On that suburban livestyle dream (and why planners don't like it)

“Off they went, the two of them, both with their beautiful old houses and even more soulful gardens, on the emptiness of the suburban dream. All about what a crime the destruction of the countryside was, and not one word about what those houses, those small plots of land, might mean to those who owned them, let alone the fairness of distributing a little to many rather than sticking with a lot for a few.”

This quotation comes from a piece in LitHub by Suzannah Lessard entitled “Why We Hate the Suburbs” and describes a conversation in exurban New York with friends and neighbours. It captures for me the way in which a certain sort of educated, privileged person dismisses suburbia without realising how this isn’t simply an attack on the aesthetics of suburbia but assaults the lives and culture of the people who choose to live in such a place.

Lessard then observes how progressives share this hatred of suburbs with old money and the aristocrat and explores why this might be the case. For me the obvious truth here is that progressive thinking, especially in academia, is dominated by the privileged, progressives make common cause with an ancient feudalism because they are part of that feudalism, it is what made their idle, speculative yet well-rewarded life not only possible but esteemed.

Suburbia, and the portrayal of the people in those suburbs, has been a subject of sneering condescension since the first eager pioneers ventured out from the unhealthy and unpleasant European inner cities in the late 19th century – a departure made possible by the train and a liberalised land ownership. Places like Sydenham, Blackheath and Islington, for all that we now see their Victorian terraces in yellow London stock brick as iconic, were the subject of the same sneering outlook as Malvina Reynolds had for “Little Boxes” in 1962 and films like Vivarium do today. These critics are saying, “look at those dreary people in the suburbs” hinting that their lives are something shallow, selfish and inward looking. Historian, Simon Schama uses this sneer to put down columnist Rod Liddle: 'turn your suburban face away from the plight of the miserable'. It is the dismissing of little people by a grandee, a grandee who considers himself not just materially better but morally superior to a person from suburbia.

The elite view is that suburbs are shit. The Twitter account “Shit Planning” invests a lot of time into sneering at the aesthetics of house extensions, at pragmatic decisions that offend his eye. Interspersed with this is a steady stream of “look at this suburban development isn’t it horrible”



Despite this elitist disdain most of the critics, including Simon Schama, are the products of that suburbia. Some suburban experience will be from the peripheral council estates built after WW2 to replace cramped tenements, cold and damp back-to-backs and putrid inner city slums while others’ backstory will be of the 1930s three-bed semi that rolled out space and contentment across fields near railways into London. Yet still the distaste for the suburb persists, they’re places where people live out dull, ordinary lives, doing dull ordinary unexciting things like raising children - "raise the child and be released" is what the newcomers to Vivarium hear echoing that idea that bringing up children is a chore without reward done in a place without soul.

There is a disconnection between what people want and what the privileged, progressive and entitled believe we should have. As Joel Kotkin reminds us, suburbia reflects the reality of people’s choices – a house with a garden on a nice street with decent neighbours. The suburban dream may seem banal to grand people with grand ideas but that shouldn’t justify such people, as Kotkin remarks, imposing their bias on society:

“The urban gentry and intelligentsia, though, disdained this voluntary migration. Perhaps the most bitter critic was the great urbanist Jane Jacobs. An aficionado of the old, highly diverse urban districts of Manhattan, Jacobs not only hated trendsetter Los Angeles but dismissed the bedroom communities of Queens and Staten Island with the memorable phrase, “The Great Blight of Dullness.” The 1960s social critic William Whyte, who, unlike Jacobs, at least bothered to study suburbs close up, denounced them as hopelessly conformist and stultifying. Like many later critics, he predicted in Fortune that people and companies would tire of them and return to the city core.”

The old feudalism held that the great and good should direct the life and labours of the majority. Beyond a few personal chattels, this majority would not be owners, especially owners of land. Vast swathes of the country would be set aside as protected – not for the ordinary man’s pleasure but for those great and good to enjoy. Where people live wouldn’t be determined by their preference but by the requirements of the feudal lord or latterly the industrial mill owner. And those ‘mere uncounted folk’ as Kipling called them, would leave little mark on the world beyond, at most, a carved name on a gravestone now grown over with weeds.

Suburbia was the inevitable consequence of people choosing. I remember reading the biography of Body Shop founder Anita Roddick where she talked about always wanting a house like the one a child would draw and this reminds me of how suburban design (or at least the best of it) seems to mimic this childlike desire for a house that looks like a house. Those rows of identikit houses, those little boxes, aren’t soulless at all but express the reality of childhood dreaming. Yet the sneering classes still see suburban life, despite its desirability, as wrong – ‘ticky-tacky’:

And the people in the houses all go to the university
And they all get put in boxes, little boxes all the same
And there's doctors and there's lawyers
And business executives
And they're all made out of ticky tacky and they all look just the same
And they all play on the golf course and drink their martini dry
And they all have pretty children and the children go to school
And the children go to summer camp
And then to the university
And they all get put in boxes, and they all come out the same

Your life, such people say to the suburbanite, is dullsville. What you do for pleasure – golf, caravans and the like – are naff and your tastes (Berni Inns, Pringle sweaters, patterned wallpaper) are low status. Yet this is not just the life most people enjoy but it is the life many others aspire to enjoy – room to breathe, a place to park the car off the street, a garage to fill with the kids bikes, power tools and old plastic toys, and rooms big enough for everyone to sit comfortably. People will fill these homes with the material possessions our progressive elite sneer at but still buy – giant fridge freezers, huge wall-mounted TVs, - and the things they like: bottled lager, wine boxes, good white bread and mature yellow cheese, chocolate and shop bought cake.

