Archinect - News

On the potential 'second draft' of the American suburbs

2022-07-28T13:29:00-04:00

It could look like another round of flight from the city. Or what we may be witnessing is a “second draft” of the American suburbs. Many communities that were once white, exclusionary, and car-dependent are today diverse and evolving places, still distinct from the big city but just as distinct from their own “first draft” more than a half-century ago.

The American suburbs are continuing to diversify and gain millennials and increased numbers of immigrants, two groups that have traditionally been confined to cities. More mixed-use and affordable developments are being delivered in suburban areas where single-family constructions have long dominated. Considerations for car-free and walkable communities are also becoming more popular in planning circles, joined by taller buildings, improved restaurant culture, and nightclubs. As Addison Del Mastro noted in the Vox piece, “the makings of a suburban transformation are here.”

Indeed. Home builders are currently attempting to meet a perplexing demand challenge by going smaller and cheaper, leading to a 7% decrease in single-family starts in June. ADUs are also starting to present themselves as affordable solutions, along with more newfashioned inventions like co-living that, in combination, are making the never-ending horizontal sprawl of the suburbs much denser. In the words of one eco...

Revenge of the Suburbs?

2020-06-22T12:46:00-04:00

American homes are extravagant, having swelled from about 1,500 square feet on average in 1973 to more than 2,400 in 2018. After the pandemic, memory of the novel utility of all that space could justify even more of it. Some companies have already declared their intention to let workers telecommute forever, and real-estate analysts anticipate more companies eliminating or curtailing expensive commercial leases to save money.

The new article from The Atlantic expands on the premise, "Suburbia was never as bad as anyone said it was. Now it’s looking even better."
The incoming changes to built environment due to COVID-19 pandemic, might well be viewed as going back to suburban communities and escape from the density of packed urban environments, the author argues.

As many companies want to keep "working from home" policies extended, city folks might benefit from lesser traffic and lower property values and rents, as this reporter observes.

"Sue The Suburbs" group puts apartment-denying Los Altos, California on notice

2019-08-15T09:00:00-04:00

The four-person California Renters Legal Advocacy and Education Fund, or CaRLA, has one reason for being — to sue cities that reject housing projects without a valid reason. The litigious nonprofit with YIMBY roots struck again last month, suing Los Altos after the city rejected a developer’s bid to streamline a project of 15 apartments plus ground-floor office space.

CaRLA continues its aggressive efforts to get San Francisco Bay Area cities to stop denying by-right housing developments.

“Something, by hook or by crook, has to make these cities actually build housing,” Sonja Trauss, co-executive director of CaRLA, told The Mercury News.

Renzo Piano's new Bay Area mall creates modern public space for the suburbs

2018-12-12T09:20:00-05:00

He designed the Shard in London and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, but for his latest project, Italian architect Renzo Piano has taken his impressive legacy to the unsuspecting city of San Ramon in order to build a suburban shopping center.

Completed for a reported cost of $300 million, City Center Bishop Ranch is located in a Bay Area suburb, about a 45 minute drive from San Francisco. Retail spaces have begun opening their doors, and one can expect to find mall staples like Pottery Barn and Williams Sonoma coexisting alongside Bay Area favorites such as the Slanted Door—the famed San Francisco Vietnamese restaurant—and local brewery Fieldwork Brewing Co.

As the latest champion of a new kind of mall culture, the creators conceived of Bishop Ranch, not just as a luxury shopping complex, but as a downtown area and modern public space for the suburbs. "We're trying to avoid the traditional sort of shopping center model and create a place that feels a little bit more endear...

Comic-strip ads created as marketing to entice millennials to move to a Chicago suburb

2018-04-10T13:51:00-04:00

Welcome to Homewood, Illinois, a suburb of 20,000 that is marketing itself to urbanites as a hidden hipster gem. The town, which is about 25 miles south of downtown Chicago, just launched a new advertising campaign called “Think Homewood.” Ads posted inside trains on the L’s Blue Line and elsewhere in Chicago contrast the laid-back vibe of Homewood to the stress of city living. The ads are comic strips drawn by illustrator and Homewood resident Marc Alan Fishman.

