, makes the obvious point in today's New York Times that housing is neither unneeded nor overfunded. "Much of the increase in prices was a rational response to changes in fundamental factors like interest rates and supply," writes Tabbarok, noting that "land is hard to come by in places like Manhattan and San Francisco," and other coastal areas where people seem to prefer to live. Even in inland areas, Tabbarok adds, "zoning and other land-use regulations have made [housing] scarce." As a result, he predicts that home prices will settle at about 2004 levels. While there was speculation and while we feel bad for anyone who was forced to buy at the peak of the market, for most 2004 is not a bad number. We seem to remember that prices for houses then made them an insanely good investment.

The Season of Green

2008-01-24T15:08:00.001-05:00

Suburbs may be by definition a rum deal for the environment (see last item). Or maybe green-ness is just something that occurs later in a suburb's life cycle. In Levittown, N.Y., often called America's first suburb, local authorities are pushing the owners of the village's 17,000 once-identical houses to improve the energy efficiency of the aging burb one house at a time. Few of Bill Levitt's one-story capes look at they did when they went up in the 1940s amid Long Island's potato fields. But it's estimated that more than a third have their original boilers; replacing them would save as much as 1.5 million gallons of fuel oil annually. Under the aegis of Green Levittown, which hopes to convince every homeowner to make some upgrade, discounts and low-interest loans will be offering for residents upgrading appliances, heating systems, even lightbulbs.

Levittown isn't the only town to come to its environmental senses in middle age. Around Washington, D.C., some areas have begun to reform themselves around newly erected Metro stops and their attendant, walkable shopping districts. Critics point out that making individual homes more eco-friendly won't save the planet, and that the greenest communities are those that are planned that way from the start. But focusing on the money and resources that can be saved while giving older burbs necessary may be an easier sell than asking developers of new areas to forego profits.

Dublin's Not So Fair Suburbs

2008-01-22T10:04:00.000-05:00

The Lonely Planet guide reports in its latest issue that Ireland is losing the battle to remain green. The culprit, of course, is the car. Ireland has taken admirable measures, says the hipster guidebook's 8th edition, to encourage recycling with its tax on plastic grocery bags and is a leader in organic farming and eating. But the sustained economic boom from the 1980s onward drove housing prices in Dublin out of reach while putting the price of a new car into workers' pockets. That's the recipe for suburban development, which in turn deepens the car culture. Lonely Planet also bemoans the collateral decline in public transportation in a country where the bus and train networks were top notch.

It's not like the Irish didn't try; one of the most depressing conclusions to be taken from their experience is that the boom-to-burb cycle is almost unavoidable. In the early '80s, efforts were made to contain Ireland's economic rave-up by redeveloping inner-city areas of Dublin and restricting growth to the "western towns." But the profits to be had in building low-density sprawl made sure the urban renewal programs largely failed. But restrictions, it seems are not enough. Commuters and other landscape despoilers need positive reinforcement to stay in town and build and ride smart outside it.

Palaces of the Week

2008-01-18T09:33:00.000-05:00

With the real-estate market in such disarray and the word recession pounding in our ears lately, you might expect the realty pages of the local newspapers to tone down their House of the Week features. But maybe there's something in an economic downturn that makes a mansion that much more gawkable. The Courier-Journal of Louisville is touting the Leichleiter home in Mockingbird Valley, just east of Kentucky's biggest city. The Valley has the highest per capita income in Kentucky, and the tenth highest in the United States. Fittingly, the Leichleiters' is a 5,200-square-foot colonial where personal space is the focus of the design. The elder daughter's room, gushes the C-J, is "pure girl"--purple and pink with white wrought-iron twin beds and a fuchsia chaise. The master of the house, the CEO of a healthcare company, keeps a library with leather-covered walls that "exude masculinity."

The Los Angeles Times, meanwhile, offers a Spanish colonial filled with "old California charm." On the block at $15 million, this 10,116-square-footer has 23-foot ceilings. Outside are a pool, barn, and paddock.

Homes like these are more House of the Year than House of the Week. Or maybe House of the Boom that Was.

Village Elders

2007-08-15T13:25:00.000-04:00

The New York Times most emailed story for the past two days has been "A Grass-Roots Effort to Grow Old at Home," a phenomenon that shows how much of the grass roots wants to stay close to its roots in old age. The story concerns semi-official or downright impromptu groups of elderly who are conspiring to stay in their homes even after they are unable to completely care for themselves or their surroundings—sometimes upkeep of the house can be the biggest challenge. For now, this is a mostly urban phenomenon, but the suburbs is where these groups have found their greatest utility: handymen and drivers (for trips to the grocery store, to the doctor, or anywhere off the block) are often a suburban oldster's most immediate need. As the inner-ring of suburbs gets older and the next generation splits for other states, or at least other, farther suburbs, groups like this will be more necessary for older folks to see out the project they began mid-last century.

The article gives a list of email addresses for groups the reporter mentions. But anyone who is concerned for their own older neighbors can simply knock on their door and see if they need any help.

Woodstock (Re)Generation

2007-08-13T14:27:00.000-04:00

Woodstock, Georgia is not as famous as New York's, but the Bible-belt town and the home of rock's supernova have one thing in common: they've both had to figure out how to deal with a mammoth population explosion. Considered "out in the country," barely a decade ago, the Atlanta exurb, 30 miles north on I-575, has doubled in size since then. Where many burbifying areas have been swamped by that kind of growth, Woodstock is considered the poster child of the Livable Centers Initiative, which the Atlanta Regional Commission, helped by the feds, funds "live-walk-play" districts near shopping and transportation.

Woodstock's participation in the plan was to rezone to accommodate residential buildings with retail space below, including sidewalks with room for shoppers on foot. A developer, Hedgewood Properties, already had its eye on the town. They were given the master plan and told to come back with a project that fit in. We wanted a community focused on people rather than vehicles," town planning officer Richard McLeod told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "We can go down the road of being another suburban wasteland, or we can go the way of being economically and environmentally sustainable." Today nearly 1,000 homes (above, left) and condos are either underway or being planned in a lively downtown that used to shut down at the close of business every afternoon. A website dedicated to the revitalization (named, a little perversely, Olde Towne Woodstock) keeps residents and visitors abreast of events like farmers' market days, cooking classes and town council meetings. Nothing on there at the moment about a music festival.

Grilling By the Numbers

2007-05-16T14:21:00.000-04:00

The results of the 18th annual Weber Grillwatch are in. The headline on the survey, commissioned by the Microsoft of the grilling industry, is that more than half of all grill owners now own a charcoal grill, as opposed to gas. The surge in charcoal use seems to be a collateral effect of the increase in grilling by people 35 and under. These younger grillers are grilling more often, and they prefer charcoal.

Here's why we'd consider these stats obvious: as the average age of first-time homebuyers goes down—last we saw it was dropping past 30—the average age of people with grills also drops, since what is a house without a grill in the backyard? Those youthful homebuyers are more likely to have lower incomes than their older neighbors, and are less likely to afford a gas grill (a basic gas kettle runs about $100 more than a charcoal kettle).

Our favorite tidbit: Grillers in the deep South used charcoal by a wide margin more than others. Unlike their fellow grillers in warm states, who have switched largely to gas, the Old South's spatula-jockeys have stuck with the bricks. Being rump traditionalists, perhaps they simply prefer the authenticity of charcoal, not to mention the flavor. (Sixty percent of all grillers said they prefer the flavor of grilled food.) But it could be that Southern grillers are simply poorer, and so can't spring for gas.

In any case, it's time to get grilling. Sixty percent of those who own a grill do so on Memorial Day, sharpening up their spatula skills for July 4th, when 81 percent cook outdoors.

When Stars Get Over the Hill

2007-03-06T13:59:00.000-05:00

The San Fernando Valley may be "America's Suburb" as this winsome blog about "lesser Los Angeles," claims but there's been nothing down-home about the place lately. When Britney Spears melted down in the Valley last month, the L.A. Daily News was quick to point out that Brit was only the latest Hollywood denizen to choose the relative banality of the suburbs in which to go bonkers. It was Sherman Oaks where an armed Martin Lawrence wandered into traffic shouting, "Fight the power!" Studio City saw Jack Nicholson go at a fellow driver's windshield with a golf iron. Wags might say it's the suburbs themselves that drive the stars mad; Britney's past six months argues that the stars are listing a little to port already.

Lately, though, the San Fernando Valley is starting to twinkle with its own stardust, as the vogue for mid-century Modern extends to suburban kitsch. The Valley is the perfect place for the winking retro chic of Suburbia, a salon on Ventura Blvd. in Studio City, founded when "celebrity hair stylist and colorist Jennifer Nash decided that Beverly Hills was 'so over the hill'," according Suburbia's website. Opened in November, the faux-mod spot has already appeared in The Hollywood Reporter and on E! Online.

Harold and Kumar Kill Zombies

2007-02-28T16:01:00.000-05:00

When zombies invade the burbs in "Monster Madness: Battle for Suburbia," a forthcoming game for XBox, it's up to the local teens (left) to fight them off. Decent! But "Battle for Suburbia," as described in the gamer press, misses a few beats: for one thing, the outsized, buffed and baldheaded would never be mistaken for suburbanites. One of the great gags of the classic horror flick "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" was that you couldn't tell the walking dead from the city dwellers shuffling through their daily lives. These invaders are different than you and me. The settings for the skirmishes, despite praise from gamer-reviewers, are pretty lamely drawn and only one—The Shopping Maul—is recognizable as a typically suburban spot.

What strikes us as genius is that instead of conventional gamer weaponry, the collection of nerds, Goths and skaters wields whatever lies at hand in the suburban landscape: basketballs, lawn furniture, propane tanks and nail guns. The cheerleader twirls her ordinance, and one kid lays hands on grandad's home defibrillator. And while one reviewer takes exception to what he calls the "obscenely sexy," to our eye, that's what they're wearing at our mall, anyway.

Too Good to Be True: Debunking Suburban Legends

2007-01-31T12:54:00.000-05:00

The Washington Post published an article over the weekend that has no place on a blog: sane, optimistic—even relaxing—and truly counterintuitive, at least about the suburbs. In "5 Myths About Suburbia and Our Car-Happy Culture," Ted Balaker and Sam Staley, both contributors to the libertarian magazine Reason, argue that if we really want to solve the global warming crisis, driving less isn't the place to start. This isn't the place to debate their scientific claims, and anyway, we think driving less is a life-affirming goal apart from what it might do for the planet. (So, it seems, do they.)

But along the way, Balaker and Staley put to rest some anti-suburban truisms that are ripe for debunking. To wit: "Americans aren't addicted to their cars any more than office workers are addicted to their computers," they write. "Both items are merely tools that allow people to accomplish tasks faster and more conveniently." It isn't as much fun to talk about the suburbs without this cliché, but it sure is refreshing.

Suburbanites don't even depend on cars more than other Americans, the two point out. Cars are the dominant form of transportation for all types of communities, and have been for a long time. In the 1930s, when suburbia in the modern sense had yet to occur, three of four households owned a car.

Balaker and Staley betray their libertarian worldview when they argue that, while herding people in cities might be more efficient use of land, "single-family houses, malls and shops would have to make way for a stacked-up style of living that most don't want." The implication being that suburbia is not a deleterious side-effect of freeway building and developers' greed: people live in suburbs because they like to.

An Architect Dies, Leaving Modernism Alive and Well

2007-01-30T16:27:00.000-05:00

After a more than three decades of neglect, Modernist homes have become collectors' items. Philip Johnson's masterpiece, the Glass House in New Canaan, Conn., is opening as a museum this Spring, even as other classic Modernist homes in that high-priced suburb are looking for deep-pocketed buyers to care for them for the next half-century. In several cities societies dedicated to celebrating and preserving Modernist buildings have cropped up, and in Southern California, houses designed by the likes of the mid-century master Richard Neutra have become movie stars in their own right.