Suburbia works because it provides a scale and form that fits the way humans prefer to live – every time people are asked what sort of house they want and what sort of place they’d choose to live, a majority describe suburbia: a single family home on its own plot, good neighbourhood schools, plenty of activities, all close enough to the city so as to allow a trip into town for entertainment. Only the planning and architecture professions seem to believe that either this isn’t really what people want or else that this lifestyle is terrible for the economy or society or the environment.

Suburbia provides a compromise between the city and the countryside. The latter appeals as we drive through it and see the lovely old cottage in a little hamlet or the sturdy old farmhouse halfway up onto the moor. And this bucolia lasts until we want a doctor or think about schools or popping out for some milk. For the city, the buzz of a frenetic social life with bars and restaurants, theatres, museums, and people, lots of people. Then we look at the little flat we live in with the noisy neighbours and the constant drone of the streets, where you’d not let a small child negotiate a journey to school. Off to the suburbs where there’s enough population density to sustain places to eat out, cinemas and convenient shopping but it’s spread out enough you can live in your own space. Yes, you’ll be better off with a car to get about but this is OK and a small price to pay for a well-paced live, a stable community, and a place for your kids to grow up safely and your parents to age contentedly.

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"We don't like cities, oh no. We love 'em"

One of the concerns emerging from Onward's research into the 'politics of belonging' was a concern about cities:

71% of people think that “more people living in cities has made society worse”

We could, of course, explore what exactly we mean by city here but the sentiment is an important one given that, as Onward showed in earlier research, we don't want new homes built outside the city. At the heart of the sentiment is that people really do yearn for community and, rightly or wrongly, consider that the city does not provide for such neighbourliness.

Despite this finding people continue to move into cities and the larger the city the more attractive it is to the migrant.

The United Nations in 2009 and the International Organization for Migration in 2015 both estimated that around 3 million people are moving to cities every week. Approximately 54% of people worldwide now live in cities, up from 30% in 1950. Sources estimate this will grow to 2/3 of world population in the next 15-30 years. More than half of urban dwellers live in the 1,022 cities with greater than 500,000 inhabitants.

The reasons for this migration are primarily economic - the city is where the work is so you go to the work - but there are also a collection of amenity and social factors that perhaps get less attention. I had an unresolved conversation a while ago with former ASI research director, Sam Bowman about whether the wider amenity value of a place is factored into housing costs (there's more fun stuff in a city meaning that the value from the rent is greater). There are more social and business opportunities in a city making it more appealing as a place to live.

The problem is that this doesn't explain the disconnection between what people say they want (essentially suburbia) and what they actually buy (city living). There is probably a 'life stage' factor in all this with younger people and wealthy 'empty nesters' populating a largely child free city while those with families choose the suburbs but it also reflects how suburbia not only lacks the city's amenities but also lacks affordable places to live. In times past suburbs, even well-connected suburbs, were cheaper than the city (they were also cleaner and smog-free) but the virtual halt on expansion changed this pattern.

The policy challenge is, I suspect, less about housing than it is about the connectedness of housing to the city amenities and associated agglomeration effects. When we look at transport infrastructure we spend too much time calling for multi-billion investments connecting city to city rather than creating a more intensive network within a large urban area. When you have that connectedness (as London has) it is ridiculous to then have restrictions on development within easy access of that network (which London also has). Elsewhere the situation differs either because of dispersed populations or because of topography, fragmented political geography and underinvestment (Transpennine England is a good example here) - there is no network and without it less agglomeration effect and less successful cities.

The other part of the policy challenge relates back to people thinking living in cities makes society worse, to the lack of social capital in dense urban places, and to the transience of environments dominated by private rented property. Plus, of course, the persistent problem of affordability. The odd thing is that in a previous age we considered that as a principal means of providing housing, private renting was exploitative and we replaced it via municipal housing and the encouragement of home ownership. Today many urbanists seem to favour renting as an approach praising its flexibility and, of course, affordability.

Suburbia was our historical compromise between the city and the countryside - many of the amenities of the city and access to its agglomeration effect while maintaining a sense of space and an idea of community. We need to recognise that strategies to prevent the expansion of cities - for reasons of cohesion, environmental protection and snobbery - have contributed to a significant problem. Right now most of the land needed to accommodate expanding cities is non-urban and at the margins of the exiting built area. We are actively preventing development here - this needs to change. At the same time we need to look at strategies aimed at making the city itself more liveable - experimenting with flat pack housing and sky gardens or building more child-friendly environments within developments.

