The End of the Suburbs: Where the American Dream Is Moving (12 page)

It’s no coincidence that where gas costs more—in Europe, for example—there is less sprawl. In the United States, we were so happy to spread out and make ourselves comfortable mainly because everyone could afford to. “
Exurb homeowners accepted long drives
and commutes as an avenue to getting the huge house and lot they wanted,” writes Christopher Steiner, the author of
$20 Per Gallon: How the Inevitable Rise in the Price of Gasoline Will Change Our Lives for the Better
. “That was when cheap gas seemed a certainty rather than a fleeting perk.”

But even at our subsidized prices, our consumption is so high and the price of oil has risen so much that it’s a strain for many people. And while price spikes have come and gone over the years, most experts agree we’re now at the start of something bigger—a combination of dwindling resources and a looming explosion in global energy demand that will continue to drive gas prices higher. Yes, recently we’ve been heralding lots of good news when it comes to our domestic energy supply: the discovery and extraction of shale gas in recent years has been a boon; our dependence on foreign energy imports is at its lowest point in recent memory. But most cars don’t run on natural gas. And most experts, including
the lauded oil economist Daniel Yergin
, predict fossil fuels will remain our primary energy source for the foreseeable future.

Indeed, while the development of alternative fuel sources and electric cars show promise, the solutions so far aren’t going to be enough to make a significant difference in our patterns of energy consumption in the near-term. “
The various tech industries are full of
MIT-certified, high-achiever status quo techno-triumphalists who are convinced that electric cars or diesel-flavored algae excreta will save suburbia,” says the author and sprawl critic James Howard Kunstler. That may be giving MIT scientists, as well as the array of hybrid vehicles on the market, promising developments in alternative fuel, and advancements in electric cars, short shrift. But the main problem is that to date, none of these developments has reached significant scale. To hit the mark the way cheap oil did, whatever we come up with has to be cheap and accessible enough for the
158 million
Americans who need to drive or be driven to, from, and around the suburbs and exurbs each day. If it doesn’t, the ever-rising cost of energy will increasingly impact where people choose to live.

Those on the extreme side of this argument—people like Kunstler, and Steiner, and Jeff Rubin, the former chief economist of investment bank CIBC World Markets who became so convinced of the coming oil shortage that he left to write a book about it,
Why
Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller: Oil and the End of Globalization
—say that dramatic changes are on the way. Kunstler paints a picture where oil soon hits $6, $8, then $12 per gallon; when it does, airlines shut down, parts of the world become inaccessible, and public transit gets mobbed. He foresees our pattern of development reverting to dense villages and cities where food, goods, and services will need to be produced and consumed hyper-locally; the outer suburbs will be reconverted to farmland, where the land will have more value. “Places that can’t grow food locally are not likely to make it,” he says. (Kunstler has long derided what he calls the “3,000-mile Caesar salad” and the complex, energy-consumptive supply chains we have come to take for granted to get food from the ground to our suburban tables.) As the transport of goods by water becomes increasingly important, he predicts the decline of any community that’s not near a waterway. “You can forget about Phoenix and Las Vegas,” he told me when we sat down for a chat in West Palm Beach—incidentally, the kind of in-person interview that under Kunstler’s logic will probably go by the wayside, too.

To hear Steiner tell it, meanwhile, cars will mostly be playthings for the rich, and gasoline prices will be so high that for the rest of us, as he writes, “
driving to the supermarket becomes
an exercise of coasting through stop signs in neutral” to preserve every last drop of fuel.
For his part, Rubin envisions
a world in which neighbors will reconnect with one another; will relearn domestic crafts like sewing, gardening, and farming; and will stay close to home or close to our villages. He predicts that sky-high oil prices will ultimately bring manufacturing back to the United States; even though our labor rates are higher, that increase will be dwarfed by the increase of transportation costs to import goods from overseas.

Some of these views may be extreme. Transportation engineer Eric Dumbaugh sees it somewhat more simply. Gas prices are inconvenient, he says, but they won’t be the thing that forces us out of our cars. Real behavioral change, he says, will come from somewhere else. “I think we’re going to get out of the car because it doesn’t make any social sense,” he says. “There’s a cultural shift going on right now—and I think that right there is going to be the game changer.” The cultural shift he’s referring to is that for the first time since the invention of the automobile, our driving behavior is beginning to veer in a different direction.

