Do Suburbs Crush the Soul?

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In my previous article on the uniquely American suburbs, I delved into their controversial history. Here, I’ll focus on the political and social critiques of America’s particularly car-centric and sprawled form of suburban development. A third and final piece will look at the financial picture, as well as the suburbs’ viability, both for the country and investors.

Conspiracy theories that the suburbs were created to drive demand for automobiles are, for the most part, backward. It was, in actual fact, the mass adoption of the automobile that drove the creation of the suburbs. Of course, big business (Levittown) and government policy (the creation of the interstate highway system and urban renewal) also played a part in the expansion of America’s car-centric suburbs.

But even if the causes of America’s suburban sprawl were completely benign, that doesn’t mean that the suburbs as currently constituted are good nor sustainable nor a place for quality, long-term investments. It is to these questions we now turn.

Evaluating Critiques of the Suburbs: The Suburbs Are “Soulless”

One of the major critiques of the suburbs is that they are “soulless.” In other words, as Alex Balashov puts it in Quartz, “it’s designed for cars, not humans.” He continues:

“Far from posing a mere logistical or aesthetic problem, it shapes—or perhaps more accurately, it circumscribes—our experience of life and our social relationships in insidious ways… For just one small example of many: Life in a subdivision cul-de-sac keeps children from exploring and becoming conversant with the wider world around them, because it tethers their social lives and activities to their busy parents’ willingness to drive them somewhere. There’s literally nowhere for them to go. The spontaneity of childhood in the courtyard, on the street, or in the square gives way to the managed, curated, prearranged ‘play-date.’ Small wonder that kids retreat within the four walls of their house and lead increasingly electronic lives.”

This perspective is so ingrained that TV Tropes actually list the cut-and-paste suburb as a common cliché in TV and film, saying: “In fiction, especially animation and comics, the similarity will get ramped up: The houses, gardens, and cars will be identical. The lives of the residents may also be identical…” Think Stepford Wives, Pleasantville, and American Beauty.

While I think there’s a grain of truth to this, it’s wildly overstated. Social atomization and the much-discussed lack of community may have been aided by growing suburbanization, but it certainly wasn’t a major cause.

In Robert Putnam’s classic work Bowling Alone, he looks at the decline in social capital (i.e., “the networks of relationships among people who live and work in a particular society, enabling that society to function effectively”) in the United States. Putnam looked at a broad assortment of indexes, such as the number of friends people report having, the number of social occasions they attend, volunteer hours for things like PTAs, church attendance, marriage rates, family dinners per week, etc.

Putnam found that these indexes—which together measure a nation’s social capital—increased dramatically throughout the first half of the 20th century as America left behind the Gilded Age, before peaking in the early to mid-’60s and declining thereafter.

Here is Putnam’s chart on membership rates across 32 national chapter-based associations:

Average Membership Rate in 32 National Chapter-Based Associations (1900-1997) – Bowling Alone

What’s noteworthy here is that the car-centric suburbs started growing almost immediately after World War II. Urban renewal started in the early ’40s, the first Levittown began selling houses in 1947, and the interstate highway system was started in 1956. None of this coincides with when social capital began decreasing. Therefore, it’s highly unlikely that suburbanization was a major cause.

Underlying this criticism is the assumption that the suburbs are, and have always been, atomistic and soulless. But I remember my own youth, living in a suburb and playing outside with other kids from around the block or who came over after school. I recently lived downtown and would never see such things. Indeed, families with kids have been leaving urban areas for decades, and as the Economic Innovation Group found, “Birth rates in large urban counties have declined twice as fast as in rural counties over the last decade.”

Urban housing tends to be small and lack a backyard, making it less than ideal for families with children. In some cases, it likely even lowers the birthrate, as Peter Zeihan makes the case for in Russia in the second half of the 20th century:

“The housing programs of Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, may have put roofs over heads, but the resulting apartments were so tiny that they lowered birthrates nearly as much as World War II.” (The Disunited Nations, Pg. 146)

Returning to the United States and the present, I’m now back in the suburbs and see kids playing up and down the street whenever the weather is nice. Indeed, while the “cut-and-paste suburb” is a TV trope, so is the nostalgic, suburban family life represented in shows such as Wonder Years and Family Matters.

It would seem that the decline in community life can be found elsewhere. Part of this is a decline in religiosity, as whether you’re religious or not, religious services are a good place to meet people, put down roots, and become part of a community. And just between 2007 and 2019, those saying they were “religiously unaffiliated” increased from 16% to 26%, while “monthly or more” church attendance declined from 54% to 45%.

Marriage is another thing that tends to bring people together, even if gatherings with in-laws have some negative stereotypes. While divorce rates have leveled off after skyrocketing in the late 1960s, the actual number of marriages has dropped precipitously. The marriage rate per 1,000 women has fallen from 76.5 in 1965 to 31.2 in 2022.

While this doesn’t count cohabitating, the overall trend is clearly down and likely to get worse. For example, a whopping 60% of men in their 20s are currently single. This may have a lot to do with technology, but as being single tends to inhibit family formation, it would appear that this type of social atomization is a vicious cycle.

While family formation is declining, Americans also tend to move away from their families. The rate of internal migration has actually declined slowly for decades now, but Americans are still among the most likely people to move from one city to another, often leaving behind family and friendship ties.