Suburban living dying off as people migrate to the cities again

[Crazy Volvo Guy]

In Alabama, people are still moving out to the suburbs. Birmingham's been loosing population.

Birmingham is basically the Detroit of the South.  The two cities have had very similar struggles.

[Tom958]

According to this article, Atlanta has somehow managed to become even sprawlier over the last fourteen years, which is hard for me to imagine. I thought we were already at the outer limit. 

[bing101]

Wait if I lived in San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose I would have to depend on Public Transit more.
But Wait what if Bart, AC Transit or Muni Decided to have a shutdown for Political reasons you can walk, use your bike, skateboard if you plan to stay in the city. But if you need to leave the city you have to either hitchhike to get out or vanpool in case of a transit strike.

I would rather have more options. Solano county is good for housing. Options to use Public transit and of course Employer buses in Vallejo can use the Soltrans Downtown bus terminal without facing protests.

[Stephane Dumas]

Interesting to compare it with a thread I spotted on Skyscraperpage titled "the suburbs are back"
http://forum.skyscraperpage.com/showthread.php?t=211439

[Scott5114]

I can't live in a dense urban environment–my border collie needs a yard. Even aside from that, I think I'd prefer a happy medium with something like a Walgreens within walking distance, and safe biking facilities, but otherwise set up for cars.

[Duke87]

I like living in the city although the aforementioned parking issue does grate on me. As does the fact that this city seems to be heading in a direction where they want to make it less friendly to cars.

But I've been back and forth between the city and the suburbs a few times and I will probably move back to the suburbs at some point in the not too distant future.

To me it's a balancing act between:
1) Stores and restaurants being close enough to walk to
2) Keeping a car and using it when I want to for pleasure being easy, inexpensive, and hassle-free
3) Commute being as short and hassle free as possible

Ideally I want all three. My current situation does exceptionally well at (1) and decently well at (3) but quite poorly at (2).


Of course, there are other considerations. I would never live anywhere that is geographically isolated and a pain in the ass to leave by car (Long Island, I'm glaring at you). And I would never live anywhere that's within a hurricane evacuation zone or within the floodplain of a river.

[JakeFromNewEngland]

All my life I have spent living in suburbia and I'm starting to get sick of it. It does have benefits though. For example, in Southwestern Connecticut, most major cities such as NYC and New Haven are within an hour from most towns in the region making commuting easier via the roads or Metro North.

I could never see myself living in a city. Although I enjoy visiting cities and seeing the sights, it's just not something I would be able to put up with everyday.

As you can see I'm a very picky person when it comes to city vs suburb.  My ideal place to be is somewhere between rural and suburban. 

[triplemultiplex]

After growing up in a small, rural community, I wound up living in the heart of Milwaukee for 7 years.  It was quite the transition, but as I got used to all of the amenities and access to a wide variety of nightlife and opportunities to mingle with other people, I grew to love it.  Street festivals, ethnic festivals, live music, sports, every kind of bar there is; I could go on.  I was fortunate enough to live within walking distance of my place of work for much of that time so I didn't have any of the commuting or parking woes that are tops on people's complaints.  The place had character the people were varied and interesting.  I formed a bond with a city that previously was just a place I visited occasionally.  I would move back there in a second.

I compare my experience to when I visit relatives out in suburbia.  The houses all look the same.  The grocery stores all look the same.  The people all look the same.  The roads are a twisted maze of dead ends, left turn arrows and bland, non-specific names involving ridges and birds and flowers.  Now that I travel for work, I see that every suburb looks like every other suburb no matter where you are.  Cheaply constructed, overpriced houses taking up lots of land so insecure people can hide from broader problems of society.  Suburbs are designed to create the illusion of wealth, but really they are the physical manifestation of fiscally, demographically and environmentally unsustainable activities.

Now understand, I don't want to bag on people for acting in their own interest.  Everyone does it.  And I don't want to tell people how to live.  I also don't want to motivate certain unsustainable trends.  The current system rewards sprawl and promotes the isolation of people into self-segregated groups that don't have to be around each other if they don't want to.  Density forces people to interact with others; people they agree with, people they don't, people with different life experiences from your own.  It enhances one's ability to empathize with someone not part of their own "in group".  I am worried that life in suburbia means people can be dismissive of their fellow citizens because they are in some "other" group "over there".  Multiple generations raised in suburban 'isolation' have enhanced this natural tendency we have as a species and I don't think most people realize it.

[hbelkins]

Street festivals, ethnic festivals, live music, sports, every kind of bar there is; I could go on.

None of that appeals to me. I haven't been to a concert or a ballgame in ages, and have no desire to go. I'm a NASCAR fan but I would not want to go see a race live, because I'd have to deal with crowds of people and the traffic jams getting to and from the track. I'm not a bar-goer and never really was, even in my single days. Again, too crowded, too loud and too many people (not to mention too smoky; at least now in many cities if I chose to go to a bar it would be smoke-free).

