7 Rules for Rehabilitating Suburbia
America’s suburban experiment has long been running on borrowed time. For decades, we have pursued easy short-term growth in the form of the hyper-expansion of our towns and metropolitan areas—spreading ever outward, building subdivisions and strip malls, roads and sewers, out of proportion to our ability to pay for the long-term maintenance liabilities we incur. When the housing market last collapsed, bringing much of the U.S. economy with it in 2008, we got a grim preview of what might eventually befall much of the American landscape. In “drive until you qualify” bargain-basement boomburbs, construction went unfinished, poverty and foreclosure rates skyrocketed, and municipal budgets cratered by half or more. We profiled one of these places in a 2016 article: Lehigh Acres, Florida, an expansive Fort Myers exurb built in a scattershot way by real-estate speculators.
In the 2016 essay, I compared the visual appearance of much of Lehigh Acres to that of Detroit, Michigan—specifically, the infamously "hollowed out" sections of Detroit where houses long abandoned have been demolished and what's left is an eerie patchwork of weed-strewn lots with one home here or there. (Lehigh Acres is this way because only a smattering of the lots were ever built on in the first place, on a grid of streets that extends miles into featureless scrubland. The public infrastructure is there, but the people—and tax base—are not.) The comparison earned me some irate emails from Lehigh residents—How DARE you suggest we have ANYTHING in common with Detroit?!
We Are All Detroit. So Now What?
We've written for years at Strong Towns that we are all Detroit. The staggering population collapse and resulting dysfunction of the Motor City has specific historical, racial and economic antecedents, but the underlying fragility that made Detroit’s fall so unusually precipitous and total is a product of the Suburban Experiment approach to growth, of which Detroit was an early pioneer. By running highways and stroads through the city, building far-flung bedroom communities, and demolishing historic buildings for parking lots, you thin out the tax base: the source of revenue to keep the lights on and the streets paved.
The inexorable math of decline is simple: If we find we’ve built more than we can afford to maintain, it's not all going to be maintained.
There are a lot of reasons to think that outlying suburbs are the places most likely to go the way of Detroit in the future of many metro areas. Their development pattern is fragile: these places are vulnerable to decline over time because their main selling point tends to be cheap housing and/ or simple newness, more than intrinsically distinctive qualities. The buildings are often not built to age well or to be adaptable—think of big-box store buildings literally only designed to last 15 years. The transportation costs to living on the suburban fringe are high, even with cheap gas.
The "suburban retrofit" movement that is in vogue among some planners is not an answer that can scale to meet the extent of the problem. Sure, it offers elegant design solutions to renovate key suburban sites—for example, old shopping malls—into master-planned new developments with a traditional urban form. But each such project is a time-consuming and expensive gamble that requires a big, well capitalized developer and an engaged City Hall to pull off—not to mention some bonafide market demand for the end product. Ultimately the most likely prospect for the high-dollar suburban retrofit model is that it creates small pockets of success, surrounded by an ocean of dysfunction—homes declining in value, streets crumbling, neighborhoods slowly but steadily becoming worse places to be.
The Messy (But Actually Scalable) Way Forward
With widespread municipal insolvency looming amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the time is yesterday to think about adapting pragmatically to a future that, for a lot of places, might look a bit more like Detroit’s recent past. For local leaders, this means recognizing that the goal is not jump-starting a renewed wave of growth, or restoring or maintaining the trappings of a (superficially) wealthy, desirable place. The game is now about the real, pressing needs of your residents. And you need to humble yourselves to understand those needs and do your best to facilitate them.
This is not glamorous work. There’s an obnoxious narrative of Detroit out there that romanticizes it as a sort of frontier for "urban pioneers"—all cheap real estate for scrappy dreamers who have visions of permaculture and makerspaces and green-tech startups. This is insulting to the Detroit that is not, in fact, a post-apocalyptic blank slate but a real place where nearly 700,000 real people live (more than in, say, Atlanta or Portland). Those people, who are more likely to experience the city’s eagerly-hyped recovery as actually just grossly uneven, are often looking for just the basic ability to live a functional life in a city: a roof over your head, a neighborhood that’s safe, a way to get around, a job to get to, water that doesn’t get shut off, a 911 service that responds on time.
