Host an april tight for wonders. Richmond dawkins it the author. It will be in book stores in september of 2013. This is booktv on cspan. Up next on booktv, afterwards, with guest host, richard benjamin. And the end of the suburbs, where the American Dream is moving. Discussing the crash of the Housing Market has forced people to leave the suburbs. A migration that is good for society. The program is about an hour. Host a fascinating book. Everybody lives somewhere, and youre telling us where we live in america, the end of the suburbs. Could you tell us about your title . Guest sure. The main idea behind the book is that after more than a half of a century of expansion into the suburbs, the suburbs are the sort of more than any other place, sort of cultural pillar of america. Its embodies the American Dream. Its very the image of the house in suburbia is where most people live and strive for. But that is changing and its changing pretty dramatically. These changes happen slowly but every indicator is showing this. Were tiring of this way of life, and the reason behind that are numerous, and theyre complex, and they have been kind of grinding away for a number of years. But the data, the indicators out there, the sort of sense of American People who live in the suburbs, were really looking at a seismic change in how and where we live, and i just thought that was a really momentous trend. Host ill be very interested to hear about the indicators. First i wanted to know, what inspired you to write this book to look at this momentous trend . Guest i caught whiff of headlines about census data showing this or housing dat showing that. There was whiffs of this percolated on my radar, and i thought that was interesting. I had a sense there could be something bigger there. So i started looking into it, and it was sort of a case where every stone i turned over yielded some other fresh, demonstrative proof that something was changing, that our housing processes were changing, that our migratory patterns were changing, our demographics were changing, every aspect i came at this, everything was sort of moving away from conventional suburbia and towards not the cities but there was a Huge Movement happening, and i in fact made it by societal trends, trends that shape how and where we live, trends that kind of hits through the here i have this topic i thought was so allconsuming and affects everyone. So i decided to double down and research and it write a book. Host everyone can relate to suburbs, either through popular media or living there themselves or a relative live there told us about the old normal and then the new normal. Guest whats really funny is everywhere i went, everybody wants to talk about this topic. I would go to cocktail parties and say what is was up to, and i couldnt escape. Everybody was interested in the subject. If you didnt grow up there youre curious or had the opposite experience. Everyones super interested in how and where we live. One of the things i encountered was lot of people that grew up in the 70s or earlier, a tremendous amount of nose stall gentleman for the suburbs they grew up in, and one thing i document is how we have really the suburbs of yesterday look nothing like the suburbs of today, and theres many reasons for that. Zoning, policy changes, mass production being kind of invented and taking over in the 1950s, but if you think about the older suburbs, you know, a lot of the suburbs in the northeast or other places around the country, older, i would say before world war ii, they grew up tended to grow up around railroad stations or street car stations. Those suburbs were built before the car was built, and they kind of sprouted organically, there was a nuke close where the Public Transportation dropped everybody off and then the shops and apartments, they all sprouted around that center, and then because there was no car at the time, all the houses had to be built relatively within walking distance to the town. And starting after starting in the 1930s, a new type of zoning came to be, and its a little bit like going mow detail in the book but it broke everything apart and mandated all the stores are over here, all the houses over here, all of the industry is over here, and even all the medical places are over here. So spread everything apart. And so by that time the car was how everyone was getting around everywhere, and so it set up this lifestyle where you had to kind of go from one place to the other to the other. And so that sort of modernday suburbarch but as suburbia evolved the distances between points grew longer and longer and farther apart. So, you know, theres a many years between then and now, but during that interim, we kind of overexpanded, built houses far apart from the cities, so far from each other, very far away from the cities. The traditional definition of a suburb is a Residential Community outside of a city. Many suburbs are hours away from cities now. So they overshot their mandate. Host take a Community Like new york city, the suburbs youre talking about might be yonkers or westchester, and then you go farther and farther to the outer suburbs or the exbushes, which could be farce as buck county, pennsylvania 0, upstate, and this has made us move further into the ex urbs. Guest then you has this housing boom in the 90s, and in 2000s peaking in 20052006. That put the whole operation on steroids so what was considered exurbs a years ago are now convention alsuburbs. During the housing boom people in new york city would commute to the poconos. This mania this sort of mania around getting the biggest house you could buy or the nicest house you could buy and the lending standards were so liberal that you could get a loan for almost nothing. We all remember that. And because of the sort of builtin wiring of the American Dream, playing such a role in peoples mind, people wanted that. They want tote get loaned and put themself thursday the best house they could, and offer times that meant going the furthest out, because the further away you go, the bigger house you can get. Plain economics. There was a coin for that behavior. Drive until you qualify you cant get the house in the closein suburb that is beautiful, but the one away, you can get that, and the commute is not so bad. Well deal with it. It will be fine. But i go into commuting commuting is a whole other topic i spend a lot of time in. But three and a half Million People in the country now do commutes of 90 minutes each way a day. Host before getting to the commute, you quote an expert who has a fascinating statement and he says, the sprawl demon is dead. Tell me what you found about mcmansions. Guest theres two camps of thought when it comes to sprawl and is it totally dead or is it just sort of quieted down because over the housing bust and is it going to come back when the market comes back in which its starting to. The Housing Market is starting to come back. Those who say its dead say, this was a failed social experiment. This did not work for many reasons. Many reasons are it toly legitimate. And when you look at demographic trends and the changing American Family, theres a case to be made for the next boom, the next time we expand, its going to look different. This source who says the sprawl demon is dead is interesting. A former Civil Engineer in minnesota and he spent many years basically building sprawl. He put in place the