Sprawl, By Any Other Name
The Hidden Columnists--David Brooks Edition

Mr. Brooks visits Arizona and sees a growing utopian suburbia in A Nation of Villages (full column available to Times Select subscribers)

Between now and 2025, the population of the United States will increase by 70 million. That's the populations of California, New York and Florida put together.

To accommodate these people, 100 billion square feet of new residential space will have to be constructed. According to a Brookings Institution study by Arthur C. Nelson, half of the buildings in which Americans will live, play and work in the year 2030 don't even exist yet. We are in the middle of a $25 trillion building boom that is changing the face of the country, and most of it is happening in desert places like this one.

It's true that cities have experienced a resurgence in the past 10 years, but the real action is still out here on the fringe. All the population growth of all the major U.S. cities in this decade still doesn't equal the growth of just two suburban California counties: San Bernardino and Riverside. The flow of people moving into cities is but a trickle compared with the torrent moving out to exurbia.

When you study this torrent, you realize it is actually several torrents running in the same direction. It's active seniors looking for communities tailored to their needs. It's young singles looking for town houses (there are more single-person households in suburbia now than two-parent families). It's rich people looking for country clubs and poor people looking for affordable housing. Most of all, it's immigrants who are skipping gateway cities and buying homes twice as quickly as earlier immigrant groups.

Up until now, explosive growth and increasing market segmentation have led to sprawling decentralization. In pursuit of their own private havens, people have been spreading out and unwittingly creating the centerless landscapes of strip malls and tract homes that have been the subject of a million anti-sprawl lamentations.

But that's not what is being built and planned here outside Phoenix, and that's not the emerging pattern nationwide. The story of American development is the story of a contest between privacy and community, and the tide is turning. Communal impulses are rising up to counter privatizing, decentralizing trends.

[...]

The first wave of far-flung exurbanites overshot the mark, and found they were missing civic bonds. So creative builders are responding to the new market pressures.

When you look at the new influential master-planned communities - Verrado here in Arizona, or Stapleton near Denver or Ladera Ranch in California - you see that the old tract homes and enclosed-mall version of suburbia are gone. These new developments combine New Urbanist ideas - like mixed-use downtown neighborhoods with lofts over shops - with the traditional car- and backyard-friendly neighborhoods that people move to the suburbs to get.

[...]

This is what Joel Kotkin calls the New Suburbanism. These new suburban villages, he says, will combine with revived older suburban villages, like Naperville, Ill., and Fullerton, Calif., to create an "archipelago of villages" - a new sort of landscape that is neither city nor sprawl.

Frankly, I read that and I become scared. Not of the stultifying and stereotypical suburban/exurban lifestyle that's nicely tweaked by shows like Weeds on Showtime (Mrs. F and I watched the first episode last night--quite good). But of the drastic drain on resources and the continued expansion and building without much thought to usage of renewable materials/energy or sustainable building practices. I don't know, maybe I'm freaking myself out with too much doom and gloom global warming reading of late. But you try to put a happy face on this article from Fortune (which I'll be blogging about a bit later in the day).