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

can be a lot less charming. Salon.com cities columnist Will Doig calls them a “Frankenstein of supermarkets, outdoor dining, parking lots and mock-cobblestone sidewalks.” But it is all part of the same grand effort to bring an injection of urbanization to the suburbs, or to create what the
New York Times
has referred to as “hipsturbia .” The mainstream home builders and developers, who tend to be hyperaware of what their buyers are looking for—or as Duany calls them, “touchingly responsive”—are simply following the market, and the market is telling them that this is what people want. When you hear the home builders starting to talk about “streetscapes,” “mixed use,” and “sense of place,” the principles Duany and his disciples talk so much about, it’s clear something is afoot. “The pendulum is swinging back toward walkable urban development,” says George Washington University’s Christopher Leinberger. Leinberger calls these new urban-suburban markets Walkable Urban Places, or WalkUPs, and he’s intimately familiar with them. In 2012, he led an effort to define and identify forty-three such neighborhoods in and around Washington, DC, classifying them into seven different archetypes according to degree of walkability. A niche market twenty years ago, he says, this kind of pedestrian-friendly development has become “the market of the future.” Says John McIlwain, senior resident fellow of the Urban Land Institute: “I don’t think people have a clue that we’re creating totally, radically different suburbs than what we have thought of.” Out with a big group of friends one night, I was explaining this change when Neil Vogel, a New York tech entrepreneur and armchair urbanist who grew up in the Philadelphia suburbs, jumped in. “It’s urban suburban,” he said. “That’s what everyone wants. That’s the ideal.”
    Helping things along is an increasing amount of data that suggests that these kinds of communities are more valuable than subdivision-style development. Studies have shown that people are willing to pay more to live in New Urbanism communities than in conventional suburban neighborhoods. A 2001 study that analyzed more than two thousand single-family home transactions found that buyers paid a 15 percent premium for homes in Kentlands over homes of similar age in nearby subdivisions. For other New Urbanism communities the premium was 4.1 percent and 10 percent. The difference is even greater after the Great Recession, as New Urbanism communities have held up better; valuations in Kentlands were less impacted than in nearby areas. Diane Dorney and her husband bought their live/work unit for $450,000 in 2001; six years later similar units were selling for around $1 million.
    Now an increasing body of research is showing that home valuations hold up better in suburban communities that have even the slightest urban-esque features. Kevin Gillen, a housing economist at the University of Pennsylvania’s Fels Institute of Government, drilled down on this with a study of 340 zip codes in the Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New Jersey suburbs. Looking closely at the relationship between the physical design characteristics of a community and its home valuations, Gillen found that housing prices held their value in direct proportion to the presence of urban design elements like mixed-use spaces, access to public transit, and walkable streets. Homes in suburbs that were either in or near pedestrian-friendly town centers, for example, held up 8 percent better than average home values in the area. Homes in higher-density communities held up 20 percent better; homes in communities that had a balanced mix of houses and commerce held up 6.6 percent better; and every additional rail stop in a community, Gillen found, led to prices holding up 9 percent better.
    A separate study of metropolitan Washington, DC , conducted by Leinberger and Mariela Alfonzo for the Brookings Institution, found a