Read Online The End of the Suburbs: Where the American Dream Is Moving by Leigh Gallagher - Free Book Online

time, fall apart. Construction on these homes was breakneck, and many were built on the cheap. It’s not inconceivable that if they don’t sell, without care and upkeep many will deteriorate. This could be bad: without proper policy programs to manage their depopulation, these neighborhoods risk becoming hotbeds for crime, squatters, and blight, speeding their decline. James Howard Kunstler has been saying this for years. “The suburbs have three destinies,” he says. “As slums, salvage yards, and ruins. And those are not mutually exclusive.”
    Much of the future of U.S. residential development will be dictated by policy. If, for example, the government decides to move forward with location-efficient mortgages, that would increase demand for those kinds of places. Right now, our housing policy still encourages the purchase of single-family homes. “It’s pretty damn easy to securitize the single-family product,” says Brookings’ Katz. “This isn’t something that our policy system has responded to yet.” Katz also points out that having choices is only going to become more important: unlike other mature countries—like, say, Germany or Japan—we’re still experiencing massive rates of growth; the U.S. population is growing at the rate of thirty million a decade. Our racial and ethnic makeup is evolving. We have many different cohorts and a continuum of housing preferences. “People really just want more alternatives,” Katz says. Now, they will undoubtedly get them.
    But there’s still some of what Chuck Marohn of Minnesota would call “lobster-eating” going on. Driving around the far reaches of Summerlin, Nevada, after my visit with Zappos’s Tony Hsieh, I found myself at what seemed like the end of the earth. It was really just a small subdivision up a hill right off Paseo Breeze Drive, but as I drove up the half-developed street, it seemed like the final frontier, the edge of the developed United States itself. Soon the pavement turned to dirt road, and I pulled over when the road ended and got out of my rental car. There was a chain-link fence with alarming DANGER/NO TRESPASSING! signs. All I could see in front of me were vast acres of arid land and mountains in the distance.
    And yet as I faced the empty desert I heard a familiar sound ring out, that of a single spare hammer hitting away, its familiar echo reverberating across the neighborhood and signaling new home construction. On one side of the street behind me a few new homes were going up, and crews were toiling away on top of the roof working in the hot sun. This was Barcelona, a sign soon told me, a new upscale community from Toll Brothers. I walked inside the completed showhouse across the street and toured the thirty-three-hundred-or-so-square-foot home, which had all the trappings of suburban Toll: a two-story foyer, a great room, gourmet kitchen with a large island, dual vanities in the master suite. The house was opulently decorated and highly staged, complete with fictitious handwritten notes on the bulletin board in the girl’s bedroom (“don’t forget! sleepover @ Emily’s”). It was high quality: walls were thick, doors heavy, carpeting lush; all the touches seemed just right for the upscale buyer. “The ideal destination for moving up,” the materials advertised. But
were
there any upscale buyers anymore, especially here in housing’s post-bust wasteland? I asked the real estate agent why they were building new homes when there was still so much for sale. The foreclosure glut had actually only increased the demand for new construction, she told me. If you buy a foreclosed home, she pointed out, you don’t know if the insides will still be there; your money could be held in escrow for six months, only to have an all-cash buyer come in and pull it out from under you. New homes were safer. I signed the guest book, and when I got home, I got a nice thank-you card from Toll Brothers for taking the time to view its exciting