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What we talk about when we talk about suburbs
Let's get the BS out of the way first.
First, the obvious one: In the last few decades, suburban growth hasn't been caused by racism. As a matter of fact, blacks and immigrants are moving to the suburbs at a faster rate than whites. Meanwhile, whites have moved into the cities.
Now let's talk about the supposed conspiracy to force people into the suburbs. The largest American cities of 1920 were all built before the car. Many of them have a ring of streetcar suburbs. Most of them have lost population. There is a plentiful supply of dense urban cores in America with lower population than they had a century ago, and yet all the demand is for building more suburbs. The population has spoken, and they don't want to live in cities, they want to live in suburbs, New York City, and nothing in between.
What about "fifteen minute cities?". I live in one, it's called a suburb. I can get to everything we need on a regular basis (groceries, parks, schools, kid's activities, a decent restaurant) in fifteen minutes. This is only possible with point-to-point, immediate-availability transportation. Mass transit simply doesn't work for this, as at-grade transit (busses, streetcars) are slower than bikes due to the number of stops, and grade-separated transit stations are so large and sparse that it's usually fifteen minutes just to get from the front door to the platform, plus half a headway.
If you want to drop one kid off at one activity, the other kid off at a different one, get a week's worth of Costco, and then pick them both up, while changing at least one of the activities every six months, you simply can't beat the car.
We have community in the suburbs. The great American self-organizing spirit is a live here. No matter what you're into (or your kids are into), there's some knitting club, drum club, or bike club. Even better, our city parks and rec centers are actually usable, and the staff and patrons are clean and pleasant.
Real problems with the suburbs
This doesn't mean we don't have real problems with the suburbs. We do, especially from a few decades ago. In a uniquely American fashion, the Garden City Movement mutated into ever-larger lawns, ever larger medians, and ever larger streets. This, plus Euclidean zoning, does mean that the only way you can get around is the car. While it's great to have the car as the primary method of family transportation, having it as the only means of transportation does constrain older kids.
There is a pointless bigness to much of our environment. The standard American family combination of a big truck for dad and big crossover for mom would probably be improved by exchanging them for a HiLux and a Golf. We insist on building houses with formal living and dining rooms that we never use, paired with the "breakfast nook" and "family room" that we actually use. And of course yards, but I repeat myself.
Suburbs in the 80s were also less pleasant. There weren't many good restaurants, and if you didn't want something from a chain store or an understocked, overpriced mom-and-pop, you were out of luck. If you wanted a specialized job, you were in for a brutal commute into the city. Amazon and work-from-home have fundamentally changed that. We don't have to be near "stuff" anymore, it all comes to us.
Real solutions from the suburbs
Right now, I live in a townhouse in a master-planned new urbanist suburb. It's medium density, I have no yard, and the houses barely have any. There's a mini-park every few blocks, the elementary school is in the neighborhood itself, some blocks are designed extra long to prioritize sidewalks and eliminate street crossing, and the "town center" has a supermarket, a coffee shop, and a few adequate restaurants. We go there all the time, often on our onewheels.
If you're not in the family stage of life, the town center also has a four-over-one mid-rise that's pretty nice.
We have all the human-scale upside of a streetcar suburb, and all the modern benefits of suburbia (close to 3k sq ft, a real two car garage, modern appliances). We even have ethnic diversity (upscale immigrants) and a low carbon footprint (modern insulation, and I have a place to charge my Tesla)
Surprisingly, people who complain about the suburbs never say that we should all move to a master-planned New Urbanist suburb.
I love it, I would recommend it to anyone, and I'm leaving.
What we're really talking about when we talk about suburbs
I'm moving to an 80s suburb, with all the problems I just described. It has a pointless bench on a lawn built in a roundabout. Every week I see someone mowing that stupid patch of grass. You can't walk anywhere.