Despite their rebirth as national treasures, the supply of Modernism may be too deep, at least in the West, for mid-century homes to be hoarded like rare gems. This is thanks in no small measure to Dan Saxon Palmer, who died a month ago in Los Angeles. With his longtime partner, William Krisel, Palmer designed the first subdivisions in the San Fernando Valley (above), most of them built by the developer George Alexander. "They took on one of the great problems of Modernism, which was to create good, decent contemporary housing that was affordable for the masses," architectural historian Alan Hess told the Los Angeles Times this week.

Krisel has described the partners' early L.A.-area work as "transitional" modernism, since sales-minded developers didn't cotton at first to the severe lines and butterfly rooves that later became a Palmer & Krisel signature. Only after the pair had transformed the desert around Palm Springs with some 2,500 inventive and very successful tract homes could they have their way in L.A. "After Palm Springs, we could do those kinds of houses here. Because you've got to understand," said Krisel, "a tract builder is like a sheep. He follows."

Obama Unbored by the Suburbs

2007-01-29T13:35:00.000-05:00

The country is playing catch-up with Barack Obama, getting to know the charismatic U.S. senator from Illinois now that he is already considered the male to beat for the '08 Democratic presidential nomination. In a long profile (here on login-free The Seattle Times site) that ran on Sunday's front page, The New York Times officially introduced him to Northeast elite voters. Characterizing Obama as "modest and careful" in dealing with the media, reporter Jodi Kantor unearthed "a rare slip" during his early '90s tenure as president of Harvard's prestigious law review journal. "He told The Associated Press," notes Kantor, "'I'm not interested in the suburbs. The suburbs bore me.'"

It may be that Obama is now playing catch-up with the suburbs. On Martin Luther King Day, Obama pulled off a "minor coup," according to the Daily Southtown, when he traveled to Chicago's south suburbs to speak at St. Mark Missionary Baptist Church, an African-American megachurch in Harvey. Harvey isn't the affluent consumer-culture haven the Times imagined when it coined the phrase "suburban populism" elsewhere in Sunday's paper. Harvey struggles with crime and poverty, and a mayor who has been the subject of several Southtown articles about town-hall corruption. Obama felt their pain while showing that the close-in burbs are on his national agenda. "Obama suggested the money sent to rebuild Iraq should be spent to rebuild towns such as Harvey," wrote Southtown reporter Guy Tridgell.

The trip to Harvey was unexpected both because St. Mark pastor Bishop William Jordan has supported Republican candidates in the past (though he backed Obama in his senatorial campaign), and because downtrodden Harvey didn't seem a large enough stage for a man ramping up to run for the White House. "If I recall Dr. King, he wasn't hanging out in Manhattan. Dr. King was not in Beverly Hills," Obama told the crowd at St. Mark. "Folks said, 'Why are you going to Harvey? Harvey has got a lot of problems.' I said, 'That's why I'm going to Harvey.'"

What Drives in the Suburbs Stays in the Suburbs

2007-01-16T17:19:00.000-05:00

Last year, the Washington, D.C. blog DCist took satisfaction in a report that said suburbanites in Virginia and Maryland had the longest commutes in the nation, and were quick to give the news an anti-suburban spin. "When local media … discuss our countless transportation and traffic problems, it is often to be described as D.C.-Metro or Washington-area congestion," DCist wrote. "However, statistics indicate that something along the lines of Va./Md.-Metro area congestion might be a more appropriate description." They are right, of course: suburban drivers are clogging theirs. "The extreme commutes of Prince George's and Montgomery residents suggest that many of them are traveling to jobs in other suburbs rather than in the District," says a Washington Post piece cited by DCist.

But this doesn't mean traffic problems are restricted to the suburbs. (Memo to DCist: Hell hath nothing on a summer Friday afternoon rush hour in Washington, D.C. proper.) Nor do suburbanites cause all traffic woes. A recent study of traffic congestion in New York City showed that most of the cars in the urbanites' path, it turns out, belong to other urbanites. According to regional traffic experts, "more than half the drivers who crowd into Manhattan each workday come from the five boroughs," the New York Times reported last week, graciously registering their shock that suburbanites are not to blame. "'There’s a lot of myths, and when you look at the data, the myths go pop, pop, pop, one by one,' said Bruce Schaller, a transportation consultant."

Nice Suburbs, If You Can Get There

2006-11-28T17:23:00.000-05:00

Business Week has released its list of the "25 Best Affordable Suburbs," a curious sort of beast that has no outright winner—no one, presumably, is going to up and move to a faraway suburb based on its ranking, as they must do in response to the Best Places to Retire or Best Cities to Live In. Instead, the list identifies the most appealing suburb in each of 26 metropolitan areas, from New York City to Iowa City, working with crime rates, cost of living, home prices and school stats. For a list of national scope, the 25 Best Burbs turns out to be frustratingly parochial.

What's stranger still is the monstrous chip the magazine wears on its shoulder about haute-suburbia: "For hedge-fund managers, plastic surgeons, corporate lawyers, and other people who earn millions a year, choosing a suburb is not about affordability but convenience and, frankly, prestige," snarls writer Mara Roney in her introduction to the list. Has convenience ever been made to sound so wretched? "Sure, you might own the cheapest house in a top suburb," she chastises suburban wannabes, "but is that really worth it?"

The correct answer, is No, nothing is worth living next to an Iowa City hedge-fund manager. The list, with its metro area in parentheses, follows:

Sandia Heights, N.M. (Albuquerque)
Roswell, Ga. (Atlanta)
Columbia, Md. (Baltimore)
Sharon, Mass. (Boston)
Mattews, N.C. (Charlotte)
Lake Zurich, Ill. (Chicago)
Evendale, Ohio (Cincinnati)
Flower Mound/Lewisville, TX. (Dallas)
Castle Rock, Colo. (Denver)
Weston, Fla. (Fort Lauderdale)
Sugarland, TX. (Houston)
Noblesville, Ind. (Indianapolis)
Coralville, Iowa (Iowa City)
Shawnee, Kan. (Kansas City)
Santa Clarita, Calif. (Los Angeles)
Lakeville, Minn. (Minneapolis-St. Paul)
Livingston, N.J., (Newark)
West Nyack, N.Y. (New York)
Elkhorn, Neb. (Omaha)
West Chester, Pa. (Philadelphia)
Folsom, CA. (Sacramento)
Kaysville, Utah (Salt Lake City)
Mukilteo, WA. (Seattle)
Saint Charles, Mo. (St. Louis)
Herndon, Va. (Washington)

Suburban Schools' Catch-22

2006-11-27T17:38:00.000-05:00

Public schools drive the suburban housing market: the better the schools, the higher the prices. But there's a catch: the better the schools, generally, the higher the taxes. "That's the whole point," says a suburban parent in a recent New York Times article (abstract only), "you pay the high taxes, but you get the good schools."

Except when you don't: the Times article tells the sad tale of families who moved to high-priced suburbs, only to find that the public schools are too crowded and too "bare-bones" for their kids, whom they drag back into the city to attend private schools, on a daily basis as commuters or by moving them back in.

But other recent reports say suburban public schools are anything but barebones. In the July/August issue of The American Enterprise, a former Wilmette, Ill., school board member says “spending on special programs, technology, and ‘enrichments’ actually crowds out time for math, reading, writing, geography, and history.” The magazine blames wealthy school board members acting in cahoots with unionized teachers to lower class size and upgrade extra-curricular programs, granting the parents prestige and the union more teaching spots.

Whether suburban public schools are too stripped down or too buffed, both the liberal Times and the conservative American Enterprise seem to agree that parents aren't getting their money's worth in the burbs, and that's more than a shame. "Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren studied bankruptcy filings in America," says one American Enterprise article. She found "that the biggest squeeze on middle- and upper-middle-class families came from high mortgage payments and escalating property taxes on homes in towns with desirable public schools."

The common sense solution may be to shop for housing in communities with low- to middling house prices, close to private schools. By saving on both mortgage and school taxes, you'll be able to afford a private school that delivers a solid education. Chances are, you'll get more house for your money, in an area that needs your renovation dollars.

It's the Suburbs, Stupid

2006-11-14T15:57:00.000-05:00

The suburbs have spoken, but last week's seeming rebuke to the GOP may not be the burbs last word. Despite the Republican's Suburban Agenda, promising attention to schools, college costs and other domestic matters, the suburbs were mostly responsible for the drubbing the GOP took. "A majority of the seats the party gained in taking control of Congress were either wholly or partly suburban," said Newsday columnist Lawrence C. Levy, pointing out that it was the first time the suburbs nationally didn't go Republican.

In Illinois, the suburban districts west of Chicago, historically strongly Republican, instead gave the Democrats a "supermajority" in the state Senate in Springfield. (The Illinois suburban GOP also lost, in the resignation of defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, a man whose career they jump-started in the early 1960s. But this story says they lost him long ago.)

In Washington state, "the drubbing was so complete that seats flipped in Spokane and traditionally Republican Puget Sound suburbs," reported the King County Journal. In New York, incumbent Sen. Hillary Clinton won in Long Island's rock-ribbed Republican suburbs, where she was tromped in 2000. In Massachusetts, governor-elect Deval Patrick scored his biggest wins in the tony burbs west of Boston.

But the Democrats, according to Levy, didn't lure suburbanites left as much as the GOPs presumed too much. Levy portrays the suburban rebellion as not an extreme reaction to either the war or the deficit, but a reaction against extremist politics. "Suburbanites are not anti-change, just anti-extremism of any stripe," he wrote. "They're not anti-government. Many people move here for more and better government services. And they're not anti-tax. They're willing to pay high taxes, to a point, if they feel they're getting good value."

And the suburbs may be growing more conservative. In Dallas, Republican judges lost last week not in the anti-Iraq tsunami, but because their conservative Anglo constituents have been moving out of the city to the suburbs, as they have in other southern cities. And in other places, a suburban/exurban split is developing. In Oregon, "Washington County … long-considered the state’s bellwether, seems to be trending blue, largely thanks to the explosive growth in its close-to-Portland suburbs over the last decade," reports the Gazette Times. Clackamas County, with its fast-growing exurbs—20 miles or more from downtown Portland—is still up for grabs, analysts from both sides say."

The fight for the suburbs, in other words, has just begun.

An Escort in Every Garage

2006-10-27T11:13:00.000-04:00

Much is being made of a new study about squeeze put on "working" families—those making $20,000 to $50,000 annually—by the high cost of transportation and the high cost of housing. As they are priced out of downtown living quarters, lower earners are finding the even the furthest suburbs are no relief: what they save in rent or mortgage they give right back in commuting. "A Heavy Load," by the Center for Housing Policy, "found that the costs of one-way commutes of as little as 12 to 15 miles … cancel any savings on lower-priced outer-suburban homes," wrote The Washington Post.

Fascinating but not surprising is how reactions to the study immediately bumped the problem up to the middle class. "It doesn't just apply to those earning between $20,000 and $50,000," Business Week's Douglas McMillen assured readers. Except for the rich, says McMillen, "moving from the city to the country no longer makes as much sense financially as it used to." The Washington Post article included a case study of a commuting couple in Sterling, Va., where the average income is $89,000.

Other outlets used the study to whomp the burbs over the head about improving their relatively poor public transportation, which theoretically would not only take pressure off the working class's wallets, but lighten traffic as well. DCist has suggestions about "backbone" and "feeder" systems that certainly make sense—as long as we can predict where the commuters are headed.

Since as many workers are now shuttling from suburb to suburb when they go from home to job and back, building traditional burb-to-town transportation lines may end up wasting money. Buses are more adaptable, but still require more density than the outer suburbs provide to be efficient. Perhaps these realities are why, besides stopping the flow of jobs to the suburbs and connecting existing sprawl, the new study's recommendations include reducing the cost of owning a car.

Reaching Equilibrium on the Commuter Rails

2006-10-17T14:54:00.000-04:00

The New York Times reports in this morning's edition that the New York City commuter line Metro-North no longer carries mostly Manhattan-bound working stiffs. With jobs moving to the suburbs and suburban roads increasingly clogged, the train system that connects Connecticut, suburban Westchester County and upstate New York to Grand Central Station in Manhattan only half of its riders now go to work in the city in the morning and travel back home at night. "Metro-North’s ridership is higher than it has ever been in the system’s 23-year history," says the Times, citing Metropolitan Transit Authority numbers. "But [non-traditional] categories of riders have grown at a much higher rate, including reverse commuters traveling to jobs north of the city, riders traveling between suburbs and day-trippers on shopping or sightseeing trips."

Blue in the Burbs

2006-10-17T13:55:00.000-04:00

Four suburban counties in Pennsylvania will dictate the fate of three congressmen in next month's elections, and perhaps the course of the next Congress. "If you see Democrats taking two of those three House seats, you’re looking at a Democratic House,"  Democratic strategist Paul Begala told Bloomberg News this week.

Think that's pure spin? Consider that in the past two weeks, the national Republicans, Democrats and interest groups like the National Rifle Association and the League of Conservation Voters have poured $6.4 million—almost one-sixth of their national spending—on those three races alone. In Florida, Illinois (reg.req.) and others locales, suburban voters will largely determine the makeup of congressional delegations and state legislators.

Early in this midterm election cycle, the suburbs were targeted as the key to winning the House. The GOP led the charge with their Suburban Agenda—a sort of Contract for America aimed at school- and safety-minded suburbanites—but the agenda never gained much traction, and late surges show Democrats edging Republicans in a number of traditionally "red" suburbs.

Going into the elections, Republican worries had to do with the flow of Democratic-leaning African-Americans and Hispanics out of cities into the suburbs the GOP had dominated for a generation and more. But polling since the campaigns heated up show that the Republicans are beset by their conservative positions on abortion and stem-cell research. Suburbanites are "leaning Republican on economic issues, but liberal on social issues," says Michael Hagen, director of the Institute for Public Affairs at Temple University in Philadelphia.

With the GOP's success at revving up the base in 2004 with ballot initiatives on gay marriage, Democrats have answered this year with ballot initiatives on stem-cells and the minimum wage, the latter a historic African-American cause, to bait blue suburbanites to the ballot box.

Spare the Suburbs, Spoil the Culture

2006-10-10T17:49:00.000-04:00

Over the weekend NPR used the new film "Little Children" to examine why the suburbs come out so badly in popular culture, and to suggest that "Desperate Housewives"-syndrome may have reached its peak. "There's a real packaged contempt for the suburbs," says Todd Fields, director of the movie, one that represents a certain kind of laziness on the part of artists. Fields believes, according to the story, that "using a suburban setting as a shorthand for alienation and repression reveals the smugly provincial limits of a culture industry centered in cities."

NPR reporter Neda Ulaby bathes in a few suburban clichés, citing the G.I. Bill utopias versus the dystopia of "uniformity, alcoholism, and adultery" of the mid-century burbs, and referring to "The Sopranos" as a "post-Enron" view of the suburbs—we're still working that one out—and "Little Children" as a corresponding "post-9/11" view. Culturally, neither 9/11 nor Enron belongs to the suburbs, of course, but to the country as a whole (and, if anything, to our cities). Tom Perrotta, who wrote the screenplay for "Little Children" as well as the novel on which it is based, calls the movie "less a suburban story than an American story," and suggests that "Maybe they are one and the same. The suburbs are the central American place."

Mammon for Us, God for Them

2006-10-04T14:18:00.000-04:00

The new owners of Lord & Taylor, the venerable department store whose Fifth Avenue flagship is a New York landmark, said they intend to close many downtown locations to concentrate on suburban shoppers. Some of the Manhattan store's 650,000 square feet will be turned into offices and apartments; Philadelphia's Lord & Taylor is already a Macy's, and the Watertower Place store near Chicago's Miracle Mile will soon be closed. The company, NRDC Equity Partners, says it prefers to focus on "residential neighborhoods in upscale lifestyle centers." Shoppers there, a spokesman said, are looking for an alternative to Nieman Marcus on the high end and Kohl's on the low.

Meanwhile a suburban Chicago institution is sending God downtown. The Willow Creek Community Church—a megachurch that is a landmark in its own, uh, rite in South Barrington, Ill.—has opened a downtown branch in Chicago's historic Auditorium Theater, holding its debut service last Sunday.

Rezoning the Party

2006-09-28T23:44:00.000-04:00

The fight for suburban votes this fall has begun to skew traditional party allegiances, especially for urban African-Americans. In Maryland, the Democratic candidates for statewide office hail mostly from suburban Montgomery and Prince George counties, adjacent to Washington, D.C. Even the Dems man for governor, Baltimore Mayor Martin O'Malley, says a local free weekly, The Gazette, "has practically earned frequent-flier miles touting his roots in voter-rich Montgomery." The party has been drawn by more than votes. The wealthy suburbs have more cash, which in the television era has replaced ward-by-ward organization that used to win elections.

For African-Americans, who have been Democratic mainstays for generations, picking a mostly suburban (and mostly white) slate seems like a betrayal. "The Democratic Party, despite all of its claims of being inclusive and liberal, has left its principal group of voters behind," former Prince George’s county executive Wayne K. Curry told the Gazette.

Black Flight in Austin

2006-09-18T17:42:00.000-04:00

In the Texas capital, East Austin is losing its character as the center of the city's African-American life. Stepping in to the breach are suburbs. "In the Austin area from 1990 to 2000, the percentage of black suburbanites grew at about twice the rate of growth of white suburbanites," says an article in the American-Statesman. The once-rural Pflugerville saw its African-American population more than double in that time. Black-owned and –oriented businesses are following, from hair salons to nightclubs.

The drain on the quality of life in East Austin sounds very much like the losses suffered by cities when white residents left in the '40s, '50s and '60s—the phenomenon known as "white flight." But though the article suggests that the exodus is due to gentrification spurred by rising housing prices and taxes, it also makes clear that, whatever their culture, Austinites come to the suburbs for the same reasons: better schools and more space.

Burbs, Unite!

2006-09-15T13:39:00.000-04:00

For a few years, Robert Puentes of the Brookings Institution has been preaching about the the need for "first suburbs" to work together. Increasingly, it seems, he has a choir. In New Jersey this week, two dozen mayors and other officials from some of the state's older suburbs gathered to discuss their common concerns and plan an formal association. "With growing social needs, reduced outside financial resources, and greater dependence on tax revenues," writes Gene Racz in Central Jersey's Home News Tribune, "older suburbs are struggling to fend for themselves, often competing with one another for limited funds." An association of first suburbs, it is hoped, will allow suburban towns to work together and unify their voice when arguing for changes in the state capitol.

In 2002, Puentes identified 64 counties across the country that contain first suburbs, communities that boomed after World War II, but now face many problems associated with urban decay. They are home to a fifth of the American population.

Suburban Country

2006-09-13T21:18:00.000-04:00

Suburbia has sent its spurs deep into Long Island, borne on the high price of housing in the New York area that long predated the recent national boom. But the sprawl has never eradicated Long Island’s rural population: Yankee fans in pickup trucks, Second Amendment supporters (spotted on a van’s wheel cover: "My wife yes, my dog maybe, my gun never"), and rednecks who pronounce it "Lawnguyland."

So it's not so surprising that Long Island could produce a country music star. Mindy Smith, whose sophomore album, "Long Island Shores," arrives next month ahead of critical acclaim, grew up in Nesconset. "Exit 56," she tells New York magazine, identifying herself as solidly mid-Island by naming her exit on the Long Island Expressway. But Smith’s upbringing sounds like she arose from cotton fields, not potato country—she sang weekends at the Nesconset Church of Christ, where her father was the minister—and her "sweetly aching soprano, says the (suburban) music blogger Andy Whitman, "reminds me of Emmylou before she lost her purity because of age and cigarettes."

Tammany Across the Potomac

2006-09-08T17:00:00.000-04:00

"McLean is the new Georgetown," The New Republic pronounces in a tone befitting the voiceover from "The DaVinci Code." The political mag's cover story this week (itself only available to registered users) calls the Washington, D.C. suburb "home of America's ruling class"—meaning, mostly, that top Republican Senators, White House aides and lobbyists live "in a leafy suburb among landmarks that neatly represent the modern GOP era: the McClean Bible Church ... the Saudi ambassador's personal compound ... and CIA headquarters."

Despite the heavy breathing, the article amounts to a workaday skewering of the real-estate boom, complete with shocking prices, lavish architectural details and fireplaces in master baths. The magazine puts no less of a figure than Jimmy Carter's national security director, 78-year-old Zbigniew Brzezinski, to work complaining about McMansions. Another resident calls the Bible Church "the Wal-Mart of churches."

A good line, but The New Republic also wants to imply that the suburban environment is somehow especially conducive to Republican political excesses and influence peddling. McLean's rise, however, hardly seems the stuff of conspiracy, given the GOP's strong suburban base (a point the article notes only in a throwaway dependent clause). The Republican revolution began in iconically suburban Orange County, Calif., and peaked in the triumph of Newt Gingrich, who represented the suburbs north of Atlanta. Not only are the Republicans politically suburb-oriented, they tend to live there; why would they suddenly take up city living?

If the Democrats retake the House this fall—a feat they'll only pull off if they win some key suburban races—we'll be watching to see if Georgetown is re-established as the nation's power precinct.

Look, Up in the Sky, It's SuperCommuter!

2006-09-06T21:54:00.000-04:00

Super-commutes are becoming more common as suburbs are flung farther from the city core, and the price of a home within reasonable distance of town keeps heading upward. But most super-commutes still only involve trains and automobiles. This piece in the Los Angeles Times concerns a trauma nurse who works 16-hour shifts in the Bay Area and commutes by plane (to the tune of 350 miles and $400 a month) to her home--her dream home, needless to say--in suburban Las Vegas.

A different kind of commuting--call it kindercommuting--is cropping up in Seattle. A Seattle Times article today profiles families who send their city kids to close-in suburbs for high school to avoid the overcrowding and violence that some Seattle schools suffer. The piece estimates that as many as 1,000 Seattle students are skipping town, including two dozen or so who commute by ferry to Vashon Island (above). The suburban schools get to be choosy--kids who are discipline problems are not accepted--and each transfer represents a vote of confidence in the education the suburban schools are providing. The transfers are not moneymakers for the receiving districts, however. For every out-of-towner,the suburban schools get only the state funds attached to a student, not the local levy.

"Weeds" Creator Discovers Suburban Ecstasy

2006-09-05T23:32:00.000-04:00

Could television be falling a little for the suburbs? The Baltimore Sun's Stephen Kiehl thinks he notices an appreciation for suburbia cropping up in the second season of "Weeds," Showtime's dark comedy about a suburban widow who turns to drug dealing to keep her family afloat. He even gets the show's creator, Jenji Kohan, to admit to a little suburb-envy when she's on location. "They're clean and they're safe and the gardens are very well-manicured," says Kohan, who lives in L.A. Given the antiseptic surroundings, people in the suburbs have to work harder to make life interesting, Kohan goes on to say, "and they do." (And not only by dealing pot, one assumes.)

