16 ms·

The Suburb of the Future, Almost Here

97 points by tysone 9y ago

fenwick67 9y ago
"Millennials want a different kind of suburban development that is smart, efficient and sustainable" Suburban or Sustainable, pick one.
- pavel_lishin 9y ago
  Why are they inherently incompatible?
  - AstralStorm 9y ago
    Low density is more expensive in all ways. This affects sustainability.
    - rayiner 9y ago
      Suburbs aren’t necessarily low density, though they usually are. In places like New York, many “suburbs” are just small satellite cities well connected to the downtown core with rail.
      - amyjess 9y ago
        I don't know if NY suburbs are a great example, though. Things are much more spread out and loosey-goosey there than in younger cities. Here's Plano, TX, which was mostly developed in the '90s and the 21st century: https://i.imgur.com/TmIlgBh.jpg https://i.imgur.com/TmIlgBh.jpg Here's Westchester County, NY, developed much earlier than that and not nearly as dense: https://i.imgur.com/pSIettu.jpg https://i.imgur.com/pSIettu.jpg (I used Google Maps zoom level 14 for both screenshots)
        CalRobert 9y ago
        Is Plano much denser? Or just more paved? Plano is a city of 71 sq miles and ~3800 people per square mile. Westchester is a _county_ of 500 square miles and 2300 people per square mile. In many regards, Westchester may be denser. It also looks like they haven't chopped down every last tree and laid waste to the land with asphalt.
        pavel_lishin 9y ago
        Never been to Westchester, except on a train passing through, but I am intimately familiar with Plano. It's dense, but most of it is a poster child for shitty suburbs: if you don't have a car, you're fucked. (Take a bus, you say? What bus? When I was living around there, most of Plano wasn't served by buses.)
      - danans 9y ago
        Those are not the example of suburb that people are referring to when they discuss the sustainability issues. Usually they are referring to the much sparser developments of often large houses, built between the 1960s up to the early naughts. What you are describing are more like towns, which usually have more sustainable features (smaller houses and lots, ergo less pipes in the ground, a rail corridor connecting them to a major city) because they were built before the car era.
  - ThrustVectoring 9y ago
    Infrastructure costs scale approximately linearly with road frontage. 1000 feet of road with associated water lines, power lines, street lights, etc, costs roughly the same whether it serves ten households or fifty. A sustainable development will necessarily have a high number of households per foot of road frontage. This will not have the suburban look and feel of single-family homes with yards. At best it's going to be medium-density townhomes and row-houses to eliminate wasting infrastructure on the space between houses.
    - majormajor 9y ago
      The future of the suburbs depends greatly on renewable, clean sources of energy. Reuse and recycling of resources is also important, but for things like power lines or water pipes, seems less so (more for things like those self-driving-electric-cars everyone's waiting for to give them suburbs + not having to drive in stop and go traffic). Of course, so does the future of the city, just in a denser package, so it has better per-capita figures in many ways - but is there a scenario where we can get enough of it to power cities but not cities + suburbs? That seems unlikely to me.
- jimktrains2 9y ago
  Suburbs don't have to be substantially less dense. Heck, I think there are neighborhoods in my nearest city (Pittsburgh) that are less dense than my town just outside of it. Mine was built before cars were a given and when the trolley was a given. There are "exurbs" which are just abominations of low density and bad design. There are some lower density suburbs, and yeah, neither of those are sustainable.
nextstep 9y ago
I'm a millennial. I don't want any kind of suburb. I refuse to live anywhere that isn't well-connected/dense enough to provide a good lifestyle completely car-free (i.e. all travel is quick, ubiquitous and convenient on foot/bike/public transportation). I do not ever wish to drive and this is not possible in any suburban development.
- Armisael16 9y ago
  No one ever said that all millennials want to live in the suburb, so...
- pavel_lishin 9y ago
  I feel the same way that you do, but I worry that the realities of the housing market are going to drive my family to some stupid suburb where I have to get a car and spend 30 minutes every morning screaming inside it.
  - francisofascii 9y ago
    I suggest looking into 'inner' suburbs or pre WW2 housing built around a town. At least that allows you to walk to stores, schools, and usually closer to a city. The trade-off is an older house and possibly a higher cost.
- jedberg 9y ago
  Out of curiosity, do you have kids? It's mighty convenient to have a car with all the stuff in it and plenty of space to park that car nearby, and also lots of space for the kids to play outside.
  - MBlume 9y ago
    I have an 11-month-old and any given time I put him in a carseat it's 50-50 whether he'll holler until we get there. I take BART now even more than I used to.