The Chicago suburb Homewood harnessed the graphic skills of a local artist to launch their comic-strip ad campaign, Think Homewood, in order to attract millennials. Joining the list of suburban towns that must now work to attract the demographic they were originally intended for, Homewood strives to market itself as a diverse neighborhood for young families.

Homewood ad campaign by artist Marc Alan Fishman.

Think Homewood addresses the inconveniences of city life, especially for those with kids, and promises a stress free alternative. The campaign plays off millennial tropes including love of avocados, children named "zen", and brunching at farm-to-table cafes.

Homewood ad campaign by artist Marc Alan Fishman.

America is building more for cars than people

2017-09-18T19:10:00-04:00

It’s hard to escape the irony that the U.S., which will need something like 43 million new housing units to keep up with population growth in the next 35 years, is using space to build apartment-size garages, even as trends in ride-sharing and self-driving cars cast a measure of uncertainty on American car culture.

Despite housing shortages and rent increases, 24% of the new homes completed in 2015 in the US included a garage for 3 or more vehicles. Since 1992, when the census started tracking this, more 3-car garages than 1-bedroom apartments have been built. With the ever-increasing need for housing, and uncertain future of car ownership, these large garages could be transformed into living or working spaces.

Richard Florida on the fragility of the Urban Revival

2017-09-06T15:26:00-04:00

For all the concern about the gentrification, rising housing prices and the growing gap between the rich and poor in our leading cities, an even bigger threat lies on the horizon: The urban revival that swept across America over the past decade or two may be in danger. As it turns out, the much-ballyhooed new age of the city might be giving way to a great urban stall-out.

Richard Florida paints a gloomy picture of the state of the great American urban revival in his NYT op-ed, "The Urban Revival Is Over," citing gentrification, income disparity, rising crime numbers, unaffordable housing prices, and the anti-urban agenda of the current White House tenants.

Joe Cortright, over at City Observatory, offers a good analysis of Florida's piece; breaking down numbers, highlighting statistics, weighing in on the crime numbers claim, and easing the general dystopian mood: "Rather than proclaiming the end of the urban revival, Florida’s evidence really makes the case for a renewed national commitment to building more great urban neighborhoods."

'The New Urban Crisis' as Richard Florida's mea culpa

2017-08-21T14:45:00-04:00

After fifteen years of development plans tailored to the creative classes, Florida surveys an urban landscape in ruins. The story of London is the story of Austin, the Bay Area, Chicago, New York, Toronto, and Sydney. When the rich, the young, and the (mostly) white rediscovered the city, they created rampant property speculation, soaring home prices, and mass displacement. The “creative class” were just the rich all along, or at least the college-educated children of the rich.

Richard Frorida's latest book, The New Urban Crisis, represents the culmination of this long mea culpa. Though he stops just short of saying it, he all but admits that he was wrong. He argues that the creative classes have grabbed hold of many of the world’s great cities and choked them to death. As a result, the fifty largest metropolitan areas house just 7 percent of the world’s population but generate 40 percent of its growth. These “superstar” cities are becoming gated communities, their vibrancy replaced with deracinated streets full of Airbnbs and empty summer homes. Meanwhile, drug addiction and gang violence have spread to the suburbs. “Much more than a crisis of cities,” he writes, “the New Urban Crisis is the central crisis of our time” — “a crisis of the suburbs, of urbanization itself and of contemporary capitalism writ large.”

The author offers both—specific solutions like more affordable housing, more investment in infrastructure, and higher pay for service jobs—and va...

Los Angeles' urban core is full (unlike most other major U.S. cities)

2016-08-25T13:39:00-04:00

This isn't your grandfather's urbanization: population figures in major U.S. cities, which on the whole are on the uptick after declining in the 1960s, are adding residents not to their already built urban cores but rather in the form greenfield sprawl, which makes use of farmland and lightly developed suburban housing tracts. The big exception? Los Angeles, whose urban core Slate pronounces full. Here's more detail from the piece:

A new and illuminating analysis by Yonah Freemark, a project manager at Chicago’s Metropolitan Planning Council and the author of the Transport Politic blog—well worth reading in full—reveals some important trends in the past half-century of city-building...

