
The line is blurring between city and suburb - elberto34
http://www.businessinsider.com/death-of-suburbia-series-overview-2017-3?IR=T
======
kr7
The title is somewhat misleading. The suburbs are not dying; in fact they are
growing [1][2][3][4] and this article makes no claim to the contrary.

The article is saying that suburbs are becoming more like urban areas.

I like the author's evidence that housing prices are falling:

> In that same city in 2012, a typical McMansion would be valued at $477,000,
> about 274% more than the area's other homes. Today, a McMansion would be
> valued at $611,000, or 190% above the rest of the market.

Up 28% in price - must be dying!

[1] [http://time.com/107808/census-suburbs-grow-city-growth-
slows...](http://time.com/107808/census-suburbs-grow-city-growth-slows/)

[2] [http://www.citylab.com/housing/2016/03/2015-us-population-
wi...](http://www.citylab.com/housing/2016/03/2015-us-population-winners-the-
suburbs-and-the-sunbelt/475251/)

[3] [http://www.businessinsider.com/americans-moving-to-
suburbs-r...](http://www.businessinsider.com/americans-moving-to-suburbs-
rather-than-cities-2016-3)

[4]
[https://www.forbes.com/sites/joelkotkin/2013/09/26/americas-...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/joelkotkin/2013/09/26/americas-
fastest-growing-counties-the-burbs-are-back/#3ab5c42d338a)

~~~
lukeschlather
The point of that comparison is separating the value of the lot from the value
of the house sitting on that lot. The property value isn't going down, but the
value of the home is dropping considerably.

The misleading thing may be that this is just standard depreciation, although
I wouldn't be surprised if houses in the 3000-5000 sq.ft. bracket were
depreciating faster than smaller houses. (Though it seems likely these numbers
they stated were the simplest way they could find to say that they are
depreciating at an unusually fast rate.)

~~~
Spooky23
I'm not sure I follow that logic. Lot value is difficult to assess and
frequently wrong from an assessment standpoint.

The cost to tear down a McMansion that isn't depreciated way is very high,
making the lots value questionable. Additionally, since tract housing is often
identical in most ways, if your neighbors homes are going to shit and
depreciating, that will impact the lot value too.

------
hackuser
> "Ideally, there won't be any new highway capacity built because we can't
> afford to maintain what we have"

It's not a detail that changes the conclusion, but I want to focus on it:

The U.S. definitely can afford to maintain its roads. The country is the
richest in the history of the world, richer than it's ever been. U.S. GDP in
1960, when the Interstate Highway system and many suburbs and malls were being
built, was ~$3 trillion in real dollars;[0] now it's ~$18 trillion.

The U.S. chooses not to maintain its infrastructure.

[0] According to one unofficial source on the web, which I'm going to trust
for this purpose.

~~~
mhneu
Strong Towns has written extensively on this. Their conclusion is that our
infrastructure is not affordable because too many roads are built to non-dense
areas that do not have the tax base to support them.

Federal highway dollars get dropped in to build, but then no dollars are
available to maintain.

[https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/2/five-ways-
feder...](https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/2/five-ways-federal-
infrastructure-spending-makes-cities-poorer)

~~~
PeterisP
Just as the parent poster says, the U.S. chooses not to maintain its
infrastructure. The infrastructure is not affordable by many municipalities,
but that same infrastructure _is_ affordable by U.S. as a whole.

They _could_ subsidize the infrastructure required to integrate the country
and keep the non-dense areas viable even if these areas don't have the local
tax base to pay for that infrastructure, just as they did with federal highway
dollars when they were built, just as many other countries are doing. It's a
choice to do so or not. The rules of who pays for maintenance of which parts
of infrastructure are essentially arbitrary and the U.S. can alter them if
they choose to.

~~~
Inthenameofmine
Not from the US, but I lived there shortly and was asked to move there and had
to decline. To me it's pretty clear that your single biggest problem is your
suburbs and car culture. Everything from anti-social behavior, social anxiety
snd isolation, depression, obesity, diabetis, divorce, as well as partisan
politics stems from it. Subsidizing that mess should be the last thing you
should do.

Other countries subsidize rural areas primarily for 3 reasons: 1\. Certain
political parties have their base in rural areas and want to subsidize their
life style. 2\. Strategie for making the country more food-independant through
farming. 3\. Military strategie for having people in remote areas.

Nobody in the world subsidizes non-productive suburban sprawl.

~~~
panglott
I think you captured it with "1\. Certain political parties have their base in
rural areas and want to subsidize their life style."