While Kohan's admission is a kick in itself (up there with a "Weeds" writer's news last year that he'd never inhaled), it's not the warming trend Kiehl has in mind. What Kiehl detects in the new "Weeds" episodes is a sense of community imposed on suburbanites by their neighbors. In the suburbs, in other words, you don't pick your friends, but are forced to befriend your neighbors.

The Upside of a Down Market

2006-08-29T17:34:00.000-04:00

With each new day, we get another article bemoaning the end of the housing boom. Last weekend The Washington Post's Michael Grunwald explained why there are plenty of reasons to welcome a kinder, gentler, if slower, real-estate market. Writing about the nation's seeming allergy to affordable housing, Grunwald cites the 200,000 units of affordable rentals that are lost to the stampeding market every year. A slowdown in home prices should also slow the conversion of affordable homes to high-end rates.

It won't change deeper policy problems, however. While much of the affordable housing is evaporating from our cities, many of those who would fill it are headed for the suburbs, where the bulk of new jobs are being created. And most suburbs are not rising to the occasion. As Grunwald points out, zoning regulations in many locales are designed to preserve single-family homes. "Minimum lot requirements, minimum parking requirements, density restrictions and other controls," he writes, "go well beyond the traditional mission of the building code and end up artificially reducing the development of safe, affordable housing." Instead, the new suburban population either crams into unsuitable spaces in numbers breaking both fire codes and zoning laws, or commutes unconscionably long distances to affordable communities.

Grunwald commends Fairfax County, Va., for its "Penny for Housing" tax that takes a cent from each dollar of property taxes to fund affordable housing. The county has also built housing for emergency workers like firefighters and nurses. But these measures are a drop in the bucket. It's time, says Grunwald, for localities to ease zoning regulations so that the market can direct higher-density, cheaper housing to the places that make the most sense for everyone. This can only happen if politicians, says Grunwald, "rediscover housing—not as an urban poverty issue, but as a middle-class quality-of-life issue, like gas prices or health care."

Love Your Neighbor(hood)

2006-08-21T21:32:00.000-04:00

At the heart of many critiques of suburban life is a critique of the suburbs' soul--or the lack one. So books like "The Suburban Christian" by Albert Hsu, an editor at Intervarsity Press, are more pertinent than its parochial title may suggest. Devout Christians are particularly out of sorts in the suburbs; the emphasis on prosperity and acquisitiveness is the opposite of the Christian ideal of service and sacrifice. But suburban values concern faithful and secular suburbanites alike. And Hsu, who grew up in Bloomington, Minn., has a native son's affection for malls and megachurches that moves him to look for real, and sometimes surprising solutions.

Hsu's respect for the suburbs sets him apart from other Christian takes on the burbs, like Dave Goetz's fizzy "Death By Suburb: How to Keep the Suburbs from Killing Your Soul," published earlier this year, which seemed to draw its moral situations from soap-opera suburbs. Hsu also distinguishes himself from heavy-hitting academic and media prognosticators by having a little, well, faith in the suburbs.

The suburbs, in Hsu's vision, ought to be more than neatly arranged nodes of convenience. "Instead of the job being the lead factor [in where you live], how about having community be the decisive factor. ... Choose your community, live there, work there, worship there and minister there." Hsu wants us to be intentional about where we live, and not abstractly. Investing ourselves in the physical place, in Hsu's vision, can be a route to spiritual investment. He is tempted by the idea of ditching single family homes, with their impractical land use and outsized mortgages, in favor of suburban-futurist ideas about "sixplexes," where one house holds six families with a common kitchen and living areas (New Urbanists: how's that for density?), or private homes surrounded by communal land.

Hsu presents the shortcomings of his own Christian community too, warning that megachurches—Christian mallls that entice suburban parishioners with shopping, entertainment and worship—risk becoming the culture they seek to change. Worried that suburban Christians are too comfortable, he wants them to turn back to the cities they have left to experience hardship and suffering and help heal it.

At times, Hsu allows the suburbs to stand for too many of the ills of our current culture, overemphasizing the racial and economic homogeneity or portraying materialism too strictly as a suburban phenomenon. And too much of the book is taken up with statistics and trends any newspaper reader (or pew denizen) will have already absorbed. Both these sins are available in nearly any current treatise on the suburbs. What you won't always find are Hsu's optimism and exhortation to positive action.

Speaking of High Gas Prices, and the Best Outside of Phillly

2006-08-18T15:44:00.000-04:00

A discussion on PhillyBlog.com's thriving "Burbs" forum is a good starting point for exploring how oil and gas hikes do affect surbubanites. Some on the forum say they have saved as much as $900 a month by moving back onto city transit lines, but one contributor writes, "I drove 300 miles today. This trip cost me $3.50 more than it would have cost months ago, and my car is a gas hog which runs on premium." Still another cites urban planner Joel Kotkin's op-ed from May, suggesting that, whatever the real cost of car commuting, suburbanites won't likely move into the city to be closer to their jobs, since their jobs, for the most part, are in the suburbs.

Another thread on the same forum asks: Which is the best—and worst—Philadelphia suburbs? In 15 pages of responses, the favorites, by our informal count, are Media, in Pennsylvania, and Collingswood on the New Jersey side, with Jenkintown, Pa. a close runner-up. Bensalem gets roundly booed.

Interestingly, many upscale towns like Wayne, Pa., are dissed and many lower-class places are given high marks. What earned a suburb high marks? One poster sums it up: "City shopping and density for a couple blocks, suburban homes for the rest."

Oh Well! Suburbs Were Great While They Lasted

2006-08-18T14:33:00.000-04:00

In a piece so mercilessly grim and certain of its premises that it's worth a read, Paul Harris of England's newspaper The Observer explains that the jig is up for "America's Eden." Harris leans heavily on doomsayer James Howard Kunstler, author of the "Long Emergency," who, Harris points out, "postulates the end of suburbia." In drawing up his schedule of catastrophy, Harris exhibits a natural way with hyperbole, suggesting that the bump in oil prices "threatens a way of life where pavements [sidewalks] are rare and everyone moves by car." This, and the much-prognosticated collapse of home prices, inspire language once reserved for nuclear holocaust and Soviet world domination. "Those warning of a coming crisis believe suburbia's economic collapse would force a rethink of the fundamentals of the American way of life."

Near the end of his piece, Harris hedges his bets. Before introducing "Sprawl" author and suburb defender Robert Bruegmann, Harris sportingly admits, "Most Americans have still chosen to live [in the suburbs], which leads some to believe predictions of a crisis are overblown." But that's not half as fun a story as postulating the end of suburbia.

Share the Bliss

2006-08-15T16:56:00.000-04:00

It's difficult to find homegrown websites about the suburbs that don't present them as existential wastelands full of bad restaurants, kidney-shaped coffee tables and Twister parties, then proceed to savage the suburban lifestyle. An exception is Suburban Bliss, a blog by a homemaker and mother of two in Indiana named Melissa Summers. Sarcastic, honest, and more than occasionally profane, Summers covets the houses and swim clubs of others, alternately idolizes and detests her husband and generally kvetches about life in a way we can relate to. "I swear to you I have gotten better about spending money," she wrote a few months ago. "I'm so careful now. I watch every cent and I now realize there is no such thing as 'just $20' and I realize going to Target is a dangerous endeavor I should try to avoid." Share the addiction here.

A Gay Revolution the Suburban Way

2006-08-11T11:31:00.000-04:00

The Nutbush, a gay bar in Forest Park, Ill., outside Chicago, celebrated its 30th anniversary last month. The bar is as revolutionary for its unremarkable anonymity as other urban gay bars, like Manhattan's Stonewall, once were for their scenes of intolerant violence. Even as the Nutbush has become accepted, with its own dart team in the local bar league, it continues to serve as an oasis for newly "out" men and women as well as, in the words of one patron, much more: "This is where I get a mortgage. This is where we buy a house or a car. Somebody wants to take a trip to Honduras or Cancun, we've got guys who are travel agents. This is family. We keep it in the family."

This Week's Dire Prediction About Home Prices

2006-08-09T14:54:00.000-04:00

Time magazine this week finds house sellers in denial, refusing to drop prices despite the media's insistence that the bubble has popped. "The nation's median home price is still up 0.9% this year, to $231,000," Time says. "But that stat is misleading. There's a stalemate between buyers and sellers: property owners are reluctant to cut prices, and buyers are patrolling from the sidelines, hoping for fire sales."

What the piece doesn't point out is that stable median home price means that, by and large, the sellers are winning. The story also offers tolerable-to-good stats: David Lereah, chief economist for the National Association of Realtors is quoted as saying "he'll probably cut his forecast for price growth from 5 percent to 4 percent this year"—hardly a bust, but the story puts this figure in its litany of bad news.

The story also deploys puzzingly bright anecdotes to illustrate the agony of today's seller. "Some sellers figure they're lucky to be getting out," Time says, telling the tale of a Navy officer who sold a four-bedroom home in San Diego for $476,000 after spending $7,000 on the kitchen and dropping the price by $18,000. But a little math shows that even with the improvements, the poor guy cleared nearly $200,000 on a house he owned for four years. This kind of bubble we can live with.

Towns Take Their Cut of the Real-Estate Boom

2006-08-08T21:50:00.000-04:00

Seeming ever on the watch for reasons to bemoan the fate of the suburbs, The New York Times prospected a story from property-tax data showing that taxes have outpaced incomes for most of the decade, nowhere more than in the Times own tri-state region. The story explains that income and property taxes are related issues, since one or the other must provide revenues to pay for schools and other local costs. In the financial capital of New York, the stock market slowdown of 2000 robbed brokers and other traders of income taxed by the states of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. Without those revenues, the states cuts school aid, leaving local municipalities no choice but to raise taxes. The biggest tax bulge was 41 percent in Somerset County, N.J., where income went up only 5 percent from 2000 to 2004.

There are some subtleties the Times misses. School costs, whether paid by the state or towns, have been rising precipitously during the period the story examines, due to higher healthcare costs for teachers, unpolled immigrants and the price of special education. Politics have also played a part: during a 40-year reign by Republicans in Long Island's Nassau County, where the story cites a 29 percent jump in property taxes from 2000 to 2004, tax hikes were blasphemy. Only when the state stepped in to end the county's financial crisis did legislators finally order a new property-tax assessment, which raised taxes countywide.

Accompanying the Times tax story was this tale of a poor little rich rapper.

Strawberry Fields Forever?

2006-08-01T22:35:00.000-04:00

The story is an old one, common to many onetime rural communities, but in Carlsbad, Calif., the decision over whether to turn over farmland to developers is particularly wrenching. The citizens of Carlsbad could face a choice this November between two ballot initiatives, each of which will determine the fate of more than 300 acres of land traditionally planted with strawberries and wildflowers. The Flower Fields in particular are considered an institution in Carlsbad and their Spring blooms are listed alongside Legoland as one of the town’s nearby attractions.

Much of the land is owned by the local utility company, SDG&E, which had planned to allow developers to build a hotel complex on part of the land until members of the city council put forward a plan to rezone the fields to prevent it. A competing plan has proposed a city takeover that would allow the fields to be developed as public space. But an economic study requested by the council released last week said that stopping development would force Carlsbad to pay the current owners for the land, and would cost the city $30 million, including lost tax revenues, each year. The backers of the original initiative say rezoning the land as agricultural would not require the city buy a single acre. The city council votes tonight on whether to put the second initiative on the ballot.