I'm moving from my semi-New Urbanist paradise to this terribly-designed 80s suburb for the same reason that some people live in Minneapolis instead of San Diego. San Diego has better weather, beaches, hot girls in bikinis, and you'll never shovel snow again, but if your family lives in Minneapolis, you live in Minneapolis, you shovel snow, and you ride your polar bear to work. If I grew up in Manhattan, NY, I would want to live there - and if I lived in Manhattan, KS, I would want to live there too.
I'm moving there for the same reason people hate suburbs: community. People talk about how suburbs are alienating and have no third spaces. I'm moving for the community, which is my wife's extended family. The third space was her grandparent's house. Now it is her parent's house, and someday (hopefully far in the future) it will be our house.
We might prefer one physical environment to another, but the main factor for where people live is the human environment - family, jobs, schools, crime.
That's also what people are really talking about when they complain about suburbs. They complain that suburbs are isolating and atomizing, which is obviously not true if you have family there.
What we really talk about when we talk about suburbs is social climbing. The suburbs are associated with the middle class, and if you're a social climber, you have to denounce the suburbs. A century ago, when industrial working class families lived in urban flats and townhomes, the social climbers made a point of talking about how they escaped the city.
When us proles couldn't afford cars, the social climbers flaunted their cars. Now that us proles can afford cars but can't afford Manhattan, the social climbers disdain cars and flaunt their apartments.
A century from now, if a shingle-sided split-level becomes expensive, you'll see disaffected young social climbers sneer that the 70s suburb is the pinnacle of human organization, unlike whatever form of housing the proles of that day live in.
Or is it rather that outside of New York City, a handful of other small cities and college towns, nowhere else in America provides a relatively safe dense, walkable urban core? In the majority of medium to large sized cities in the United States you cannot even live this kind of life without significant compromises. There may be condo buildings downtown but they’re not located in dense, walkable neighborhoods, the young PMC residents therein just have to Uber everywhere.
I’ve often heard on Reddit and in real life how strange it is for foreigners to visit American urban cores (even comparatively dense downtowns - when compared to Midwestern sprawl - like San Francisco, Seattle, Philadelphia) and find so few people walking the streets. American cities outside NYC feel empty. Most major cities are even worse, downtown is a few skyscrapers and condo buildings and a sports arena, separated by huge parking lots. Crime rate aside (and that’s a big, big aside in many places), “walking around” say downtown St Louis is like walking around a larger suburban business park in Europe where everyone drives in.
It’s clear that Americans do want this kind of housing. The handful of ex-NYC neighborhoods that offer even the vaguest semblance of this kind of lifestyle are often extremely expensive. See Venice and Santa Monica in LA, Georgetown in Washington, D.C., Back Bay in Boston and so on.
The problem is that the only way this kind of thing emerges organically is because it was already there or because of the gentrification of dense urban neighborhoods that survived the 20th century (eg. what has happened in Brooklyn since the 1980s). You can’t build it because large downtown parcels of contiguous land rarely come up for sale and when they do developers would prefer to build a few big condo buildings, a large parking lot (often mandated by zoning laws) and stuff a small mall on the lower levels instead of creating more of a mid-rise community. And in many US cities where downtowns were hollowed out for parking lots and office buildings between 1950 and 1980, there just isn’t the residential capacity to make the network of small local businesses that bring that kind of community to life viable. So there’s a chicken-and-egg problem to it.
That said, there have been some attempts. Pre-pandemic downtown LA was undergoing pretty rapid densification to a more residential, walkable place, although it’s worse again now.
There are millions of dirt-cheap middle-density units in America that cost nearly nothing.
Half of Philadelphia is mid-rise. The majority of Cleveland proper is. Huge swathes of St. Louis, Baltimore, and Chicago are. In many of these places, you can buy a house for the price of a loaded pickup truck.
I love my suburban townhouse, but it's selling at a slight discount to similarly-sized houses with yards in the same development I live in. I'd rather walk two blocks along a walking trail to the nearest park than deal with maintaining a yard, but it seem the market has spoken and people want to live in Irvine.
People don't make their decisions based on the built environment though, they act based on their social environment. I'm moving from my nearly-perfect townhouse to a sprawling, Euclidean-zoned 80s suburb with a huge yard in a place with worse weather, and I'm happy about it. My in-laws live there, and kids should be near family.
