the suburbs are a cultural touchstone in life setting for novels movies super bowl halftime ads and even t.v. shows like the wonder years and for good reason to suburbia is literally everywhere proximately one hundred fifty eight million people more than half the country live in areas generally recognized as sub urban but all is not well placed bill clinton changing lifestyles of the top for economy have many americans rethinking the value of suburban life just as people fled the cane cities in the one nine hundred sixty s. and seventy's many people i know the suburbs my guest for tonight's conversations of the great minds leigh gallagher assistant managing editor of fortune magazine has

written about this trend of assimilating new book the end of the suburbs where the american dream is moving he joins us now from our new york studios you're welcome. hi tom thanks for having me it's great to be here thanks for joining us this is a fascinating book and let's actually let me start out with you what what got you interested in this topic what led to your writing. well i've always been drawn to big sort of trends about how we live and especially when those trends are rooted in economic data and a couple years ago i swear i saw i was caught and you know i really was struck by some census data that had started to come out that showed that for the first time our our cities had grown faster than our suburbs and that that was a trend that had not really taken place in it was the first time in more than ninety years and i just thought oh that's good. interesting because as you point

out are what is more american than the suburbs it's the white picket fence it's the lawn it's the kids in the schools and the bake sales and there's just such a rich history and cultural significance to that and at the same time you know i think a lot of us is probably witness there has been you know everybody knows someone who left their suburban house to move into the city or it seems like everyone knows someone like that these days and i just thought there might be something more to this so let me just sort of dig around and see what i can find and you know every stone i turn over seem to yield some other different way of saying this same overall things so i was just really struck i just thought that this was this was a big idea with a capital b. and a capital i and i just i had it was a story just like i had i had to tell i mean it's just it's fascinating what's happening we're really at the. peak suburb if you want to think of it that way we're in a really inflection point right now for a number of reasons certainly peak oil that and in fact is probably dissociation

with that i lived in europe for a year and one of the things that i noticed living there was we lived a little town of thirteen thousand people in the northern part of bavaria in the front involved and there were no suburbs. in germany and i travel all over europe and i don't think i've ever seen any place that would compare to the american suburbs you either live in a small town surrounded by by by farmland or forest or mountains or you live in a big town you know small medium big town that's period and you know they're connected by trains and mass transit and that's it how did suburbs come about and why are these so uniquely american or is my observation austria. now you're spot on but here's the ironic thing which is that the very first suburbs actually dates back to the u.k. way back when the original notion of the suburbs a sort of halfway point between city and gentry to countryside but what

happened in the u.s. and in the u.s. in the in the eighteen hundred and early one thousand nine hundred you know the suburbs here weren't all that different from in europe and that's because our early suburbs sort of sprouted up around transit before the cars so if you think too that's why on the east coast we have a lot of older suburbs that are more village esque and they have a completely different design and a different plan and that plan is more like a traditional town planning blueprint that goes back centuries that's the way cities are planned it's sort of a grid with transit in the center of commerce in the center this is the way a lot of classic railroad suburbs are called now and still are today but what happened was we sort of blew up that model right around the world war two when we were suddenly in namur with mass production. the levitt brothers came back from world war two armed with these new skills of how to make houses very quickly on an

assembly line basically the automobile of course just changed our all of our lives dramatically and we were again we were just so enamored with this that several suburbs became designed a different way and that's the sort of modern postwar cul de sacs plus connector road plus strip mall you know the kind of looping sprawling model came to the fore and that was the one that we chose to sort of supersize and stepford eyes and cut and paste across our whole landscape and this was happening in the fifty's i mean as early as one nine hundred fifty nine the national home builders association put out a video kind of. raising concerns that is this too much you know if we're all going to be the end of us but that was just the i was like the beginning of the first inning and so we just kept growing and growing and growing and it was always this kind of one road map this was going to be the answer for everybody so you know and

that's that's one of the big problems i mean there's many problems with the bourbon design that we can talk about but it was sort of our country with design that way almost to the exclusion of out of anything else and it's sort of this one size fits all house thing that isn't that work for a really long time but it's not working anymore one of the things that really struck me in your book was the idea of. it to a large extent this has come about as a consequence of government subsidy and it raised the question in my mind you're i'm sure you're familiar with the story of what happened in los angeles and i think was the one nine hundred twenty s. los angeles had the best mass transit system in the united states it was all above ground street cars and general motors and goodyear. or firestone it was came in and said to the city council we'll take over your subway system and run it for you more efficiently less expensively and we'll take better care of it and so