This Week's Dire Prediction About Home Prices

2006-07-27T10:55:00.000-04:00

When the National Association of Realtors says the housing market is crashing, can there be any doubt? A new report from the NAR on June's homes sales spurred an especially sober round of prognostication yesterday about the supposed popping of the real-estate bubble. “Housing has had a great five-year run,” sighed one expert in The New York Times, whose story, like many across the country, cites the building inventory of unsold homes, and a one percent dip in the rate of home sales compared to last June, as evidence that "the housing industry appears to be moving from a boom to something that is starting to look a lot like a bust."

The NAR's report is actually more optimistic than any of the press reports let on—but then the realty industry naturally keeps its chin up in the darkest of times. The data does contain some genuine cheer. Though the pace of single-family home sales fell, the decline in the number of houses that sold was not as steep as the NAR had predicted, and the national figures hide some significant regional differences. The rate of existing home sales dropped the most in the West, off 17 percent compared to last June, and that was not enough to shake the average price of a home, which stayed even at $342,000. In the Northeast, despite a slowing of 3.5 percent, existing home prices actually rose more than seven percent.

Existing home sales don't help the building industry, which is clearly overextended. It's no coincidence that the Times begins it dour tale by citing the giveaways developers are forced to come up with to sell their product. (Our favorite desperate developers' perk is the community water park.) There's no doubt that those who treat houses as commodities, whether mass builders or individual investors, need to weather a down market. The rest of us should avert our eyes whenever real-estate stories rear their heads.

Suburbs Unsafe for the Combat Ready

2006-07-25T15:34:00.000-04:00

Congressional Republicans have tried to engage certain voters with their "Suburban Agenda," a package of legislation focused on college loans, public schools, children's safety and other close-to-home issues. This Washington Post article suggests suburbanites are looking further afield. In several of this fall's tighthttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifest congressional races, incumbents in suburban districts are in trouble because they supported the Iraq war, and in Illinois a female helicopter pilot who lost her legs in Iraq is threatening to take an open seat now held by retiring GOP dean Henry Hyde.

Since the Vietnam Era, the suburbs have been counted as the bedrock of "The Silent Majority," that segment of the population who are too busy (or self-absorbed) to turn out for political causes, but who tacitly support the current administration. The Iraq War has brought the fight out in the suburbs, however. This year July Fourth saw demonstrations, often led by that species of generic American called the "suburban mom" deep in the heartland. Nowhere is the trend more surprising, perhaps, than in Westchester County, the leafy suburban district north of Manhattan that sent six full buses to anti-war marches three years ago, and the home of , a protest group that holds weekly rave-ups opposing the war.

Hard Words About Suburban Hipsters

2006-07-25T13:46:00.000-04:00

When we heard that Urban Outfitters was making its big move into suburban malls and Main Streets, we resisted making grand statements about a broader cultural shift. Selling urban hip in the suburbs didn't make the suburbs hip, after all. Now comes some hard numbers—fittingly, from Mike's Hard Lemonade--that "suburban cocktail culture" has overtaken city clubbing among our nation's young people. A survey conducted for the makers of the bottled alcoholic drink found that "78% of American adults now say going to a BBQ and get-together in the suburbs is more fun than going out to bars and clubs in the city. And it's not just suburbanites that feel that way -- 72% of adults living in urban environments say so as well."

While we suspect that "the suburban cocktail culture" is a confection akin to Mike's new "mike-arita," which seems to have spurred the survey, it's no surprise that young urbanites are more fond of gathering around a Hibachi than club-hopping: urban-hip as they may be, the majority of Americans under 30 grew up in the suburbs--the first generation for whom that is true—and backyard entertaining makes them feels at home.

Last Round for Cul-de-Sacs?

2006-07-24T20:53:00.000-04:00

Have cul-de-sacs hit a dead end? People who live in these polyp-shaped, elegantly named "courts" love them for their quiet and neighborly charm, and developers like the way they maximize space for building. But town planners are increasingly trying to discourage cul-de-sacs, since the extra houses make more cars dependent on fewer through streets. Ninety percent of Oregon cities have outlawed them, according to this story from the McClatchy News Service, and Minnesota officials are also moving against them. Other northern states are expected to follow, and for good reason: one of the biggest headaches of cul-de-sacs is where to plow the snow in winter.

Hello, Young Buyers!

2006-07-21T11:35:00.000-04:00

Amid concern on New York's Long Island that the real-estate boom has priced out young couples and families, Newsday throws down an article showing how many 20-somethings have managed to buy a place of their own. The heart of the piece is the data, often cited here, showing that Gen-Y has become a large part of the suburban housing market. "The homeownership rate for people under age 25 jumped from 19.3 percent in 1982 to 23.6 percent as of the first quarter 2006," it says, citing U.S. census reports. "For buyers between the ages of 25 and 29, the homeownership rate rose from 38.6 percent to 41.0 percent for the same time period." Behind the trend is the increased safety of loaning to untried borrowers, thanks to improved tools for measuring who's a risk, and the emergence of the secondary mortgage market, which allows small banks to reduce their exposure by selling their mortgages to bigger institutions. Another help are piggyback loans—mostly in the form of home-equity loans—that allow cash-poor buyers to finance 100 percent of the cost of their new homes.

But the 20-somethings in the article say affording a home means more than being savvy about credit. "Things will definitely be tighter," says a 26-year-old homeowner, "It's going to be a lot of tuna fish in the beginning."

The Newsday story includes a 5-point sidebar on smart home investing.

This Week's Dire Prediction About Home Prices

2006-07-20T11:55:00.000-04:00

Here's the riddle of the current real-estate market, as reported this week by the Los Angeles Times: In California's San Bernadino County, the number of homes sold is down 14 percent from this time last year. The price of a home, however, is up by the same percentage. In Ventura, the market is bailing, moving 24 percent fewer homes than this time last year, but the price of a home is up more than 7 percent. Only in San Diego has growing inventory brought the median price of a home down, by one percent compared to last July's numbers. With supply growing, the question is, why aren't prices falling faster?

One answer is that sellers aren't desperate enough to drop prices. It's impossible to tease motivation out of sales data, but the opposing market vectors suggest that many sellers aren't selling out of necessity. They have been lured into the market by the high prices and they have a number in mind. The price they can get for their current house, therefore, is driving the pace of sales, not the other way around. Another answer is that the inventory of homes hasn't reached true downturn proportions. It would take less than six months to sell off all the properties on the SoCal market today. While this is twice what it was two years ago, one analyst put it this way: " "We're getting closer to a normal market." And that's still a good thing.

The enigma wrapped inside the realty riddle is that builders keep adding to the housing market at an alarming rate. Earlier in the week, the Times ran this article, about the rampant, disturbing but altogether classic, development trend in the Antelope Valley, northeast of L.A.

Green Acres

2006-07-19T21:52:00.000-04:00

New suburban development historically claims small farms, contributing to a movement away from the land. But two recent stories show how traditionally rural activities are adapting to suburban encroachment. Near Fort Wayne, the 4-H Club, which has taught farm kids their parents' business for generations, is expanding the range of topics for members' projects to include robotics and small-animal husbandry. West of Boston, backyard livestock is catching on among suburban moms as a way of making sure their families are eating wholesome, organic eggs and meat. "Hens are one of the few animals you can have in a suburb without much work," a Needham resident tells the MetroWest Daily News. Authorities are concerned the trend will create under-the-radar pockets where bird flu could fester and grow. But for now, the main downside may be the amount of quiche the microfarmers are forced to eat to keep up with their layers.

How the Automobile Changed Hyphenated America

2006-07-18T21:45:00.000-04:00

While most of the stories on immigration in the burbs this year have focused, like the debate in Congress, on illegal immigrant laborers, the Associated Press taps into the other way the suburbs are growing more diverse: highly educated middle-class immigrants from India and other south Asian countries. Long Island, N.Y.'s Newsday ran the AP tale of Indian tech workers clustered around Albany and other upstate New York cities. Like any suburban transplants, they pass up city life for better schools and more space. Like other immigrants they come to suburbs because that's where the jobs are. Like previous generations of self-exiles, they try to preserve their culture, but not always, as with urban immigrants, by living in enclaves. Dish-TV allows the Tamil family in the AP story to keep up with home news, while the automobile allows the south Asian community to spread itself across the entirety of New England: the Albany Hindu temple's 130 worshippers include some who drive from as far away as Burlington, Vt.

Hill No Longer Overlooks Suburbs

2006-07-17T16:50:00.000-04:00

Columnist Morton Kondracke tracks the rise of the GOP's "Suburban Agenda," a legislative package spearheaded by Illinois Republican congressman Mark Kirk. Kirk's essential insight is that congressional Democrats are focused on city voters, whether the uptown elite or the downtown minorities, while the conservative Republican ascendancy is based in the rural South; the great mass of suburban voters, Kirk says, are there to be claimed by the party that addresses their concerns about school safety (the first bill to pass in the agenda was a background check on public school new hires), college costs, and preservation of open spaces. That these voters have already been the focus of the past several electoral seasons as "soccer moms" and "soccer dads" seems to go unnoticed, but we've been following the progress of the Suburban Agenda and will continue to do so.

When Is a Suburb Not a Suburb?

2006-07-15T11:02:00.000-04:00

Seattlest, the blog about Seattle, faces the question: Is a suburb that is no longer dependent economically on its city, that has broken the 100,000 population mark and is the fifth largest city in the state, still a suburb?

The debate about Bellvue originated on Wikipedia, which gives this list of suburban communities with at least 100,000 residents.

Mesa, Arizona (Phoenix)
Elk Grove, California (Sacramento)
Henderson, Nevada (Las Vegas)
Paradise, Nevada (Las Vegas)
North Las Vegas, Nevada (Las Vegas)
Hialeah, Florida (Miami)
Aurora, Colorado (Denver)
Lakewood, Colorado (Denver)

Meanwhile, Back to the Ranch

2006-07-14T15:51:00.000-04:00

For years, the hottest architectural style in the shelter magazines has been Midcentury Modern, the glass and steel boxes of the 1940s, '50s and '60s that today embody the retro gleam of the Space Age but accommodate the open, Zen-calm interior high-end designers prefer today. Examples have shown up prominently in the movies (see the Richard Neutra house that starred in 2001's "The Anniversary Party") and they are glorified in their own magazine with its winking ironic name, Atomic Ranch.

A more recent, and more shocking, trend is the reprise of the lower order of ranch—brick or sided single-level or split-level homes that populated the suburbs from the '60s on—that has long been the very image of suburban bland bad taste. The first inkling of this development came a dozen years ago, when the markethttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif in Long Island's East End became so tight that dumpy-looking G.I. Bill ranches were being spruced up as Hamptons getaways. Another milestone was Princeton, N.J. interior designer and architect Bruce Norman Long's transformation of a traditional ranch near New Hope, Penn. Long replaced the living room's plate glass with a row of vertical windows and added columns around the front door.

But trendy buyers have no interest in masking the true nature of these suburban staples. Instead, they are decorating with period furniture, preserving their linoleum, cork walls and other original materials, and generally treating them as antiques. "The Ranch has not only survived," say the authors of "Updating Classic America: Ranches", "it's on its way to timelessness."

Catch a Rising Star

2006-07-13T22:09:00.000-04:00

The New Yorker's post-mortem on the United States' World Cup soccer team includes a oafish sideswipe at suburban soccer programs. Over in Gelsenkirchen for the U.S.-Czech Republic game, the magazine's legal affairs writer Jeffrey Toobin is awed by Czech striker Jan Koller ("no one has quite the same combination of graceful athleticism and lurid menace...") and falls to bemoaning the lack of similar balletic brawn on the American team. The fault is somehow to be found in the suburbs. Toobin's article wants to convince us that "soccer in America can't quite transcend its suburban roots." He continues, "Soccer in the suburbs serves mostly as a bridge between Barney and Nintendo; it's a pleasant diversion, not a means of developing brutes like Jan Koller, to say nothing of the magicians who stock the Brazilian team."

