12 Suburbia
Previous mainstays of suburban life are now myths: that the majority of people own their homes; that the suburbs are havens for the middle class; or that the bulk of people are young families who value privacy over urban amenities like communal spaces, walkability, and mixed-use properties.
This mismatch has led to a phenomenon called “suburban retrofitting”.
When the suburbs are retrofitted, they can take on an astonishing array of modern issues: car dependency, public health, supporting aging people, helping people compete for jobs, creating water and energy resilience, and helping with social equity and justice.
12.1 The Great American Infill
Smith
America began as anarchy, and our history has been a series of repeated offensives against that anarchy, in which we tamed our civilization a bit more each time. The unrest of the 1960s was an eruption of wildness — a revolt against the order that industrialization and the World Wars had brought. Romanticism bucked against rationalism; the spirit of the frontier returned, as an idea rather than a place.
America dealt with those years of unrest by spreading out. We fled the inner cities for the security of the suburbs — not just White people, but middle-class Black people and eventually Americans of all races. There, hunkering behind fences and lawns in our cavernous houses, we could do our own thing, and forget that we were all part of the same country. Americans segregated ourselves by race, but even more we segregated ourselves by politics — liberals moved to big cities and the coasts, conservatives moved to the exurbs or stayed in the heartland.
We bowled alone. We dropped out of civic organizations and cultivated our hobbies. We stopped watching CBS and consumed our own partisan news. We became a nation of subcultures. Suburbia was our new frontier — even if for kids who grew up there, it often felt like a trap. We guarded that frontier with NIMBYism, with zoning laws and environmental review and parking requirements. When the internet came, that frontier, and our subcultures, went digital, and we escaped each other even more.
That was the bargain we made in the 1970s.
That bargain broke down at the end of the 2000s. Two things made it untenable. First, we reached the limits of our ability to endure long commutes out to ever-more-far-flung exurbs, even as economic clustering effects pulled people back to the big productive metros. Places like California’s Inland Empire went from clean, pretty refuges to struggling, shabby decline, even as rents soared in cities unwilling to accommodate the inflows of yuppies. The second thing that happened was the dual advent of social media and smartphones. This turned the internet from a place you could escape to into a place you had to escape from — a churning maelstrom where every single political viewpoint, identity, and subculture that had found its own space during the previous four decades was suddenly thrown together and stirred in a pot.
Urban limits and the rise of mass social media closed our frontier, yet again. I often say that the 2020s are the new 1970s, because we’re at a similar point in the American cycle of unrest. Once again, political coalitions, social relations, and the economic order are in flux; we are searching for a new equilibrium, a new bargain. But this bargain won’t look quite like the last one. In some ways we’re going to have to reverse the changes we made in the 70s.
We’re thus living through the Great American Infill — the closure of the frontier of suburbia.
The pressure of infill will be mitigated somewhat by the spreading of economic activity from “superstar” cities to other cities around the country, aided by the rise of remote work. But in the end, even if people move to Nashville and Denver and Bozeman, the lingering power of clustering effects will create a lot of pressure to live near the city center. The suburbs of these cities will be speckled with rowhouses and low-rises and duplexes and missing-middle housing of all sorts, while city centers will slowly open themselves to high-rise housing. The country won’t become Tokyo or Manhattan, but it’ll look a little more like Germany.
As for cultural infill, this will also be slowed by the migration of internet users from big centralized social media sites like Instagram and Twitter X to the relative safety of small-group chats on Discord, Reddit, or various chat apps. (And hopefully we’ll find some way of persuading people to limit their time on their phones.) But the rise of social media has already forced the creation of norms of politeness throughout American society that didn’t exist a decade ago; “cancel culture”, like the conformity of a small town, has done its brutal work.
What this will mean, I suspect, is an America that’s less wild and free than the one I grew up in — but one that’s also more orderly, more communal, and perhaps more rational.