None of this precludes the need for more development land at the city margin or the requirement to spend money on the networks needed to integrate new development into the wider city but we need to get away from the rigidity of current plan-driven development models. We need to recognise that families need private outdoor space (and parks, while great, don't meet this need) and that cities do too little to make families welcome. This matters because families stay put for a substantial time - the demands of children (schools, childcare support and the activities of growing up) tend to keep people in one place for a long time, something that would allow for denser urban areas to develop the sense of community that transient singles really don't provide.

How our urban environments develop, whether or not we shape them in the manner of suburbia or as rabbit hutches for tomorrow's peons, is one of the big policy questions but sadly one mostly pushed aside by dominant obsessions with slaying perceived environmental demons. The decline in community is as big a problem as climate change yet we seem not to be thinking about how to restore trust, how to create stable neighbourhoods and how to get this without throwing out the social and economic advantages of the city.

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British and American suburbs are very different - we should remember this when doing housing policy.

 I am, as you know, a fan of suburbs. The best suburbs combine the attributes of the city - walkability, access to public transport (but not to the exclusion of cars), a variety of house styles and tenures build reasonably densely all combined with a sense of openness and access to clean, fresh air and even the countryside.

So it worries me when people write about housing development and, in doing so, repeat this sort of line:

“…sprawling communities of single-family homes that require a car to navigate are not what’s drawing people anymore. What’s popular now are places where people can live in mixed-use, multifamily housing—maybe an apartment building above a coffee shop—and walk, bike, or take transit to get around.”

Firstly this isn't true. Or rather it is in some places because that's all we're building. This quotation comes from Tracy Hadden Loh, Christopher B. Leinberger, and Jordan Chafetz - pretty much champions of dense, high-rise city development. My problem is that it's quoted in a piece about British housing issues. Plus is completely ignores what Americans say when they're asked about the place they want to live and the houses they prefer - and what they actually do when able to choose.

But first let's remember that British suburbs look and feel very different from American suburbs. You'll all be familiar with what American suburbs look like from just about every second thriller or romantic comedy - low rise, often single-storey, family homes built on large plots that feature huge garages, lawns and not much else. Often there's no pavement (as we Brits call it correctly) and the road space is wide.

You'll also know that, while there are some similarities, British suburbia doesn't look much like this. I was brought up in Beckenham which is pretty much an archetypal suburb and while there were some larger houses (and a few very large houses) most of it consists of three-bed semis or, in the older Edwardian parts, solid three-bed terraces.

Even in today's new build suburban housing, the style, size and spacing is completely different from just about anything you'll see built in US suburbia (and not just because we use more brick or stone and less wood). Yet the writings of US anti-suburb urbanists are taken as applicable to this completely different environment.

The development of Britain's suburbs did not sprawl out in an uncontrolled manner, nibbling away willy-nilly at the edge of the countryside. They were, from late Victorian times onwards set out in planned environments - visit the Cator Estates is South London to see how this worked before the first world war and any number of places from Shirley near Croydon to Pudsey in Leeds to see the product of the 1930s housing development boom. These suburban developments were connected to existing communities - helps sustain and expand the services those places provided and allowing for immediate access to public transport networks - and laid out to encompass open space, schools and those rows of local shops we all grew up knowing. The idea that these places weren't 'walkable' is manifest nonsense yet again and again we're peddled this myth that only crowed, dense "mixed-use family housing" can provide for this perfection of urban pedestrianism.

Finally can we just say 'no, not true' to this nonsense:

...because though city-loving hipsters tend to grow up, start families and even buy houses and cars, they’re not going to conform exactly to the lifestyles of their parents and grandparents

Whenever people are surveyed about their preferences, most plump for that familiar family home with a garden - ideally near good schools and not so far from a good link to the city. Perhaps with a good park nearby, a decent pub and some local facilities (post office, chemist, doctors). It remains the case that suburbia - the English sort of suburbia - represent best compromise between urban living and some sort of bucolic countryside idyll.

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The Conservative Party is the party of suburbia - we should remember this and build more suburbs

I remember canvassing with my Dad in true-blue Beckenham. At one house the woman who opened the door explained here reasoning in a strong Cockney accent - "we've always voted Labour before but we was in a Labour area. Now we're in a Tory area we'll be voting Tory." Who am I to argue with such a profound argument especially since further study - not least what us direct marketers call the 'Bestseller Effect' - tells me that this sort of decision (not necessarily expressed as bluntly) really is influenced by social geography. Here's Joel Kotkin & Wendell Cox on voting in suburban 'red state; USA:

Even if the tide is turning, it’s happening slowly, and the GOP has political and cultural advantages in both Texas and Florida that will delay any turning of the tide even if they don’t finally stop it. Latinos in Texas, for instance, are considerably more GOP-leaning than their counterparts elsewhere. And surely some of the blue-state refugees won’t be inclined to support the same policies that led them to leave these states in the first place. The suburban areas that attract newcomers still tilt decisively GOP, and in 2016, turned out mostly for Trump.