  - alistairSH 9y ago
marcoperaza 9y ago
>Yet millennial suburbanites want a new kind of landscape. They want breathing room but disdain the energy wastefulness, visual monotony and social conformity of postwar manufactured neighborhoods. That's a hell of a claim, and no evidence whatsoever is provided for it. Could it be that the New York Times writers are projecting their slavish political devotion onto the rest of us? Once we're all married with school-age kids, we will choose to move out to the plain, boring suburbs just like the generations before us. You might keep wasting your time with composting, but almost nobody is going to let "sustainability" actually detract from their quality of life. The only reason why people in other countries don't make that same choice is that they're not really allowed to, because of development laws, high fuel taxes, and so forth.
- ch4s3 9y ago
  Another way to put it would be that roads, sewers, and mortgages aren't heavily subsidized in other places.
  - taway_1212 9y ago
    Also, it costs more to build and maintain a house (compared to a flat), and most of the other countries, even the developed ones, aren't as affluent as the US.
    - ch4s3 9y ago
      That's true, but you still find higher rates of urban living in similarly rich countries with lower subsidies on sprawl.
    - fuzzybeard 9y ago
      But after 15 years my house is paid off. With renting, you're paying for the rest of your life. After my mortgage I only pay taxes and upkeep which is a fraction as much.
      - gozur88 9y ago
sealthedeal 9y ago
I was thinking the exact opposite of this. I thought millennials were not into subs.
cpursley 9y ago
This trend must be a price over preference issue. The desirable cities in the US are just so damn expensive to live in town. If you want to buy, it's either the 'burbs, or most of your income going to rent/buy in the city. Of course, if you really do the math, even beyond being unsustainable from an economic and infrastructure/governance standpoint, on a personal level, owning and maintaining a house in the suburbs has many hidden costs.
- ashark 9y ago
  It's that plus the schools, at least in this city. If we lived in the city, it'd take ~2-2.5x as much money to buy a house with one fewer bedrooms than our current 'burbs house has (two of our kids could have bunk-beds I guess) and probably 500-100sqft smaller overall and in kinda so-so shape, and that's outside the heart of the city and not in a ritzy neighborhood (but also not a slum). Then we'd also have to hope our kids got into one of a couple good waiting-listed charter schools, or else pay another $2-3K/month for private school. We couldn't afford that at all, and even if they got into the charter schools we'd be living like paupers thanks to the much-higher mortgage (or rent). So, lifeless, boring 'burbs full of seemingly-intentionally-ugly houses it is.
- majormajor 9y ago
  Is it that hard to believe, especially with other articles[0] discussing how much millenials love pets even before having kids, that there's a significant number of people who prefer yards and quiet and peace and all those other suburban perks over living in dense environments? I don't deny that a lot of people prefer living in the city, but it's not only price that can make people choose the alternative. (But due to the nature of density and surface area, you'd have to seriously large majority prefering the suburbs to really drive the city prices down.) There's also a definitions thing hiding in here: much of San Fransisco is pretty damn suburban, with houses, one or two story buildings, etc. Still expensive as hell, though. And then look at all the towns on the peninsula. I'd argue that the affordability differences are regional much more than urban/suburban driven. Worth also looking at the costs within those regions of city vs certain suburbs, like SF vs Palo Alto, or LA vs Santa Monica. [0] such as https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2016/09/13/millennials-are-picking-pets-over-people/?utm_term=.6509c339a5d6 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2016/09/13/m... http://www.marketwatch.com/story/do-pets-have-the-potential-to-unleash-millennials-on-housing-market-2017-08-02 http://www.marketwatch.com/story/do-pets-have-the-potential-...
notahacker 9y ago
it wasn't until I noticed the animated clouds in the background that I was sure the image of the "future" suburb with houses that weren't shaped like regular houses and the staggering innovation of roads that are curved hadn't been drawn at some time in the, say, 1930s. On closer inspection, there is a difference in vision, but they might want to reconsider the sustainability implications of the bird that disappears and is replaced by a drone...
- logfromblammo 9y ago
  This article sounds a whole lot like every "housing of the future" ever written--except the flying cars have been split into robot cars for people and flying delivery drones for everything else. And none of the authors ever seem to indicate any understanding of why the suburban housing development exist in its current form before hand-waving away all those real factors and baking up some pie-in-the-sky nonsense to support whatever their vision of the future may be. We already know what a sustainable, efficient suburb looks like. It's a city block. But if people who live in suburbs actually wanted that, we'd have more urbs and fewer suburbs.
pascalxus 9y ago
Its fun to dream about the future. But, a dream is all it'll ever be. how does anyone expect to build this stuff, when we can't even build regular housing, anywhere near the amount that is required to match demand. The only way, I can see this being built, is if new cities are created. These cities need to be populated by employers first: once that's there, most people that works there will find housing there too. I wish these articles would stop pretending like everyone has a plethora of housing choices available - talking about what millenials "want" ~ our so called housing preferences. Our housing preference, first and foremost is to have a roof over our head without it costing more than 60% of our paycheck. People go where the jobs go, there's no choice - this will always be the case as long as people need money, at least until remote work becomes possible
- majormajor 9y ago
  > how does anyone expect to build this stuff, when we can't even build regular housing, anywhere near the amount that is required to match demand. You can't in SF, NY, LA... other areas don't have this problem. If your biggest desire is to have your housing not cost more than 60% of your paycheck, move to the suburbs of somewhere like Dallas. You'll be shocked at how many millennials can afford to have nice apartments or even buy homes without spending close to that, percentage-wise. Sure, they're doing it on a later schedule than the baby boomers, but in a lot of places that's a separate discussion of higher education requirements, student loan situations, etc, not terribly inflated housing costs. But long-term-wealth-wise it might be better to land a top-tier job in an expensive city making $100K more a year in some combo of cash and equity and plowing that back into some of that expensive housing. Bit of a gamble, though. But if you aren't making more than (rough first guess, I feel on the too-low side with what I'm seeing rent-wise these days) $120K early in your career in one of the super-expensive cities, or have a clear path to well eclipsing that, you'd probably be much more comfortable making $70-100K in one of the cheaper, more southern, booming-yet-still-building-housing regions.
  - derekp7 9y ago
    Chicago area is similar -- you can easily get a tech job (lots of trading houses here) making 6 figures (or close to it), and get a house in the suburbs (about 50 minute train ride away) for less than 200K, or often times around 100k if you get one that is less than pristine (and these are good investments too, if you can do handyman work yourself).
RickS 9y ago
> They want breathing room but disdain the energy wastefulness, visual monotony and social conformity of postwar manufactured neighborhoods. then a few sentences later > Existing suburbs were developed to maximize house and lot sizes, There is an important piece of info they brushed right past: Existing suburbs were developed to maximize house and lot sizes within a single development, but optimize for that development to be as tightly clustered as possible. This is obvious if you travel through the outskirts of a major metro area. Loudon VA years ago (DC) or Gig Harbor (Seattle). There will be a bunch of nothing for 20 miles, then 40 houses with about 20 feet between each of them, and then a bunch of nothing. I think it's lazy and shortsighted of NYT to write this off as disdain for "visual monotony and social conformity". It's about peace and quiet. The next generation of suburbs needs to be optimized for a bunch of tired sacks aching for reprieve from a world that seems to always be poking at them for something. That means not being elbow to elbow with your neighbors and their shitty, shitty kids.
- pstuart 9y ago
  > and their shitty, shitty music blaring out FTFY edit: downvoted and flagged? My response was somewhat tongue in cheek but germane to the conversation: amplified music wasn't an issue when these suburbs initially came to be, but it is definitely a public space issue today.
kps 9y ago
“The use of drones will reduce the need for many car errands — and their emissions” Apparently the suburb of the future will be powered by magical fairy dust.
- kalleboo 9y ago
  You mean solar?
gnarbarian 9y ago
Eh, no thanks. I'll continue to live in the woods in Alaska.
chrismealy 9y ago
The future belongs to bikes. With safe and smooth infrastructure it's the most efficient and healthiest way to get around. It's not a coincidence that Dutch kids are the happiest in the world.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
elihu 9y ago
The article seemed like kind of a fluff piece reminiscent of the articles people used to write about flying cars, robot maids, videophones, etc.., but for anyone who's interested in this kind of thing, I'd recommend A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander. It was written 40 years ago, but the ideas are still relevant, I think.
burntsushi 9y ago
I'm a millennial, and it made me sick to read this. It made me glad that I live where I live. I don't live in the suburbs in spite of having my own discrete unit; I live in the suburbs precisely because I have my own discrete unit. I want my own backyard so that I can go and enjoy sitting by a fire with music I like without ever needing to worry that I might have to compete with others on a cool Friday night in Autumn. I want my own driveway so that I can go play basketball whenever I feel like, without needing to feel pressured to play nice with others. I want my own car so that I can drive to and from work in peace, and so that I can do whatever I want in my car, like smoke a cigar. What's the likelihood that my friendly neighborhood ride sharing service will let me do that? Zero. My car is just about the only place left I can smoke in Massachusetts when I'm not at home, and I'm happy to pay for that privilege. Even if I were OK with all of that, there are numerous dubious claims made in this article about how this new style of living would benefit the environment and would presumably save people from flooding. Really? Would it? How did you figure that? Or does it just sound like it makes sense? Many signs point to me being stranger than my generational cohorts, but I like the suburbs precisely because I viscerally dislike living in shared spaces.
- ant6n 9y ago
  Free health advice: smoking kills.
- eastWestMath 9y ago
  So basically you like to live in the suburbs for antisocial reasons, and you your argument against the research showing suburbs are an ecological disaster boils down to "nuh-uh".
  - amigoingtodie 9y ago
    Not that I agree completely with the original comment, but I, too, feel like when visiting a 'city', I am competing for resources. I do not enjoy this adversarial feeling.
    - eastWestMath 9y ago
IncRnd 9y ago
I'd rather live on my 20 acres with propane power and the batteries powered by the sun. I like that we dug a pump well for fresh water. I like that I can go outside with my daughter and watch wildlife walk by. I don't need to get a streaming service that puts an image of wild things on a 40" screen. My daughter is going to have memories for a lifetime of her and dad naming the pretty cougars and foxes that walked in her backyard. She'll always remember and be able to come back to her own woods with trails and chirping, the stream by the house, and her very own lake Elizabeth with little jumping fishies. I already get things delivered to my door same day from Amazon, so I don't need drop off locations at town central, where I would need to get my packages. But, I can go into town, whenever I want. It's not far. If people want to keep building ever more expensive housing that is constantly more and more interdependent with other systems and people, then go right ahead. Meanwhile, life is waiting to be lived right now.
- javabean22 9y ago
  Can your daughter go outside and play with her friends unsupervised? Does she have any friends?
  - IncRnd 9y ago
    That's rude. She has many friends and sees kids her age almost everyday. She's too young to be unsupervised. Let me ask you a question similar to what you just asked me, "Do you enjoy letting your family breathe the smog and pollution infested air that you live in? If they don't breathe the outside air, are they aware of the pollution and climate change that is killing the planet, caused by your car?" See how silly the kind of assumptions are that you made?
    - javabean22 9y ago
      I don't have a car.
      - bnjms 9y ago
        > See how silly the kind of assumptions are that you made?
dennyabraham 9y ago
The idealized suburb of this article sounds a lot more like extramunicipally extending the service range of a major city than it describes any real place. look to new york and chicago and where their home prices are raising fastest to know where folks are trying to move and what for.
perpetualcrayon 9y ago
Community planners should really think about how to "modularize" / "componentize" neighborhoods. What's valuable to the next generation may end up being despised by future generations. Also human civilization is only at the infancy of what technology will be capable of. Unfortunately capitalism as a concept causes buyers and sellers to only concern themselves with the immediate future. "Can I sell this to someone tomorrow?" A lot of industries can afford this short-sightedness, but there is only so much physical space (and orders of magnitude less that is livable) on the planet.
jtraffic 9y ago
Times nods to the fact that millennials are not as homogeneous as society thinks: > millennials, who, as it turns out, are not a monolithic generation Then, I feel they go right back to the attitude in a new context: > Yet millennial suburbanites want a new kind of landscape.
noetic_techy 9y ago
As a millenial who lives in an east coast HOA controlled suburb, the biggest thing about modern suburbs that bothers me, especially HOA controlled ones, is the need for useless grass and manicured shrubs that require constant upkeep for purely ascetic reasons. I would love to see more fruit trees and vegetable gardens. It brings a lot more joy and peace of mind.