I think that's why people complain about suburbs. Their family lives there, and they're trying to distance themselves from them.
Yeah, and the places where a house costs the same as a pickup truck are not, generally, the places where it’s safe to actually enjoy the amenities of living in a dense neighborhood, like being able to walk to and from dinner, to let the kids play outside and walk to their friends’ houses, to not worry about extreme risk of property theft. Kensington in Philly wouldn’t be undesirable if the police did what was necessary to make it safe, clean and amenable to middle class people. But unsafe cities aren’t an intractable problem or ‘inevitable’ as a result of housing type, the cleaning up of New York shows that it’s entirely and absolutely possible to reduce violent crime rates by 80%+ across the board and to bring law-abiding people back to the cities. You just have to get serious about it.
The temporary cleaning up of New York shows it's impossible. It's a cycle.
Dangerous cities drive out PMC whites Normies/immigrants vote for safe cities Safe cities bring in PMC whites PMC whites vote for depolicing and crime Dangerous cities drive out PMC whites
Reminds me of the hard times meme.
Also, use two spaces for line breaks, two returns to turn each line into a paragraph, or turn your comment into an unnumbered list.
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This isn't true either. I look at an inner-ring suburb of Pittsburgh like Dormont. It's about as walkable as one can reasonably expect. It has 2 nice main drags with lots of amenities, and it's affordable; less than a decade ago you could get a 3 bedroom house for under 100k. There was a time when people called it "Dirtmont" because it was kind of dumpy and working-class, but it was never dangerous, and no one would ever look down on anyone who lived there the way they'd even look down on someone living in a similarly white working-class area like Carrick. But now, people seem to like it. But not enough that people are banging down the doors to get in. There are a ton of areas like that around Pittsburgh, a lot of them in the city proper, but only trendy areas like Lawrenceville seem to be getting unaffordable (at least by Pittsburgh standards). I can't speak to other cities, but I doubt this is a unique situation.
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This does not stop people from living in non-walkable housing in similarly terrible neighborhoods.
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Amen, thank you for beating this drum with me. The market has shown that people will pay a ton for this kind of housing, and any sort of mixed-use residential/commercial developments that do get built are typically very high-class and quite desirable. Prices reflect that reality.
The true cause of these issues, specifically the large parcels of land being sat on, goes down to how we value/price land in the US. Land values at local assessors' offices are literally calculated by taking an arbitrary % of the total value, and saying "That's the land value!". You will see values of improvements (buildings) jump up 20-30% in one year, and assessors just shrug their shoulders and say 'that's how our system calculated it.' It is utterly absurd.
What's worse is that many large department stores, like Walmart etc, who buy these massive parcels of land often have specific tax cuts for them that they carve out with local government. On top of that, the plattage effect means that land value does not rise linearly with square footage, it drops off as you get an increasingly large parcel. There are good reasons for that, but it turns into a situation where large retail stores can acquire massive amounts of land for cheap, and they do.
This isn't even getting into land speculators who sit on vacant land for years as an investment, because they know it's one of the safest investments out there. After the massive housing price raise during Covid we're seeing far more activity in the land speculation space as well. For some reason we've decided to tax buildings, the things that actually generate economic activity and benefit, far more than land. This is ridiculous because useful land parcels in desirable locations are scarce and if you let people sit on them, you miss out on a ton of opportunity to beautify a space, create new businesses, or just leave the land to nature.
IMO dense cities should have practically 0 vacant lots sitting there, ever. Land needs to be taxed far higher than it is currently.
How does that work? It seems to be a well-studied effect, yet I would naively assume that an owner of a large parcel in such a market would always choose to subdivide that parcel, thereby making more money, up until the point where the thereby increased supply of small parcels and reduced supply of large ones eliminated the effect. I could imagine constant-cost overheads (if you need the same number of real estate + escrow + whatever agents whether you're selling a fifth of an acre or 50 acres, the 1/5-acre option has 25x as much transaction cost per square foot) ... but economists seem to be modeling the plattage effect as logarithmic, and I don't see how that would happen at all.
