Suburban Realities; Suburban Dreams
Pandemic prognosticators say we're headed for the suburbs. We're already there. Here's how we can make them better.
Few places produce mixed emotions like “the suburbs.” They’ve been framed as idyllic retreats from the hectic city or insular bunkers for the frightened and middle-aged; seas of sameness and conformity or islands of opportunity for the upwardly mobile.
While 20th-century culture critics condescended, Americans kept moving there anyway. Since 1990, more of the US population has lived in suburban counties than anywhere else - 55% as of recent Census counts. This despite the revitalization of many urban cores and the “back to the city” movement of the 1990s and 2000s that had some predicting the end of the suburbs.
People, it turns out, are passionate about where they live.
Commutes and Civic Engagement
Those of us fortunate enough to have desk jobs are spending a lot more time at home these days. And with the lingering images of our nation’s largest city humbled by the coronavirus, the pundits say, our socially distanced suburbs will start to look more appealing.
More likely, our six-month experiment with home offices, which shows little sign of slowing, will prove more productive than skeptical bosses expected. Despite child care challenges during school closures, it’s doubtful that rational office workers will want to go back to 45-minute commutes, five days a week.
And that, perhaps, could solve one of the major downsides of suburbia - wasted resources. The move to the suburbs, at least for urban professionals, has usually meant a trade off - better schools and a bigger piece of grass for more time spent on the asphalt and dollars at the pump.
The environmental consequences of this lifestyle are clear, but there are societal implications as well. Every hour on the road is an hour not having dinner with family, not hanging out with neighbors, not keeping tabs on the town council. Researchers have shown that longer commute times decrease civic engagement.
The move to home offices could help suburbs develop community and civic purpose. Of course civic engagement might not always be a positive thing, especially if that purpose is channeled toward exclusion. I’m thinking here of suburban town hall meetings where neighbors organize to keep out new apartments, commercial development, or even (as I remember happening in Fayetteville, NC in the 1990s) sidewalks. The subject of anxiety is always slightly different but the goal is always the same - to keep undesireable buildings, activities, people, out.
Real Estate, Tax Ratios and Exclusion
Which brings us to one downside of suburban living - homogeneity and exclusion. There is no getting around the fact that the American suburb has its roots in racially exclusionary subsidies. And while American suburbs have become far more racially diverse than classic depictions of the 1960s, suburbs remain less diverse than cities. De facto economic segregation remains embedded in the landscape with its pop-up signs in front of new subdivisions, “starting in the low $500s.”
But homeowners aren’t the only ones to blame for the exclusive nature of the suburbs. The cold calculus of municipal tax ratios can also explain incentives for towns and suburban counties to seek higher cost housing development. This is especially true for suburbs with little industry or commercial property to tax. With budgets reliant on property tax revenue, bedroom communities need the revenue from high-value homes to provide services. This leads to discussions of the “break-even” price point for new housing below which new development costs the municipality more in service provision than it generates in taxes. Spoiler alert: that “break-even” number will vary but it is usually somewhere north of what a family with a below-median income can afford.
This all brings us back to the office and our sudden discovery of the uselessness of commutes. While the pandemic has proven we can work from home and remain productive, we’re not likely to forget the benefits of office space entirely. There is something to be said for the informal exchange and knowledge spillovers that come from regular interaction with co-workers. But with fewer people in the office at any one time, whether because of the lingering impacts of the virus or the longer-term acceptance of working from home, single-use Central Business Districts and large office towers seem uncessary.
What’s the alternative? Smaller office space strategically located among nodes of suburban housing could acheive two goals - 1) accessible landing spaces for those times when in-person work meetings make sense, and 2) diversification of suburban property tax bases away from housing. Many suburbs currently seek capital intensive manufacturing growth to shore up residential-dependent tax bases. While office space can’t match the tax revenue of manufacturing operations, residential areas are likely to prefer offices to heavy manufacturing next door.
Dead Malls, Distribution Centers and Downtowns
One trend complicating this whole process is the rise of e-commerce. Big box retail will dwindle to a few key players as an increasing share of shopping goes online. This change could be the longest lasting as the pandemic has simply accelerated a structural shift to online shopping that had been happening, slowly but surely, since 2005.
The implications of this shift - boulevards lined by aging, empty malls and shopping centers - is another blow for suburban budgets. And the notion of gray distribution centers eating up vast acres where heavier, more taxable, manufacturing operations might have one day gone, is no great alternative. Amazon’s move to turn old Sears and J.C. Penney stores into distribution centers provides a blueprint for reuse without additional infrastructure burden.
Despite advances in automation, distribution centers still require a lot of hands-on work. Work that pays better than some service jobs, but nowhere near professional salaries. In this way, the move to e-commerce will also mean higher demand for low-cost housing, whether subsidized or naturally occuring. Redeveloping outmoded retail into apartments, as many suburbs have done with underused industrial buildings from earlier generations, is also a possibility, provided that walkability and small-scale transit is available to connect workers to job centers. All services that would require a diversified tax base.
The key aspect of this new suburban ideal is in its smaller scale. When white collar professionals’ willingness to commute shrinks, demand for services near their homes will increase. Smaller offices and smaller retail centers could be a boon for walkability and the revitalization of older small-town downtowns. But inclusive suburbs will need to incorporate the foundations that make their laptop-enabled lifestyle possible.
Predictions are tricky and prone to error. And the ripple effects of redevelopment are often unanticipated. But I am hopeful that we’ll discover that long commutes are neither sustainable nor desireable. Using less of two key resources - fossil fuels and time - can help us build more efficient, more connected communities.
We don’t have to leave the suburbs to make this happen. We have to build better suburbs.