According to a study done by the Brookings Institution the suburbs are becoming poorer as the educated elite move back into the cities:
Anyway what sort of future do you see for the suburbs?
As someone who recently took up residence in the suburbs, I do miss the relatively short commute. My neigborhood is fairly diverse (race and age wise), but overall it’s pretty quiet. According to police reports the only crime reported here over the past three months was the theft of a garbage bin. So at least where I live things are still fairly stable.
They’ve been calling for this for a long time. I think there are too many attractive houses/properties in the suburbs for it to happen to a drastic extent.
I suspect there will always be plenty of affluent folks who want a house with a yard, or just don’t trust urban schools to educate their children.
Personally, though, you couldn’t pay me enough to move to the 'burbs. The idea of not being able to do anything without driving is just plain depressing.
(Technically, I suppose Arlington could count as suburbia - but I live in Ballston, which is heavily developed and only a short metro ride from DC).
Around here (Tucson) there was an article in the paper saying that while the city itself is mostly half white and half Hispanic (with a sprinkling of others), the suburbs are now mostly minority and the central part of the city is mostly white.
The suburbs were hugely overbuilt when housing was at it’s peak, and those who couldn’t afford to live centrally bought in the suburbs. Now in Tucson 40% of houses are ‘under water’ or worth less than they were bought for. And almost all of those houses are in the suburbs.
The life and death of suburbia will come directly from the cost of fuel for cars. When the cost of a daily commute and the running around that suburban life entails becomes too high (and that’s a sliding scale depending on the person) then people will seek other options.
Keep gas prices low = keep suburban homes filled.
Nothing has encouraged suburban living more than the car culture. Nothing.
I think this is mostly wishful thinking on Huff’s part. For whatever reason, certain liberals really hate the suburbs and are always predicting their imminent demise. I’ve been hearing the whole ‘end of the suburbs’ meme for decades now and they still seem to be going strong.
As several other posters have said, the demise or continuation of the suburbs is going to hinge on cheap personal transport. As long as we have (relative) cheap personal transport we are going to have suburbs…simple as that. Oh, there will be fluctuation over time to the cities and away, but it’s a transitory shifting, not a whole sale abandonment.
As I understand it, the term is worse than that. If a house is “Under Water” it means it is worth less than is owed on it. This is particularly depressing for people who have been paying on a mortgage for 7-10 years.
I don’t imagine it will ever really happen. Except in a place like Flint, MI where there simply are no more jobs available. there will always be people who want to live in the city, and those who want to live int he country, and those who want the best of both worlds. (I’m not arguing that the 'burbs necessarily are the best of both, just that that’s what people think they are buying when they come here.)
Regarding the “cheap personal transportation” idea – I agree, in general, But I want to point out that many regions we now call 'suburbs" were, in fact, founded and settled long before the 1950s, and before personal ownership of cars became common. People often talk as if the 'burbs didn’t exist until after WWII. But my grandmother (and grandfather) moved to my home town in the 19-teens. They got to the surrounding towns and the Big City the town is now a suburb of using the Cheap Transportation of the day – trolleys, and, later on, buses.
The last town I lived in, before my present home, was blocks from a commuter rail station into the City.
Of course, in the past several decades most of that network of public transit has withered. Even when I was a kid I could catch a downtown bus to the City – no more. You need to drive to a transportation center. And the closest train station is a car ride away. Most of the commuter rail lines where I now live have been torn up. (although there is still a trickle of bus transportation that will, eventually get you to the City).
So, sadly, although many now-suburban towns weren’t created by the automobile, they’ve effectively lost their transportation links, and will die if the private car goes away. Unless they’re able to re0-establish the buses.
In a lot of cases, it doesn’t even make much sense. Unless you live in East Bumfuck and are 20 miles from anything (in which case, you’d he living in a “rural area” and not the suburbs), the average suburban home is likely only a few miles from a grocery store or a restaurant or a shopping mall or a high school.
The way people mistakenly think that houses are separated by huge tracts of land in the suburbs and are then 20 miles or more from “civilization” really makes me nuts.
I’ve lived in cities and suburbs. I currently live outside of the suburbs (a rural area) and if I would only go back to the burbs or city if forced at gunpoint.
But they are generally designed in a way that you pretty much have to drive to get anywhere. The home areas are separated from shopping areas. A large strip of land often divides the two and you have to move to a big connecting and often busy road to get from one place to the other. Smaller streets stop at the boarder and you can’t get to the shopping area any other way.
The suburbs may not go away, but hopefully they will be forced to change fairly drastically in order to survive.
Suburbs will only go away if fuel become very expensive and even very efficient cars become too costly to operate.
If fuel/energy becomes much more expensive, you got MUCH bigger problems than shrinking burbs, like a failing economy and poor people starving, which aint going to make the cities particularly attractive either.
So did anyone actually read the linked article, or are we all giving knee jerk responses to the thread title? It didn’t say the suburbs were dying out or going away. It says they’re becoming poorer, older and less white, which conflicts with the usual picture of Suburban populations being the domain of young, white middle class famililes.
I am given my knee jerk reaction to other knee jerk reactions thank you very much. Or do you want me to complain that my burbs are being taken over by the less desirables while the “enlightened” rich folks flee to the city?
STM most people who are always predicting the demise/ruination of the Burbs are the ones that have an almost irrational hatred of them, rather than a rational understanding of pros, cons, and personal preferences.
I repeat, the distance between the homes of a suburb and the shopping areas are usually somewhere between one and two miles apart. Only the most insane person would think this will eventually create a hardship for suburban dwellers. The “car culture” may wane, but it’ll never go away so completely that a single mile will be too much to drive.
As to the article, it looks like a “sky is falling” cry because white people are outnumbered by non-white people for the first time in the suburbs. To that I say, who gives a shit?
That might have been true 20 years ago when the shopping centers were built, but it is true no longer. The two malls closest to me are right up next to houses.
When the development I live in got build, in the mid-50s, it was far away from anything - there was even a little airport a mile from where I live. Now there is a mall, three shopping centers, two supermarkets, and about 50 restaurants within walking distance. Newer houses may be built further away, but the stores migrate to where the people are.
The Brookings Institute seems to have discovered gentrification, the aging of boomers who bought in the suburbs and want to stay in their homes, and the increasing minority population. Whoopee.
A more interesting trend is the attempt to make suburbs more like cities. My town, which was created from the merger of five smaller towns, has no center. They are trying to create one near the BART station, with mixed business, retail, and residential. A lot of towns are trying to fight sprawl by putting relatively high density housing downtown, and using this to attract merchants - and often closing off streets to cars to make a more walkable neighborhood.
As long as there are urbs, I believe we’ll always have suburbs.
I just moved out of the city into a meta-urb (I’m claiming the coining of that one). Basically, I live in a little enclave that consists of a peninsula that juts out into the river between Portland and South Portland. It exists as its own little town, with all the amenities I’d ever want … and I have the Portland city skyline from my parking lot, and all of South Portland wrapped around me.
Meta-urb. It’s all mine, baby.
ETA: I would classify Alameda, CA as a meta-urb. I used to live nearby to there too.
This. And how much of this migration is occurring because inflated rents in cities have fallen due to overbuilding and the financial crisis? To the extent that it’s economically driven, this “trend” will reverse once times improve - but don’t expect HuffPo to loudly mention *that *trend.