The End of the Suburbs: Where the American Dream Is Moving Read Online Free

Kentlands in 1993 as some of the original residents. Prior to that they lived in a suburb of Pittsburgh, where they lived on a cul-de-sac and where Dorney, a stay-at-home mom with a newborn, was miserable. She says she had never spent much time alone and was surprised that no one in the cul-de-sac was home during the day. “It was hell,” she says. They relocated to Maryland for her husband’s job, moving first to a town house community nearby until her husband saw the construction for Kentlands while he was out on a run. When they moved in, she says, “it was like heaven.”
    New Urbanists are not without their critics, many of whom label them as sellers of a kind of fakified nostalgia. (New Urbanists would counter that claim by saying that everything—even old historic places like Georgetown—was master-planned and brand-new at some point.) Others say they aren’t solving the problems posed by the suburbs because they build on large plots often in the middle of nowhere, which has led to the nickname “New Suburbanism” ( one blogger described New Urbanism as a “pretty veil over common suburbia”). New Urbanism communities can be expensive to build and their homes expensive to buy. Getting over conventional zoning codes is often problematic and requires lots of patience, and often compromise: FHA loan rules still limit the percentage of commercial real estate in vertical apartment units, making it hard for New Urbanism developers to secure financing for the mixed-use buildings they say are a critical ingredient in their neighborhoods.
    Nevertheless, New Urbanism principles have been followed and copied over the years. In 1996, Disney opened Celebration, Florida, its five-thousand-acre master-planned community near Orlando, largely on New Urbanism principles, though it did not bill it a New Urbanist community. In the mid-1990s, the Department of Housing and Urban Development adopted New Urbanist design criteria in its program to build public housing projects. The Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Learning now offers a master’s in architecture and New Urbanism. And there is some indication that when the opportunity to rebuild from scratch presents itself, the New Urbanists get called in. After Hurricane Katrina, 170 New Urbanists, led by Andres Duany, prepared redevelopment plans for eleven Mississippi Gulf Coast communities; as this book was being written, staffers from New Jersey governor Chris Christie’s office had started calling DPZ for ideas about how to rebuild the Jersey Shore after Hurricane Sandy. Membership in CNU is growing, and there is a new offshoot group for the movement’s younger generation.
    During the housing crisis, New Urbanism communities around the country held up better than traditional suburban communities, performance that won the attention of policy makers and the conventional home-building community and led the movement to some important victories. The FHA recently loosened the restrictions on the percentage of commercial space that can be attached to residential units. Certain municipalities are starting to bake New Urbanism tenets into their planning methods—even in Texas, of all places. El Paso recently became the first city in the United States to require that architects working on city projects be accredited in New Urbanism, while the Texas Department of Transportation has adopted the rule book that guides New Urbanism street design as recommended practice. “The dynamic is changing,” says Benjamin Schulman, former communications director for CNU who is now with the Chicago chapter of the American Institute of Architects. Delivering the closing night keynote speech at the CNU conference in West Palm Beach, celebrity author and urban theorist Richard Florida acknowledges these recent successes. “Isn’t it interesting,” he says, “that the world has come to us?”
    Perhaps the biggest proof of the growing adoption of New Urbanism theories is that the large