Suburbs have won. Get over it. Resistance is futile.

Suburbs are winning because they are the environments that people prefer. They are greener, healthier and happier tha the city. And there are children.

The headline here comes from a short piece by Pete Saunders at his Corner Side Yard blog.

“When it comes to the kind of places people choose to live, the places people prefer, and the places that are growing in absolute if not relative terms, cities will always lose out to suburbs. The way we define cities and suburbs in America – cities are fixed constants while suburbs are ever-expanding variables – simply isn't comparable. Unless our definitions change somehow, it will always be that way.”

Saunders cites Joel Kotkin on how cities need creative destruction too:

“The very impressive blocks of skyscrapers that housed many of the world’s leading corporations have gone from harbingers of the future to something resembling the abandoned factory towns of the Industrial Revolution. Transit systems critical to the old urban model are in free fall. In great cities like New York, Los Angeles, or San Francisco, criminals and the homeless, many of them mentally disturbed and unstable, lurk on the streets, in the parks, and in the stores.

At the same time, residential neighborhoods in places like New York, Boston, and even much of San Francisco have retained their streetwise vitality. Since the pandemic, Brooklyn has experienced a resurgence of new businesses while Manhattan has seen large declines, particularly in its office-dependent retail sector. Additionally, a new and largely unheralded chapter of urbanity is being written in suburbs and exurbs as these areas, once derided as cultureless wastelands, are increasingly walkable and diverse, in some ways challenging the supremacy of traditional cities by becoming more like them.”

Kotkin observes that the ‘transactional city’ of great office complexes has been in decline since the turn of the Milennium and this trend was supercharged by the COVID pandemic. We hear how the big cities of the USA like New York, San Francisco and Boston now suffer “…the largest income gaps between the bottom and top quintiles of all American cities” and that this gulf is accomapnied by homelessness, drug abuce, crime and social disorder.

The collapse in urban social order catalogued by writers like Ed West is a feature of what I’ve called “The Great City of the West”. Yet hardly a day passes without one or other pundit boosting these dying cities - usually by proposing public policies that act to protect the declining transaction model such as ‘get-back-to-the-office’ campaigns and calls for more subsidy or ‘investment’ in loss-making urban transit. All of this is sold to policy-makers as agglomeration, the largely mythical idea that people living hugger-mugger on top of eachother results in accelerated creativity rather than a less pleasant, more expensive and unhealthy environment.

“There's no actual reason, other than our sociable nature, for us to live in those 'Great Cities of the West'. Indeed, they're filled with untypical humans. There are the brave few who upped sticks and travelled thousands of miles to live poor quality lives on the fringes of the gleaming, sparkly city hoping for a lucky chance. We've the fortunate beneficiaries of inheritance or beauty who can skim across the surface of the city enjoying its lights and pleasures while affording the means to avoid its darkness. And there's a vast mass of clever, skilled, hard-working people who turn the wheels of the city's economy but can't get a stake in the city, can't find the means to settle and have a family, and who justify this on the basis that they can get to see the beauties in their plays, galleries and stadiums.

If this - 'The Great City of the West' is the future of mankind then it isn't a future, it's a dead end. Because the great mass of the city dwellers can't afford a family, the only way to provide the services is to import more people from elsewhere. But what happens when those elsewheres don't provide people any more? The city grinds to a halt when economic growth in other places reduces the imperative to migration. So perhaps this explains the enthusiasm of the great and good of such places for elsewheres to remain poor - not starving but just poor enough for the stream of migrants not to dry up. But this is a false perspective - even the gradual rising of economies results in reduced birth rates so the city cannot win if it does not breed.”

City boosterism is part of our problem not part of the solution to our problems. Trawling round underperforming cities in Europe pointing at polished central squares and cute tram systems, however, seems to be the urbanist preference of today. These city boosters troop off to Barcelona, Milan and Berlin, praise the mayor of Paris (despite the persistence of riot and that city’s dependence on extensive suburbia) and ignore the fastest growing cities in the USA, a country that is outperforming anywhere in Europe on just about any metric.

And the chances are you won’t have heard of most - nearly all - of those fast growing cities. And they aren’t in California or New England, they are in the mountain west and the south - Florida, Arizona, Texas, Utah, Tennessee, and the Carolinas. Worse still these cities aren’t built round legacy transit systems and dense urban cores but around a dispersed suburbia. While urbanists in California and London shout at cars from their over-valued one-bed apartments, the creative and ambitious are getting into planes and cars and going somewhere that affords them space as well as opportunity.

I appreciate that the UK is very different from the USA but we still need to recognise that the big city model is pretty broken - not just because people prefer suburbia but because the collapse of fertility (and the accompanying enthusiasm of business grandees and oligarchs for immigration) directly tracks the increased densification of our cities. Places like Milan and Turin - lauded by the city boosters for their trams and walk-up blocks - hav elong had some of the lowest fertility rates in the world. Even the boosters who travel further for their inspiration, to Seoul, Singapore or Tokyo, are boosting places with the world’s fewest children. Dense urbanisation leads to the selfishness of now in our policy-making and fails to create the enviornment where people can do what people want to do - settle down and raise a family in peace and safety.

As Ed Ring points out in talking about California, the damning of suburbia - ‘sprawl’ as its detractors call it - is one of the three big myths in California’s urbanism:

“Nuclear power and natural gas power causes unacceptable harm to the environment; reservoirs and desalination plants cause unacceptable harm to the environment; and single-family homes nestled in sprawling suburbs cause unacceptable harm to the environment. These are myths. Yet they are being exported to the rest of America, where they will wreak the same havoc they’ve already inflicted onto Californians.”

Suburbs are winning because they are the environments that people prefer. They are greener, healthier and happier tha the city. And there are children. Places that act - influenced by an unrepresentative minority of big city urbanists - to limit or prevent subrban development are places that will lose out to the communities that embrace the suburban lifestyle dream.