97 points by tysone 9y ago

"Millennials want a different kind of suburban development that is smart, efficient and sustainable" Suburban or Sustainable, pick one.

pavel_lishin 9y ago
Why are they inherently incompatible?
- AstralStorm 9y ago
  Low density is more expensive in all ways. This affects sustainability.
  - rayiner 9y ago
    Suburbs aren’t necessarily low density, though they usually are. In places like New York, many “suburbs” are just small satellite cities well connected to the downtown core with rail.
    - amyjess 9y ago
      I don't know if NY suburbs are a great example, though. Things are much more spread out and loosey-goosey there than in younger cities. Here's Plano, TX, which was mostly developed in the '90s and the 21st century: https://i.imgur.com/TmIlgBh.jpg https://i.imgur.com/TmIlgBh.jpg Here's Westchester County, NY, developed much earlier than that and not nearly as dense: https://i.imgur.com/pSIettu.jpg https://i.imgur.com/pSIettu.jpg (I used Google Maps zoom level 14 for both screenshots)
      - CalRobert 9y ago
        Is Plano much denser? Or just more paved? Plano is a city of 71 sq miles and ~3800 people per square mile. Westchester is a _county_ of 500 square miles and 2300 people per square mile. In many regards, Westchester may be denser. It also looks like they haven't chopped down every last tree and laid waste to the land with asphalt.
      - pavel_lishin 9y ago
        Never been to Westchester, except on a train passing through, but I am intimately familiar with Plano. It's dense, but most of it is a poster child for shitty suburbs: if you don't have a car, you're fucked. (Take a bus, you say? What bus? When I was living around there, most of Plano wasn't served by buses.)
    - danans 9y ago
      Those are not the example of suburb that people are referring to when they discuss the sustainability issues. Usually they are referring to the much sparser developments of often large houses, built between the 1960s up to the early naughts. What you are describing are more like towns, which usually have more sustainable features (smaller houses and lots, ergo less pipes in the ground, a rail corridor connecting them to a major city) because they were built before the car era.
- ThrustVectoring 9y ago
  Infrastructure costs scale approximately linearly with road frontage. 1000 feet of road with associated water lines, power lines, street lights, etc, costs roughly the same whether it serves ten households or fifty. A sustainable development will necessarily have a high number of households per foot of road frontage. This will not have the suburban look and feel of single-family homes with yards. At best it's going to be medium-density townhomes and row-houses to eliminate wasting infrastructure on the space between houses.
  - majormajor 9y ago
    The future of the suburbs depends greatly on renewable, clean sources of energy. Reuse and recycling of resources is also important, but for things like power lines or water pipes, seems less so (more for things like those self-driving-electric-cars everyone's waiting for to give them suburbs + not having to drive in stop and go traffic). Of course, so does the future of the city, just in a denser package, so it has better per-capita figures in many ways - but is there a scenario where we can get enough of it to power cities but not cities + suburbs? That seems unlikely to me.
jimktrains2 9y ago
Suburbs don't have to be substantially less dense. Heck, I think there are neighborhoods in my nearest city (Pittsburgh) that are less dense than my town just outside of it. Mine was built before cars were a given and when the trolley was a given. There are "exurbs" which are just abominations of low density and bad design. There are some lower density suburbs, and yeah, neither of those are sustainable.

nextstep 9y ago

I'm a millennial. I don't want any kind of suburb. I refuse to live anywhere that isn't well-connected/dense enough to provide a good lifestyle completely car-free (i.e. all travel is quick, ubiquitous and convenient on foot/bike/public transportation). I do not ever wish to drive and this is not possible in any suburban development.