The suburbs are politically very important in the U.S. because a lot of people
live there. The question of most national elections is whether the suburbs
will ally with the urban core or the rural areas, and the answer is usually
the rural areas.

------
rhapsodic
I prefer a 0.5-1.0 acre lot to a lot slightly bigger than the footprint of the
house it contains.

I prefer to have the privacy that's afforded by having my house set 40' back
from the street, with plenty of space between my and my neighbors' homes,
rather than living in a house that abuts, or is 6 feet away, from my
neighbors'.

I prefer a spacious driveway and an attached, heated, two car garage, to
parking on the street a block from my house, and having to dig my car out
after a snowstorm.

I prefer to own a home that was built during or since the 1950s, when Romex
wiring was original equipment, rather than own something that still has knob
and tube wiring with decaying fabric insulation.

I prefer a home built with drywall or rock lathe and plaster, over one built
with wood lath and plaster.

I've found that most pre-1910 homes I've examined do not have foundations or
basements to my liking.

I prefer to live in an area where I can leave my doors unlocked and my windows
open at night without giving it a second thought. Or where, if I leave the
house and realize I left the front door unlocked, I don't feel compelled to go
back and lock it.

I prefer to live in an environment where junkies and bums are virtually
nowhere to be seen, rather than an environment where I have to be careful not
to step in human feces when I walk between two parked cars.

When I can get all that affordably in the city, I'll consider moving back.

~~~
rhapsodic
This post got a lot of upvotes, and a lot of downvotes. I know because I
watched it fluctuate up and down. Everything I wrote was merely my personal
preferences. I wonder why so many people were upset by it enough to downvote
it.

~~~
yongjik
I think you have some good points, but it seems you're against a straw-man
version of city life that doesn't match what most city folks experience every
day:

* "a home that was built during or since the 1950s"... is supposed to be preferable? A home built in the 80s will be considered old-fashioned in places like Seoul. (Besides, what's that got to do with city-versus-rural difference?)

* "I prefer to live in an area where I can leave my doors unlocked..." Some cities have crime problem. Others don't. Also, I have the impression it's always the (Americal) rural dwellers who say "You urbanite liberals have no idea why guns are necessary!" So I'm taking your argument with a grain of salt.

* "...rather than an environment where I have to be careful not to step in human feces when I walk between two parked cars." Well... then don't live in SF, I guess?

~~~
rhapsodic
_> I think you have some good points, but it seems you're against a straw-man
version of city life that doesn't match what most city folks experience every
day:_

 _> "a home that was built during or since the 1950s"... is supposed to be
preferable? A home built in the 80s will be considered old-fashioned in places
like Seoul. (Besides, what's that got to do with city-versus-rural
difference?)_

First, a little background. In a previous life I was a carpenter who did some
new home construction, but mostly remodeling, in both cities and suburbs. So,
given just about any wall in any home, I have a pretty good idea what you'll
find under the paint if you take a sledgehammer to it.

In the northeastern US city I'm using as my reference point, the housing stock
is on average much older than the suburbs. And to me, an old house is like a a
really old car. It breaks down a lot and requires a lot of maintenance. The
walls are less likely to be square and plumb. The wiring is more likely to be
obsolete and insufficient for all the computers/gadgets/appliances we rely on
today. I just don't care to deal with it.

Different people have different value systems. I really don't care whether or
not there is excellent Thai Fusion cuisine available within walking distance,
but I like a home that is reasonably up to date and low maintenance. The so-
called charm of century old city houses is of no value to me. In some
wealthier areas of my local city, most of the houses have been gutted and
refurbished down to the last piece of trim by their cardiac surgeon owners,
but those houses sell for around 4X what I paid for mine and cars are still
more likely to get stolen from their driveway than from mine.

So, to sum up, my preferences are based on my own set of values, which are
markedly different from people who prefer to live in cities.

And one thing I've noticed, is that when I say things like this openly, for
example at a dinner party attended mostly by white professional city dwellers,
it invariably bothers some of them, visibly, that I have the preferences I do
and I'm not embarrassed to admit them. (I'm well aware of how fashionable
suburb-bashing is among fashionable people.) I always find that part amusing.
They try to convince me that it's so awesome living as they do in a row house
in some "up and coming" neighborhood, but it really sounds like they're trying
to convince themselves.

