The Fixed Nature of Suburbs

When I post these videos about suburbs and urbanism I think many of the people who make these videos completely miss the point of suburbs. In this video, the main thrust is that the suburbs can’t really grow because of single-family zoning and height restrictions. This means that there is a relatively fixed number of houses and, therefore a fixed number of people (relatively) that can live in a given area. What the video misses out is that this is exactly the point of the suburbs. The suburbs were built to create communities that were all the same and wouldn’t grow. It’s a feature, not a bug. If you own a house in the city and the area around you gets rezoned or new construction goes up, then you can end up owning a house next to a shopping mall. The suburbs were built to stop this exact scenario from happening. The trouble comes when an area becomes desirable, and demand outstrips supply, and there is nowhere to increase supply. Here in Seattle, we solved this problem by upzoning, and it has helped but has not been popular for people who own a single-family home next to an apartment building. People are paying to live in the suburbs and have a certain expectation of what the built environment around their home will look like. This has, in the past, included racial covenants to ensure that neighborhoods would always stay a certain racial population. People are really paying for the privilege of not having their neighborhoods change that much. In the United States, we have enough space that we can build new spaces, new cities, and start new communities. Perhaps instead of trying to change the suburbs, we can change the cities who are willing to change and start to build new communities where people can live their lives.