Building a New Suburbia

A new suburbia is about a family sitting in their garden, surrounded by good comfortable things and looking at the home they own. As the sun shines, that family knows that the efforts were worth it.

These are a couple of articles I wrote back in 2022 about the need for a new suburbia. We hear a lot about the housing crisis but too many of the answers presented by YIMBY experts are based purely on the maximum number of units occupying the smallest amount of land. I beleive this to be socially damaging exacerbating, even causing, the declines in fertility rates across the developed world.

New Suburbia: 1. What is a suburb?

There are, it seems, two sides to the housing debate – NIMBYs and YIMBYs. Yet these groups agree on one thing – that the answer to the housing crisis is to cram more and more people into our existing urban footprint. NIMBYs do this because otherwise, in the words of Levelling Up Minister and Tory MP, Neil O’Brien "...it means building right next to people. And specifically, to people who chose to live on the edge to get a nice view." YIMBYs do it because they see dense, busy cities as a wonder, “humankind’s greatest invention” to quote Ben Wilson.

The thing that YIMBYs and NIMBYs agree on is that suburbs are naff. For sure most don’t use that precise word. But between the wealthy inhabitants of places like the Cotswolds and the similarly wealthy inhabitants of posh inner London (often the same people of course) there is an accord that suburbia is boring, filled with dull people doing dull things and raising dull children who will go on to be similarly dull. Suzannah Lezzard, in an essay entitled “Why Do We Hate the Suburbs?” described this outlook:

“Off they went, the two of them, both with their beautiful old houses and even more soulful gardens, on the emptiness of the suburban dream. All about what a crime the destruction of the countryside was, and not one word about what those houses, those small plots of land, might mean to those who owned them, let alone the fairness of distributing a little to many rather than sticking with a lot for a few.”

Meanwhile in the big city people like “celebrated urbanist and Fairfax architecture critic Elizabeth Farrelly” have no doubt that suburbia is not only dullsville but a dullsville which is destroying the planet:

“The suburbs are about boredom, and obviously some people like being bored and plain and predictable, I'm happy for them … even if their suburbs are destroying the world.”

The thing is that, despite a hundred years and more of urbanists and cultural critics sneering at suburbia, people still flock to live in those dull and boring suburbs. People still tell pollsters that they prefer a proper family home over a flat. Suburbia is popular. People want to live in suburbs. Or at least it seems that way. To appreciate why this is so, we need to get away from the pleasant city life of the wealthy and look instead at the unpleasant urban life of the poor.

“Suburbia in England is more than just a functional concept: it was about an escape from the squalor of the Victorian city, about well-being, aspiration, decent, plentiful and affordable housing, and the freedom of good transport, initially rail (Metroland etc), then also the car.”

This, from urban policy writer, Tom Bridges takes us away from the usual characterisation of suburbia as a sort of social dead end and towards an appreciation that living in a suburb is aspirational for someone brought up in a cramped, crowded inner city tenement. For all that we are much richer than in the Victorian slums people got on a train to escape, the life of an immigrant family in an East London council flat is still made better when that family might aspire to escape to a three or four bed house in one of those reviled suburbs.

What do we mean by a suburb? My generation in Britain have our suburban image set by popular culture. We watched Reggie Perrin walk to the station reciting the names of the streets. We laughed along with Tom and Barbara Good. We saw in ourselves a little bit of Mrs Bucket’s snobbishness and revelled in the lives of Brookside residents. Of course, most of us were growing up in these places, we were laughing at ourselves just as The Simpsons, Rosanne and The Fresh Prince allowed Americans to laugh at their suburban lives. Suburbia became a mindset, a set of values rather than just a location sort of adjacent to a big city.

Suburbia became something other than its inception as an extension of the city. A commuter village like Cullingworth where I now live is just as much a suburb as Shirley where I grew up, a land of semi-detached houses squeezed between Croydon and Beckenham. Most people’s aspirations are realistic, we’d like a huge house in Oxfordshire or a beachside villa in Southern California, but our real aspirations are for a decent family home in a good neighbourhood where we can live that boring life the urbanists peer at down their noses.

Suburban aspiration is a compromise between the pokey bedsit with a good view of a brick wall and that stately home. Quite how far along that path we travel is down to our own fortune and effort but for most people the place we finish is in a suburb, somewhere that isn’t the city. A compromise between the city’s bright lights and the comforting peace of the countryside. Suburbia, however, is more than this, it isn’t a mere compromise but a physical manifestation of our values and a reflection of what matters most to us.

