Outer Ring Suburbs and the Permanent Foreclosure

(A quick little Friday afternoon note.)

Discussion of planetary boundaries is pretty surreal everywhere these days, but in the United States, the disconnect between reality and rhetoric has reached what I think are pretty stunning proportions. Nowhere can this be better seen than in the discussions about how to “fix” the suburbs.

Many still debate that anything about the American model of sprawl development needs fixing, but most understand that something has gone seriously wrong with the outer-ring suburbs that more than a quarter of American call home. It doesn’t take a futurist to look at the conditions on the ground — long commutes, auto dependence, the expected steep rise in oil prices, environmental problems, the bursting of a massive financial bubble (resulting in millions of abandoned homes and ruined families and a wave of bankrupted suburban local governments) — to realize that they suburbs are in deep trouble, and that trouble is just going to get worse.

Many have started to realize that the foreclosure crisis isn’t a crisis in the sense that it will come and go and everything will be fine again someday. For many places, this is the new normal; a permanent foreclosure. Any plan based on the idea we’re going back to some modified form of what we had before is wishful thinking, especially in the sunbelt states where speculative sprawl was at its worst. (In fact, I think that we haven’t seen anything like the bottom on this bust, with millions more foreclosures in the pipeline, and little money or political will to make the massive investments it’d take to keep many newer suburbs afloat.)

As people have realized how severe the problems facing outer-ring suburbs are, designs which attempt to solve those problems by turning sprawl into something else have seen a vogue. (Part of the reason I was prompted to fire off this note was that I got yet another call from a journalist working on a suburban solutions piece, and that got me thinking.)

Often, the thinking behind new suburban design provocations seems to go something like this: the problem with the outer ring is that it’s too spread out; therefore, let’s make that weakness a strength and use all that land between the buildings, say, for farms and wildlife habitat. On the surface, it might appear to make sense, but reality is far less forgiving.

The reality is that because of the way we build suburbs, the land left underneath has limited value either as farmland or as habitat; it has neither the benefits of proximity of truly urban gardening, nor the richness of undisturbed land farther out; while pulling out buldings and roads, mitigating toxics, re-shaping the flow of water over the land and restoring ecosystems essentially from scratch is such an expensive process that it will never make sense as long as really critical prime habitat remains endangered elsewhere (which will likely be the case for the foreseeable future). The “asset” of open land that outer ring suburbs have is not a very valuable one, in ecological terms.

Unfortunately, it’s becoming less and less valuable in economic terms, as well. Most suburbs have extremely tough times ahead.

I expect that the wealthiest quarter of the suburbs may well thrive for some time. In many cases, they have strong tax bases and the political power to demand new state and national infrastructure investments. More importantly, what those suburbs sell is exclusion, not bargain living, so rising operational costs may not matter as much to them (the rich can afford high gas prices).

The rest are in for a rough ride. Most of the outer ring is not enclaves of high-status exclusivity. Most of it is strung together from developments marketed as offering big family homes in safe areas at a reasonable price. It’s designed to be upper-middle class life, on the cheap.

But it’s not cheap anymore (it was never as cheap as it looked, as one glance at the Housing and Transportation Affordability Index will show). Many homes that looked like good investments during the bubble are now underwater, and surrounded by communities that will never be finished or are already in decline. Rising fuel prices are about to make big cars, long commutes and poorly insulated homes even more expensive for middle class people. What’s worse (from the perspective of the suburban homeowner) is that the cultural worm has turned, and more Americans now want to live in walkable neighborhoods and increasingly associate sprawl with poverty and crime. I expect much of the outer ring’s economic value is gone, never to return.

The conventional answer to the problems moderate-income outer ring suburbs face would be redevelopment: bring in more housing, retail and commercial, and rescue them by making them more like the prosperous walkable neighborhoods that now command a premium on the market. But inner ring suburbs already possess a huge set of strategic advantages in moving to meet the demand for walkable communities: its not that hard to imagine adding lots of infill development and new transportation infrastructure to make livable, fairly walkable, much more sustainable communities. They have good bones, and they have location.

Imagining that kind of retrofit in the outer ring is a stretch. In the absence of an as-yet-unseen, brilliant solution, the outer ring suburbs, especially those recently built with funny loans at the far edges sunbelt cities, are probably just destined to become semi-rural slums. The idea that some solution has to emerge to their problems rejects both evidence and history, it seems to me; worse, it doesn’t much help us think through how we might offer better outcomes to the people who’ve invested everything they have on the suburban fringe.

It may well be that the ruins of the unsustainable are the 21st century’s frontier. I fully expect to see some really interesting experiments cropping up in half-abandoned suburbs in coming decades. But it’s worth remembering the decline of the inner city from the 1940s to the 1990s, and thinking about how long it was before new answers and possibilities took hold there, and how much of urban America is still suffering. If we’re going to avoid that kind of disaster in the outer ring, we need big, bold thinking — thinking that transcends farming and other small-scale solutions to reimagine what the macro-level possibilities might be for places the 21st century has left behind.

One of the things I’d like to explore in the next few years is what truly different models for suburban redevelopment might look like. As I find interesting ideas, I’ll definitely be reporting back.

Images: Damon Duncan, CC; Frog’s Dream: McMansions Turned into Biofilter Water Treatment Plants, by Calvin Chiu

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(Posted by Alex Steffen in Urban Design and Planning at 2:55 PM)

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