The founding generation of any sport in this country has never, however, come from the suburbs--at least, not yet. A young sport is generally populated by the hyphenated Americans of the middling classes first, minorities or the sons and grandsons of immigrants: in the 1920s and '30s, the glory days of of Major League Baseball was keyed by Italian-Americans like Joe and Dom DiMaggio or German-Americans like Lou Gherig. Today, the explosion of Hispanic immigrants, from countries where soccer is a treasured sport, nearly guarantees that the United States will eventually bear its soccer stars. Hispanic soccer associations, often run by churches like the Irish and Italian CYO Leagues of an earlier generation, are already operating in many places. Established suburban leagues are already looking to draw talent from those leagues.

As it happens, unlike the urban champs of old, who grew up playing inner-city sandlot ball or boxing in city gyms, these Hispanic soccer worthies are likely to come out of the suburbs, where their parents gravitated to as the nation's biggest job growth areas. Toobin may be right that the Nintendo playing suburban sector will never produce a Ronaldinho, but a suburban soccer star is almost certainly being
born or made as we speak.

The New Yorker hasn't put Toobin's story online. It can be found in the July 3 issue of the magazine.

An Inconvenient Truth

2006-06-27T12:53:00.000-04:00

The New York Times tells the story of one suburbanite's battle against the injustices of immigration as they play out on his block in Elmont, on the Nassau/Queens border on Long Island. Patrick Nicolosi is an idealist posing as a realist: he wants immigration and housing laws enforced strictly, in order to keep a lid on school taxes, which have risen 57 percent in four years to accommodate, in part, illegal immigrant families. The article does a good job of showing how the injustices cut several ways, and of portraying the divided sympathies of the neighborhood—which was first settled by European immigrants last century. If the point of the piece is the fruitlessness of trying to solve the immigration problem one block at a time, it also impartially shows the frustrations of homeowners who want to keep the suburban nature of their neighborhoods intact.

Dropping Out of Sight

2006-06-26T17:09:00.000-04:00

According to the the Brookings Institution, exurban sprawl shows no sign of stopping. Matching data from the 2000 census with building permits issued since, the Brookings researchers found growth patterns, predictably, in the South and West, where new McMansions are eating up former farm and ranchlands.

The second-day story was more interesting, and perhaps more hopeful, despite the somber headlines than ran atop them: "U.S. Losing Its Middle-Class Neighborhoods" said The Washington Post. Buried in its tale of the rich getting richer and the poor poorer was this mysterious line: "The Brookings study says that much more research is needed to better understand why middle-income neighborhoods are vanishing faster than middle-income families." Could a clue be found in what the study called "increasing heterogeneity in some neighborhoods"? Is it possible that some of those missing middle-class families are ending up in marginal suburban neighborhoods?

The anecdotal evidence has been building for some time that younger homebuyers—and homebuyers are getting younger all the time—are ardent gentrifiers. Marketing studies from building supply companies like Andersen Windows and Doors say Gen Y is looking for homes with architectural character, avoiding McMansions and the pristine newer exurbs they grew up in. Gen Y might also be called Gen DIY: they like to remodel and refurbish, say the big box stores.

In many places, as the Post story notes, suburban buyers are undoubtedly running to far-off exurbs for more space and quiet. But as the experts, these abdicators might be better described as newly affluent, not solidly middle-class. It bears checking to see if young middle-earners might be dropping off the radar by dropping down a rung for a home they can afford to love.

The Drive Time Belt

2006-06-22T12:13:00.000-04:00

The costliest place to commute by car is Atlanta, according to Sperling's Best Places, a research company, who based its study on the expenses of households where two people drive to work. Atlanta, whose residents pay $5,772 annually to sit in morning traffic, beat out the traditional winner, Los Angeles, as did six other southern cities. In all, eight of the top ten costliest commuting cities are in the Southeast, including four in Florida: Orlando, Jacksonville, Pensacola and Cape Coral.

'Real-Estate Agents, Wake Up!'

2006-06-21T10:40:00.000-04:00

On Gather.com, a fan of California's historic bungalows—and self-confessed open-house addict—rants against real-estate agents who don’t know the architectural value of the homes they are selling. "I've heard agents counsel prospective buyers that beautiful red oak interior trim would be 'livened up by a coat of Varithane'," Moe Hong writes, or that colored mylar can "create a stained-glass effect in a 1909 Spanish Revival home." Hong urges the nation's Realtors, "learn a bit about the local architectural tradition, and don't rely on what you've picked up by osmosis to sell houses. You may be only in it for the money, but you are the guardians of your own town's architectural heritage."

Where the Jobs Are

2006-06-20T10:28:00.000-04:00

More than half of the immigrant population in the Chicago metropolitan area now lives in the suburbs, according to a study by professors at the city's Roosevelt University. Immigrants follow jobs, and James Lewis and Rob Paral at the university's Institute for Metropolitan Affairs say most new jobs are in the suburbs. Between 1990 and 2000, their study says, immigrants increased their share of suburban jobs to 17 percent from 10 percent.

Today's Dire Prediction About McMansion Prices

2006-06-16T12:55:00.000-04:00

The Wall St. Journal leads today's Weekend Journal (subscription required) with a big article on the McMansion Glut. Like most phenomena with catchy names, this one bears scrutiny. The article's point is that as Baby Boomers mature and heating prices rise, the real-estate market is trending toward smaller homes. As a result, the inventory of gaudy, overlarge domiciles is growing against lower demand and poor McMansionnaires are having to cut prices. One family cited in the article had to toss a life-size Spiderman statue and a dog bowl into the deal to get their Loudon, Va., house sold.

There are a couple of holes in the Journal's logic. The shift to smaller homes as been going on for well over a year, predating the serious rise in fuel prices. And if Boomers are downsizing, their children are just gearing up for their childbearing, income-producing years, as this week's Harvard study on real-estate prices points out. (The good news for the suburbs seems to be that those Boomer-babies are buying older homes in the inner-ring burbs.)

No doubt McMansions are stacking up on the market. (Memo to WSJ: all kinds of houses are.) But according to brokers, a cooling realty market often pushes buyers away from overblown architecture (the Journal shows a Phoenix pile with landscaping fit for a waterpark) toward more conventional colonials, tudors and even modernist boxes. And when you do the math, even the homeowners who gave up Spidey aren't doing so bad: they cut their price from $1 million to $820,000, after buying the house for $515,000 six years ago. That's an average of more than nine percent a year on their money. Where were they get that return on investment?

The Real Estate Journal has a seeming companion story on Microhouses, the anti-McMansions.

Threat to the Ash Spreads in Midwest

2006-06-15T17:20:00.000-04:00

The Emerald Ash Borer, an insect already responsible for the destruction of 15 million trees in Michigan, has been spotted near Chicago, in a leafy subdivision called Windings of Ferson Creek, in exburban Kane County. Believed to have come from China in wooden packing crates, the ash borer was first discovered in the Detroit suburbs in 2002. Illinois is the fourth Midwestern state to report a sighting, along with Ontario province in Canada.

The loss of trees in Michigan already puts the ash borer ahead of last decade's scourge, the Asian longhorned beetle. Arborists fear the bright green borer's destruction will outpace Dutch Elm disease, which all but eradicated that species beginning in the 1950s. Ashes are thought to make up at least six percent of the Midwest's tree population.

The adult borer nibbles only leaves, doing relatively little harm. The bug's larvae, however, eat their way through the bark, killing the tree over two to three years. Leaving smaller holes higher up the tree than Asian beetles, borers are harder to detect. The adult found in Kane County this week was trapped in a spider web.

Drenching the soil at an infested tree's base with Bayer Advanced Garden Tree and Shrub Insect Control can stop the borer, as can implanting insecticide "bullets" below a tree's bark. But arborists are preparing for the worst, gathering healthy seeds of the four main varieties of ash to replant in case grown trees vanish from our woods and streets.

Reorienting the Strip Mall

2006-06-14T21:48:00.000-04:00

Johnson, Arkansas may sound a bit remote to serve as the cradle for a suburban architectural revolution, but at the American Institute of Architecture's national convention in Los Angeles last week, Marlon Blackwell's Srygley Office Building in Johnson, near Fayetteville, was honored as "a wonderful argument to banal suburban office parks." Blackwell is recognized internationally, but his best-known buildings are in the South, and he has gained a reputation as an architect-laureate of the Ozarks. (His modernist redesign of Arkansas House in the state's northwest corner was also cited in L.A.) He is fond of "plunking down industrial-strength structures in these bucolic settings," according to ID magazine, which made him one of their young architects to watch in 1995.

His strip-mall building in Johnson is a vaulting box of concrete and corrugated metal with a bent for nature. It turns its back on traffic to face a creek, with native grasses planted where cars are normally parked. In the two-story wing of the building, shown above, employees can cook, relax and take in views of the wooded scene from two decks. Most suburban buildings, don't make use of where they sit, he says. "They're boilerplate buildings plopped down on site."

This Week's (Less Dire) Prediction About Housing Prices

2006-06-13T17:36:00.000-04:00

Divorce, porous borders and a gradual slowdown of the U.S. economy: all good news for home owners and bad news for those waiting for a crash in real-estate prices before buying their dream homes. So says a Harvard study reported by today's Financial Times. Harvard's study—one of those data-mulching reports that valiadate backyard barbecue scuttlebutt—concludes housing prices are likely to stay high, though slower sales will calm the frenzied speculation and double-digit percentage profits that characterized the past few years. It seems that "accelerated household formation"--increasing fracturing of family units—is helping to drive demand for houses, as is the rise in financial fortunes of the enormous immigrant influx of the '90s, who are finally in a position to buy their stake in the American Dream.

The disappointment in the Financial Times's article is nearly palpable. "The Harvard study concedes that a slowing housing market could take a heavy toll on growth, as Americans become less able to use their houses as ATM machines," it notes, but even a slowdown has a silver lining: "This could help rebalance the US economy, reducing demand for imports and so stemming the growth of the trade deficit."

Big Bang for Suburban Gangs

2006-06-10T23:08:00.000-04:00

For years gang problems have hidden in the suburban small towns, because their crimes were spread across various jurisdictions. In burbs dominated by established white residents, locals assumed gangs drew only Hispanics and other minorities and were therefore a transient problem. Increasingly, though, suburban gangs are gaining footholds in suburban high schools, attracting white teenagers, including girls--a development guaranteed to get suburbanites' attention.

Accordingly, suburban officials are educating themselves about gangs whose names are well known to urban law enforcement, talking with state police and cooperating among themselves to identify and fight gang activity. In Westchester, north of Manhattan, last week, a seminar on "Gangs in a Suburban Community" drew county bosses,teachers, police and youth workers to hear local law enforcement describe the signs of gang infiltration, including "hand signs, graffiti, tattoos, mysterious bruises and a stark change in attitude" toward education, parents and violence, according to a Mount Vernon, N.Y., detective. He was joined by former gang members who urged them to find ways to engage teens in after-school programs, judged the best way to keep them out of gangs.

In Massachusetts, where small cities outside of Boston like Lynn and Lawrence have had active gangs for years, the state police are concerned that gangs are broadening their area of activity and are already cracking down. A conference held in Topsfield in Essex County will address how local and state authorities can work better
together.