“The average of the 100 largest cities grew by 48 percent overall,” Freemark notes. “Yet the average city also lost 28 percent of its residents within its neighborhoods that were built up in 1960.” That’s not just true in Youngstown and Detroit, post-industrial Rust Belt cities that have struggled with...

Half the world lives in cities – or not

2016-06-09T17:48:00-04:00

Last month, the journal Science published a special issue examining the challenges and opportunities of an urbanizing world. Titled “Urban Planet” and featuring an image of clouds wafting across skyscrapers in Dubai, the issue opened with an eye-catching statistic: “More than half of the world’s people now live in cities.” Of course, that number would be even more impressive if it were actually true.

According to the article, the statistic that half the world's population lives in cities is misleading. Many of these people live in towns and small urban enclaves, not the bustling metropolises conjured by the stat.

The author argues that such thinking makes one overlook sprawling fringe areas, which face challenges that require as much attention as a bustling city.

In related news:

Flashback: Floyd McKissick's unfinished “Soul City” suburb in NC

2016-05-13T13:13:00-04:00

There would be homes and industry surrounded by trees, hills and lakes. Above all, there would be no prejudice, poverty or slums, according to a Soul City brochure...Despite its name, Soul City was never intended to be an all-black town, but rather, a multi-racial community built and managed by black people. [But] Portions of the area resemble a ghost town, rotting – or perhaps waiting. Could Soul City ever be resurrected?

Read up on the rise and halt of Soul City, a suburb that attorney and civil rights activist Floyd McKissick envisioned for North Carolina's Warren County in the late 1960s-70s.

A guide for New Yorkers exploring the "Suburban Jungle"

2016-03-25T12:55:00-04:00

Some New York City real estate agents have teamed up with their counterparts outside the five boroughs for organized seminars and “immersive tours” of the suburbs. The city agents get a cut of the commission if their clients decide to buy a house in the suburbs. The services, which reside somewhere between shrink session and sales pitch, intend to address the concerns of families unsure about leaving the city and guide them to suburbia, step by step.

Related news from the 'burbs on Archinect:

Where journalism neglects, public space suffers

2016-03-09T15:42:00-05:00

“Shady,” “unethical,” “secretive,” “robbed of our due process” — these were just a few of the choice terms used by angry residents this past week at a packed City Council meeting about the selling of Pine Tree Park [in Kent, outside of Seattle, WA]. Longtime Seattle land-use attorney Rick Aramburu has another term for what happened: illegal. It’s also a growing trend in the swath of cities around Seattle, places that no longer receive much scrutiny from the press. “It’s becoming a cancer"

More on recent (legal) park development:

The strength of Chinese suburbia

2016-01-22T17:38:00-05:00

As of the 2010 census, the vast majority of Shanghai’s population lived in suburban areas. Between 2000 and 2010, suburban areas grew by 50 percent or more, compared to the city’s central districts, which grew slower or in some cases even shrank [...] The villagers who join the urban economy, then, don’t go downtown, but to the settlements that dot the fringes of the city. The industries that really help China to grow are here, too

More related news:

How one urban planner is helping revamp a Miami suburb "without gentrification"

2015-11-10T20:20:00-05:00

Germane Barnes wants Opa-Locka to be known for something else...He knows [change] can happen because he lives there, and has seen the work of a group of artists and organizers slowly change the landscape...The city's history intrigued him, not merely because it seemed like a perfect case study for his thesis about revitalizing a community without gentrification, but because it also spoke to his own experiences.

Welcome to Evanston, Illinois: the carless suburbia

2015-10-23T16:27:00-04:00

What if a suburban downtown became a place where pedestrians ruled and cars were actively discouraged? As it turns out, what looks like normal urban gentrification actually marks the success of one of the most revolutionary suburbs in America. And its approach to development is fast becoming a model across the region—a model even embraced by [Evanston's] urban neighbor to the south, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel.

In Chicago, forming economically integrated suburbs is more complex than it looks

2015-07-20T15:37:00-04:00

Housing advocates have long debated the merits of moving low-income families from high-poverty urban areas to suburbs like Glenview. The move can be challenging for families, who leave behind family and friends and enter a new, affluent world. But the research is increasingly conclusive: Living in a 'good' zip code dramatically improves kids’ chances of going to college, getting a good job, and escaping poverty.