•   •   •

I
n one of the more striking societal behavioral shifts of the past few years, after all these years of car dependency and after millions and millions of miles clocked, it seems that Americans are slowly but surely driving less.
The total number of miles driven peaked in 2007
for the first time since World War II and has been declining since, according to the Federal Highway Administration.
The total number of registered automobiles
has fallen, too: nationwide, the figure fell 4.5 percent from 2008 to 2010; in California, it’s fallen nearly 10 percent.
In April 2012
, a U.S. Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) report showed that by 2011, the average American was driving 6 percent fewer miles per year than in 2004. This is partly due, of course, to the financial crisis and the persistent near recession we’ve been in in the past few years, which has forced Americans to pare back on everything. But the changes are significantly more perplexing than that because they started happening before the financial crisis set in.
When measured per capita
, vehicle miles traveled started to decline in 2004. And
in addition to miles driven
and automobiles registered, the share of trips Americans make by car has been on a downward trend as well—one that started in 2001. “America’s transportation preferences appear to be changing,” says Phineas Baxandall, coauthor of the PIRG report. Some in transportation circles are calling these collective changes signs that we’ve reached or are about to reach “peak car.”

One reason for the change in behavior may be an ever-increasing awareness about the need to be more responsible with energy use. Consider the success of the Prius and other hybrids, or the rise of Zipcar, the car-sharing service that saw membership grow to close to eight hundred thousand before rental car giant Avis bought it in early 2013. The company specifically markets its service as a way to reduce the number of cars on the road. “Less cars on the road mean less congestion, less pollution, less dependence on oil, and cleaner, fresher air to breathe,” its Web site says. Originally born as a service for city residents, it’s seeing more demand come from suburban markets: in early 2012, Zipcar invested in Wheelz, a peer-to-peer car-sharing service, in order to test the concept at lower densities, and it’s been expanding regular Zipcar service to suburban areas like White Plains, New York, and Montgomery County, Maryland. Meanwhile, established car rental businesses like Hertz and Enterprise, and even carmakers like Ford, GM, and BMW, are getting into the car-sharing game.

More and more suburban residents are experimenting with reducing their car dependency. In suburban Dallas,
Rachel Meeks
and her husband gave up one of their two cars a year ago and blogged about the effort. “We’ve been living in the suburbs with just one car for over a year, and I must say that it’s been 10% inconvenient and 90% awesome,” Meeks writes. “With two cars, there was always something we had to do: Oil changes, inspections, more gas and new tires. . . . One car is so much easier to take care of, and we drive less in general.” The post got 110 comments. In the summer of 2012, a few transportation agencies in North Texas got together to organize a “Dump the Pump” campaign, part of a nationwide effort to encourage residents to commute by means other than their cars. Commuters could bring a gas receipt to designated destinations in exchange for unlimited bus and rail rides.

An easy gauge of the heightened interest in car-optional living is the sharp growth of Walk Score, a buzzed-about Seattle-based start-up that quantifies the walkability of almost any neighborhood (its slogan: “Drive less. Live more”). Plug in any address on Walkscore.com and the site, using a blend of proprietary algorithms and publicly available data, calculates how far it is from a school, a restaurant, a store, a coffee shop, and about a dozen or so common destinations and ascribes it a “score” of 1 to 100, with 90 to 100 being the best (a “walker’s paradise”) and 0 to 24 being the worst (“car-dependent”). The site is part utilitarian, part social mission: its founders believe that walkable neighborhoods are one of the simplest and best solutions to the problems facing our environment, our health, and our economy. Messages reminding users of that ethos appear all over the site. (“Save money, get fit and make room for the rest of your life,” reads one.) Walk Score now shows more than nine million scores a day—and it’s also introduced Transit Score and Bike Score ratings—but more telling is the way it has been embraced by the real estate community. Fifteen thousand realtors now build the Walk Score search mechanism into their Web sites sharing housing listings, largely because their house-hunting clients are asking for it.