Armisael16 9y ago
No one ever said that all millennials want to live in the suburb, so...
pavel_lishin 9y ago
I feel the same way that you do, but I worry that the realities of the housing market are going to drive my family to some stupid suburb where I have to get a car and spend 30 minutes every morning screaming inside it.
- francisofascii 9y ago
  I suggest looking into 'inner' suburbs or pre WW2 housing built around a town. At least that allows you to walk to stores, schools, and usually closer to a city. The trade-off is an older house and possibly a higher cost.
jedberg 9y ago
Out of curiosity, do you have kids? It's mighty convenient to have a car with all the stuff in it and plenty of space to park that car nearby, and also lots of space for the kids to play outside.
- MBlume 9y ago
  I have an 11-month-old and any given time I put him in a carseat it's 50-50 whether he'll holler until we get there. I take BART now even more than I used to.
- alistairSH 9y ago

marcoperaza 9y ago

>Yet millennial suburbanites want a new kind of landscape. They want breathing room but disdain the energy wastefulness, visual monotony and social conformity of postwar manufactured neighborhoods. That's a hell of a claim, and no evidence whatsoever is provided for it. Could it be that the New York Times writers are projecting their slavish political devotion onto the rest of us? Once we're all married with school-age kids, we will choose to move out to the plain, boring suburbs just like the generations before us. You might keep wasting your time with composting, but almost nobody is going to let "sustainability" actually detract from their quality of life. The only reason why people in other countries don't make that same choice is that they're not really allowed to, because of development laws, high fuel taxes, and so forth.

ch4s3 9y ago
Another way to put it would be that roads, sewers, and mortgages aren't heavily subsidized in other places.
- taway_1212 9y ago
  Also, it costs more to build and maintain a house (compared to a flat), and most of the other countries, even the developed ones, aren't as affluent as the US.
  - ch4s3 9y ago
    That's true, but you still find higher rates of urban living in similarly rich countries with lower subsidies on sprawl.
  - fuzzybeard 9y ago
    But after 15 years my house is paid off. With renting, you're paying for the rest of your life. After my mortgage I only pay taxes and upkeep which is a fraction as much.
    - gozur88 9y ago

sealthedeal 9y ago

I was thinking the exact opposite of this. I thought millennials were not into subs.

cpursley 9y ago

This trend must be a price over preference issue. The desirable cities in the US are just so damn expensive to live in town. If you want to buy, it's either the 'burbs, or most of your income going to rent/buy in the city. Of course, if you really do the math, even beyond being unsustainable from an economic and infrastructure/governance standpoint, on a personal level, owning and maintaining a house in the suburbs has many hidden costs.

ashark 9y ago
It's that plus the schools, at least in this city. If we lived in the city, it'd take ~2-2.5x as much money to buy a house with one fewer bedrooms than our current 'burbs house has (two of our kids could have bunk-beds I guess) and probably 500-100sqft smaller overall and in kinda so-so shape, and that's outside the heart of the city and not in a ritzy neighborhood (but also not a slum). Then we'd also have to hope our kids got into one of a couple good waiting-listed charter schools, or else pay another $2-3K/month for private school. We couldn't afford that at all, and even if they got into the charter schools we'd be living like paupers thanks to the much-higher mortgage (or rent). So, lifeless, boring 'burbs full of seemingly-intentionally-ugly houses it is.
majormajor 9y ago
Is it that hard to believe, especially with other articles[0] discussing how much millenials love pets even before having kids, that there's a significant number of people who prefer yards and quiet and peace and all those other suburban perks over living in dense environments? I don't deny that a lot of people prefer living in the city, but it's not only price that can make people choose the alternative. (But due to the nature of density and surface area, you'd have to seriously large majority prefering the suburbs to really drive the city prices down.) There's also a definitions thing hiding in here: much of San Fransisco is pretty damn suburban, with houses, one or two story buildings, etc. Still expensive as hell, though. And then look at all the towns on the peninsula. I'd argue that the affordability differences are regional much more than urban/suburban driven. Worth also looking at the costs within those regions of city vs certain suburbs, like SF vs Palo Alto, or LA vs Santa Monica. [0] such as https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2016/09/13/millennials-are-picking-pets-over-people/?utm_term=.6509c339a5d6 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2016/09/13/m... http://www.marketwatch.com/story/do-pets-have-the-potential-to-unleash-millennials-on-housing-market-2017-08-02 http://www.marketwatch.com/story/do-pets-have-the-potential-...

notahacker 9y ago

it wasn't until I noticed the animated clouds in the background that I was sure the image of the "future" suburb with houses that weren't shaped like regular houses and the staggering innovation of roads that are curved hadn't been drawn at some time in the, say, 1930s. On closer inspection, there is a difference in vision, but they might want to reconsider the sustainability implications of the bird that disappears and is replaced by a drone...

