EXURBAN SUNSET: FAILING THE MILK TEST
The least environmentally and economically sustainable form of urbanization over the past twenty years has been the exurb. Defined as smaller cities located outside of—yet dependent upon—major cities, exurbs usually are more than 50 miles from the original city center. Typically built on “greenfields” (a category that can include agricultural land as well as undeveloped wetlands, deserts, forests, or other biologically sensitive natural habitat), they leapfrog existing communities, jobs, and infrastructure. Even more than established suburbs, exurbs are designed almost exclusively for cars, needing massive supporting highway and parking infrastructure. A relatively new kind of exurb is the “boomburb,” with populations over 100,000 and boasting double-digit percentage population growth within an average ten-year period.
A quintessential boomburb, Victorville grew from 64,000 residents in 2000 to 107,000 in 2007, similar to the fast-growing population gains in other U.S. boomburbs during this time period. Relatively cheap real estate, flat land, and single-purpose zoning meant big profits for real estate developers and construction companies. Builders could easily and quickly build vast residential neighborhoods without thinking about where residents would work or how they would get there. Relaxed federal regulations on the financial industry meant first-time home buyers could “own” their home without a down payment, and sit back while home prices climbed.
And for a few years, climb they did. When home prices were rising in the region in the early 2000s, Victorville seemed like a sound investment. But by 2006 the price of gasoline began its steady ascent above $2 a gallon and a burst bubble in Victorville and other exurban housing markets created the first wave of foreclosures that helped set off a national economic crisis.
A complex and devastating chain of events began with people losing confidence in the seemingly ever-upward growth of exurban economies. Across the country, home foreclosures began to appear overnight in exurban hyper-growth markets, most notably inland central and southern California, Las Vegas, Phoenix, and much of Florida. The house of cards that had been built on cheap energy, imported water, easy lending terms, and massive speculation tumbled down like a tar-paper shack in a windstorm.
The nationwide exurban decline that has ensued may prove to be the last gasp of the Sun Belt's decades-long development frenzy. We will be absorbing or trying to erase the unwanted surplus of this end-of-the-twentieth-century building spree for years, if not decades. A recent report by the Urban Land Institute and PricewaterhouseCoopers, “Emerging Trends in Real Estate 2010,” cautioned commercial and institutional investors against spending a penny in exurban and outer-suburban markets: “Avoid neighborhoods wracked by foreclosures, especially in outer suburbs—these places may have no staying power.” And “shy away from fringe places in the exurbs and places with long car commutes or where getting a quart of milk takes a 15-minute drive.”
Californian exurbs like Victorville will have to contend not only with dismal real estate outlooks but also with the ramifications of a statewide (and global) push to fight carbon emissions. In 2007 California successfully sued San Bernardino County, charging that its out-of-control growth endangered the state's air quality and its goals for greenhouse gas reduction.San Bernardino and other California counties will now have to forecast the greenhouse gas emissions of future development and provide detailed actions for how they will keep total emissions within state limits—a major change in how communities are allowed or are not allowed to grow, and a precedent that other states may ultimately follow.
REMAINING FUNCTIONAL
Exurban communities will need to do more than adapt to changing economics and regulations. In the long term, the biggest challenge of the exurbs will be keeping them functional after the global peaking of oil production. Many exurbs—especially in the Sun Belt—will also need to contend with the regional peaking of freshwater availability. Again, Victorville illustrates this monumental challenge: Substantial amounts of electricity are needed to power the city's ubiquitous air conditioning (the average late-July high temperature is 100 degrees), while the city's water comes from arsenic-contaminated groundwater supplies that are diminishing. Moreover, like much of the rest of the nation, Victorville's food supply has become utterly dependent on a global corporate supply chain fueled by cheap oil. Even if the Inland Empire wanted to grow more of its own food, the lack of rainfall (less than 4 inches a year) makes agriculture without constant irrigation highly challenging.