City boosters always point to amenities as proof of how inner urban density is best: more restaurants, more museums, more fancy shopping, more “culture.” Yet we don’t spend our actual lives flitting from restaurant to museum to art gallery, we spend most of our lives working and at home. There may be a few people for whom that bewildering amenity is a daily blessing, but most people don’t have the time, money, or inclination to live such a life. When people in cities do go out, it is to the same narrow selection of places because these are the places we like, where we meet our friends, and where we are comfortable. Suburbia offers all of this and more – you have those places and amenities plus a healthier space, safer streets, less pollution, and better schools.

Most people’s values are distinctly conservative, and suburbia reflects this because people built such places in the teeth of opposition from radicals, liberals, and reactionaries. The sort of people who think we will live happily in tiny flats if those flats are in stylish mock-Georgian terraces do not share the values that make suburbia work. Worse these slightly fogeyish advocates of the city want to destroy the suburbia of family homes and gardens tand replace it with communal living, manicured boulevards and tightly regulated public gardens. Oh and trees, lots of slowly dying trees.

This is not people’s preference even when such environments are designed by award-winning architects and built from traditional materials. When we ask them (and, history shows, when they have the opportunity) people opt for suburb over city: in repeated surveys for the US Association of Realtors over two-thirds of respondents say their preference is for what us Brits would call a detached house and, in the most recent survey, we can see the basis for a good suburb:

“Ideally, most Americans would like to live in walkable communities where shops, restaurants, and local businesses are within an easy stroll from their homes and their jobs are a short commute away; as long as those communities can also provide privacy from neighbors and detached, single-family homes. If this ideal is not possible, most prioritize shorter commutes and single-family homes above other considerations.”

Things aren’t so very different in Britain. We are less attached to the idea of a detached home, but the main findings of these American surveys apply. It is still true that “an Englishman’s home is his castle” and the balance between community and privacy is a critical function of the suburb. We want good schools, parks, trails and social activities but we don’t want to compromise on the space where will spend most time – our home.

New Suburbia 2: cities or families?

With the announcement of initial figures from the 2021 census there has been a little flurry of stories about housing policy plus, for perhaps the first time in decades, the national media has noticed that we stopped having quite so many babies.

The population of England and Wales aged 65 and over has finally surpassed the number of children aged under 15, according to the first results of the 2021 census, which provided a snapshot of an increasingly crowded island nation.

As a 20% surge in the number of people aged 65 and over in the past decade drove the population of England and Wales to a historic high of 59,597,300, the Office for National Statistics recorded 11.1 million people aged 65 and over compared with 10.4 million people aged under 15, tipping a balance that has favoured the young for decades.

Cue a little policy panic as people start asking whether this is a problem, why there are so many of us sixty-somethings, and how come we have so few children? Some commentary is dull and short-term – are there too many school places, what does this mean for the NHS and other technocratic questions. Among this there are, however, some people asking about this:

The number of infants aged four and under was one of the few categories where the population fell but the over-90 population broke through the half a million mark, rising to 527,900 people.

Not so much that, even with a pandemic, our over-90 population continues to grow (this is a good thing by the way) but how come we’ve so few pre-school kids. The first comments on this inevitably point to the obvious and proximate cause of low fertility rates – the cost of having a child. Most commonly people frame this cost in terms of how expensive it is to buy childcare. We’re told, for example, that Germany has lower childcare costs than the UK (it doesn’t, it just has a bigger state subsidy) but this observation is almost always made in the context of how the cost of childcare acts as a barrier to women returning to work. As a result, we ask what is best for the mother’s economic circumstances rather than what is best for the child.

But there’s little evidence that lower childcare costs result in higher fertility rates. The UK has a higher fertility rate than Germany (1.74 compared to 1.61) yet, as we have noted, German childcare costs are (to the parent) close to zero whereas UK rates are among the highest in the world. So, if we want a policy that leads to higher fertility rates, state-subsidised childcare isn’t the solution because its sole purpose is to get the woman back into the workforce in the shortest possible time.

Given this finding, people start looking for other factors that lead to lower fertility – levels of female education and especially higher education, delayed start to family formation, and the status of women within the economy (if not within wider society). And all these things would feature in a full analysis of declining fertility and its relationship to society being more socially liberal and more economically successful. But, as Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson wrote in “Empty Planet”, the biggest reason for fertility decline is urbanisation. The best way to get reductions in fertility is to increase the numbers living in dense urban environments.