What we can learn from the likes of Detroit that’s worthy of imitation is that there's a pragmatism and possibility that arises when you've stopped expecting ossified institutions to function. Red tape tends to fall away—the premise of the Project For Lean Urbanism’s “pink zones” initiative, which has used Detroit as a pilot site. Experiments tend to flourish that would have been disallowed in earlier times as a threat to neighborhood character.
This is a healthy shift that should be encouraged. But it is a pronounced cultural shift for suburbia, so much of which was built on the promise of exclusivity, manicured pleasantness, order and homogeneity. This goes beyond planning or zoning, but it is exemplified in the zoning codes that strictly separate houses from apartments from shopping from office parks, and seek to freeze all of it in amber exactly the way it was built—the outward appearance of a dream whose reality is long gone.
Here are a few ideas, far from exhaustive, for how declining suburbs—places that don’t have either enough wealthy residents or a timeless, historic downtown to coast on when economic times get rough—can make themselves resilient in the face of a likely harsher future.
1. Allow your housing stock to adapt.
Photo: Nicolás Boullosa via Flickr
Americans’ housing needs are evolving. Only 1 in 5 households is a nuclear family. In places where the range of built options hasn’t caught up, it’s improvised living patterns that bridge the gap, often in somewhat uncomfortable ways like large, blended households sharing single-family homes not really designed for that. (For example, Santa Ana, California, a postwar suburb of mostly modest single-family homes, is one of the most densely populated cities in the U.S. for this reason.)
Every city should allow, at a bare minimum, the smaller end of the “missing middle” of housing options including accessory dwelling units (ADUs), duplex and triplex conversions, and small houses on small lots. This meets housing needs but also allows neighborhoods to “thicken up” in an organic way, achieving the critical mass to support some walkability and a stronger tax base.
This kind of thing rarely attracts the interest of large-scale developers, especially in a place that isn’t growing: it must be doable by small-scale developers and rehabbers. This means cities should work to make permitting easy and automatic, and to connect homeowners to financing for something like an ADU.
2. Allow a bare-minimum bar of entry for entrepreneurship.
All neighborhoods should be de facto mixed-use now. Hundreds of American suburbs have more ailing, half-vacant strip malls than they can ever hope to refill with stores and restaurants, even with tax incentives and other inducement. Many of these properties are encumbered by debt or unusual lease arrangements that stymie their redevelopment. But this doesn’t mean there isn’t a demand for goods and services near where people live.
Want to operate a home-based business—especially in the wake of the coronavirus? Go for it. A food truck? Go for it. Set up a pop-up store in a tent or kiosk in the underused parking lot of the neighborhood big-box plaza? Go for it. Build stuff out of your garage? Go for it. The lowest possible bar of entry for someone who wants to become a local entrepreneur should be available to them.
3. Allow transportation systems to adapt in ad-hoc ways.
The great fantasy of some transit advocates is that we are going to blanket America with high-frequency bus routes and light rail, as soon as the federal government comes to its senses and funds transit adequately. We aren’t. A place where population density is on the low side, there is not a well-connected street network, and people’s destinations are highly decentralized, is pretty prohibitive for a well-functioning, orderly transit system without immense ongoing subsidy.
What is more likely is that adaptation to transit needs in these places will be a chaotic but functional mix. You might bike-share + scooter + ride-share + paratransit + conventional transit your way to something workable for a critical mass of people. Ditch the laser focus on 2 or 3 big decade-defining projects, and look for 200 or 300 small ways to make those options more useful for short trips and to connect your residents to the region’s formal transit system.
Buford Highway outside Atlanta, Georgia. Photo by Marian Liou.
4. DO prioritize street safety for all users.
The notion that there won’t be a car-free renaissance in suburbia does not mean surrendering to the status quo of streets that are inhospitable and downright deadly for anyone without a car. In fact, socioeconomically declining suburbs—especially those built in the 1950s and 1960s with outdated engineering standards and a lack of basic accommodations like sidewalks—are the places of the greatest need by far when it comes to safety enhancements.
