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The American suburbs are better than you think
They're not my personal cup of tea, but there are good reasons people like them.
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“Buy a big house and live in the suburbs” — Tracy Chapman
“Outside suburbia’s sprawling everywhere/ I don’t want to go, baby” — Kim Wilde
I grew up in the suburbs, and when I got the chance, I moved to a big city and never looked back.¹ I love living in dense, built-up urban areas, with great train systems and tons of restaurants and shops. Japanese cities are the best in the world, and I’ve written plenty of posts about what makes them so great. But you don’t have to be Japan in order to create amazing metropolises — New York City, Paris, Istanbul, Seoul, London, etc. are all excellent places to live.
I’m far from the only person who feels this way. Rents in New York City are absolutely insane — $5300 a month to live in Manhattan, $4350 to live in Brooklyn. That’s partly because there are a lot of good jobs in NYC — it’s a cluster for industries like finance and media. But more and more, Americans move to cities because they like living there.
As early as 2000, economists were starting to find that “amenities” were driving America’s urban revival even more than job opportunities were. Couture and Handbury (2020) find that wanting to be close to restaurants and nightlife explains about 40% of the trend of young, high-earning, college-educated people² moving to cities in recent decades. Furthermore, the stereotype of dense cities as crime-ridden and unsafe is just wrong — NYC has one of the lowest violent crime rates among big cities in America.
I’ve been a relentless advocate of building more dense, walkable cities in America. Not only would this raise GDP (because of improved clustering effects), but it would let Americans live where they want. The demand for life in cities like NYC exceeds America’s willingness to supply these environments; this raises rents in places like NYC, which pushes a lot of people into the suburbs who don’t want to be there. Forcing those city types into the ‘burbs raises rents for people who like suburbia. Basically, everyone would be happy if America had a few more Manhattans and a lot more Brooklyns.
Yet among my fellow urbanists and YIMBYs, I often encounter disdain or outright hostility toward the suburbs that define most of America’s present urban landscape. This isn’t just an urbanist thing, of course — my own parents had a lot of negative things to say about suburbia, and ranting against its sterility and boredom is a staple of pop culture. But the criticisms are just way overdone; the suburbs are not the isolating, lonely hell that they’re often made out to be.
And I think that the constant ranting against the suburbs complicates the quest for denser cities. It creates the suspicion that urbanists and YIMBYs want to make the whole nation into Manhattan. Nothing like that could ever happen, of course; even Japan is mostly suburbanized. But painting the quest for denser metropolises as an attack on suburbia makes everything needlessly confrontational, polarized, and zero-sum.
So I think it’s helpful to go through some reasons why the suburbs aren’t actually as bad as they say.
The suburbs don’t force you to have a long commute
One of the most persistent myths about suburbia is that it forces you to commute a long way to work:
It’s possible, of course, for something like this to be true. If cities refuse to build housing (which they do), and if jobs are concentrated in the city center (thanks to clustering effects or agglomeration or whatever), then people will be forced to live far out on the periphery and endure punishing commutes to get to work.
The thing is, it’s not true. Despite greater sprawl, Americans have some of the shortest commutes in the developed world. This is from the OECD: