Stepford Lies
Everything you think you know about life on the edge of a city is probably wrong.
People who arent white.
The reality is, the [suburbs] were never entirely white, affluent, middle class.
But the suburbs, at least, are showing progress.
Areas with a high proportion of minorities were marked red translation: high risk.
In the last 30 years, the suburbs have also become more international.
This happened even in areas you might think of as heavily segregated.
Georgias Gwinnett County, right outside of Atlanta, was predominantly white as recently as the early 2000s.
It was an old boy, white power internet, Dunham-Jones recalls.
Today the community looks and behaves very differently.
Theyve got two districts that are struggling with 20 or 30 languages of kids, she says.
The suburbs is no longer a separate way of life.
But I think that, too, is likely to become dispersed as we develop communities online.
The city-suburban divide has become less important in shaping where households with kids live.
They want to go back to cities, get into the office.
They will want to socialize in these large cities, Wachter says.
In just the second quarter of 2021,construction of multifamily buildings in suburbs increasedby more than 10%.
Dunham-Jones says the suburbs now reflect a generational shift in how Americans define prosperity.
In most of the world, the history of civilization is a history of the pursuit of privacy.
As you get more wealth, you get more privacy.
What that is already starting to look like is walkable, mixed-use town centers, Dunham-Jones says.
Ironically, theyre increasingly springing up in redeveloped malls, big-box stores, and other husks of suburbia past.
Both the supply of defunct suburban commercial propertyandthe market demand for walkable/bikeable urbanism remain very strong.
These Zoom-lets, as Wachter calls them, dont feel exactly like a city, of course.
Still, the new suburban work-from-home class is likely to accelerate it.
If you might climb the corporate ladder from the farmers market, why wouldnt you?
