For better and for worse, the now middle age baby boomers were the first generation to grow up on television. This huge age cohort was raised on Leave It to Beaver in the late 1950s, Dick Van Dyke Show in the early 1960s and The Brady Bunch in the early 1970s, some of the most popular situation comedies of the era. These shows had one thing in common; they were all set in the suburbs. The unifying sub-text of these series was the appeal and desirability of suburban living. All of the main characters, from the Cleaver family to Mike and Carol Brady lived in single-family houses in picture perfect drivable sub-urbanism. The optimism of the era comes through with every episode as dogs get lost and found, teenage romances bloom and fade and issues at work that are brought home get hilariously resolved. The warm glow of a happy ending descended at the end of each 30-minute show. This was how life was meant to be. 

The fact that nearly all situation comedies of the era were set in the suburbs is not an accident. The media entertainment industry (movies, television, music, now video games, etc.) probably conducts more consumer research than any industry. Television shows in particular are barometers of how Americans want to see themselves, even if it does not reflect their current life. In the 50s, 60s and 70s, Americans obviously wanted to see themselves as living a drivable sub-urban life, relishing the joys and not concerning themselves with the then not recognized unintended consequences. After the travails and ultimate success of fighting World War II, suburban life was “the best of all possible worlds”; the epitome of the American Dream for that age.

Fast forward to the 1990s and early 2000s to see the most popular television shows of that era: Seinfeld, Friends, and Sex in the City;  all set in the city. The unifying sub-text of these series was the appeal and desirability of walkable urbanism. Even though only 41 percent of all residents in metropolitan areas in 1990 lived in their central city, television research and viewer-ship indicated a desire to at least watch their favorite characters live and work in walkable urban places. Gatherings of young adults in restaurants and apartments in these shows made urban life exciting, engaging and offered that most attractive attribute of any era; being hip. 

These shows were also significant for what they did not portray; urban violence. A single woman would saunter down the street at night on the way to an art gallery opening in a former industrial section, as imagined by the television writer and portrayed on the screen, without a sense of foreboding. It was safe, exciting, hip and the place to be if you were young and on the way up.   

Even as edgeless cities were pushing growth ever outward, the popular appeal of urban life was growing. While subtle at first, the 1990s witnessed a revival in many American downtowns, spurred in part, no doubt, by the dramatic drop in urban crime in the 1990s. There were also signs of new walkable urban places being developed in some suburban town centers, new development around transit stations, and new walkable development built from scratch on greenfield sites without transit. At first this development started slowly in the mid and late 1990s but it took off in the 2000s. The New Urbanism movement sparked much of this development.

So the middle of the 2000s decade found the country going in two, diametrically opposed directions. The majority of housing and commercial development was still heading for the hills, pushing the fringe like it has never been pushed before. Metropolitan areas were expanding geometrically as farms were converted into subdivisions named after what they replaced…Whispering Woods, Bubbling Brook, Woodmont. Yet a counter trend had certainly started with downtowns reviving and transit and non-transit-served suburban town centers taking off with new development and revitalization.

Many contemporary observers of the built environment, such as Joel Kotkin, Robert Bruegmann and David Brooks feel the rediscovery of walkable urbanisn is at best a small niche, at worst a Yuppie fad that will soon fade. Kotkin disdainfully refers to downtown revitalization as a “Potemkin strategy” producing a “boutique city” for the “so-called creative class”. These critics generally feel that drivable sub-urban development has been the continuation of thousands of years of sprawl; mankind has always wanted more space and a desire to be away from other humans and the car was just the next step in that millennium-old progression.

So what is it going to be over the next generation — continued low density, drivable sub-urbanism or a shift to compact walkable urbanism or some combination of the two? 

I argue that demographic trends, consumer preferences, an emerging new version of the American Dream, and recognition of the consequences of sprawl are all pushing the pendulum back. The United States is on the verge of a new phase in its built environment.

Impact on Future Development
 
Since the built environment takes far longer to turn than a super tanker, adding between 1.5 and 2 percent to the existing stock per year, and there is a significant undersupply of walkable urban product, driving up residential,, commercial and land prices, what does that mean for what will be built over the next generation?  As Arthur C. Nelson, Professor at Virginia Tech, wrote in a 2006 paper in the Journal of the American Planning Association;

“More than $30 trillion will be spent on development between the period 2000 and 2025. Nearly 50 million new homes will be built including some 16 million that will be rebuilt or replaced entirely with other land uses. Seventy-five billion square feet of nonresidential space will be built with 60 billion [square feet] replacing space that existed in 2000: New nonresidential development will equal all such development that existed in 2000.”

This is a tremendous amount of development that, if it follows current asset allocation, will require around 40 percent of American investment capital during that period.  This would be the largest portion the country will invest in any asset class, more than government and corporate R & D, more than all of the growth in publicly traded companies and more than in the country’s defense spending. 

Given the zoning laws that generally outlaw walkable urbanism, the financing that is in place today which has a strong bias toward drivable sub-urban development and the skill set of the development industry in building drivable sub-urban product, it would stand to reason that the vast majority of this huge growth will be built as a continuation of drivable sub-urbanism.  This would be a mistake.  Employing the recent trade-off analysis consumer research, such as the Levine and Frank research, and demographic changes mentioned above, nearly all of the housing and much of the commercial product should be high density product suitable for walkable urbanism – or face early obsolescence. 

Nelson’s “probable” case scenario shows that between 2000 and 2025, there will be a 31 percent increase in the number of rental apartments units (8 million new units added to the 25 million existing units in 2000), a 175 percent increase in attached for-sale units (21 million new units added to the 12 million existing units in 2000) and a 67 percent increase in small lot detached houses (25 million new units versus the 40 million existing units in 2000).  All of these new units have the potential to be built in walkable urban places, though probably not all of them will be. 

The shocking conclusion of the Nelson research is that nearly 40 percent of all large lot single-family houses existing in 2000, presumably most if not all of them in drivable sub-urban locations, will go begging for buyers. There were 54 million large lot single family houses in 2000 and Nelson projects that 22 million will not find ready buyers when it comes time to sell, which implies much lower prices.  The premiums for walkable urban housing cited above (40 percent to 200 percent) may only get higher.  Nelson’s numbers show that it will take until 2025 and probably even longer to get the inherently slowly changing real estate market to correct the current shortage of high density, walkable urban real estate product.