Are Americans ready for lifestyle change?

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Commentary:

To a remarkable degree, Americans have resisted giving up the suburban lifestyle. It’s okay to talk about hybrid and electric vehicles, wind farms, and even high-speed rail — all of which look cool and high-tech. But don’t touch the American lifestyle; that’s “nonnegotiable,” as the first President Bush said in 1992. This reflects a long-time national attitude with roots in the post-World War II boom, the greatest era of prosperity the US has ever known.

In a decade or two, we went from desperate poverty to unprecedented wealth. America led the world economically, industrially, culturally, and politically. You can talk about jet planes and Interstate highways, astounding advances in science and technology, but the greatest symbol of the age, perhaps, was the suburban house.

So connected were the suburbs to an image of the good life that for a while we couldn’t imagine anything else. We made walkable, compact communities illegal to build anew in approximately 99 percent of municipalities, and very few citizens viewed this policy — if they even thought about it — as anything other than normal.

We invested in the suburbs personally, with much of our wealth tied up in mortgages, and collectively, through massive infrastructure spending.

The cracks appeared in the 1970s, when the first energy crisis convinced Americans to do the unthinkable — give up their large Detroit cars in favor of energy-efficient foreign-made vehicles — but they still did not move to walkable neighborhoods. Cities were in serious decline at the time — partly because nearly everything new was being built in the suburbs.

Then the energy crisis ended and Reagan declared “morning in America.” What he meant was: it’s okay to buy that McMansion with the gas-guzzling SUV. Forget about the smoldering cities.

After that, it was clear that Americans would relinquish the suburban lifestyle when their cold, dead hands were pried from the remote control of the front-loaded garage. But several trends began to take hold in the 1990s, slowly at first, so that our political and intellectual leaders did not pick up on them right away.

Suburbs lose their shine

The image of the suburbs has tarnished over time. Many of their initial advantages — low traffic and crime, novelty and new infrastructure — diminished as suburbs got bigger and older. In recent years, research has strengthened the links between suburban development patterns, global warming, and petroleum dependence. Then a serious blow was dealt by the economy when property values in the suburbs plummeted in the housing meltdown that began in 2006 — even as cities held their value better.

Meanwhile, the stock of cities has risen. Starting in the 1990s, they have seen a resurgence in housing, and crime rates have dropped. In the current decade, they became associated again with economic dynamism and quality of life. They are the preferred choice of the “creative class,” a term used by social researcher Richard Florida.

Now a new generation is coming of age, the massive cohort called “the Millennials,” children of Baby Boomers. For Millennials, the postwar boom and suburban Golden Era is ancient history. They feel little emotional attachment to the suburbs. They grew up there, and find suburban life boring. They love urban places — and they are poised to become the biggest force in the housing market in coming years.

The new urbanists have played a part in this shift, because the public needed to believe that it was possible to build urban places again. Without that, people still would associate walkable urbanism only with historic neighborhoods. They would not think of cities and towns as anything more than a very limited solution to problems like global warming or housing the next generation. But the success of new urban communities in market after market has helped to shatter that impression.

When the economy recovers and gas prices rise again, the response will be different from that of the 1970s. We are poised to redefine the American Dream.

This article is available in the October/November 2009 issue of New Urban News, along with images and many more articles not available online. Subscribe or order the individual issue.

By Robert Steuteville

From the October/November 2009 issue of New Urban News.

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