New Urbanism takes over Chicago’s suburbs

2015-07-07T17:20:00-04:00

But thanks to increased interest from buyers and less resistance from village governments, developers are constructing more new-urbanism-style homes in the burbs. “Millennials and boomers are demanding it,” explains Drew Williams-Clark, principal planner at the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning.

Renzo Piano: the future of European architecture lies in the suburbs

2015-03-13T20:48:00-04:00

In the 1960s and '70s, like many of his contemporaries, Piano was involved in the battle to revive forlorn and decaying historic centers of cities. Now he's fighting to save their often desolate outskirts. Unlike the suburbs of U.S. cities, which are often well off, the suburbs of many European cities tend to be the poorest parts of the metropolitan area. [...] Piano believes "the suburbs are the place where energy is in the city — in the good, in the bad."

From an urban planning/demographics/housing junkie

2015-02-16T10:32:00-05:00

Increasingly, in the US at least, central cities are all becoming more or less the same...Meanwhile, the suburbs are becoming more diverse. Not just in terms of ethnicity as growing numbers of blacks, Asians, and Hispanics pour into the suburbs from central cities and abroad. But also in terms of winners and losers

Last year following visits to Chattanooga, Knoxville, Lexington, Cincinnati, Columbus, csen proposed four basic city/neighborhood archetypes for thinking about a non-dystopic 2030. He also wrote about Central City Homogenization and Suburban Diversification and argued for why The Sun Belt Economic Model is Amazon-omics. More recently, he asked When Will We Build Internet Cities the Way We Built Railroad/Steel Cities?

NIMBYs go to court over "modern" home; Zaha gets an apology; global warming rages on: News Round-Up for August 25, 2014

2014-09-02T20:07:00-04:00

Friday, August 29:

MIT's MindRider helmet draws mental maps as you bike: The prototype is currently being used to create a mental-map and guidebook for NYC, and an upcoming Kickstarter campaign will attempt to fund the project for commercial sale.
In Beirut, a grassroots push for more grass: Lebanon's fifteen-year civil war made much of Beirut's green space inaccessible or dysfunctional. The Beirut Green Project is trying to bring at least a modicum of green space back to the city's residents.

Thursday, August 28:

Norwegian artists plan to open art academy in North Korea: Nothing's final yet, but the school is committed to its disbelief in sanctions or boycotts on art.
Alvar Aalto gets a close look from Google's Cultural Institute: Google's cameras go inside the famous Finnish architects studio, as well as a selection of his works, for a curated photo-exhibition.

Wednesday, August 27:

China considering drastic ban on coal: Chinese news outlets claim that work is underway to ban coal in Bei...

Paris and its Suburbs Will Join to Become the Métropole du Grand Paris

2014-08-27T16:13:00-04:00

France has embarked on an ambitious plan to remake Paris -- and, in the process, solve its suburbs problem. On Jan. 1, 2016, Paris, along with Clichy and more than 120 of its closest suburbs, will be enfolded into the Métropole du Grand Paris, an ambitious but still ill-defined project to create a sort of uber-city -- an overarching metropolitan government for the greater Paris area, encompassing around 7 million inhabitants and over 270 square miles.

This ambitious project will be the first of its kind in the world, one that planners hope can become a model for other cities. The Parisian suburbs – or banlieues – are notoriously underprivileged. Generally, Paris and its environs are markedly economically segregated: the central city is basically unaffordable to all but the very rich. Meanwhile, the suburbs – such as Clichy-sous-Bois (Clichy, for short) – tend to lack cafes, markets, train stations, and other trappings of vibrant urban life. A few years ago, Clichy and other poor suburbs gained notoriety after violent riots broke out.

By enfolding the suburbs and the central city into one giant Métropole, Parisian officials hope to mitigate the dire conditions of the former. With a shared tax base, the suburbs would get much need revenue for infrastructure and other urban projects. Moreover, the plan would hopefully reduce the notorious mess of the current bureaucracy.

More importantly, the Métropole would work in opposition to many...