‘Retrofitting’ The Suburbs — It’s About Prosperity, Not Politics

Over the weekend that silly pinko rag the Wall Street Journal ran a long article looking at suburban “retrofitting”– the process of going back a trying to figure out how to make the ‘burbs look and act less like ‘burbs and more like those places where people ride bikes to work and hang out in coffee shops.

It tends to involve creating better non-automotive infrastructure (useful sidewalks, quality transit, etc.), and finding ways to cluster retail, housing, and workplaces together with places where you can chill out and have fun. Towns across the country are getting serious about this not out of some irrational and treasonous love of European lifestyles, but rather because of what the market is saying. It turns out that old people especially care about living less car-dependent lives and that the demographic growth of old people in the coming decades will be epochal.

But the olds are just part of a broader shift. Over the weekend we looked at a new report from the Victoria Tranport Policy Institute called “Where We Want To Be.” The report starts from the same premise of market demand:

Market research indicates [...] demand for sprawl housing is declining, resulting in oversupply and reduced value. The current stock of large-lot housing is adequate for the foreseeable future, but the supply of small-lot and attached housing will need to approximately double by 2025 to meet growing demand.

OK, then we have something like a fact. Which is helpful in matters like this and allows us to ignore the question of what we feel about the suburbs, and just accept that the Beaver Cleaver style of living was overbuilt in the past 50 years. Sprawl housing is essentially a commodity, and there’s a glut. But unlike coffee or pork bellies, a season or two of low prices don’t clear the market. This is a verrrry long term situation.

Todd Litman, author of the VTPI, report describes the scope of the shift:

Twenty years ago less than a third of households preferred smart growth, but this is projected to increase to two thirds of households within two decades.

This goes hand-in-hand with a suburbanization trend that peaked about a decade ago–not coincidentally at about the time when most baby boomers had a nest full of kiddies:

Those nests are now fast-emptying, and people are moving back to cities.

As the WSJ story highlights, a handful of Atlanta suburbs are at the forefront of retrofit movement. They are getting very serious about redeveloping so that seniors want to “age in place” rather than move somewhere else:

Five lifelong communities are on the drawing boards [in Atlanta]. Created by Duany Plater-Zyberk, the Miami firm, each starts with an existing setting—a suburb or small town, for instance—and, first, “repairs” the local infrastructure. Typically, that involves changing street grids to connect neighborhoods and making it easier to walk to services and amenities. Next, the plans add features—social spaces, housing, shops, transportation options, recreation and entertainment facilities—that help address the needs of an aging population.

The plan for Fayetteville, the town south of Atlanta, calls for new “greenway paths” for pedestrians, a shuttle bus to shopping and health-care services, and improved links among neighborhoods.

It has created the amusing effect of making a America’s senior citizens a kind of New Urbanist vanguard:

Then there’s the showstopper: taking a 38-acre undeveloped site that in the past might have supported 38 single-family homes, and wedging in more than 200 housing units, including town homes and condominiums, around a neighborhood square. For older Fayetteville residents with large homes, it could be an attractive option for remaining in the community.

That kind of development and density are “unheard of” in the Fayetteville area, says Jan Trammell, a local builder and developer. But “we can’t keep doing what we’ve been doing,” she adds.

“Space is something we thought we had to have” in the suburbs, says Ms. Trammell, age 74. “But we can’t afford that today—time-wise or money-wise. Putting a single house on a one-acre lot means more street in front of that house, longer electric and gas lines to run to the house, more yard and shrubs to cut, and a bigger property-tax bill for the owners. We’re all tired of that. I know I am.”

A pitfall of discussing the suburbs is it often creates an argument driven by emotion, with the battle lines often being drawn in political terms. The more sensible conversation centers on a desire for local prosperity–which everybody can relate to. Fortunately, that discussion seems to be what’s emerging.

Top image: WSJ; Chart: VTPI