The assumption (and we've seen similar arguments in the UK about millennial suburban migration) is that the left-inclined young urban vote, when it moves to suburbia to do that old-fashioned raise-a-family thing, will carry on voting left despite this likely being against their economic and social interests. Moreover, the millennials cycling out from inner-urban places are, I suspect, more likely to be conservative in outlook if not in current voting choice.

Of course, other demographic factors (not least ethnicity) are significant too - like US Republicans, the Conservatives have less support among non-white voters and, in particular, among two established and economically bettering groups - Pakistani and Bangladeshi voters. This may change but right now these groups remain overwhelmingly Labour voting despite the Conservatives having both the first Pakistani-heritage Home Secretary and the first female Muslim minister.

It's still the case, however, that the left - influenced by its inner-urban core support - is inherently anti-suburb and anti-family providing conservatives with a core message to new arrivals in suburbia. Here's Kotkin & Cox again:

Contempt for suburbia, so common among Democratic-leaning academics, planners, and media, could make appealing to these voters more difficult. Many party leaders support forced densification, anti-car strategies, and the annexation of suburbs—ideas that lack broad appeal in a country where most people live in single family homes and rely on cars and roads to conduct their lives.

If UK conservatives want to build a future base, it will be in suburbia (just like it has always been - we are the party of the suburbs). This means we've got to be brave enough to recognise that building new suburbs and more family-housing should take priority over protecting agricultural monoculture, especially in the Home Counties.

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Clean, green, child-friendly and joyful - why we need more suburbia

I wrote recently about our confused, often negative relationship with suburbs and the idea of suburbia:

So why is it that we have such a problematic relationship with suburbia? How did a suburban boy like Simon Schama come to use 'suburban' as an insult, as a way to dismiss someone he disagreed with and felt, in some way, beneath his attention? And when did we start the fetish of the city - the dirty, crowded, unsafe, unfriendly, child-free city? A fetish that, frankly, is something we (perhaps secretly) despise - what we hanker for is suburbia.

I feel that this attitude is damaging society by supporting the idea that somehow suburbs are places without soul or even worse, places that are environmentally damaging, socially divisive, mere creatures of our car-crazed culture. Suburbs are a sin:

In all, that suburban form of homogeneity, orderliness and spacing was an outward response to internal desires for security and control. But there was a cost to such an approach. Namely, the texture of life. Because sameness breeds sameness, which breeds stasis—hence, the “soulless” suburb moniker that has come to permeate the pauses in between suburban praise of “good schools,” “abundant parking” and “safety.”

Inside this desire is something else. Yes, it's to do with safety, comfort and good schools but it's also about space to live. And this is the reason why so much of the New Urbanist, city-focused planning and development approach is problematic. We might be building places suited to people in one stage of their lives but those folk don't stay in a sort of city living, Peter Pan world of endless youthful fun. Mostly because there comes a point in many people's lives when youthful fun isn't fun anymore.

Suburbs are essential if cities are to succeed rather than turn into rapacious parasites sucking the life from rural communities while the 24-hour party people become ever richer in their unhealthy, child-free towers:

For the first time in the history of the Western world, the one-person household has become the dominant mode of living. In Manhattan, New York City’s most densely populated borough, more than half of all homes have a single occupant.

Now I'm sure most of these single-person households are perfectly happy but there, niggling away in the back of my mind, is a question as to whether this really is ideal living. What we do know is dense urban environments in the developed world are increasingly child-free. Here's Aaron Renn, who lives in that child-free Manhattan:

The values and priorities of people without children are different from those with children. One example is the value people put on space. In our central cities populated with largely people who have no children, a big obsession is changing zoning regulations to allow smaller units, including so-called “micro-apartments.” These kinds of developments would enable more upscale young adult singles to live in cities. That’s good in itself. Yet it is not paired with equal concern about creating more housing for families.

When you look, for example, at the recently published (draft) London Plan - 2kg of turgid prose interspersed with nice maps - you see that, far from addressing the sort of concerns Renn raises, the Mayor simply sees housing as a numbers game with the solution being to build the little boxes on top of each other rather than next to each other. In places - Grove Park, Eltham, Southgate, Chiswick - that were once filled with family homes (with gardens), we can expect ever taller accommodation blocks suited to the frenetic, solo life lived by so many young Londoners. All this is intended to avoid taking anything out of the precious 'green belt', to not build new suburbs but crowd the ones we've got.

The attacks on suburbanisation - as typified by that London Plan - continue. Witness the responses to the damage done by Hurricane Harvey in Houston. We're told (by New Yorkers) it is the Texan laissez faire approach to development that made things worse:

For years, the local authorities turned a blind eye to runaway development. Thousands of homes have been built next to, and even inside, the boundaries of the two big reservoirs devised by the Army Corps of Engineers in the 1940s after devastating floods. Back then, Houston was 20 miles downstream, its population 400,000. Today, these reservoirs are smack in the middle of an urban agglomeration of six million.

