New BiggerPockets Article: America’s Suburbs: The Controversies, Conspiracies, and Greed That Built Them
Part one of my two part series on the history and controversies of American suburbs
This is an excerpt from an article originally published on BiggerPockets.com.
In recent years, a sizeable amount of criticism has been leveled against what many see as endless sprawl and “lifeless” suburbia that surrounds many American cities. In fact, it happens so often that I’m actually a bit surprised that while the difficulty and opportunity of rural investing comes up fairly often, there isn’t a large amount of discussion regarding the merits and challenges of urban versus suburban investing (although there is certainly some in the BiggerPockets forums).
Regardless, for those who haven’t noticed, amongst urban planners and the growing car-free movement, the suburbs represent a capitalist conspiracy created by ruthless developers and a dastardly plot by General Motors to create an atomized, soulless, car-reliant hellscape Ponzi scheme that has indebted local governments up to their eyeballs and will soon come crashing down catastrophically. A few “anti-car activists” have even gone so far as to commit low-level terrorism, such as deflating random people’s tires while posting threatening letters.
Given real estate investors are rather dependent on the cities they invest in not collapsing, the truth of this matter should be of some interest here. Unfortunately, this topic is quite large, so I will cover it in two pieces.
Here, we will cover the complex origins and unique characteristics of the American suburb. Part 2 will cover its critiques in more depth and look at the viability of suburbs, particularly for real estate investors.
The History of the Suburbs
The biggest problem when critiquing (or defending) the suburbs is that the definition is rather squirrely. Google’s dictionary just defines “suburbs” as “an outlying district of a city, especially a residential one.”
And by that definition, the suburb has existed since the invention of the city. As far back as ancient Jerusalem, Rome, or Persepolis, cities have always had a central district (or several) that is the most dense and then gradually becomes less dense and more residential the further you get from it.
Indeed, this partially mirrors the layout of Medieval castles. The lord’s castle was typically surrounded by the farmland and villages of his serfs. When threatened with an attack, the serfs would retreat to the castle and defend themselves from there.
In other words, the suburb, as defined, is nothing unusual, and criticizing it would be absurd. Indeed, the word “suburb” came into common English speech in the middle of the 18th century, long before the “car-free movement” argues the modern American suburb was created.
Prevalence of books with the word “Suburb” (1500-2019) – Google Books Ngram
Instead, what “smart growth” promoters complain about is the particularly car-centric model of development that became extremely popular following the Second World War.
…
To read the read the rest, please go to BiggerPockets.com.
You can find my book here.
And the audiobook here.
And please subscribe to my YouTube channel.