The speculative model that came to a grinding halt in Victorville and at the fringes of dozens of other Sun Belt cities was largely predicated on the underlying assumption that energy (whether for vehicles or for houses) would always be cheap and readily available, which led to high per capita community energy use and greenhouse gas emissions. But the world has changed. With climate change now an almost universally recognized challenge, and top analysts in government and industry warning of a global “oil crunch” by 2014–2015, communities have little choice but to make better use of energy—through smarter practices in land use, transportation, and food production, and in the use of resources, particularly water.
VOTING WITH THEIR TIRES
It is worth recalling that during the latter part of the twentieth century, urban living in the United States was widely viewed as an outmoded way of life, with high taxes, crime, blight, and vanishing manufacturing jobs. America's formerly urban middle class had been fleeing to the suburbs since the end of World War II, decimating inner-city economies while fueling near-continuous development in the suburbs and, by the 1980s, in the exurbs. Well into the twenty-first century, some experts went so far as to predict that the exurban development model was the key to the nation's economic future. Harvard economist Edward Glaeser, for example, argued that most boomburbs had two key ingredients necessary to drive economic growth: sun and sprawl. He even argued that the more cars a community had per person, the more likely that community would succeed economically.
For a time, it seemed like Glaeser was right. Not coincidentally, this was also the point when gas prices reached their lowest relative cost in U.S. history (see figure 23.1). But far from heralding the next era of the nation's suburban ascendency, boomburbs have proved instead to be the final expression of the unsustainable sixty-year development model driven largely by cheap oil.
Modern suburbia got its start in the 1950s when construction began on the federal Interstate Highway System. Much of the system was in place by the mid-1960s, and vast areas of suburban and rural land were suddenly easily accessible from cities. Meanwhile, innovations in the mass production of tract housing and consumer goods made the cost of owning a new suburban home affordable to tens of millions of people. Together with the dominance of the United States in world oil production (which lasted until the late 1960s) and federal policies supporting both suburban house financing and road construction, the stage was set for the country's rapid suburbanization and concurrent deurbanization.
By the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s, ultra-cheap energy prices fueled the perfect conditions for the next phase of suburban development. Multiple “beltways” now ringed both large and medium-sized cities, while automobile manufacturers morphed the family car into the minivan and the oversized sport utility vehicle (SUV). Ever-larger gated communities of “McMansions”—served by malls designed not just for shopping but also for entertainment—sprouted beyond the farthest suburban edges and in between existing suburbs. New exurbs acted as petri dishes for different configurations of “big-box” retail centers and horizontal office campuses. Car ownership and vehicle miles traveled per person spiked dramatically upward, while once-vibrant downtown Main Streets were boarded up and left to fester.
Glaeser observed and condoned these cultural shifts in his foreword to Robert Lang and Jennifer LeFurgy's Boomburbs: The Rise of America's Accidental Cities (2007):
Shopping malls increasingly play the role of downtowns. Lang and LeFurgy emphasize correctly that there is plenty of walking in boomburbs, but it takes place in the mall that you drive to. The boomburbs are able to deliver some sort of facsimile of a pedestrian experience, where people mix with each other and experience street life. The experience is, however, planned by developers rather than delivered by the chaotic functioning of the market. While traditional urbanists may find these malls no substitute for the market of the Ponte Vecchio, people do seem to be voting with their feet or at least their tires. It may make more sense to put effort into humanizing the mall than into reinvigorating many older downtowns.
It wasn't just the physical appearance of the metro landscape that was transformed during the 1990s: Our own bodies began to change as well, despite all that walking in malls. The number of older adults (ages forty to seventy) not engaging in any regular physical activity increased from 15 percent in 1988–1996 to 35 percent in 2001–2006. The main causes for this disturbing trend were attributed to longer commutes and more time spent on the computer. Children began to have less physical activity because they were being driven more, and childhood obesity began to increase. In 1969 just over 40 percent of all children walked or bicycled to school; by 2001 this number had fallen to about 15 percent, and