We have a street festival in my little county seat town and I avoid it like the plague.

That is one reason I could never enjoy living in a city. I prefer to be isolated from people vs. having them around me all the time.

[oscar]

When I moved into my county in 1982, the saying was that just raising your voice was a misdemeanor.  Now parts of Arlington are thoroughly city-fied (especially the high-rise districts on Metro's Orange Line), but still getting used to stuff like organized pub crawls.

Fortunately, I live a mile away from those parts.

[NJRoadfan]

Isn't calling Arlington a "city" considered a misdemeanor?

[triplemultiplex]

Street festivals, ethnic festivals, live music, sports, every kind of bar there is; I could go on.

None of that appeals to me. I haven't been to a concert or a ballgame in ages, and have no desire to go. I'm a NASCAR fan but I would not want to go see a race live, because I'd have to deal with crowds of people and the traffic jams getting to and from the track. I'm not a bar-goer and never really was, even in my single days. Again, too crowded, too loud and too many people (not to mention too smoky; at least now in many cities if I chose to go to a bar it would be smoke-free).

We have a street festival in my little county seat town and I avoid it like the plague.

That is one reason I could never enjoy living in a city. I prefer to be isolated from people vs. having them around me all the time.

Yeah, it's not for everyone.  Small towns are a completely different animal.  I can't really compare them to urban areas, regardless of the density.  Suburb vs. city is a much more equivocal comparison.

[jeffandnicole]

Someone emailed me this link today:  http://www.governing.com/topics/urban/gov-end-of-sprawl.html

My response:

I stopped reading when I looked at the first picture.  The captain: "A virtually empty parking lot" . The picture? The top deck of a parking garage.  Probably a rarely used area of the garage anyway.  Is it an office building's parking garage?  Was the picture taken on a Sunday morning, when the office is closed?  I almost want to question an article when such a potentially deceiving picture and captain is used to illustrate their point.

[Laura]

I compare my experience to when I visit relatives out in suburbia.  The houses all look the same.  The grocery stores all look the same.  The people all look the same.  The roads are a twisted maze of dead ends, left turn arrows and bland, non-specific names involving ridges and birds and flowers.  Now that I travel for work, I see that every suburb looks like every other suburb no matter where you are.  Cheaply constructed, overpriced houses taking up lots of land so insecure people can hide from broader problems of society.  Suburbs are designed to create the illusion of wealth, but really they are the physical manifestation of fiscally, demographically and environmentally unsustainable activities.

It blows my mind that middle class society chose inferior housing, streets, urban design, and ultimately an inferior way of life due to personal insecurities over living with people different than themselves (due to race) in the early to mid 1960's. I look at the majority brick houses in cities and compare them to the majority wood and siding houses in the suburbs and shake my head. I think about how there are a plethora of ways to arrive at a destination in a city yet only one way in the suburbs. The major benefit to the suburbs is having a yard, but in turn public neighborhood spaces are sacrificed.

My personal ideal is a mixture of both worlds: I would like to live in an older suburb (no newer than 1965). I like the idea of having a detached house and a small yard so that I can garden and have a few chickens, yet being close enough to walk and bike to essentials like public transit and a grocery store. Depending on the city, this is either inside the city limits or just outside (or both).

I've been seeing both trends at once: people moving into the cities to be "where the action is" and others moving out to the suburbs to raise a family. Yet, I know people with kids who are staying in the city and either sending them to charter schools or homeschooling them.




iPhone

[bing101]

http://www.npr.org/2014/06/18/323166109/as-exasperation-mounts-french-rail-strike-turns-violent

Well Public transit is not the solution to everything. I know cities depend on this more than suburbs. But both cars and rail transit have their pros and cons.

in some cities you have to worry about rail strikes more.

[hbelkins]

It blows my mind that middle class society chose inferior housing, streets, urban design, and ultimately an inferior way of life due to personal insecurities over living with people different than themselves (due to race) in the early to mid 1960's.

How much of it was due to self-segregation, and how much of it was due to the atrocious nature of schools in the cities? Or forced busing which took kids out of their neighborhood schools and made them ride across town to be enrolled in schools that may not have been as good as the ones closer to their homes?

My dad's siblings all lived in Shepherdsville, Ky., in Bullitt County when I was growing up (three of them still do). It's 20 miles south of Louisville on I-65. When I was very young, it was a sleepy little town despite the interstate and the proximity to the city. It wasn't the bedroom community for Louisville that it is now. The property behind the home of my aunt where we always stayed when we spent the night was a field. There was little commercial development at the town's exit off the Kentucky Turnpike. The three high schools in the county (Shepherdsville, Lebanon Junction and Mt. Washington) had consolidated into Bullitt Central.