Terrible! Suburban sprawl at its worst - we need denisification, zoning, strict enforcement. Or do we?

Houston’s dispersed, multipolar form, notes MIT’s Alan Berger, may have helped it respond more effectively to Harvey; the city has no central point, like Manhattan in New York City, whose closure damages the entire region. If we accept that more Harvey-like events are possible, even probable, then the most important issue is not zoning but flood control, which requires resilient systems.

So sprawl ain't so bad after all. Indeed, it might just be a good thing. Let's start with a look at South London. This is part of Beckenham, the suburb where I was brought up (my old primary school is featured as is the house where Mary Finnegan - and David Bowie - lived):



The striking thing about this image is the presence of so many mature trees and so much undeveloped space (OK planners, I know you call a garden development). Across the vast acres of London's suburbs this is the norm - even in Croydon. Suburbia is a lot greener - and more environmentally sustainable - than most urbanists and planners credit:

“We’ve all grown up thinking that urban density and verticality is a good thing but there has never been a study that has really looked at this in any detail; they’ve all been generic studies, based on large sets of generalised data. So we thought we should undertake a more focused study to prove it. And the results have been quite the opposite to those we thought we would find.”

And what did they find?

The high-rise residents energy consumption was 27 per cent more per person than the suburbanites, and even per average square metre of space, consumption was 4.6 per cent higher. Remarkably, the suburban homes involved not only had a typically larger floor area and greater surface-to-volume area (e.g. higher ceilings, roof cavities, etc.), they were also wooden-framed and significantly older – nearly 100 years old on average.

Some of the greater energy use in the high-rises was due to the lifts and the lighting and heating of common spaces and amenities. But on the “embodied energy” (in construction and materials) measure, the high-rise buildings required 49 per cent more embodied energy per square metre, and 72 per cent more per resident.

Piling people up in tall towers feels like better land use but it turns out to be the wrong idea if we want a more sustainable urban environment as well as some children (and let's not get started on safety). And, if you're concerns are about social sorting, - planners are always on about mixed tenure and social mobility after all - densification is again a bad idea:

One important point that needs to be taken into account when studying this phenomenon, is just how steeply “exclusionary” a city is “by location”. It has often been noted (e.g. by the authors of the “Costs of Sprawl 2000” study) that the higher house prices are (e.g. expressed by a median multiple) in the entire urban area, the stronger the “drive to qualify” effect. Chicago is actually significantly cheaper in all housing options than Australia’s main cities. Explicit anti-sprawl growth boundary policies exacerbate this “spatial sorting by income” effect, inevitably forcing up the price of all urban land and housing of all types in all locations.

It seems that, far from suburban sprawl being a bad thing, it is instead pretty much essential if we want sustainable cities. Urban containment policies everywhere have failed (check out Auckland's homelessness, London's beds in sheds and Seattle's inward migration crisis) but despite this planners are still churning out strategies for cities based on 'green belts' and urban densification. The reason for this isn't because we want to protect environments but rather because we've convinced ourselves that suburbs - sprawl, to use the pejorative term - are unpleasant places filled with dull people.

We need to change our thinking and rediscover the joy of suburbia not just because suburbs are great but because not building them is making our cities less sustainable, more crowded, unfriendly to children and shockingly expensive. So let's start with a correction on the environment - here's one of the editors of Infinite Suburbs:

One of the consistent themes in the book, and what gets me most excited as a landscape scholar, is the virtue of low density and the ecological potential of the suburban landscape. Environmentally, suburbs will save cities from themselves. Sarah Jack Hinners’s research in the book really surprised me. It suggests that suburban ecosystems, in general, are more heterogeneous and dynamic over space and time than natural ecosystems. Suburbs, she says, are the loci of novelty and innovation from an ecological and evolutionary perspective because they are a relatively new type of landscape and their ecology is not fixed or static.

Yet - and these editors observe this - the planning and development profession still "overwhelmingly vilify suburbia and seem disinterested in significantly improving it. Robert Bruegmann’s essay in the book reminds us that those who consider themselves the intellectual elite have a long history of anti-suburban crusades, and they have always been proven wrong."

Much of the NIMBY argument - albeit from people already in suburbs - is made easier by the willingness of planners to argue that dense urban development will work. We've got to a stage where words like "brownfield" and "regeneration" dominate the case made by the likes of CPRE rather than the reality of that case as 'we don't want any more houses round here' and little else. This urban redevelopment argument (and it is one of the five purposes for the UK's 'green belts') acts as cover for a policy that is responsible for much of London's housing crisis.

I can understand how someone who has enjoyed a field view for years might be put out by it being replaced by an estate of family housing (and I know how developers like to push the country aspect - one development in Cottingley had hoardings with a picture of horses proclaiming "meet the new neighbours") but I also feel that we shouldn't let such sensitivities dominate the system to the point where:

Around 9,000 illegal “beds in sheds” housing tens of thousands of people have sprung up across London over the last five years, a report says today.

