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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.
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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