In the early 1970s, a court ordered desegregation of schools in Jefferson County by forced busing. People moved to Bullitt County (and Oldham County, and to a lesser extent, Shelby County and Spencer County) in droves. Shepherdsville grew like crazy. The field behind my aunt's house became a subdivision. KY 44 between Shepherdsville and Mt. Washington, and KY 1319 through Bullitt and Spencer counties, which we used as a shortcut to KY 55 and I-64 at Shelbyville, went from a country road to lined with houses. Bullitt County had to build new high schools not long after consolidating. US 31E/150 between Mt. Washington and Louisville was four-laned to deal with the commuter traffic.

Some of it may have been "white flight" spurred on by racism, but very little of it was. Instead, people were moving to a place where their children could attend schools close to home.

The growth of these counties was inevitable, because there's been growth in practically all the towns along the interstates surrounding other nearby cities (such as Lexington and its satellites), but forced busing probably accelerated that growth by about 10-15 years.

I think "inferior way of life" is a totally subjective statement. There is nothing at all appealing to me about urban living. I know I'm an old fart, but even as a 20-something, I was never attracted to the city.

[Brandon]

I compare my experience to when I visit relatives out in suburbia.  The houses all look the same.  The grocery stores all look the same.  The people all look the same.  The roads are a twisted maze of dead ends, left turn arrows and bland, non-specific names involving ridges and birds and flowers.  Now that I travel for work, I see that every suburb looks like every other suburb no matter where you are.  Cheaply constructed, overpriced houses taking up lots of land so insecure people can hide from broader problems of society.  Suburbs are designed to create the illusion of wealth, but really they are the physical manifestation of fiscally, demographically and environmentally unsustainable activities.

It blows my mind that middle class society chose inferior housing, streets, urban design, and ultimately an inferior way of life due to personal insecurities over living with people different than themselves (due to race) in the early to mid 1960's. I look at the majority brick houses in cities and compare them to the majority wood and siding houses in the suburbs and shake my head. I think about how there are a plethora of ways to arrive at a destination in a city yet only one way in the suburbs. The major benefit to the suburbs is having a yard, but in turn public neighborhood spaces are sacrificed.

My personal ideal is a mixture of both worlds: I would like to live in an older suburb (no newer than 1965). I like the idea of having a detached house and a small yard so that I can garden and have a few chickens, yet being close enough to walk and bike to essentials like public transit and a grocery store. Depending on the city, this is either inside the city limits or just outside (or both).

I've been seeing both trends at once: people moving into the cities to be "where the action is" and others moving out to the suburbs to raise a family. Yet, I know people with kids who are staying in the city and either sending them to charter schools or homeschooling them.

Brick houses have their downsides, after having lived in one for five years.  They get cold in the winter and bake in the summer (don't get one without air conditioning).  Wood frame tends to breathe better and has more chances for proper insulation.  Even houses you think are brick actually have a wood frame underneath.

Not everyone who moved did so because of race.  After World War Two, there was a housing shortage in the US.  Levitown and other such places filled a need for new housing stock (which had been retarded due to the war and the Great Depression - few new houses were built between 1929 and 1945).  Some of these actually took over pre-subdivided grids that were prepared prior to 1929 (Skokie, Illinois is a prime example).  A lot of GIs took advantage of college and housing discounts after the war and moved into places like this from their parents' homes in the city.

What's also forgotten is that the idea of suburbs is not new, and certainly not confined to solely the post-WWII era.  One of the earliest suburbs, designed to be a bedroom community was Riverside, Illinois.  Riverside, designed mostly by Frederick Law Olmsted, was started in 1869.  It was meant to be a suburb connected to Chicago by rail for commuting.  It was designed for mostly upper middle class people, and still is fairly middle to upper middle class to this day.

Not everyone "wants to be where the action is" as a single either.  Some of us prefer living in satellite cities (not to be confused with suburbs) that have their own downtown and life by themselves (I do, for example).  The satellite cities tend to provide the best of both worlds as they are small to medium sized cities on their own, but they do provide the closeness of the mothership (i.e. Aurora, Elgin, and Joliet in relation to Chicago).

As for older suburbs, most Chicago suburbs are older than 1965, and have merely added housing and businesses since 1965.  Even a place like Bolingbrook was founded in the 1830s (not more than a corner store for decades), started to be built up in the 1950s, and incorporated in 1965.  It still fits the older than 1965 bill.  Or do I talk about Romeoville?  Founded in the 1840s with the Illinois & Michigan Canal.  Incorporated in 1895, but remained small for decades.  Built up in the 1950s with the Hampton Park subdivision, and continues to grow currently.  Even Naperville started in the 1830s and incorporated in 1857 before growing rapidly in the 1970s and 1980s.  It has a downtown and a nightlife all its own with a college nearby.