~~~
matchbok
Nobody is trying to convince you of anything. Some people value time more than
money. Living in the burbs requires a car, sitting in traffic, etc. That's not
worth it for a lot of people. I can walk outside my door and have access to 10
times the things the average suburbian does. That makes it worth it.

~~~
int_19h
> Living in the burbs requires a car, sitting in traffic, etc.

FWIW, this isn't always true. I live in the suburbs about 30 miles from work,
and it takes about as much time for me to drive there as it does for my
friends who live 3x closer, but in the city. They get all the traffic; I can
literally just set cruise control at speed limit, and coast 20 miles out of
those 30 on a wide open freeway.

~~~
umanwizard
If your friends need a car for their daily commutes then they probably don't
live in what I would consider a "city".

~~~
hueving
That's a no true scotsman argument. What the OP described matches almost every
metro area of the US (except maybe Manhattan). So by your definition there are
basically no cities in the US, which is pointless for this discussion.

~~~
umanwizard
Really? I lived in Seattle and didn't need a car for daily use. I also highly
suspect you don't need one in Chicago, Washington DC, maybe Philly and
Pittsburgh. And you definitely don't need one in most parts of NYC, not just
Manhattan (I know plenty of people who live in Queens and commute by train).

~~~
int_19h
I didn't say that you need a car to live in Seattle. I said that commute times
are not necessarily shorter.

Besides, where did you work when you lived in Seattle? Plenty of people live
in the city, but work across the lake in one of the offices in Eastside
(Microsoft in Bellevue, Redmond or Samammish, Google in Kirkland etc).

You don't need a car in a sense that you can take a bus, or the private
connector shuttle if your employer provides one. But they sit in the same
traffic jams on the roads, so it's not really saving you any time (although
you do get the benefit of reading or doing something else while waiting).

------
dthal
Jed Kolko, former chief economist at Trulia, thinks stories like this are
either exaggerated or wrong. His basic claim is that urban revival is limited
to childless professionals in their peak earning years. See [1], or any of his
posts at [2] for the data and analysis.

[1] [http://jedkolko.com/2016/03/25/neighborhood-data-show-
that-u...](http://jedkolko.com/2016/03/25/neighborhood-data-show-that-u-s-
suburbanization-continues/)

[2] [http://jedkolko.com/favorite-housing-
posts/](http://jedkolko.com/favorite-housing-posts/)

~~~
mhneu
Anecdotally, when I lived in an urban condo, half the building was empty-
nesters -- couples who raised their kids in the suburbs then moved back to
walkable smaller city apartments after the kids left the nest.

The problem demographic is couples with kids. Our urban schools are bad, so
they leave the city to find good schools. But people with no kids -- either
before children or after they leave for college -- are living in cities.

~~~
otoburb
>>The problem demographic is couples with kids. Our urban schools are bad, so
they leave the city to find good schools.

Good urban schools exist, but there aren't enough of them, hence there is
intense competition to get into good urban schools. To your point, this then
ends up driving more families away from dense urban centers.

~~~
wtbob
> Good urban schools exist, but there aren't enough of them

It's not just that — due to desegregation (itself a good thing!) one can't
ensure that one's kids will go to either a good school or one nearby. Parents
want the best for their kids, and will do their best to ensure their kids'
success (note that Mr. Obama's kids went to Sidwell Friends, not to a public
DC school).

------
jtedward
This somewhat anecdotal, but the biggest issue I had when living in the
suburbs was traffic. I'm someone who has driven hundreds of thousands miles
and never been in an accident, but the extreme levels of fear and stress I got
from going even short distances in the suburbs was just aweful.

I didn't always feel this way, but I think the use of cellphones has created
and environment where even slow moving drivers are unpredictable. I now walk
to work and frequently see people on their phones while driving, if a line of
ten cars are stopped at a light at least three people are on their phones. The
result isn't an extreme increase in accidents but a constricting deficit of
attention which incrementally lengthens every encounter on the road. More
short stopping, more people missing green lights or just driving super
conservatively and not merging holding up traffic.

Also I never use my phone while driving, but the fact that I can't even look
at it when I know someone is trying to contact me is incredibly frustrating
and impacts my enjoyment of driving.

~~~
mhneu
_if a line of ten cars are stopped at a light at least three people are on
their phones._

As a cyclist, I often check who is on their phone when I pull up to a light.
My guess would be even higher - 50-75% of drivers are on their phones when
stopped at a light.

~~~
CalRobert
This is terrifying to cyclists, motorcyclists, and walkers alike, and probably
leads to thousands of deaths a year.

------
pm90
I would be very interested to know how much of this is caused by a change in
housing preference v/s a change in the nature of employment/wages for
millennials. When you had reasonable expectation that your job would last for
several years, you are more willing to invest in building up equity in a
suburban home/community.