logfromblammo 9y ago
This article sounds a whole lot like every "housing of the future" ever written--except the flying cars have been split into robot cars for people and flying delivery drones for everything else. And none of the authors ever seem to indicate any understanding of why the suburban housing development exist in its current form before hand-waving away all those real factors and baking up some pie-in-the-sky nonsense to support whatever their vision of the future may be. We already know what a sustainable, efficient suburb looks like. It's a city block. But if people who live in suburbs actually wanted that, we'd have more urbs and fewer suburbs.

pascalxus 9y ago

Its fun to dream about the future. But, a dream is all it'll ever be. how does anyone expect to build this stuff, when we can't even build regular housing, anywhere near the amount that is required to match demand. The only way, I can see this being built, is if new cities are created. These cities need to be populated by employers first: once that's there, most people that works there will find housing there too. I wish these articles would stop pretending like everyone has a plethora of housing choices available - talking about what millenials "want" ~ our so called housing preferences. Our housing preference, first and foremost is to have a roof over our head without it costing more than 60% of our paycheck. People go where the jobs go, there's no choice - this will always be the case as long as people need money, at least until remote work becomes possible

majormajor 9y ago
> how does anyone expect to build this stuff, when we can't even build regular housing, anywhere near the amount that is required to match demand. You can't in SF, NY, LA... other areas don't have this problem. If your biggest desire is to have your housing not cost more than 60% of your paycheck, move to the suburbs of somewhere like Dallas. You'll be shocked at how many millennials can afford to have nice apartments or even buy homes without spending close to that, percentage-wise. Sure, they're doing it on a later schedule than the baby boomers, but in a lot of places that's a separate discussion of higher education requirements, student loan situations, etc, not terribly inflated housing costs. But long-term-wealth-wise it might be better to land a top-tier job in an expensive city making $100K more a year in some combo of cash and equity and plowing that back into some of that expensive housing. Bit of a gamble, though. But if you aren't making more than (rough first guess, I feel on the too-low side with what I'm seeing rent-wise these days) $120K early in your career in one of the super-expensive cities, or have a clear path to well eclipsing that, you'd probably be much more comfortable making $70-100K in one of the cheaper, more southern, booming-yet-still-building-housing regions.
- derekp7 9y ago
  Chicago area is similar -- you can easily get a tech job (lots of trading houses here) making 6 figures (or close to it), and get a house in the suburbs (about 50 minute train ride away) for less than 200K, or often times around 100k if you get one that is less than pristine (and these are good investments too, if you can do handyman work yourself).

RickS 9y ago

> They want breathing room but disdain the energy wastefulness, visual monotony and social conformity of postwar manufactured neighborhoods. then a few sentences later > Existing suburbs were developed to maximize house and lot sizes, There is an important piece of info they brushed right past: Existing suburbs were developed to maximize house and lot sizes within a single development, but optimize for that development to be as tightly clustered as possible. This is obvious if you travel through the outskirts of a major metro area. Loudon VA years ago (DC) or Gig Harbor (Seattle). There will be a bunch of nothing for 20 miles, then 40 houses with about 20 feet between each of them, and then a bunch of nothing. I think it's lazy and shortsighted of NYT to write this off as disdain for "visual monotony and social conformity". It's about peace and quiet. The next generation of suburbs needs to be optimized for a bunch of tired sacks aching for reprieve from a world that seems to always be poking at them for something. That means not being elbow to elbow with your neighbors and their shitty, shitty kids.

pstuart 9y ago
> and their shitty, shitty music blaring out FTFY edit: downvoted and flagged? My response was somewhat tongue in cheek but germane to the conversation: amplified music wasn't an issue when these suburbs initially came to be, but it is definitely a public space issue today.

kps 9y ago

“The use of drones will reduce the need for many car errands — and their emissions” Apparently the suburb of the future will be powered by magical fairy dust.

kalleboo 9y ago
You mean solar?

gnarbarian 9y ago

Eh, no thanks. I'll continue to live in the woods in Alaska.

chrismealy 9y ago

The future belongs to bikes. With safe and smooth infrastructure it's the most efficient and healthiest way to get around. It's not a coincidence that Dutch kids are the happiest in the world.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

elihu 9y ago

The article seemed like kind of a fluff piece reminiscent of the articles people used to write about flying cars, robot maids, videophones, etc.., but for anyone who's interested in this kind of thing, I'd recommend A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander. It was written 40 years ago, but the ideas are still relevant, I think.