We have urbanised for the obvious and sensible reason that cities are, in proximate terms, very good for the economy. Even if you don’t accept the certainties urbanists apply to agglomeration theory, there’s no doubt that cities drive a great deal of the international economy. The problem is that, as I wrote a while ago, cities are also mankind’s dead end:

And who would - without necessity or accident - have children in a high-rise environment featuring fug-filled air that causes asthma, streets filled with rushing vehicles, public spaces designed for adults, and places dominated by strangers. In San Francisco and Berkeley over 70% of households are childless. And we're supposed to see dense urban living as a better model than the sprawl or the suburbs, the comfort of the small town or the community of the village?

The problem isn't just that the rural and small-town West has rebelled against the city but that the city is a failing model - at least the idea of the concentrated, centralised, mayor-led city. These things are parasites, sucking away all the good from small towns with the promise of riches, opportunities and better bars while giving little back when it comes to the long-term quality of our lives. Urbanists talk about 'liveability' and 'walkability', about public spaces, even about play - yet the reality of the city is selfish, focused on the here and now rather than on creating places to which people can relate, where they might want to spend their whole lives.

Cities may be an economic success, but they are a sociological disaster. Higher rates of crime, poorer health, more road accidents, higher rates of mental distress, more loneliness and, as we’ve seen, lots fewer children.

So, what to do? One hundred and fifty years ago, people who lived in cities sought out a solution. Not through academic study but by, as their economic circumstances improved, moving a mile or two out of the city to live in a place more suited to family, good health, relaxation and family life. As the railways spread their fingers out from cites like London and New York, communities grew up filled with the families of workers in those cities. Later, as the car arrived, these places spread a little further. Just so long as the worker could get to his - we are talking about a man here - work within a reasonable time (and get home to see his family). Even for places built on industry, as those industrial wages grew, the same journey away from the cramped tenement or terrace took place. This was helped by the building of council houses and by the fact that, with few constraints on development, housing was affordable.

The suburb wasn’t the invention of a planner or some grand thinker. For all that people like Ebenezer Howard tried to picture a sort of utopian suburban place, all they really did was polish what had already been done by builders and the families who bought the homes they built. This laissez-faire development may explain why it is that planners, architect and the cultural elite dislike suburbia. As something that wasn’t designed by the great and good or funded by government spending other folks’ money, suburbia represented the triumph of the middle-class, a place built in their image and containing the things that made their lives good.

Today those suburbs are, in many places, dying. The families that once formed these places don’t exist. And, in large part, they don’t exist because why would anyone set out to have a family and a family life when there’s no prospect of being able to have the things that make that life good? The suburbs of big cities like London, New York, Sydney or Auckland are now filled with people who had a family once. All those fifty-, sixty- and seventy-somethings who once had growing families now live in suburban homes unaffordable for all but the most fortunate twenty- or thirty-something. These older folk like that the house they bought for less than thirty grand is now worth half-a-million or more, they like the golf course even if they don’t play golf, they enjoy the paddock with the horses but don’t ride, and they like that it is a moment’s drive out into a countryside of yellow rapeseed and wheat or barley making patterns as the wind blows. It doesn’t seem to them that it is their fault or their problem that so many people can no longer afford to do what they did – buy a suburban home and raise a family.

There is an urgent need to do something about the housing crisis, but we shouldn’t do this at the expense of family life. Record low numbers of young children should be a wake-up call for those who argue for ever more crowed cities, for technocratic fixes like subsidised childcare, who want to sustain the sociological disaster of a world directed entirely towards economic productivity. A world that gave us depressed adults, stressed children and now, a generation of people who have no real stake in the society that demands their productivity.

What we need to do is build that new suburbia, to provide places that aren’t focused on productivity and the momentary pleasure that makes this grind bearable. We need places that work for children, who can be afforded off one middle-class salary, and which provide an environment that tells us work isn’t everything. We need to compromise again with the Taylorist world of the technocrats by saying that we don’t work to make money for the sake of money or, god forbid, to pay the taxes so we can get cheaper childcare and thereby earn more money to pay more taxes.

A new suburbia is about a family being able to sit in their own garden, surrounded by good comfortable things and looking at the home they own. And as the sun shines, that family knows that the efforts they made were worthwhile. Mum and Dad can look at the kids larking about n a paddling pool or bouncing on a trampoline and take pleasure in knowing that life’s not all about work.