Do we seriously think that protecting someone's open view across a not particularly special field should prevent us building the homes we need to prevent people ending up in cramped flats or on a bed in a drafty wooden structure down the end of an inner city garden? Especially when building tower blocks is expensive, environmentally-damaging and unsafe?

It is time to get less precious about those fields, to end planning micro-management of housing delivery and to get back to the sort of build rates we saw from the private sector in the 1930s (when lots of those lovely London suburbs were built) - touching 300,000 in 1937/8. Suburbs are great - you can call them what you like, even 'garden cities' - and we need more of them. The best way to do this is to put the planners back in their box and let people get on building the homes they (and we) need.

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Yay for suburbia (and let's build more of it, fast)

I'm a suburban boy, it's in my bones - the semi-detached house with a garden, one of thousands just the same. It is, for some, the veritable definition of Malvina Reynolds' song "Little Boxes".

"And they're all made out of ticky-tacky and they all look just the same."

As children - perhaps prompted by a father who was something of a folk music fan - we even referred to the estate at Orchard Avenue in Shirley as the 'ticky-tacky houses'. This was a world of trains to work - Reggie Perrin's soliloquy of a walk to the station from his semi in a London suburb - of buses to school, of hobbies and pastimes, sheds and allotments.

It became popular to deride suburbia - its design, its housing, its values - and to draw a negative parallel with either the racy, youthful and exciting life of the big city or else the bucolic, laid-back pleasures of the distant country. To be suburban became the acme of shallowness, a selfish existence, uncaring and dull - an insult used by historian, Simon Schama to put down polemical columnist, Rod Liddle:

‘Go back to your journalistic hackery… and turn your suburban face away from the plight of the miserable,’

Yet most of us - even Simon Schama - are the products of suburbia, living in those semi-detached houses, going to the same sort of state school and having our values set by life in these work-a-day, middle-class places. When I think of my childhood, I think of suburbia, of its space, its variety and the security it afforded us. And I know that my core values - community, neighbourliness, decency, politeness, respect - come from that suburbia.

So why is it that we have such a problematic relationship with suburbia? How did a suburban boy like Simon Schama come to use 'suburban' as an insult, as a way to dismiss someone he disagreed with and felt, in some way, beneath his attention? And when did we start the fetish of the city - the dirty, crowded, unsafe, unfriendly, child-free city? A fetish that, frankly, is something we (perhaps secretly) despise - what we hanker for is suburbia. There is no better place to raise a family - near enough to town for work and pleasure but far enough away that you can take Mr Pooter's advice about home:

"After my work in the City, I like to be at home," as he put in his Diary of a Nobody. "What's the good of a home, if you are never in it? 'Home, Sweet Home', that's my motto ... there is always something to be done: a tin-tack here, a venetian blind to put straight, a fan to nail up, or part of a carpet to nail down."

The truth is that, despite all the efforts of planners to force us into over-dense, anti-family urban cramp, we're still headed for suburbia if we get the chance:

Much of this has been driven by migration patterns. In 2016, core counties lost roughly over 300,000 net domestic migrants while outlying areas gained roughly 250,000. Increasingly, millennials seek out single-family homes; rather than the predicted glut of such homes, there’s a severe shortage. Geographer Ali Modarres notes that minorities, the primary drivers of American population growth in the new century, now live in suburbs. The immigrant-rich San Gabriel Valley, the Inland Empire, Orange County and their analogues elsewhere, Modarres suggests, now represents “the quintessential urban form” for the 21st century.

This is California, famously unfriendly towards sprawl, a place with some of the world's most vicious urban containment policies, and a place with some of the world's most over-priced housing. Imagine how much better it would be if we recognised that people want to live in one of those 'ticky-tacky houses' - three bedrooms, front and back garden, garage. A place that combines comfort and affordability with room to grow.

And it makes economic sense too:

Overall, what suburbia dominates is the geography of the middle class. All but four of top 20 large counties with the highest percentage of households earning over $75,000 annually are suburban, according to research by Chapman University’s Erika Nicole Orejola. One reason: Most job growth takes place in the periphery. Even with the higher job density of downtowns, the urban core and its adjacent areas account for less than one-fifth of all jobs, and since 2010 this pattern has persisted.

It's a myth that the only places where jobs get created is in the urban core or grand cities - 80% of jobs are elsewhere and, you've guessed it, most of those jobs are in and around suburbia.

So suburbs are nicer places to live (really they are) with better amenities than either the city or the country. Suburbs are cleaner, friendlier, safer and less stressful that the city. And more accessible with better schools, healthcare and activity than the countryside. Plus people want to live in them.

Perhaps then, we should ignore all the pompous city living snobs who sneer at suburbs (often while dreaming of a nice posh pile in some village that's really an exurb) and get on with building what most folk want - more suburbs.

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Is our future suburban?