Saving the Dinosaurs

2006-06-09T16:29:00.000-04:00

As yesterday's post shows, suburbs and their cities relate like parents and children. In some places, the children are grown and still living at home. In others, the parents are moving in with the kids. In Milwaukee, the parents are looking for a little financial help in their old age.

As the population, and attendant tax revenues, have moved to the burbs, older cities are having a hard time keeping up parks, zoos, arts complexes and other attractions that, they argue, benefit surburban residents as much as downtowners. A study group Milwaukee commissioned to look for solutions suggested a regional "cultural" sales tax that would sustain the Marcus Center for the Performing Arts, the Milwaukee Public Museum (above) and Art Museum, and Milwaukee County's parks.

Milwaukee isn't the first to discuss a regional tax. New York City used to charge suburbanites a commuter tax to defray transit expenses. A 0.1 percent sales tax tacked onto retail purchases in the Denver area helps foot the bill for the city's botanical garden, a zoo, and two area museums. Other cities, including Detroit, are looking at similar solutions.

So far, suburban county officials in Wisconsin have said no, suggesting instead that the state prop up wobbly cultural institutions, or, says the Waukesha County executive, make them pay for themselves or close—an ultimatum Waukeshans offered their public-funded nursing home. If you're willing to put your own old folks on an ice flow, you're more than happy to do it to your city.

Breaking Up Is Hard to Do

2006-06-08T11:34:00.000-04:00

In Canada, Montreal city officials are engaged in a nearly impenetrable squabble with several surrounding towns, after the towns were spun off into proper suburbs. The fight, which has been going on for months, centers on accusations by the de-merged towns' mayors that Montreal has overcharged them for city services.

Suburban expansion has created the same problems to the south. The nabobs of Nashville, Tenn., are trying to force 10 suburban cities to pay more for the sewer service they buy from the city. Those towns, in return, are saying that Nashville needs to measure their flow better to make sure the suburbs don't end up footing the bill for city residents.

There's more than one way to stop the financial drain of clinging suburbs, however. Indianapolis annexed its suburbs, soaking up the tax revenues generated by the development boom for itself, and creating a small-city superpower that is the envy of its Midwestern neighbors.

Could Your Grass Be Greener?

2006-06-01T21:57:00.000-04:00

Americans invest more than $40 million a year (and some 80 percent of their water) in their 20 million acres of lawn. Most of those dollars are spent for gasoline: 800 million gallons go to run power mowers each year, and with fuel prices rising, homeowners and lawn-care companies are beginning to feel the pinch.

Is there a better way? Ted Steinberg, author of "American Green: The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Lawn," notes in this article in The Contra Costa Times, that healthy, attractive lawns don't have to be Wimbledon-ready swards. Nor do they have to be "environmental" lawns that leave bare patches and use only organic additives, though Steinberg says these lawns are growing in popularity. (We have a stat for that, too: an acre of grass is dosed with 10 times as much pesticide as any acre of farm.) A relaxed approach--avoiding chemical fertilizers and keeping grass long enough to inhibit weeds by depriving them of sunlight--produces a lawn that is natural and durable.

If even relaxed sounds like too much work, there is always synthetic turf. AstroTurf, the Monsanto product that made indoor sports possible is an antique in the world of fake grass. For about $5 a square foot, J.M. Synthetic Grass, a two-year-old New Jersey company, can cover your freehold with a plastic, shown above, that has the look, and, according to owner Jeff Mitnick, the feel of real grass. You can find a host of faux turf providers on Synthetic Grass Blog, a site that looks suspiciously like a sales gimmick. But even S.G.B. admits that "if you are the kind of person that likes to play in your grass with your bare feet so you can feel the tingle of the blades between your toes, then don¹t bother with synthetic grass!!"

Out of Town Scoreboard

2006-05-30T22:21:00.000-04:00

Sports in the suburbs is no longer limited to municipal swards filled with soccer players. Professional sports, from minor-league baseball and soccer to International League basketball and even NASCAR, is exploding in the burbs, even in locales where a major-league team is on tap downtown. "As you look around the country, it's very hard to find a major city without some sort of minor league presence in the suburbs," Matt McLaughlin, director of media relations with the Schaumburg, Ill., Flyers told a local paper, the Daily Herald. Minor-league parks are a bargain compared to a night at the Bigs, but draw enough dollars to make suburban towns anxious to capture out-of-town fans. They also provide wholesome family entertainment for residents. In California, the independent Golden Baseball League is targeting suburban venues all over the West in their expansion plans, and in Metairie, next to Katrina-damaged New Orleans, the Zephyrs baseball team's season opener was hailed as a sign of hope even as the city's pro teams' loyalty was still uncertain.

The next step seems to be the return of major-league sports to the suburbs. Major League Baseball's Miami-based Florida Marlins and the Minnesota Vikings of the NFL are both considering the suburbs as sites for their planned stadiums.

The Fight for Suburban Votes

2006-05-26T10:15:00.000-04:00

The Republicans have decided to make their stand in the suburbs in this November's midterm elections. Earlier this month, congressional leaders introduced their "Suburban Agenda," targeting crime, education and the economy in a slate of bills they hope will rally the suburban voters they've won with in the past. Their raft of proposals, some smacking of an urban relief initiative from the 1970s, are designed to help suburbanites (voters formerly known as Soccer Moms and Dads) curb gang violence, conserve land, save for college and mandate background checks for teachers.

The Democrats' strategy seems to be to fight the GOP's foray on the local level. In House Speaker Dennis Hastert's home state of Illinois, local Democrats are holding press conferences to complain that the GOP's agenda needlessly replicates state and county laws already on the books. They also call federal involvement in local issues plain cumbersome. "A one-size-fits-all or one-suburb-fits-all approach to dealing with local issues has some severe shortcomings," said State Sen. Susan Garrett, who represents the Chicago suburb of Lake Forest.

Planes to the Burbs

2006-05-24T15:58:00.000-04:00

The cowboys and small-craft pilots have something in common. Suburban expansion is also crowding in and pushing out the rural airports around Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Times reports. The airports' neighbors don't like the noise and their beancounters prefer the revenue generated by residential development. California aviation officials are on a campaign to inform locals of the economic benefits of the small runways, most of whose flights are businesspeople shuttling to the area.

Suburbs that close their small airports may be even more short sighted than the pilots think: in India, civil aviation authorities are eyeing small planes for commuter hops between, say, New Delhi and its suburb of Meerut, a distance of less than 40 miles. "Civil Aviation Minister Praful Patel says he wants to see 80-seater planes, planes with even smaller capacity and turbo prop aircraft flying virtually like public utility buses in the skies" says a story that originally ran in the Hindustan Times.

That sounds like the perfect solution for this man, who recently won the Midas Muffler Longest Commute contest.

Cowboys and Suburbanites

2006-05-22T16:10:00.000-04:00

The New York Times does it's stiff-necked best today to tell a story of suburban development swamping a great American tradition—the rodeo. In traditional hotspots in California like Clovis and Hayward, cowboys are getting penned in by tracts of estate homes. The juxtaposition makes for some patented sneers about the "Peet's-Coffee-and-pinot-noir culture of the Bay Area" giving way to "the Jack Daniel's salute" (a whiskey bottle held aloft). But the Times doesn't convince us it's truly broken up about either the sprawl or the cowpokes' loss of territory. Nor does rodeo itself seem particularly threatened: fans who have long since moved off the ranch get their fix from stadium-sized shows, which are televised on ESPN. The old-timers who run the remaining small-town rodeos even seem to get a kick out of the suburban dudes. "This was big-time cowboy country," says one saddle-bronc rider. "Today, the newcomers don't know what-all."

Black Coaches Sidelined in Texas

2006-05-19T11:05:00.000-04:00

When the University of Texas won college football's national championship, much was made of the school's 1969 team, whose every member, from coaches to waterboys, was white. Today in the suburbs of Dallas, notes a piece in the Dallas Morning News, the percentage of African-Americans on high school football teams often outstrips the percentage of African-Americans among students. But on the sidelines, blacks are underrepresented. Of 72 top suburban high schools, the DMN points out, only three have black head coaches. A kind of secondary racial separation, not discrimination, is to blame, according to the article. One coach, says the article, supposes there are "potentially good coaches, minority and otherwise, whom he hasn't hired because he doesn't know them that well."

Suburban Snob Control

2006-05-17T14:58:00.000-04:00

In the June issue of its magazine, the American Enterprise Institute takes on snobs and particularly anti-suburban snobs, who break down into Anti-Sprawl Snobs and Anti-WalMart snobs. Architectural historian Robert Bruegmann leads the charge against the former category with an essay adapted from his new book, "Sprawl." The concern about suburban sprawl, he argues, amounts to class bias. "Sprawl" means subdivisions and shopping centers for middle-and lower-middle-class families," he writes, and implies that anti-sprawl activism is fed by the well-to-do exurbanites who don't want those families as neighbors. If history is any guide, the houses that make up today's ugly sprawl will become the fashionable, collectible homes of tomorrow. "The now-treeless subdivisions of look-alike stucco boxes at the edge of suburban Las Vegas," he predicts, "… will likely be candidates for historic landmark designation."

Bruegmann doesn't pause to consider that it's precisely the creation of exurbs deplete interest in restoring these close-in "vintage" neighborhoods. Nor does he quite close the gap between his seeming affection for the architecture of first-ring burbs and his support for teardowns. But his article is part of a larger defense of suburban development that says the suburbs, like the cities, are organic, dynamic communities in their own right, and not social laboratories awaiting the next urban planning experiment in correcting their ills. " Tear up and start over at your own risk," he warns.

Also in the issue is an interesting interview with urban design chronicler Witold Rybczynski.

Generation Burb?

2006-05-16T17:52:00.000-04:00

The young seem to be moving into older houses, younger. When Douglas Coupland published "Generation X," the 1991 novel that coined the term, he defined the generation's endemic maladies: "homeowner envy"—a jealousy prompted by gruesome housing statistics—and "architectural indigestion"— the obsession wih "cool" living environments. But Gen Y, the larger group coming behind them, is even more home obsessed. Thirteen percent of all Gen Ys, still under the age of 25, own a home, compared with eight percent of Gen Xers, and the average age of a first-time home buyer, currently 32, is thought to be dropping. Together, the two groups have been dubbed "Generation Nest."

The trend makes sense, since Gen Y have come of age in a time of cheap debt and rising house prices. But real-estate insiders say Gen Y is also more likely to renovate or improve a home, data that is being interpreted to mean that Gen Y is moving into first-ring burbs with older housing stock that, not coincidentally, is closer to urban jobs, nightlife and pals.

Pretty in Green

2006-05-11T10:52:00.000-04:00

The sheer number of houses being built in New Jersey has been a political issue in the state since the late '90s. Now the state's new governor, Jon Corzine, wants to count how much energy each new house uses. Officials from New Jersey's housing codes divisions, public utilities, mortgage agency and its Department of Environmental Protection are organizing a push to make all new homes the greenest they can be. "We have no choice but to do this," Community Affairs Commissioner Susan Bass Levin told The Philadelphia Inquirer. "New Jersey is the most crowded, congested state, very dependent on foreign oil. Long-term, it brings down the cost of utilities."

If Levin is right, why hasn't the real-estate market not shepherded buyers toward low energy living already? Studies, like this one from the University of Michigan, show that over a house's lifetime, a more energy efficient box costs the same as a leaky one, even though environmentally correct homes are almost $23,000 more expensive on average to build. (That upfront cost may come down, the U of M study implies, if demand for green homes picks up, introducing economies of scale to the supply of green materials.) The current low demand, in turn, is due in part to a lack of incentive for builders to offer green homes. New Jersey's initiative may change that, and, following the study's logic, topple green dominos beyond the Garden State.