Also, the no.1 reason why people seem to want to move to suburbs is children
(IMO, anecdotal etc.)... perhaps the falling fertility is making married/live-
in couples more willing to live in a dense, urban communities?

~~~
seanmcdirmid
I have a one bedroom apartment next to work in a fairly urban location. This
fits my wife, my MIL, and our newborn. It doesn't feel small at all (helps
that this is more space than we had in China, but still...)

~~~
jimbokun
When your child starts school is when the big decisions will come.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
Ya, but for the first few years, at least, it doesn't feel crowded.

------
johan_larson
Some of the living arrangements people are resorting to just reek of
desperation:

[http://www.businessinsider.com/how-millennials-live-in-
san-f...](http://www.businessinsider.com/how-millennials-live-in-san-
francisco-2017-2)

Living in vans. Living in _boxes_ in larger apartments. Thirty people living
in a 10-bedroom building.

There is vast demand to live in these cities, and their governments are
utterly failing to accommodate it in an orderly and dignified fashion.

~~~
ghaff
Or maybe it's just the market's way of telling employees and employers that
it's a big beautiful country that doesn't begin and end with a small peninsula
on the West Coast.

~~~
Spooky23
It's amazing that most companies, including tech companies, operate technology
with a diaspora of people across the globe. Yet the bigshots need to be in SFO
for reasons.

~~~
toomuchtodo
I'd say "Why work for a tech company that pushes the externalities of high
housing costs onto you by not allowing remote work" but I assume it'd be
drowned out by the same sound as the rush of folks to grab shovels and pick
axes during the gold rush era.

Housing in the Bay Area is like roads; build more and capacity will simply be
soaked up. Either move elsewhere or accept the SV tax. No property owner in
their right mind would vote for more building (depressing the value of, most
likely, the largest asset they own).

TL;DR Vote with your feet, prefer remote first companies.

~~~
OrwellianChild
This is a really interesting contrarian perspective... I think the only thing
that prevents it from being true is that you can very easily build a lot of
housing stock - just build up! SF's restrictive zoning/NIMBY is the only thing
in the way. The "housing congestion" is artificial - not "induced demand" like
with the typical road problem.

~~~
toomuchtodo
I would argue you'll never be able to build so fast as to get ahead of tech
hiring in SF, but only time will tell.

There's only so much land you can build on, and only so high you can build
(whether through physics or legislation).

------
nikanj
"Millennials want to cook at home and don't like to play golf"

They don't have money for restaurants, let alone the resources to pick up a
hobby as expensive and time-consuming as golf.

~~~
smileysteve
In Atlanta, I find this wholly untrue, and the "doesn't cook at home" is
something I find most easily defines between gen-x/early millennials /
millenials with older siblings and late millennials.

Of my friends and people I've in mid twenties to late thirties, most define
eating at home as microwaving or heating a frozen meal; otherwise fast food
and eating out are what they spend their budgets on.

------
pmoriarty
There's a great documentary on this called _The End of Suburbia_ ,[1][2]
though the causes for such a collapse are very different in the documentary vs
this article.

[1] -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_Suburbia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_Suburbia)

[2] -
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3uvzcY2Xug](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3uvzcY2Xug)

~~~
gozur88
Peak oil? Oil is still cheap. If expensive oil is the end of suburbia, we
wouldn't be seeing any effect yet.

~~~
kbob
Yabbut if you're taking out a 30 year mortgage, you're not just going to look
at current oil prices. The media are full of stories about the end of oil and
looming price increases.

~~~
gozur88
The media is also full of stories about new billion-barrel fields being
discovered. Based on what Americans are buying to drive, they don't seem too
concerned about the price of oil.

I don't know what it is now, but back when I bought my first house the average
length of time people stayed in a house was 4 1/2 years.

~~~
kbob
We consider it acceptable for a car to be mostly depreciated after five years
of ownership. We do not want our houses to have lost value in five years,
especially as many of us will still owe 75% of its value.

A house is still a longer term investment than a car, even if you sell it.

------
agentgt
I'm curious if others are seeing tear down fest in semi-urban neighborhoods?

So I live in Metrowest Boston Area. I own a multi family. My wife, infant son
and I live in modest square footage despite having fairly generous annual
incomes (e.g. well above AMT tax rate).

My parents used to live nearby in affluent town (Wellesley) before just
recently selling their house to a developer... who of course knocked it down
to build a gigantic pimped out house. The same developers was buying 4 other
houses at the time. In short Metrowest Massachusetts has become tear down
central.

