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

home builders, who don’t tend to care much for the social aspect of the movement or the well-intended principles behind it, are starting to build New Urbanism–style communities themselves. They’re not calling them that, of course, and many may not even be familiar with New Urbanism, but there are by some estimates as many as four hundred “city replicas ” already built or going up in suburban America, ranging from small-scale, intimate walkable villages to giant, ambitious “lifestyle centers” that combine retail, apartments, restaurants, and sometimes high-rise apartment buildings. In one of the brightest spots in the housing market, nearly every major home builder these days is working on some effort to effectively urbanize the suburbs.
    In Glenview, Illinois, a North Shore suburb of Chicago, Pulte Homes, the largest U.S. builder, is building The Glen, a master-planned community of several hundred town houses built around a town center with a movie theater, spa, comedy club, pub, and coffee shop. (You can “leave the car keys at home,” the Web site says.) Not far away, it also has Arlington Crossings, a community of sixty-six stately-looking town houses from fourteen hundred to seventeen hundred square feet. In the Washington, DC, area, the company recently opened MetroWest, a transit-oriented, mixed-use community of three hundred condominiums and town houses next to the Vienna metro station. “We’re seeing more of a demand for the evolution of suburbia and a desire for community centers where walking areas and retail areas are more accessible,” says Deborah Meyer, senior vice president and chief marketing officer of Pulte, “where you don’t have to get on a highway to get a cup of coffee.”
    Older suburbs are beefing up their downtowns, too. Morristown, New Jersey , a leafy railroad suburb thirty miles west of New York City, is in the middle of a $300 million redevelopment of its historic town center that has seen the construction of more than five hundred new residential units in the past few years. They include 40 Park, a seven-story luxury apartment building that went up where the old Epstein’s Department Store used to be and whose loft-style apartments have Brazilian hardwood floors, open kitchens, iPod docks, and walk-in closets; the building’s seventy thousand square feet of ground-floor retail space means that tenants are steps from a Starbucks and a yoga studio. The building won the “Best Mid-Rise Condominium Community” award from the National Association of Home Builders a few years ago; last year, two of its penthouse apartments sold within days of each other for $1 million to $2 million.
    Many of these developments are deliberately playing up their urban design elements. The shiny new Village at Leesburg, a massive fifty-seven-acre urban development just off Route 7 not far from the famous Leesburg outlet mall, advertises its “carefully designed streetscapes” and “traditional Main Street feel.” It has shopping, apartments, and work space, the very “mixed use” style of development the New Urbanists talk so much about. On a parcel of land some thirty miles from Philadelphia in suburban Bucks County, Pennsylvania, Toll Brothers has built Newtown Station, a collection of forty-seven federalist-style town houses and condos built at higher density in a grid-style, walking neighborhood. “Echoing the style and grace of Society Hill and Boston’s Back Bay,” the marketing materials describe, Newtown Station was a “quiet enclave of city homes reminiscent of an earlier time.” In Conyers, Georgia, outside Atlanta, Arab developers who had bought up six hundred acres in the 1980s for a shopping mall have adjusted their original plans and are building a massive New Urbanist community instead.
    It’s important to note that not all of these are New Urbanism developments; New Urbanists, after all, didn’t invent the concept of walkable villages, and the giant urban town centers