Already, New Jersey isn't alone in its interest in green shelter. As soon as the governor can be scheduled for the photo op, the Maine State Housing Authority will make public the winners of their Green Home Design Contest. Such contests, which are already popular abroad suggest there's something besides regulatory oomph that's damped the market for energy efficient homes. In a report on Australia's avid green-home effort, one assessor noted, "The aesthetics of the Green Home have been the subject of a fair amount of critical comment."

Ed Burns's 'Love Letter'

2006-05-03T14:40:00.000-04:00

Director Ed Burns first, who first hit it big with “The Brothers McMullen,” his family-financed flick shot in and around his childhood haunts in Long Island’s Valley Stream, calls his most recent film “a love letter to the suburbs.” Specifically, “The Groomsmen” which played at the Tribeca Film Festival this week, is a paean to those beachy South Shore neighborhoods where he spent summers—“the kind of place where you cross the street into your best friend's house.” Burns tells Newsday. “It's more of a family than a neighborhood."

The new movie, which Burns wrote, directed and appears in, also stars Jay Mohr, who hails from Verona, across the river in northern New Jersey. Mohr’s character, he says in an interview, was a familiar suburban type. “I just knew who he was. You don't get to do that very often, play someone that you've actually met in the flesh. You can put your imagination on hold for a while, and just imitate someone you grew up with. A review of "The Groomsmen" appears here.

Smackdown in the Middle

2006-05-01T11:33:00.000-04:00

In Long Island’s Suffolk County, at the eastern edge of New York’s suburbs, three towns are squaring off over their plans for four new shopping centers to be built within a mile of each other’s borders. If completed, the projects crowding six square miles of Babylon, Smithtown and Islip will include a Wall-Mart, a Home Depot, a 14-screen cineplex, and hundreds of other stores—in all, 2 million feet of retail space, 3 million feet of office space, and apartments for 9,000 people. The traffic numbers have not been fully crunched, but planners for just one of the new malls—and not the one with 9,000 residents—expect 4,000 additional Saturday car trips.

Traditionally towns clash when no regional body exists to notify localities of competing developments and play traffic cop. In this case, county officials’ warnings were ignored or overridden by town governments anxious to draw their share of revenue from the last undeveloped turf in their area, much of it a retired state psychiatric hospital. "We're kind of toothless in that all the zoning powers rest with the local towns," the county executive Steve Levy told Newsday. As local resistance to the plans grow, however, Levy has called a summit to discuss how to reduce the wallop of the simultaneous developments.

My House? I Got It at the Mall!

2006-04-28T10:46:00.000-04:00

Estridge, a homebuilder that has put up some 7,000 in the Indianapolis area in the past 40 years, is developing a new way to sell their product: at the mall. HOMExperience, the company’s new store at a Clay Terrace, an upscale outdoor mall in suburban Carmel. HOMExperience will allow customers to look at house plans, customize their choices with a designer and even furnish the home with products from Estridge’s partners in the scheme, which include bath-and-kitchen maven Kohler, Masterbrand cabinets and Anderson Windows. Offering virtual tours of homes as well as art shows and cooking demonstrations, Estridge hopes the stores will lure women—specifically overscheduled soccer moms who aren’t as likely to visit a model homes at distant development—with the convenience of buying a home the way they buy coordinated back-to-school outfits at The Gap.

House of the Week: Lexington, Mass.

2006-04-27T11:25:00.000-04:00

Here's what $609,000 gets you in a woody suburb outside Boston: a "compact" but pristine Garrison house with oak kitchen cabinets and African ipe front steps.

S.F. Scourge: Suburb Envy

2006-04-25T01:52:00.000-04:00

In her "Surreal Estate" column, Carol Lloyd often examines the bargains people make with themselves to stick out the high cost of living in San Francisco. For the city dweller Lloyd profiles this week, that cost includes a $1,700 rent for a weekend pied-à-terre in suburban Menlo Park to assuage what Lloyd calls her subject's "suburb envy."

Party On

2006-04-19T16:36:00.000-04:00

Republicans aren’t known to be any better at managing garbage pickup than Democrats. Nonetheless, electoral campaigns in the suburbs have become infected with partisanship, according to the St. Paul Pioneer Press. The phenomenon follows a larger national trend toward greater party identification, but the politicization of the suburbs has more to do with demographic change than red-blue divisions. As suburbs, especially middle-ring and exurban areas, grow and grow more diverse, experts say, their new residents import traditional party affiliations. Politicians begin to declare party affiliations on campaign literature to lay claim to a growing base.

A few suburban areas, of course, have been notoriously partisan. The last bona fide political machine in America may have been Al D’Amato’s Republican lock on Nassau County, which propelled him from county executive to three terms in the United States Senate, and the Democrats’ success on Long Island has only deepened the partisan divisions. But most elections below the state level remain nonpartisan, at least on paper: A 2001 survey by the National League of Cities shows 77 percent of cities still hold nonpartisan elections.

Sex Outside the City?

2006-04-18T11:29:00.000-04:00

Single women are shaking off city life. As many as half the homeowners in some close-in suburban Atlanta towns are single women, a trend the Atlanta Business Chronicle attributes to better pay for women, the movement of jobs (and restaurants and shopping) to the burbs and the rising value of real-estate. Also, the prevalence of townhouse developments has made the suburbs more conducive to lone females, who are said to be less than keen on doing their own mowing and raking.

This Week's Dire Prediction About Real Estate Prices

2006-04-15T11:06:00.000-04:00

The financial newsletter Capuchinomics ("Investment Ideas Inspired by Monkeys," and not "Investment Ideas Inspired by Capuchin Monks") took the Brookings Institution,
The New York Times and a Federal Reserve board member to task this week for condoning a study suggesting single-family homes are still good investments. In a paper presented at Brookings, Pomona college professor Margaret Hwang Smith and her colleague (and husband) Gary Smith compare the cost of renting a single-family home to the cash generated by owning, a method they claim values real estate the way we value stocks. The Smiths portray real estate in Boston, Los Angeles and Dallas, markets other studies have red-flagged as risky, as undervalued. Only in San Mateo County, near San Francisco, did they find evidence of a bubble. "Most of the country is certainly not in a bubble if you define a bubble as prices far above fundamentals," said Gary Smith. "The average person in the U.S. is still better off buying than renting."

Capuchinomics editor Paul Mampilly calls the Smiths' paper the housing market's "Dow 36,000 moment," referring to James Glassman and Kevin Hassett's famously optimistic appraisal of stock prices in 1999, months before they collapsed. While some may take the Smiths' paper to mean that it's open season again for real-estate speculation (and will likely get burned), the key to their conclusions is long-term ownership. Even studies like the recent PMI Index report (pdf) that identifed Boston, L.A. and Dallas and 45 other markets as risky consider a single-family home in these places a good investment if held for five years or more. (Only in L.A. did some owners get burned after holding a house that long.) "And when you add in the intangible benefits--from the stake homeownership gives you in a stable community to the pure satisfaction you get from standing on a piece of earth and knowing it’s yours—it’s hard to beat." In other words, it's still your father's real-estate market. The full text of the Smith's paper in .pdf is here.

And the Hispanic Club Shall Lead Them

2006-04-13T11:50:00.000-04:00

In the New York metro area, “Greenwich” is a synonym for well-to-do white suburbia, but lately even Greenwich is dealing with its minority populations—well, everyone but the minorities. According to The New York Times, an influx of service workers from Central and South America in the last decade has doubled the number of Hispanic kids attending the Connecticut town’s high school, causing jousting between Anglos and Latinos. “You'll hear a white kid say to a Latino kid, 'Hey, when's your father coming over to mow the lawn?'” a student told the Times. “And the hard part is, it's true. It's a true statement. But nobody wants to admit it.”

After a fight broke out in the cafeteria recently, GHS principal Alan Capasso recruited student volunteers to hold homeroom discussions about how to clear the air, the article says. Posters and a class on stereotyping and racial sensitivity have also been deployed. Divisions still remain, says one of the volunteers, but friction has subsided.

One group slow to address the cafeteria fight were Hispanics themselves. The controversy highlighted a heretofore unaddressed feature of the town's Hispanic community: the lack of community. “Immigrants come to Greenwich from dozens of different Spanish-speaking countries; some leave everything behind in search of a better life, while others are transferred here by their international employers. The group is too diverse to have spokesmen,” Greenwich Latinos told the local newspaper, Greenwich Time. In the breach, the high school’s Hispanic club, Vision, became the ad hoc HQ for the community. Thanks to schoolyard fisticuffs, the high school may be the place to look for tomorrow's leaders.

Ask What Brownfields Can Do for You

2006-04-12T14:56:00.000-04:00

A utopian “megaburb” is growing west of Salt Lake City, on the former site of a massive copper mine. Like the enormous development that replaced Stapleton International Airport in Denver, “Daybreak,” in South Jordan, Utah is being designed under strict New Urbanist principles, but unlike Stapleton, Daybreak is outside the city limits, and is conceived as a satellite to a city, neither an urban district or an independent town. The highly controlled experiment is taking place under the auspices of Kennecott Land, a subsidiary of the mammoth miming company that despoiled, then restored the soil on the 144 square mile parcel—the largest holding by a single owner in the country.

Given its history, Daybreak has been a suprisingly easy sell: of 162,800 homes planned over the next few decades, 800 retro bungalows and deep-porched two-story jobs are already sold and rising, even though buyers have to sign a statement saying they know the ground water is still tainted, and may contain pollutants powerful enough melt concrete. (Drinkning water is drawn from South Jordan's water district.) Kennecott’s attention to the ecology of their former fief, from reclaiming the ground to its push to make light rail the easiest commute into Salt Lake, has garnered the support of environmental groups and of Peter Calthorpe, the Berkeley, Calif., planner who designed Stapleton and whose New Urbanist doxology includes green features like walkability and lean energy consumption. Calthorpe has signed on as a consultant on Daybreak.

That leaves only the residents of Salt Lake’s West Side and an existing hamlet near the new community called Copperton to grumble: the former are losing bus routes even as the transit authorities redirect resources to the new TRAX rail line to Daybreak, funded by Kennecott. The latter, equally understandably, simply don’t want neighbors.

Public Safety and the Anti-Snobs

2006-04-10T16:06:00.000-04:00

The high price of suburban homes hasn’t killed anyone—yet. But as home prices have soared beyond the reach of the average family in many communities, firefighters, police officers and other emergency personnel are being forced to live out of town, depleting forces or extending response times. The cost of housing has chased other essential, if not emergency, workers out of many communities: in New York’s Westchester, the New York Times reports, snow days have increased as teachers move up to 50 miles away to find homes that suit their civil salaries. As the problem has grown, "affordable housing" is trading in its connotation of government-imposed blight for a welcome sound of salvation for affluent communities.

The media loves tales of such communities buying priced-out teachers fixer-upper ranches on the edge of town. In Massachussets, a 1969 regulation known as Chapter 40B has gotten more wide-ranging results. Chapter 40B allows a local zoning board to fast-track a development that dedicates 25 percent of its units to affordable housing. The “anti-snob” law’s heydey was in the 1980s, as housing prices took off due to the strong economy and as locals came to see that “the housing can blend in with the surroundings, and doesn't get inhabited by people who don't take care of their property,” says a report on the law’s effectiveness. Today, more than 175 Massachusetts towns have accommodated more than 25,000 homes under Chapter 40B.

Such is the success of Chapter 40B that attempts are underway to profit from its good name. This round of high real-estate prices has prompted developers to lobby Massachusetts legislators to modify the definition of "affordable housing" to shoehorn more upscale units into affluent communities under 40B.