Residents who don’t have access to a car in these places often take their lives in their hands daily just getting around. Correcting this situation should be the obsession of every local government—and streamlining what is now often an infuriating game of delay and buck-passing between many different agencies (cities, counties, state DOTs, and so forth) when it comes to who is responsible.
5. Don't fear or stigmatize the working class. Embrace being a place of opportunity.
I know of a Midwestern suburb that shall remain nameless where the city council recently sought to respond to a sharp uptick in single-family rentals—which they saw as a harbinger of socioeconomic decline—by passing a moratorium on new rental permits. In other words, “If we just prohibit renters, then we’ll become a city of comfortably middle-class homeowners again.” This is pure fantasy: mistaking one of the effects of decline for its cause.
A much more forward-thinking narrative for a city finding that its residents aren’t as well-to-do as the residents of one or two generations ago is, "Welcome. We’re a place where you—whether you’re a young family or you’re recent immigrants or you just bought your grandparents’ house that they built here in the ‘50s—have the opportunity to come, live in an affordable community, and build something out of nothing for yourself. You can start a small business in a cheaper space than you’d find in the city, with less red tape. We're a place where the American dream is alive.”
6. Support local food and community spaces.
Photo by Johnny Sanphillippo.
Postwar suburbia tends to be designed for an atomized life: you travel by car between private spaces, through a public realm that is not meant as a place to linger. Even parks may be large, central destinations that everyone drives to. This is no longer viable in a place seeking to maintain its economic productivity and quality of life amid a protracted period of decline.
Our suburbs need community gardens, providing some needed diversification in our food supply. They need pocket parks. They need farmers’ markets—not the kind geared toward high-end consumption, but toward neighborhood togetherness. All these are spaces for the community to do the work of forging collective ties and social capital. There’s certainly enough land for it: we’re just not set up to be nimble enough to see, and then prioritize and fund, opportunities to facilitate it. Under a Strong Towns approach to identifying worthy public investments, that changes.
7. Invest in people, but don't prop up dysfunctional places.
If we find we’ve built more than we can afford to maintain, it's not all going to be maintained.
This doesn't mean we let neighborhoods rot—”Sorry, ZIP code 00000, your trash doesn’t get collected anymore.” It does mean we don't throw good money after bad. If you’re not going to keep every street paved, then at least make sure that your most financially productive areas—the ones paying the freight for everybody else—are taken care of and kept from slipping into a spiral of decline.
If you let your residents create value in the ad-hoc ways that might feel unsightly by 20th century suburban aesthetic standards, you'll find that they will. And that the places that turn out to be reasonably functional places to live will stabilize and attract more residents, and present opportunity as they do for commensurate public investment. But you've got to let the wisdom of the crowd lead. If we do, we'll actually have some pleasant surprises to look forward to as things reorganize themselves.
The Strong Towns movement is about confronting the realities facing our cities and towns following decades of unproductive growth. We are a worldwide community of advocates and local leaders looking to do things a better way, and we want to equip you with the tools to ask a better set of questions about how to secure a prosperous future for the place you love. Together, we can do this.
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(Cover photo by Johnny Sanphillippo)
Daniel Herriges has been a regular contributor to Strong Towns since 2015 and is also a founding member of the organization. His work at Strong Towns focuses on housing issues, small-scale and incremental development, urban design, and lowering the barriers to entry for people to participate in creating resilient and prosperous neighborhoods. Daniel has a Masters in Urban and Regional Planning from the University of Minnesota, with a concentration in Housing and Community Development.
Daniel’s work with Strong Towns reflects a lifelong fascination with cities and how they work. When he’s not perusing maps (for work or pleasure), he can be found exploring out-of-the-way neighborhoods on foot or bicycle. Daniel has lived in Northern California and Southwest Florida, and he now resides back in his hometown of St. Paul, Minnesota, along with his wife and two children.