Many big businesses like Walmart, Target etc require large parcels all in one segment to operate by law. Also, I forgot to mention they get massive subsidies on their parking lots as well since parking lots are often not taxed like normal parcels or have specific adjustments/write-ins from the city.
Those are great demand-side reasons for Walmart to bid up the price of large parcels ... but apparently they didn't, so what's the supply-side reason why someone would want to sell them a parcel anyway? If I can make $M by selling N acres to Walmart but I can make 2($M/2+$P) by instead selling N/2 acres each to a restaurant and a gym, why would I ever do the former if the premium $P for the latter is positive?
Subdivision is not always trivial. I would not say that the there is only a single fixed cost, there are also variable costs associated with land surveys, environmental surveys, administration, utilities, etc.
Then there are selection effects. Areas with large blocks of land are usually more rural which have lower land prices.
I have a feeling that the complete picture here has to do with the marginal utility of developed vs undeveloped land, economies of scale, and maybe commercial vs residential markets.
It seems intuitive to me that the utility value of developed land does not scale linearly with size, unless you're a farmer or something.
If I'm a large developer that can afford to buy a large parcel, subdivide, AND develop those parcels, I will likely (up to a point) get a better ROI from a larger number of smaller plots. In SFH residential markets this happens often because there is a consumer desire to "own" their plot. In commercial markets, this demand matters less, so the ROI maximizing strategy is to buy a large plot, build X storefronts, and rent to tenants. The size and distribution of those storefronts should reflect the market for commercial renters, and I think that is what you do see (a decent mix of large home-depot style tenants and smaller independent businesses).
Yet on the other hand, selling a small plot of undeveloped land is challenging since you need to develop it, and you will almost always be outcompeted by large developers who can afford to buy the larger plot in one go.
So you have a market dynamic where both things are true: the utility (and marginal market) value of the developed land is proportionally greater for small plots (or small storefronts), yet it is not always useful to simply buy a large plot, subdivide, and resell.
All this is to say, holders of large plots of undeveloped land are usually incentivized to sell in one go. Whereas developers are incentivised to buy large plots and then extract maximum utility via subdivision or multiple storefronts, which is what I think we do see in practice.
That all makes sense; thank you!
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Where permitting and regulatory regimes are complex, slow, restrictive, and carry significant ongoing costs (i.e. mandatory set-asides for "affordable" units) for those few projects that do get approved, developers are highly incentivized to make all new construction as high-class and high-cost as possible in order to maximize return per unit; they can set their own price because pent-up demand is so high, and face little competition from other new builds to drive down cost.
That's the reason mixed-use projects in major cities are so "high class and desirable" - not any inherent property of the type of units being built.
This.
Also, there is always incentive to market your product, regardless of it's actual place in the market, as "luxury" or "premium". Nobody sells "cheap cars for poor people", but they will market "affordable, reliable vehicles".
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The fact that as you say “pent-up demand is so high” is exactly the point that he’s making, though.
I mean pent-up demand for any new housing in an economically-productive area; I postulate the fact that they're housing units on the market in west-side LA (in the case of his Venice example) is much more important for driving demand than their character as "missing middle" or whether or not neighborhoods are walkable, serviced by transit, or otherwise Urbanist-ideology-approved. People happily pay out the nose for studios or "shared living" dorm spaces with no transit, a mile walk to the nearest grocery, and no dedicated parking, just because it's a place to live.
Years ago there was a Silicon Valley rental ad that was for an unusually wide gap between walls with a foam mat laid onto the unfinished floor to sleep on. Like how a rodent might live. But you gotta live somewhere and they keep importing more people and they don't build comparably more housing, so live like a rat I guess.
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Property taxes on real estate are rather weird in general: structures in many jurisdictions are valued well above the replacement cost, which as far as I can tell reflects artificial scarcity from permitting and zoning restrictions. The value of "a roof to live under in [jurisdiction]" far exceeds the cost of the roof itself and the land to put it on! And that doesn't include manufacturing businesses having to play games with inventory to limit property taxes on that.