the city privatized it and then they proceeded to rip up the tracks and and because they've they were all about tires and cars you know and and the l.a. the then turned into this incredible monster that is to this day although they're starting to build back their mass transit system it was there is some sort of corporate conspiracy i mean those two companies are actually convicted in court of criminal conspiracy in that case you know was there something i like that a lead in the suburbs or or was it just as you say early the site guys of the time was it just hey let's go out live out there what used to be a farmland. it was it was a combination of things but there was a consortium and they did they were fined and it was a conspiracy to sort of tear up our. public transit system basically so that was part of it it was also you know the federal highway act paved the way literally for some forty thousand miles of highway and there was this there was an exhibit at the

world's fair futurama and it painted this picture very famous of this this futuristic world where we were all going to live in these pretty bedroom communities and driving cars on these fast moving highways from one from our homes to our jobs and it was going to be this brand new way of living and people were i forget the numbers it was something like one point nine million people stood in line to wait and see this exhibit and it was it was this fantastic futuristic way of life that people just had to have and you know the car companies loved it of course so it was it was you know government policies had a lot to do with it government policies made it easier and cheaper to build single family homes to build homes in the suburbs instead of the cities and to pave the way for the highway they subsidize our gas prices which are way cheaper than any other country so there's a lot of government policies behind it that pushed us to the suburbs quite literally but i think morally important to remember that i'm sure yes yes actually

yes and that was actually the interesting thing about the mortgage deduction is it was sort of an accidental by product of a nine hundred thirteen act that was just about income tax in general and so it never ever was intended to have the consequences that it did but that right now is probably more than anything was pushing people to buy homes over apartments and bigger homes than they would otherwise buy so there were all these policies but at the same time i do think it's important remember that this was a this was a market driven phenomenon as well we wanted it you know we couldn't get enough of it so back then but but that's all changing that's what we're different country we're different population and tastes are changing pretty dramatically. hollin why . how and why how they're changing is one thing i mean our cities are wildly research and whenever when people ask me about my book when i talk to friends about they say oh your book is about the end of the

suburbs so does that mean it's about cities and that's part of what it's about but that's definitely not the whole story but our cities are much nicer places to live because they are no longer home to our manufacturing centers that's why in the eighty's hundreds everyone fled the cities because they were filthy new york city now is like an amusement park it's a wonderful it's great the prices are through the roof i mean and name your city in the country do you see the same way l.a. the same way providence rhode island cleveland ohio this is happening everywhere. but then the other stitches the other thing you have that's happening is there is a real demographic story happening and that is that our birth rate is falling our family size is shrinking single person households are the fastest growing household size and we have built our whole country full of you know four bedroom homes for nuclear families and the biggest home builders know this they say somebody from one of the biggest home building companies said to me at the traditional nuclear family

is really going to be the minority and so that is a complete reversal from what we're used to the leave it to beaver era the wonder years era is gone and i mean it's still going to be a part of our society but we are looking at just you know instead of one american dream there is multiple american dreamers and multiple american dreams and we have a housing landscape that's built for one kind of dream so that's that's one thing the price of oil has a huge you mentioned it earlier that's a huge factor here a lot of the you know we really over expanded in the housing boom obviously we've built millions of homes that just shouldn't have been built but a lot of the people that moved to the first. places where the people that could least afford it because it was the whole drive to qualify phenomenon and many people studies show that lived far away were spending more than half of their monthly income on their transportation costs so they were spending more on their

transportation than their housing and that's something that a lot of people can't really get their arms around but but it was true so you add in you know commuting times the lifestyle that that that that really provides which is really unsatisfying to a lot of people and then the notion that you know i think people there's a real demand for community and the way we designed a lot of the modern suburbs is they're very isolating there's no one gathering space there's no place to bump into people in a lot of towns not everywhere but in a lot of places it's very hard to even go for a walk because there's no sidewalks or the streets are so wide that the cars go really fast so the design has a lot to do with it so it's all these factors. playing it playing a role and so much is happening i mean you know people are moving back to cities or more urban locations but also retailers office headquarters there's just so much movement happening right now and it is it was it is from one direction to the other