[Laura]

In full disclosure... I wrote my previous post in a semi conscious state (and on tapatalk, no less!) so I probably could have worded some things better.

Like the "inferior way of life thing". I'm looking at it purely from an urban design standpoint. We chose a new standard that required all transportation to be by automobile, which makes it difficult for kids and the elderly to get around. I love my car, but I also love options. If I'm going to be far from things, then I need to be in the country proper. I don't want neighbors and I want to be surrounded by farms. The 1965 year specification was a guesstimate. Basically, I'm cool with suburbs as long as they were first built before that time. (Obviously there will be infill.)

I always forget about the busing element because that wasn't needed here. The white schools and the "colored" schools were almost always close to each other, so once schools were integrated, distance wasn't an issue. I don't have the statistics handy but white flight due to school integration in Baltimore was very real. There was only one school year where schools were actually integrated (1962-63) before all the whites left.

Of course suburbanization has been occurring since the streetcar was invented and grew after WWII due to housing loans being readily available for new suburban homes and not for older city homes. The "white flight" is just one example.

I mentioned my love of older burbs, but I do love small towns equally as much, if not more.


iPhone

[Dr Frankenstein]

I still work part time at the library in the small town I grew up in, and in the past ten years, I have seen new neighbourhoods and houses pop up every year, and most of the new clientele at the library has been upper-middle-class young adults with young children. Even the older houses seem to get filled up by young families from the city. While I don't consider that town to be a suburb, a significant proportion of its population does commute to Montreal.

My current location, Beauharnois, is more of a suburb, but only a half-suburb. I'd say that half of the population commutes to Montreal, and the other half works locally. We're part of the Greater Montreal metro area as far as census and taxes are concerned. It used to be its own city in the past, with its own industries and commercial activities, but nearly every plant closed one after the other, mostly because of outsourcing. Only the power plant remains, because you can't really move that to another country. With the completion of A-30, our mayor would really love to turn us into a true suburb, with a target population of nearly double of what we are now by 2020.

I'm moving to Longueuil in July, a true and much older suburb just next to the city. Just enough space to park my car and much cheaper than the city, and excellent transit. As I said in my other post, cost and parking issues are among the main reasons why I refuse to move to the city.

I think that the whole "young families moving to cities vs suburbs vs country" thing is hard to gauge here.

[golden eagle]

According to this article, Atlanta has somehow managed to become even sprawlier over the last fourteen years, which is hard for me to imagine. I thought we were already at the outer limit. 

Metro Atlanta practically spans from Alabama to Athens east & west, and from Chattanooga to Macon north & south. I wouldn't be surprised if it butts against the borders of North Carolina and South Carolina.

[tidecat]

Two counties in Alabama and two counties in North Carolina are in the Atlanta DMA.

[jakeroot]

If I was laying out a town, it would look something like this:

- thin roads to discourage high-speeds, thus encouraging walk-ability
- roundabouts to slow traffic (in tandem with above)
- shops along main avenues even in seemingly residential areas
- large shopping centres built as close to the city centre as possible, and in-keeping with the neighbourhood aesthetics
- mid-to-high density residential (closely spaced 2-3 floor homes)
- no freeways (bypass roads are fine).
- large open green areas with fountains/flowers and the obligatory horticultural club to keeps things tidy
- widespread bus service
- bike paths separate from the roads (if on the roads, bike boxes)
- bike/motorcycle filtering legal -- promotes scooter/bicycle use
- no right turn on red -- not very friendly for pedestrians
- signalized pedestrian crossings
- slip lanes signalized only if pedestrian hits the button -- otherwise, yield

I'd like to think these things would promote urban living. Suburbs would inevitably exist (they always do), but a safe, walkable, reachable, attractive, and efficient city centre would help increase desirability within the city centre and should prevent too much urban growth.

Abram V, a city planner from Texas, conceptualized a city centre that I adore:

[hbelkins]

If I was laying out a town, it would look something like this:

- thin roads to discourage high-speeds, thus encouraging walk-ability
- roundabouts to slow traffic (in tandem with above)
- mid-to-high density residential (closely spaced 2-3 floor homes)
- no freeways (bypass roads are fine).
- no right turn on red -- not very friendly for pedestrians

Remind me never to live in your town.

[jakeroot]

If I was laying out a town, it would look something like this:

- thin roads to discourage high-speeds, thus encouraging walk-ability
- roundabouts to slow traffic (in tandem with above)
- mid-to-high density residential (closely spaced 2-3 floor homes)
- no freeways (bypass roads are fine).
- no right turn on red -- not very friendly for pedestrians

Remind me never to live in your town.

I alienated 98% of AARoads with those bullet points.

EDIT: Read this if you are interested in my "thin roads" concept.

[jeffandnicole]

Ah yes, when I want absolute proof of something road related, nothing is better than an editorial written by a licensed landscape architect.