The problem is other than foreign investors (a lot of Newston, Weston,
Wellesley, and Needham is getting bought out by foreign investors) nobody from
my age group.. the age group that is looking to buy houses wants a super
mansion... even if its decked out (That is these houses aren't McMansions.
They are real mansions).

From my general experience of talking to other educated thirty somethings is
people want authentic and charming not McMansion and yet there all these new
houses replacing old New England house.

Yet these new houses are priced ridiculously high. And again talking to other
peers it seems gone are the days where people buy 4-6 times their salary.
People are buying sometimes as low as just twice their salary and completely
fine. And if people want convenient they are going for condo and not McMansion
style.

Historically New England has been fairly bubble proof. I fear that time is
coming to an end.

When it does happen I might buy some of these big boys and convert them to
multi-families ... BTW this is exactly what happened to parts of New England
in the late 19th and early 20th century [1] where giant houses were converted
to multi families aka Somerville and Waltham (where I live).

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple-
decker](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple-decker)

------
bognition
I don't know anyone who wants to live in the suburbs. They either want to live
in the city or far enough out that they can have land and privacy.

~~~
FT_intern
Isn't the entire Bay Area (outside of SF/Oakland) basically one huge suburb?

~~~
_delirium
Even a good part of SF proper (maybe 1/3 or so) feels pretty suburban to me.
Two-story single-family homes, each with a private garage as the most
prominent feature of the ground floor frontage. Granted, they're more "old-
style" suburban homes. On smaller lots and with smaller yards, on a grid
street plan, more like what '40s-'60s style suburbs looked like. Not the style
popular since the '80s with big houses on huge lots on a cul-de-sac. But not
exactly _urban_ , either.

------
leggomylibro
Little boxes, on the hillside, little boxes made of ticky-tacky...

You know, it's funny. Some cities are trying to quickly build out higher-
density apartment buildings in/near the downtown areas, and from what I've
seen the same concept applies. I'd love to see some of those fancy mini-
arcologies spring up, but really the boxes are just a bit bigger (or smaller,
depending on how you look at it.)

I do hope that malls become very cheap real estate before long; I think it's
already happening in some places. I would just love to buy what is essentially
a cheap, empty, commercially-zoned warehouse and stuff it full of things like
laser tag, arcades and e-sports, a couple of lounge areas and coffee
shops/bars depending on the time of day...but I doubt you could make something
like that work without very cheap square footage and a lot of people within a
30-45 minute drive.

~~~
dredmorbius
And that (Daly City, CA) is relatively high-density by current US standards.

------
charles-salvia
So, I have to wonder: if this trend actually continues (and I hope it does),
could this be a factor that helps curtail climate change to some degree? I
realize that we will most likely inevitably suffer major damages at this point
no matter what, but I'm wondering if trends like this (along with the rise of
better battery technology and electric cars) will at least _mitigate_ the
damage to some extent.

I mean, currently NYC has a ridiculously low carbon foot-print for its
population size. So if more places become dense population centers with public
transportation like NYC, it can only be a positive thing in terms of
mitigating climate change.

~~~
rsynnott
Not to a huge degree, probably, because this is really just America moving
towards something a bit more like what's already the dominant urban form in
other developed countries. It's not a global trend; while other countries have
suburbs, the extent of America's obsession with them and the extreme car-
dependence of the American ones is almost unique.

------
erikb
The idea of suburban areas being less about owning is horrible. Of course if I
don't buy my living space and instead rent it, someone ELSE has to buy it
first. They become not less about owning, but more about being owned by big
companies instead of individual owners.

And the reason people don't own as much as years before is because we realize
that we can't afford to. If you give me a mansion for $10 (without any zeros
behind it) I'll gladly prefer it over my apartment.

What will be the next article in the series? Children in Jemen prefer to eat
less food than their bodies require?

------
transfire
> In one example, in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, the extra money that buyers
> were expected to be willing to pay to own a McMansion fell by 84% from 2012
> to 2016. In that same city in 2012, a typical McMansion would be valued at
> $477,000, about 274% more than the area's other homes. Today, a McMansion
> would be valued at $611,000, or 190% above the rest of the market.

I love how they think it is only a matter of willingness. Do they realize the
cost cited prices out around two-thirds of the population?

------
trackofalljades
I'm really happy that everything they mention in this article is "dying," good
riddance.

------
vidanay
Good riddance.

~~~
charles-salvia
I agree - the suburbs are really depressing.