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cross talk rules in effect that means you can jump in anytime you want to. live. it will go back to conversations with great minds speaking with lee gallagher assistant managing editor of fortune magazine and author of the new book the end of the suburbs where the american dream is moving. lee i'm curious if you think that we might be repeating history and if so how it might be similar or different back during the roaring twenty's there was a massive housing boom and an explosion and building of houses a lot of huge old victorian sears was selling you know eight nine bedroom victorian houses literally through their catalog they were being built all over the country row houses in big cities particularly new york were being built like crazy where

you would have four five bedrooms six seven bedrooms in some cases three stories high four stories the house by house house by. the great depression hit in the one nine hundred thirty s. and what happened was those houses got turned into a broken up a big victorian house got turned into five apartments or people would rent individual rooms but in many cases they got apartment ties the row houses new york city got turned into level so the first floor became a house the second floor became a house the third floor became a house whereas it used to all be one house and we still see the remnants of this all around us i'm wondering if that's the fate of a lot of these big mansions and you know i mean do you see any parallels between that transition in the transition we're going through in. absolutely and as you're saying that i'm realizing i live in one of those old old broken up hartman's a new york city but absolutely you know the one of the big questions here is well

what happens to all of these big mcmansion that were built so far away and now that there's less of a demand for and many people have posited that they may be our future apartment house thing or that they maybe are you know there's all sorts of creative ideas of what to do with them some people suggest we should turn them into artists studios others have said and in fact i think this is happening somewhere they're turned into sort of film collective. so some of them actually have drawn sort of their popular with immigrant communities who all like to live in close proximity with each other and maybe even multi generations in the same house but all in the same neighborhood so. and then you know there's a big theory out there chris weinberger what wrote a wonderful piece for the atlantic in two thousand and eight which is very early on really suggesting that our mcmansion communities were going to become the next lom

so and there's there's data there's proof i mean there's and there's a lot of logic behind why that might happen and in fact we're seeing it happening already. well and in your book you talk to our suburbs are becoming poorer. can you elaborate and they are they are one of the most striking demographic trends of the last decade and the brookings institution has done a fantastic job tracking this data is the rise of poverty in the suburbs you know which is just an athame to our our vision an iconic image of the suburbs they were born as the sort of beautiful old pastor old you know wealthy place that was safe no crime no anything bad and now you know the rate there are more and more people below the poverty line in this country live in the suburbs than live in cities if you can almost imagine that and that's the trend that happened for a number of reasons over the past decade because a lot of. you know a lot of jobs went out to the suburbs but then they went away

a lot of immigrants instead of migrating to cities and then moving out to the suburbs they started going right to the suburbs there's a lot of reasons why that happened but poverty is more difficult to deal with in the suburbs so that's that's a huge problem you talk also about how the. view housing a lot of different aspects of life but housing in particular in this case different leaves gen x. gen y. and the boomers. speak to the. shore i mean the millennial is are so poked and prodded and studied for everything but they really are key for the future of our housing market and there's a couple things going on with them right now i mean number one as we know a lot of that record numbers of them are living at home with their parents so they sort of haven't launched yet which is causing a big clogging the pipeline of how things are normally supposed to happen our household formation numbers are very low but when they do launch and those that have i mean data on what they want shows that they really want different kinds of

housing then they grew up and it's not necessarily that they want to live in a big skyscraper in new york city. it's not really that it's more that they want to live where the action is and that can be in the right kind of suburb they just want to be in a cool place with lots going on and they don't want to be in a car so you know all that that data shows that they want more urban places so many people say oh but wait until they have kids they're going to go right back out to the suburbs just like their parents and everyone before them but i don't think that's going to happen for a number of reasons so what one of those reasons. well for one thing they are this generation is has expressed a sort of perplexing indifference towards cars and driving as i mentioned at that's really really big if you think back in the you know the whole notion of the one hundred fifty seven chevy and teenagers coming of age that was a real rite of passage getting your car where you were going to go and it was the

sign of really arriving as an adult and independence and all of that and that sign for today's teenagers and young twenty somethings is their smartphone or their is their text messaging device or you know it's technology in their gadgets that's what they care most about and not only that but that we when you're behind a wheel you can't be communicating that way so that that's a big thing and then you know not having as many children is also another is another factor i mean we don't know yet what this generation is going to do. you know it's getting into late start and everything so i think that's going to affect things i wonder if the car fascination in earlier generations had to do with using cars to transport yourself to be with other people for interaction and the fascination with technology is now using technology to connect with other people that the same impulse is driving it but it's being played out of different ways

