It is a habit of haters of the suburbs to regularly predict the imminent demise of the quarter-acre tract home good life.
These predictions date to the post-World War II housing boom, from Lewis Mumford’s distaste of Levittown and places like it (“An encapsulated life spent more and more either in a motor car or within the cabin of darkness before a television set,” he wrote in 1963), or James Howard Kunstler’s 1993 book “The Geography of Nowhere” in which he calls the ’burbs “depressing, brutal, ugly, unhealthy and spiritually degrading.”
Always, the prediction is that the ’burbs will collapse within the next 20 years. The reasons for collapse vary. “Peak oil” was the most popular meme of the last 60 years, though. Suburbs rely on oil, and the world’s oil supply is finite, and is now at its “peak,” the meme went. As oil runs out, the suburbs and the car-crazy, climate-controlled lifestyles that Americans love will end.
“Peak oil” prognosticators have had the American suburbs collapsing in every decade since the 1950s. So far, nothing’s happened. Maybe the peak oil people use the same forecasting tools as the climate-change people.
A new meme has gone viral among the smart set. What will kill the suburbs is that the millennial generation (born after 1983) is leaving the uncultured suburbs for the urbane cities. Rot and ruin will come to the ’burbs, with abandoned tract houses and mosquito infested swimming pools as emblematic of epic failure as healthcare.gov.
Books such as New York journalist Leigh Gallagher’s “The End of the Suburbs” make the case why we are doomed. “Millennials hate the suburbs,” Gallagher writes, because they prefer a hip, eco-friendly, “singleton” urban lifestyle.
Other writers, like Claire Thompson at the enviro ’zine Grist, declares that millennials define the “good life” differently from their parents’ four-bedrooms-on-an-acre. Millennials desire “experiences” over materialism; they want out of the rat race that consumed their parents’ lives; they have tempered ambitions. Thompson writes that they want:
“Infrastructure that supports the kind of smaller-footprint, sustainable lifestyles we’re already creating for ourselves: compact housing in vibrant, walkable communities; functioning public transportation; streetscapes that prioritize cyclists and pedestrians over cars; urban gardens and farmers markets; regulatory room for sharing communities to thrive.”
They will be a “hero generation” that leaves the vast tract housing wasteland for nifty cities. Buh-bye, ’burbs.
Except, not really.
This week, Forbes magazine, crunching government data, reported that the oldest millennials are choosing to live in the suburbs in numbers no different than any other U.S. demographic group. True, some millennials are moving to “core cities” (which Forbes defines as having populations of 1 million or more.) But these millennials have not left the suburbs – they left rural areas that have “lower economic opportunity,” the magazine reports.
Poorer country folk moving to the big city for better opportunities. It’s as old as the Republic.
“To be sure,” the magazine states, “core urban areas do attract the young more than other age cohorts. Among people age 15 to 29 in 2007, there is clear movement to the core cities five years later in 2012 – roughly a net gain of two million. However, that’s only three percent of the 60 million people in the (millennial) age group.”
The reason the suburbs are not in danger of collapse is that the millennials, an exceptionally well-educated generation, sees what everyone else sees: it’s a good place to live and raise kids, with less crime and better schools than cities. Culture is not absent, and neither is the concern to be good stewards of the environment.
In the suburbs, you can live how you please. Want to live big? Buy a Toll Brothers McMansion in Upper Makefield. Want to live small? Buy a Levittowner in Falls. Want a “walkable” community? Bristol and New Hope beckon.
The suburbs win, again. Welcome, millennials.
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