There’s another earthquake happening when it comes to our driving habits as well: teens and twentysomethings seem to be expressing a surprising indifference toward cars and driving. Getting a driver’s license used to be a rite of passage for any self-respecting postwar American teenager: it was a ticket to freedom, autonomy, and unchaperoned life with one’s friends. It’s not as significant to today’s youth.
According to FHA data
, in 1980, 66 percent of all seventeen-year-olds had their driver’s license; by 2010, that had dropped to 47 percent, despite the huge swell in the population of millennials. The PIRG study that tracked overall miles driven, meanwhile, found the decline to be especially pronounced among younger drivers:
the average American aged sixteen to thirty-four
drove 23 percent fewer miles in 2009 than the average young person in 2001.

The indifference isn’t just toward cars, it’s toward driving, and it’s sizable.
In a study done by MTV Scratch
, the network’s in-house millennial research and consulting arm, not a single car brand was mentioned in the top 10 brands preferred by members of this group. This is starting to show up in car purchase figures:
while people between twenty-one and thirty-four purchased 38 percent
of new cars in 1985, they accounted for just 27 percent of new cars in 2010. “
Gen Y Eschewing V-8 for 4G
,” read the headline on Bloomberg News when the data came out. “That is inconceivable to me,” the historian Kenneth Jackson said to me in a conversation about the decline in driver’s licenses. “You [used to count] the hours until you got your driver’s license.”

Of course, many teens still do count the hours. But ask around among the teenagers and twentysomethings you know today and you will likely find a decidedly different attitude when it comes to cars and driving. “Young people aren’t enamored with their cars anymore,” says Arcadia Land’s Jason Duckworth. “A small apartment with interesting friends and a good Wi-Fi connection are today’s ’57 Chevy.” I recently chatted with a former colleague of mine whose oldest daughter had turned sixteen several months prior. He said when he asked her if she wanted to get her driver’s license, he was bowled over by her response: “Maybe next year,” she shrugged. “Maybe
next
year
?” he repeated to me as he recounted the story. “I couldn’t believe it.”

The housing market has started to reflect a change in driving priorities. Far-flung suburban communities are losing their appeal—and their valuations. An analysis of real estate data by Fiserv Lending Solutions shows that home prices have fallen more in towns and neighborhoods far from urban centers than those closer to cities. Homes located in or near walkable neighborhoods held up better in the recession, and, as we’ll explore in the next chapter, new research keeps coming out showing an increase in demand for and higher valuations ascribed to foot-traffic-friendly, less car-dependent communities. “I think cities without adequate public transportation are going to be the ones that are really screwed over in the future,” says Diana Lind, executive director and editor in chief of the urban affairs magazine
Next City
.

In the end, after six years in Westborough, Massachusetts, Diane Roseman and her husband decided they couldn’t do it any longer; while they recognized why many people would choose it, the car-dependent, subdivision lifestyle just wasn’t for them. They sold their house and moved their family to an attached row house in Cambridge and they haven’t looked back. It wasn’t easy: they got a deal on a fixer-upper in Cambridge, but they still had to spend more than what they were able to sell their Westborough house for. When they explained their plans to their suburban neighbors, they blamed her husband’s commute for the move. “People really dropped us,” Roseman says. “They took it a little personally.”

Now in Cambridge, everyone in her household is happy. Her children walk to school, or even to the museum or to cafés. “My kids have so much more freedom than they ever had in the suburbs,” she says. Last year her daughter attended a summer camp at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts and for a week took a bus to the museum on her own. “There’s no way anything like that could ever happen in the suburbs,” Roseman says. “It can’t happen because of the infrastructure.” Her husband works for Google and can choose between a ten-minute walk or a three-minute bike ride to work. “He’s so happy,” she says. Virtually everything the family needs is accessible by walking, biking, or taking the T. They live a mile from the public school. Whole Foods is around the corner. They have a “postage stamp” backyard, Roseman says, but they love it because her husband is free from spending weekends maintaining a big lawn—and if her kids want to play outside, they walk across the street to the park.