Interesting little article by Tyler Cowan:

As American travel infrastructure decays, and traffic congestion worsens, what we used to call cities and suburbs won’t be able to rely on each other so much, as trips become too exhausting and time-consuming. That too will encourage cities and suburbs each have their own mix of jobs, retail and cultural opportunities.

I suspect he makes the point more strongly that will be realised - elite culture (and other elite institutions) will remain in the cities as will the wealthy elite that populate them. But the everyday sort of leisure and pleasure, what most of us do mostly, will be more evenly spread especially in centre urban rents continue to climb.

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Is this the new suburbia? And should we worry?

From City Lab comes an article about Urby who build high density apartments in New York suburbs (Staten Island, Jersey City, Stamford):

Barry says that at least 80 percent of Urby tenants are under 39, don't have children, and expect to stay for perhaps three years or so; he calls them “starter apartments.”

I get everything that Urby are doing - it's straight out of the New Urbanist playbook with densely packed accommodation near transport hubs meaning less parking. Assumptions about modern living argue for less storage or common storage (bike rooms and so forth) and, because there are a lot of single people, planned for entertainment:

...Urby employs a cultural director with a nightclub and hospitality background and deputies to organize activities for residents. There might be stump-the-chef or other paid event in the kitchen, standup comedy in the cafe, and flower arranging in a workshop room. “It’s a boost,” Barry says, “to help people in this demographic connect to each other—and make them feel more emotionally connected to the brand."

What we see here is an interesting shift in how we (or some of us) live. People leave home and live in shared student accommodation while at college. There next move is to the new style shared living (or, as we're already seeing in London, Manchester and Leeds as well as in many US cities to a world where student apartments become 'student and young worker' apartments) and then to something slightly more private like this suburban Urby development. Note that people are still single or at least haven't committed to a family and are 'under 39' - these are career-focused thirtysomethings we're talking about.

The question here is what happens next. Urby don't tell us where their former tenants move onto - is it family units of some sorts or are they simply earning more so can afford a slightly more swank address? More to the point is this where we're heading for suburbia in big cities? A sort of slightly more funky version of the crammed urban towers of downtown living. Millennials living in what sounds like a younger version of elderly retirement living.

I've said before that housing design in inner urban places is persistently anti-child built without thought to the young and where space for kids to roam simply doesn't exist. Yes we can build playgrounds, tidy little places tucked into corner spaces where the very young can be watched at play but the old suburb with gardens, greens and recreation grounds is lost, cities simply aren't great places for ten-year-olds. Yet every planner talks now about ways to cram more and more into less and less space. People's worlds are becoming directed and organised even down to what happens in free time.

It does seem at times that this dense city living is a dead end despite its appeal and the manifest wealth of these places. But if the cramped world of modern apartment living is now spreading to suburbia, should we be bothered? Isn't the whole point of the suburb that it gave space, openness and the chance for a family to grow while still being reachable from the centre of the city. If suburbs become indistinguishable from the city then the world those ten-year-olds once enjoyed becomes only available to the wealthiest in the big city and those who opt for a less fancy, less well-paid life somewhere else. On balance we should be bothered - it shouldn't be a choice between a good rewrding job and the chance to raise a family. Right now it seems that it is.

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Building tomorrow's suburbia - some thoughts and connections

I'll start with this blog from Orwell Prize winner, Graeme Archer - perhaps the best conservative writer in Britain.

But what – to quote a character in an early Ruth Rendell novel – is supposed to be so wrong with suburbia? A desire for a nice bit of garden and good (selective! free!) state schools; the desire to be unsurprised, should one hear English spoken on a bus; the desire for one’s country to have its own bloody passport, for God’s sake – to list just a few Mayist-Tory objectives which leave the Left spluttering with saliva-specked fury – these aren’t desires, shall we say, uncommon to those whose grandparents were in service, whose working-class parents went out on shift or opened their cornershop before dawn, so that their tiny “bought hoose” was warm and that their own children – I’m talking of myself, of course – had enough time and encouragement to study. So that they - I - could end up in suburbia, from where I commute, despicably, to and from work.

There is still, however, a desire in suburbia to make that place less affordable for the rising sons and daughters of today's working classes. Giving us this sort of commuting:

A study by online estate agent Emoov seen exclusively by City A.M. has found it would be cheaper to buy a house in seven of the UK's largest cities, fly down and stay in a budget hotel for a week, then fly back at the weekend than it is to live and work in the capital.

This isn't about rent controls, densification, or even finance - it's our bonkers planning system that's created an oligopoly of builders in an over-regulated environment of deliberately restricted land availability around the UK's golden goose of London. And it will kill that goose before long.

In the meantime the plight of high rents brought about by urban containment policies with continue to generate angst-ridden social commentary - most of it nonsense:

When they return to Britain, they face the near impossible task of buying a home without help from the Bank of Mum and Dad. I have earned more from my move up the property ladder than all the money I have earned at the Guardian in the past 17 years. This exponential increase in property values relative to incomes, particularly in parts of the south-east, will not be seen again, for a generation at least. Why aren’t the younger generation rebelling? Maybe they simply can’t afford to.

