Suburban Beauty

And yet there’s a problem. When I moved a half dozen years ago to an Alexandria neighborhood not far from Old Town, my neighbors turned out to be immigrants — from Old Town. The family on one side has four kids and wanted a bigger house and a yard large enough for football and lacrosse games. Old Town was too cramped. The family of four on the other side also needed more room and the father was eager to landscape his back and front yards with dogwoods and azaleas and cherry trees. He couldn’t plant a big garden in Old Town.

So what kind of neighborhood did they move to? One with many of the distinguishing characteristics of suburban sprawl: a cul-de-sac, single-use zoning, McMansions, decks behind the houses and no front porches, two-car garages and four-car families, five minutes from a mall and nearer to an interstate highway than to mass transit.

These refugees from Old Town were followed by two more families I know. One lived on the edge of Old Town adjacent to a swath of public housing. They were tired of worrying about the crack dealer who arranged his business deals on the pay phone across the street. And they wanted a spacious house with a yard. The other family had always wanted to live in Old Town. So when their kids grew up and left home, they moved to a townhouse there. They didn’t stay long. Old Town was too noisy and parking spaces were too few. They moved to a quieter, lower-density neighborhood miles farther from Washington. They have no trouble parking their two cars now.

All this is merely anecdotal evidence, but it’s consistent with an irrefutable fact of American life. For all the scorn that’s heaped on the suburbs — and especially on subdivisions of nearly identical houses on the fringe of metropolitan areas — people like living there. And not just middle-class drones either. My friends who left Old Town are upper-middle class, highly educated, and reasonably well-to-do. Like millions of others, they prefer a big house with a yard and plenty of room, plus a place to park their fleet of room, plus a place to park their fleet of cars. Old-fashioned towns crammed with stores and homes and apartments or new imitations of them like Seaside, Florida (the town in the movie The Truman Show) have enormous curb appeal, but they’re too crowded and expensive for most people. They just aren’t where most Americans want to live. And neither are dense city neighborhoods, even ritzy ones like Georgetown in Washington.

This is hard for those with an urban sensibility or a bias for college towns to believe, given their aversion to suburban America. Much of suburbia, after all, is grotesquely ugly, with ubiquitous strip malls and streets lined with fast-food joints. As often as not, neighborhoods in the inner ring of suburbs are decaying. In the exurbs, many homes are newer, but poorly designed and cheaply built. Then there’s the traffic congestion that lengthens daily commutes. It’s unavoidable because suburbanites are hopelessly car dependent. Yet the truth is they’re mostly contented. They’ve come face to face with sprawl and they like it. And who can blame them?

A bevy of people, it turns out, from the heavyweight authors of Suburban Nation to Rosalyn Baxandall and Elizabeth Ewen, two professors from the State University of New York, whose Picture Windows: How the Suburbs Happened is a much more lightweight entry in the sprawl wars. Planners don’t like suburban communities because much of the planning is done by real estate developers. Intellectuals have always looked askance at a suburban lifestyle they believe to be culturally barren: I can’t think of a single novel or play that treats the suburbs kindly. Transportation specialists resent the refusal of suburbanites to abandon their cars and use mass transit. Environmentalists are mad at them for gobbling up open space. Liberals look down on them because the farther one gets from the city center, the more likely residents are to be conservatives. And Hollywood thinks suburbia is crass and soulless. Thus, the Oscar-winning movie of 1999, American Beauty, depicted every suburbanite as repellant for one reason or another.

The loathing of the suburbs has now morphed into a potent political movement that ostensibly targets sprawl as a specific type of suburban development, but is actually aimed at suburbia itself. Suburban Nation is likely to become this movement’s bible. One of its authors, Andres Duany, is already the intellectual leader of the anti-sprawl cause. He’s a Miami architect and the creator, along with his co-author, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, of Seaside, Florida, and Kentlands, Maryland, and other eye-catching “new urbanist” towns. More than anyone else, Duany has made “sprawl” a buzzword and a growing issue in community after community. Videotapes of Duany’s lecture and slide show on sprawl have been circulating like samizdat for several years, and the power of his argument against the current state of America’s suburbs has been fully captured in Suburban Nation.

The case is flawed, but not easily dismissed. “The dominant characteristic of sprawl,” Duany and his co-authors write, “is that each component [of a community] is strictly segregated.” Housing, shopping centers, office parks, and civic institutions are physically separated, causing the residents of suburbia to “spend an unprecedented amount of time and money moving from one place to the next.” And since nearly everyone drives alone, “even a sparsely populated area can generate the traffic of a much larger traditional town.” As bad as the congestion is, life is worse for those who don’t drive. Kids, the poor, and the elderly are isolated. Teenagers become bored and sometimes violent. Old people “know the minute they lose their license, they will revert from adulthood to infancy and be warehoused in an institution where their only source of freedom is the van that takes them to the mall on Monday and Thursday afternoons.” And what jobs sprawl does provide, the poor can’t get to.

What strengthens the case against sprawl by Duany and company is that it has a conservative ring to it. They propose to replace sprawl with communities designed and built “in the traditional manner of the country’s most successful older neighborhoods.” Their models are the cheerful suburbs that sprouted up in the first third of the twentieth century. All the elements of community life were integrated. Stores and offices were nearby and people walked to work and to shop, or they rode trains or trolleys. Their lives weren’t dominated by their automobiles. They weren’t trapped in traffic congestion for hours every day and had more time for family life. Streets were designed to make neighborhoods peaceful, not to rush cars through as fast as possible. The suburban communities were more densely populated and closer to downtown. There were few highways, not many cars, no exurbs, and no sprawl. People sat on their front porches. They rode bicycles.

This is a pleasant vision and perhaps appropriate for a country of a hundred million people. But it’s utterly impractical for a postindustrial nation with 270 million people. Two-thirds of American families own their own homes, a phenomenal achievement. Without suburbs that extend far into the countryside, there would be millions fewer homeowners.

The authors raise the familiar cry about the lack of affordable housing. But where is housing least affordable? In fancy suburbs like Old Town Alexandria, Seaside, and Kentlands — the places extolled by Duany as models for the modern implementation of his old-fashioned vision. Housing is far less expensive the farther you get from a city. In other words, the more sprawl, the more affordable housing. The homes may look alike and be miles from offices or stores, but average working families can afford them.

The authors of Suburban Nation are candid enough to concede that not all suburban sprawl is bad. “In truth, a lot of sprawl — primarily affluent areas — could be considered beautiful.” Even a McMansion — an enormous house that’s bigger than the authors think it ought to be — “provides excellent value for its price.” Inside, American houses are roomy and functional, but outside, “our public realm is brutal.”

Cars and highways are the chief culprits. But as much as Duany, Plater-Zyberk, and Speck hate the automobile, they admit they’ve yet to give up their own cars. They have an alibi or at least an explanation: “The problem with cars is not the cars themselves but that they have produced an environment of dependence.”

Of course, people always depend on some form of transportation to get where they want to go. In the compact, close-in suburbs that critics of sprawl propose to build, folks would be dependent on their feet or bikes or trolleys. For most people, however, driving a car makes more sense. It gives them freedom and mobility and saves time that would be lost if they used mass transit. Suburban Nation admits as much. The book’s opposition to the automobile is largely aesthetic and sociological. The plethora of parking lots outside suburban shopping centers irritates the authors. “Such excess is inevitable,” they write. No parking space, no peace: “Anyone who has shopped in suburbia knows that the inability to find a parking space makes the entire proposition unworkable.” A car is an isolation chamber: “a potentially sociopathic device.” And it’s never the answer to any problem.

“The only long term solutions to traffic are public transit and coordinated land use,” Duany and his co-authors assert. They promote the idea of “induced traffic.” Building more highways will cause more traffic congestion, not less. This is nonsense. As Steven Hayward of the Pacific Research Institute has pointed out, long lines at a grocery store would not prompt anyone to say, “Well, we can’t build more grocery stores. That would only bring out more customers.” Building more highways wouldn’t lure more cars. The cars come anyway. What foes of sprawl won’t accept is the inescapable fact that most Americans would rather suffer in daily traffic jams than use mass transit. Trains, trolleys, and light rail aren’t a viable option.

Suburban Nation argues that the preference for cars didn’t come about naturally. The authors repeat the canard that the auto industry bought up streetcar companies across the country and tore up the tracks in a conspiracy to promote the use of cars. To a large degree, they claim, “the atomization of our society into suburban clusters was the result of specific government and industry policies rather than some popular mandate.” Government-guaranteed loans at low interest paid for suburban homes. The federal interstate highway system provided roads. But these programs were not imposed on reluctant Americans. Next to Medicare, they’re the most popular government programs ever.

It’s the anti-sprawl movement that wants to force a lifestyle and a housing pattern on unwilling Americans. For activists like Duany, democracy is often an impediment. Listen to this complaint in Suburban Nation:

It is painful but necessary to acknowledge that the public process does not guarantee the best results. In fact, on certain issues, such as transit, population density, affordable housing, and facilities for special-needs populations, the public process seems to produce the wrong results. Acting selfishly, neighbors will typically reject a LULU (locally undesirable land use) even if its proposed location has been determined based on regional, social, or even ethical considerations.

What should officials do in such cases? Go forward anyway, the authors suggest, because they know what’s best: “Decision-makers must rely on something above and beyond process, something that may be called principles. Affordable housing must be fairly distributed. Homeless shelters must be provided in accessible locations. Transit must be allowed through. The environment must be protected.” The authors express the hope that Suburban Nation “will provide a foundation upon which to make difficult decisions on behalf of the public good.” With or without public support.

Picture Windows doesn’t add much to the sprawl debate. The authors are professors who’ve heard from students that the Long Island suburbs aren’t that bad a place. They agree, but only because those suburbs aren’t like suburbs anymore. Gays and lesbians and immigrants live there. Women who’ve wised up and become feminists live there. Lots of unhappy people who’ve gotten a raw deal in life live there. The biggest problems are too many gated communities and not enough government-built housing and rental units. To its credit, however, Picture Windows does catalogue the “anti-suburban snobbery” of America’s intelligentsia.

That snobbery is shared even by those who live in the planned communities and affluent, mixed-use inner suburbs beloved by the authors of Suburban Nation. Return to Old Town Alexandria for a moment. A favorite solution of anti-sprawl activists is something called “in-fill,” which involves developing vacant spaces in cities and inner suburbs. Well, Alexandria has a large vacant area on the outskirts of Old Town where the federal government wants to build a headquarters for the Patent Office and seven thousand of its employees. A subway stop is nearby, and so is a train station. But residents of Old Town aren’t pleased with this opportunity to fight the spread of suburbia with in-fill. They’d like the Patent Office to be built elsewhere, somewhere far over the horizon in the outer reaches of suburbia. Somewhere in the land of sprawl.

Fred Barnes is executive editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.