Our Pennsylvania zoning laws are car based. They are designed for suburban living connected by interstate roads (that often cut cities in half), to shopping centers, commercial business parks & industrial centers, BUT:
The People the Suburbs Were Built for Are Gone
A new book documents the “retrofitting” of obsolete suburban malls, box stores, office parks, parking lots, motels, and more.
By Shayla Love
January 21, 2021, 12:00pm
"Last summer, Donald Trump and Ben Carson, then Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, co-bylined an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal promising to “protect America’s suburbs," describing how they reversed policies that would allow for the creation of denser living structures in areas zoned only for single-family homes.
"America’s suburbs are a shining example of the American Dream, where people can live in their own homes, in safe, pleasant neighborhoods," they wrote.
But the suburbs, in the sense of the idyllic American pastoral Trump and Carson referenced, have been changing for some time—not necessarily the physical homes, stores, roads, and offices that populate them, but the people who live there, along with their needs and desires. 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...
You argue that many of these suburban forms are obsolete today because they don't fit the needs of the people who live there now. Can you walk me through some of the major demographic changes that have led to these suburban forms becoming obsolete?
EDJ: One of the biggest shifts is that the U.S. now is a majority of one to two person households. And yet, the majority of land within regional urban boundaries is zoned for single-family houses. That already is something of a mismatch.
The expectation going forward is that something like 80 percent of new households that will form over the next 15 years will be these one to two person households. A lot of them would prefer an apartment or a condo—smaller units.
Plus you have the aging of the society, that's the other really big piece. Especially in the suburbs, a lot of elderly people loved their single-family house while they were raising the kids. But now that they're empty nesters and retiring, it's kind of lonely. They want to stay in their community with doctors and friends nearby. But a lot of them are looking for, frankly, a more urban lifestyle.
It's pretty interesting how the desires of both the younger millennials, Gen Z, and a lot of those aging boomers are converging on an interest in more walkable, mixed-use, compact urban places out in the burbs.
JW: Commuting has also been transformed dramatically over the past decade or so, too. The notion that people live in the suburbs and work in the cities just isn't true anymore…."
“I was really struck by the statistics in the book about how many parking spaces there are per household in certain cities. Like how there are 1.97 cars per U.S. household, but in Des Moines, Iowa, there are 19 parking spaces per household. In Jackson, Wyoming, there are 27. These all seem like really obvious places to re-think about how we're using land.
JW: These choices around parking we've made have been codified through regulations and naturalized as normal.
EDJ: We really have made it almost a right to park as opposed to a right to housing. Cars have much more protection than people do.
There are these aging properties for the most part; a lot of them have become obsolete and those are places to retrofit. But sometimes [properties] are thriving. They're doing well. Yet they still look at their parking lot as this underperforming asphalt. It's not doing enough of the job. Sometimes there's a mall that is doing well, and it makes more sense now to build a parking deck and build housing and bring in offices and make more mixed use."
Several years ago at a municipal training meeting I spoke to a West Whiteland Township Supervisor about Main Street at Exton. I said something like, “You’ve got Main Street, you need a town to go around it. She said, “We’re working on it.
SEE "Exton the Crossroads of Chester County" below to see what they did.
"All of these: the parking lots, the dead space, the vacant spaces. Those are the opportunities for the suburbs to finally address really urgent challenges of equity, climate change, and health.
You’ve been documenting retrofitting since 2011, when your first book came out, and now this second book includes even more case studies. Is the retrofitting phenomenon increasing, or does it need a push?
EDJ: If you go into any architecture school or city planning school's library, there are tons of books on downtowns. There's remarkably little written about the suburbs or suburbia. Most of what is there are sort of condemning them as wasteful and ecological boring places.
We're academics, we're documenting this stuff, but we're not exactly neutral. We are advocates. We're advocates within our disciplines to to sort of say, hey, we really need to bring design to the suburbs
There's so much opportunity. It is where most Americans live. We saw a lot of these projects happening and noticed that none of the architecture magazines would cover them because they weren't cool looking enough."
We considered moving to a garden style apartment complex a few decades ago. It was located near interstate roads connecting to municipal centers & job possibilities. Shopping was a 10 minute drive. We looked but it was miles from transit & train lines. You needed to get in a car for everything.
I drove by it recently. It was in disrepair and possibly bankrupt.
"Poverty remains most highly concentrated in our cities. But there's actually more Americans living in poverty out in the suburbs.
We draw attention to some of the efforts that have been made. Sadly, we don't yet see nearly enough examples of retrofitting that are really addressing the problem.
There have been some cases of aging garden apartments that are the housing of last resort for a lot of very, very poor people.
Those are just kind of aging out. In some cases, they're being redeveloped into more expensive fancy apartments. We need a lot more attention to preserving and restoring a lot of those. It's not solving a lot of ecological problems. These places are very auto dependent. But there's such desperate need for more affordable housing out in the burbs.
MORE AT:
The People the Suburbs Were Built for Are Gone
Case Studies in Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Strategies for Urgent Challenges 1st Edition
by June Williamson (Author), Ellen Dunham-Jones (Author)
In Chester County PA you could consider that West Whiteland Township and Downingtown are in competition with the City of Coatesville in reuse of land.
It’s not a zero sum game. The more affordable lower middle class housing there is, the more industries that employ lower middle class people that work in those industries will come to Chester County.
Understand that the middle class of 1950s & 1960s in Coatesville that I grew up in is almost gone.
Most of the United States is a tiny percentage of wealthy, a small middle class and a very large lower middle class to poor population.
Chester County PA is among the wealthier counties in the United States.
Exton the Crossroads of Chester County
Main Street at Exton, Exton, PA
May 10, 2019 12:49 pm
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