All this has made me think that the Georgists aren't wrong and that we should consider taxing property near-exclusively based on the land itself to incentivise more efficient utilization.
Actually a lot of this is due to the fact that quality of construction and depreciation are rather arbitrary place to place, and appraiser to appraiser. So especially in the big counties you can literally have two assessors that would look at the same building, one mark it grade A and another mark it grade C. It's rather wild.
But most of it is the fact that the land/improvement splits are garbage based on nothing.
When it comes to calculating value, quality of construction is usually one of the top factors in driving value as well. At least for residential parcels.
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There's a reason that safe and dense housing only exists in expensive areas: it has to be expensive to keep the undesirables out. You can have safe and affordable (in the country), you can have dense and affordable (the hood) or you can have dense and safe (Manhattan) but you can't have all three. The parent comment brought up St. Louis, well St. Louis has plenty of neighborhoods like the urbanists want with dense housing and walkable grid streets, check out Gravois Park or Dutchtown on street view. That's what a dense and affordable neighborhood looks like in the US.
Which ones? San Francisco is 40% white, 35% Asian, 5% black (a much lower proportion in the latter case than Paris, London and many other major European cities). It has extremely high median income. The reason it is a shithole has nothing to do with demographics, and everything to do with policy (regarding the homeless, mostly).
Enforce the law, and it’s entirely possible to have affordable, safe and dense housing. Inner cities (provided they’re safe, amenable and walkable) will always be expensive, but dense inner suburbs like in most Euro cities and NYC are totally feasible.
It's a shithole precisely because of demographics.
Childless PMC whites in San Francisco, Seattle, and Portland vote for shithole policies because they're the shithole demographic. Once you get out to Bay Area suburbs that are full of Indians and Chinese, the shithole factor declines to nearly nothing.
Quite a few of the most zealous supervisors and school board members in SF have been Asian, iirc.
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Back in the 1950s-80s 5-10% was often the tipping point for safety.
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2 out of 3 for safe, affordable and dense is a best case scenario. You can have somewhere like San Francisco that manages to do worse than that and is overrun with petty crime despite high prices. I agree that enforcing the law would work but that's a hypothetical. If anything the voters have turned strongly against tough on crime policies compared to five years ago so I don't see any signs that it's about to change. In the world as it exists (in the US) if you want dense and safe housing you need to be ready to write a huge check.
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There are plenty of areas in NYC that are dense* and safe middle class neighborhoods. Jackson Heights, Forest Hills, etc.
*Relative to most of the rest of the US.
A 1000 square foot apartment is over $800k in Jackson Heights so I think we have different definitions of middle class.
According to this, "Median household income in 2021 was $69,880[.]" The 2021 median income for the US as a whole was $70,784.
Per www.streeteasy.com there are currently 48 2-bed+ apts for sale in Jackson Heights. Fifteen are listed at under $400K. There are only two for more than $800K,
I see a few on Zillow in the $400k range but they don't list the square footage so I assume it's not suitable for a family. Found one that does list it as 850 square feet but it also has an $850 per month HOA fee.
My $800k was an overestimate but buying a place large enough for a family still seems insane for what you get, though doable if you're willing to part with more than half your take home on mortgage+ HOA fees.
I suggest you look at Streeteasy, which is the go-to site for NY real estate. I see a 1050 sq ft unit for 425K, five separate 1000 sq ft units in the $340 range; several others with no sq ft listed but with floor plans.
Well, we all know that NYC apts tend to be small. But that is the nature of the city. There are plenty of much more expensive places in more upscale areas that are no larger. It really says nothing about whether a particular area is middle class. As i noted, the median household income there is right at the US median.
Remember, most of the places you see are coops, and that means that the HOA fee includes property tax, insurance and, usually, heat and water. In some places it includes the electric bill, but I think that is rare. Plus, the HOA fee covers garbage and other standard city services fees.
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