burntsushi 9y ago

I'm a millennial, and it made me sick to read this. It made me glad that I live where I live. I don't live in the suburbs in spite of having my own discrete unit; I live in the suburbs precisely because I have my own discrete unit. I want my own backyard so that I can go and enjoy sitting by a fire with music I like without ever needing to worry that I might have to compete with others on a cool Friday night in Autumn. I want my own driveway so that I can go play basketball whenever I feel like, without needing to feel pressured to play nice with others. I want my own car so that I can drive to and from work in peace, and so that I can do whatever I want in my car, like smoke a cigar. What's the likelihood that my friendly neighborhood ride sharing service will let me do that? Zero. My car is just about the only place left I can smoke in Massachusetts when I'm not at home, and I'm happy to pay for that privilege. Even if I were OK with all of that, there are numerous dubious claims made in this article about how this new style of living would benefit the environment and would presumably save people from flooding. Really? Would it? How did you figure that? Or does it just sound like it makes sense? Many signs point to me being stranger than my generational cohorts, but I like the suburbs precisely because I viscerally dislike living in shared spaces.

ant6n 9y ago
Free health advice: smoking kills.
eastWestMath 9y ago
So basically you like to live in the suburbs for antisocial reasons, and you your argument against the research showing suburbs are an ecological disaster boils down to "nuh-uh".
- amigoingtodie 9y ago
  Not that I agree completely with the original comment, but I, too, feel like when visiting a 'city', I am competing for resources. I do not enjoy this adversarial feeling.
  - eastWestMath 9y ago

IncRnd 9y ago

I'd rather live on my 20 acres with propane power and the batteries powered by the sun. I like that we dug a pump well for fresh water. I like that I can go outside with my daughter and watch wildlife walk by. I don't need to get a streaming service that puts an image of wild things on a 40" screen. My daughter is going to have memories for a lifetime of her and dad naming the pretty cougars and foxes that walked in her backyard. She'll always remember and be able to come back to her own woods with trails and chirping, the stream by the house, and her very own lake Elizabeth with little jumping fishies. I already get things delivered to my door same day from Amazon, so I don't need drop off locations at town central, where I would need to get my packages. But, I can go into town, whenever I want. It's not far. If people want to keep building ever more expensive housing that is constantly more and more interdependent with other systems and people, then go right ahead. Meanwhile, life is waiting to be lived right now.

javabean22 9y ago
Can your daughter go outside and play with her friends unsupervised? Does she have any friends?
- IncRnd 9y ago
  That's rude. She has many friends and sees kids her age almost everyday. She's too young to be unsupervised. Let me ask you a question similar to what you just asked me, "Do you enjoy letting your family breathe the smog and pollution infested air that you live in? If they don't breathe the outside air, are they aware of the pollution and climate change that is killing the planet, caused by your car?" See how silly the kind of assumptions are that you made?
  - javabean22 9y ago
    I don't have a car.
    - bnjms 9y ago
      > See how silly the kind of assumptions are that you made?

dennyabraham 9y ago

The idealized suburb of this article sounds a lot more like extramunicipally extending the service range of a major city than it describes any real place. look to new york and chicago and where their home prices are raising fastest to know where folks are trying to move and what for.

perpetualcrayon 9y ago

Community planners should really think about how to "modularize" / "componentize" neighborhoods. What's valuable to the next generation may end up being despised by future generations. Also human civilization is only at the infancy of what technology will be capable of. Unfortunately capitalism as a concept causes buyers and sellers to only concern themselves with the immediate future. "Can I sell this to someone tomorrow?" A lot of industries can afford this short-sightedness, but there is only so much physical space (and orders of magnitude less that is livable) on the planet.

jtraffic 9y ago

Times nods to the fact that millennials are not as homogeneous as society thinks: > millennials, who, as it turns out, are not a monolithic generation Then, I feel they go right back to the attitude in a new context: > Yet millennial suburbanites want a new kind of landscape.

noetic_techy 9y ago

As a millenial who lives in an east coast HOA controlled suburb, the biggest thing about modern suburbs that bothers me, especially HOA controlled ones, is the need for useless grass and manicured shrubs that require constant upkeep for purely ascetic reasons. I would love to see more fruit trees and vegetable gardens. It brings a lot more joy and peace of mind.