because of technological changes to make sense exactly i mean they get a big reason was to get out of the house you know don't want to be near mom and dad whenever but now you can just be in your bedroom on your on facebook or i mean i'm probably dating myself by saying that they don't use facebook anymore that they get you know they have kids so you know texting or snap chat or whatever and that is the way to escape and that is the way to connect with your peers and so it's really it's dramatically different rather than driving over to their house or or go all meeting at the mall shop or whatever it may be you draw the distinction between the inner ring suburbs and the out her ring suburbs. what is that. well everything about you know it's very hard to paint suburbs with one brush and there's two different kind which is kind of like the good kind and the bad kind and you know in my book i really try hard to say i'm not saying that all suburbs are going to go away in paper eyes and we're all going to live in giant cry scrapers in manhattan over suburbs pre-war suburbs those that were designed around

a more kind of urbin village model have a different feel entirely and those are still in demand and valuations in those kinds of neighborhoods have held up a lot better than you. think. they are i mean there's a lot of different ways they can go it depends on where they're located but they are they are small town absolutely and they might still be a suburb i mean a lot of the new york suburbs are d.c. suburbs on the east coast were kind of oiled with these kinds of places because it's all about age and vintage and thought about when they were built and those that were built. in a third you know before world war two basically have one feel and then the others have a different feel but most americans living communities that were built in the last fifty years so most americans are living more like if you think about the show we've done show time. in which with the kind of cookie cutter suburb where everything all looked the same more americans live in those kind of communities than live in pre-war old earth older urban suburbs but those are the ones that i

think are really going to do well in the future and inner ring suburbs or one kind of those kinds of suburbs so with the outer ring suburbs where where you're these are these are the suburbs that are really designed around the car basically you have to have a car to get yeah if you got groceries you have to have the car to get entertainment yeah drive to the movie theater yet but you can't walk there may not even be a sidewalk and yet if you want to walk it's two miles down the road and is it is if possible that at or is anybody around the country doing this the suburbs like this that might have you know intrinsic value there's enough housing density there's enough human density there but people who don't want to drive anymore that you could go into you could create literally artificially create a city center by maybe buying up five or six you know one large subdivision that's surrounded by a bunch of other ones tearing the houses down putting up

a city center basically a mixed use city center where you've got you know entertainment and food never yells and starting to build some sidewalks out and turn turn them into the kind of entering suburbs or the or the the older suburbs the the new rochelle's to new york city we're talking about earlier. yes and that's happening that's happening actually in l. in a lot of places around the country there are these sort of urban urbanized suburb an experiment happening all over the place really and they take a lot of different forms and some some of them in the middle of of kind. remote eggs or via you'll see these kind of high rise suburban villages going up and it might be a high rise apartment building with a with a mixed use urban retail strip with commerce and cafes and everything in a movie theater maybe and the pitch in these in these developments is very clearly leave your car keys at home in the marketing materials they can see they say have

you met your neighbor because and it's a sort of like it's really playing towards that you know don't don't live that isolated life anymore will bring you together but these are in the middle of suburbia so there's lots of experimenting happening right now with urbanising the suburbs and i think that's going to be huge it is going it is already a huge trend and going to be a big driver of housing value in the future that's fashion in the last minute we have here you you grew up in the suburbs you live in the city no to what extent did those two express experiences influence your writing. and thinking hugely hugely you know i don't have anything against suburbs i had a wonderful childhood in a town called media pennsylvania which is as classic as it gets it has a trolley it has a main street we could walk to town we did great house i mean it was really kind of norman rockwell ask and i now live in manhattan in the west village which is a dream neighborhood for a lot of people i don't but i don't think that's the one hundred percent long term

answer either that has a lot of you know it's hard to live in new york city in many ways so i don't come at this from a zero zero everyone must live how i live in new york city and live in an apartment i mean i don't think that's the answer from for probably for most people but i do think there's something wrong with the way we sort of a covert expanded and and people are really starting to to move and corporate america is starting to move in every every moving part that response to something like this is on the move because everything moves in cycles it's remarkably gallagher thanks so much for big and for right ankle. back to sears and other conversations and great minds go to our website at conversations with great minds.

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