Truth is that, housing aside, the coming generation will be better off than we are - the rise in technology will see to that. And we could solve the housing crisis too if we stopped trying to plan our way out of it. Starting with embracing new ideas - not the crushing of good space standards that our housing minister (he's from Croydon which explains a lot) wants but real ideas:

London’s biggest housebuilder Tony Pidgley, boss of Berkeley Homes, has been experimenting with kit homes. “It’s a culture change but there’s a compelling case for modular,” he says.

He has committed 20 per cent of his output to factory-built homes, and plans a bigger amount in future via its own modular housing factory.

The first “Urban Houses” for the company’s 5,000-home scheme in Kidbrooke, south-east London, are already rolling off a Midlands production line, creating good-looking town houses with roof gardens.

And while we're about all this we need to think differently about transport. The days of the private car are coming to an end. Not only is there little need to own a car in a city like London but autonomous systems and digital connectivity mean that we can summon transport when we need it rather than have it sitting there doing nothing for most of the time. OK it's a couple of decades away but, for transport and transport infrastructure that's the timescale - we should be thinking about our cities accordingly. Meaning more space for this sort of initiative:

Toronto has more than 2,400 publically owned laneways, covering more than 250 linear kilometres of public space. This offers a huge amount of untapped potential for multi-purpose public space. Consisting of planners and urban designers, The Laneway Project works with city officials and community groups to green, beautify, and breathe life back into these back alleys in the city.

Or for making new use of redundant infrastructure:

Anders Beremsson Architects (ABA) have been commissioned by the Kungl Djurgårdens förvaltning (Swedish Royal Court) to investigate the potential of repurposing twelve power towers. The towers are located in the urban national park, Norra Djurgården, in central Stockholm. ABA has proposed transforming one or two of the power towers into sky-high picnic towers.

Or more space for the increased leisure time the robots will give us:

The idea for the project emerged in 2010. Every year, a so-called cultural capital is named by the European Parliament, and in 2010, the city of Essen in the Ruhr region was designated the European cultural capital. We launched a project called Still-Leben (Still Life), during which the most important highway in the Ruhr region, the A40, was closed to car traffic for a day. The A40 is a highway with six lanes. In one driving direction, we set out a long picnic table and on the other side, in the other three lanes, people could circulate as pedestrians, on their bikes, rollerblades, or whichever way they chose, between the city of Duisburg and the city of Dortmund, which is a distance of approximately 50 miles. That day, I biked from Essen to Dortmund and for the first time in my life I was in a traffic jam caused by bikes — a completely new experience. 3 million people came out for the event.

Town planning is mostly about stopping things from happening not making places better. We should change this to allow a bit of inspiration - everywhere we look there are fantastic projects hacking their way through thickets of bureaucracy. Helping these projects should be the priority for planners rather than dreaming up some sort of perfectly zoned and balanced utopian city. Help us build tomorrow's suburbia.
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A familiar description - for Democrat read Labour...

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From Joel Kotkin:

As will become even more obvious in the lame duck years, the political obsessions of the Obama Democrats largely mirror those of the cities: climate change, gay marriage, feminism, amnesty for the undocumented, and racial redress. These may sometimes be worthy causes, but they don’t address basic issues that effect suburbanites, such as stagnant middle class wages, poor roads, high housing prices, or underperforming schools. None of these concerns elicit much passion among the party’s true believers.

Indeed, for a time these were the obsessions of my party too. We do seem to be shifting slowly back to core economic issues though and not before time. There are still some such as those fussing about with pseudo-devolution to new urban constructions in Manchester, Merseyside or West Yorkshire who have yet to get the message. And it is a reminder that while the Conservatives remain strong in rural Britain, we have neglected suburbia and those places that were always reliably Tory up to Labour's 1997 landslide. These places aren't interested in those metropolitan obsessions and don't get how imposing a super-mayor (even if you call him a 'Manchester Boris') will improve their lot one iota.

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Quote of the day - on residential property values

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This is so true - it should be beaten into us all as we clamber up and down the so-called property ladder. It starts with the subsidising of housing provision under the New deal and, as Howard Ahmanson observes....

...instead of their forty acres and a mule, people got their ¼ acre and an automobile, the only practical way to travel from their ¼ acre to wherever they wanted to go. Eventually people came to see their ¼ acre with a house on it as an “investment,” and further, a “source of wealth.” But this was not a truly agrarian source of wealth. Farms depend for their value on the quality of their soil and their productivity as farms. They are truly commercial real estate. But residences depend for their value only to a minor degree on what is on the property itself, but rather on what is around it; and suburbanites demanded that covenants, or the Government in the form of City Hall or County Hall, control their neighbors and what is around them.

As they say, the rest is history. And, at times a pretty sorry history. Indeed a history that has trapped many of us into believing that owning a house isn't about getting a secure place to live but a shoot from the magic money tree. With the ironic conclusion that:

The suburban model, in the end, demanded that to preserve suburban values, that the building of suburbs be stopped!

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