Five years after the great mortgage collapse ruined outer suburbia, Americans are starting to believe that it isn’t coming back. Demographic and cultural changes have resulted in a permanent oversupply of suburbia.
That’s the basic premise behind an interesting New York Times op/ed by Chris Leinberger titled The Death of the Fringe Suburb. Leinberger claims that we are now in the midst of a reversal of the 1950s suburban explosion, and that the demographic convergence of millenials entering adulthood and baby boom empty-nesters ensures that the reversal is no mere blip.
Leinberger is right, but he fails to mention that what is happening is bigger than a simple reversal of trends. It’s the failure of an experiment, and the return to traditional methods of city building.
Most Americans think of suburbia as normal, but in reality it is anything but. American suburbia was a 50 year experiment. After World War II we made a massive investment in a new way of living. We abandoned thousands of years worth of urbanist heritage in order to build our lives around cars. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Now, a half century later, we’ve learned that our new paradigm has problems of its own. Large numbers of us now believe that the old way is better.
Never again will Americans think of suburbia as the problem-free utopia that our grandparents imagined it to be. The results from our experiment are in, and they are mixed at best.
My point is this: American suburbia was an historical blip, and our return to urbanism is nothing but a return to normalcy. We’ve always had suburbs and we always will have suburbs, but their day in the sun as the dominant paradigm of city building is coming to an end.