infrastructure that wires, sewers, pipes and everythingto suburbia. Cost a lot of money and a lot of resources to build suburbia, and his major point is that the suburbs are financially unproductive. He thinks theyre basically a ponzi scheme because it cost sod much money to lay those pipes and build the infrastructure that the tax revenue you get from low density arrangement of Single Family houses is not going to come close to paying for all that. So towns will get big grants to fund the initial project of building the pipes and everything, which is hundreds of millions of dollars, and the only way to fund that growth is to keep building more and getting more tax revenue coming in. So, thats his take on things, and he really thinks weed in to build communities more financially productive. So theres a financial angle to how the suburbs are built in addition to many other ang gallons i angles i go into as to why theyre not built the smartest way. Host one of the element is love about the book, its very careful and very thorough so you describe suburbs as they once were. You describe people moving further and further out into this masterplan subdivisions, and you say thats really dead and were moving towards a trend urbanizedded suburbs. Tell us through the trends and demographics that explain why that is happening to us. Guest its funny. Looking into this topic, when youre going to say the suburbs are dead or dying, its true. I stand by that. Its absolutely true. But the places that are going to do well, this doesnt necessarily mean that everyone is going to rush and live in a skyscraper in new york city. Thats ludicrous because a lot of people dont want to live that way either. So, theres a lot of people in this country were a suburban country. People say over my dead body aim going to live in a city. But Everyone Wants to be closer to the things they do every day and closer to the people they want to see and spend less time in their cars, and just be less isolated. Thats sort of what is driving a lot of this. So one of the things youre seeing is builders and developers and planners are sort of falling all over themselves to build these urbanbushbushes, and many of them are built on tholes suburbs we have read about. The one the urban bird . Some of them are the sort of older suburbs that have remained untouched in the northeast. You have a lot of those. Places like montclair, new jersey, a great example. A classic town center, village. Any center that has that village, theyre going to do okay. What is happening is builderses are trying to build new suburbs that have some of these characteristics and these take many different forms. Some of them are literally highrises in the middle of suburbia with a couple of stores down below so people can walk to the yoga place and the restaurant and everything. Some of them are brand new communities but theyre built on these older Traditional Town planning and i spent time at a community in maryland, and this community is a new urbanist community. Theres a subset of the urbanburb user and they have been lobbying there is for years and now theyre seeing their moment in the sun because the big builders are trying to do what they have been crying for all along but this community, kentlands, is fascinating. Its 30 miles from d. C. And you drive and drive and drive to get there, and you drive past this conventional suburban strip mall place, and then you make a left turn and you enter into thus community and all of a sudden its narrow streets, also town center with sidewalk cafes and the houses are sort of the federal townhouses adjacent to each other right near town, and then a little further apart as you go away. Its almost like an Older Community with cut and pasted into the middle of conventional suburbia. Almost feels like georgetown or park slope, which drops in the middle of sub zubaydah suburbia. I have been there kentland their walkability, the town center, mixed matched housing. So its fascinating the way you describe it, and i mention that because a lot of your research is data and census driven and you also have poignant storytelling and one of the most memorable moments is when you speak of a woman who thought she wanted the American Dream in the suburbs but moved there and felt isolated. So, tell us about the people you met and the stories you found and what were some of the most memorable moments of actual people you met. Guest sure, she was one for sure. A woman who had three Young Children at the time. She and her husband wanted they wanted the whole American Dream they never lived in suburbia, and said, lets try it, and this is outside of boston. And she thought, you know, if were going to spend this much money, you know, at the time the housing boom, i so 300 or more, for a house. We want it to be a really nice house. So they went a little further. Started looking at the closer suburbs. They were too expensive. A little further out and got a center hal colonial in a looping subdivision and thought it would be great, and they were really disappoint with the quality of their lifestyle. A lot of things about the way they lived their days were really different than what they expected, and i think one of the biggest things for this woman, dianne, was that she didnt realize how much time she would be spending in her car. I found this over and over again. Many people that move to the suburbs think theyre going to have this life where like maybe they had in the suburbs, where you open the door, the kid run out for three hours after school, they all play together and then you call them in for dinner. That doesnt happen anymore. I mean, it does in some places. If it does, its rare. Thats because were in this play date culture where everything is scheduled. And this isnt necessarily just the suburbs. This definitely happens to parents in new york city. At it more a lifestyle, dual parent work parent house holds and a number of reasons. This mother of three found herself, from 3 00 p. M. To 6 00 p. M. Every day, driving she would put 40 to 50 miles on her car every day driving the kids to all the soccer practice and the hebrew lessons and the this and that, and she was inspiration for one of my chapters which is called its a quote my car knows the way to gymnastics and thats what she did every day. And she also found it sort of isolating. She didnt like that the community was very it wasnt diverse in even just peoples edges. Everyone was between the ages of 30s and 50s and raising Young Children. So a lot of people well say this. When you live in a city or more older suburb maybe, and one thing the new urbanists lobby for is the diversity of age group. You want a mixture of people, older people and younger people and everything in between. It makes for a more vibrant community. Rather than everyone having a Single Mission and a single purpose, which is raising their kids. Which theres nothing wrong that but people seek more mixture. Withes these ages and long commutes and the ponzi scheme of the financial untenability, what other complaints did you find about the suburbs talking to people around the country . Guest its interesting. The commute is a big part of it. One of my one of the most interesting stories i found was i talked to a woman who lived in Orange County, in california, and she and her husband moved to they wanted to move to the inland empire to a town called temecula, and the inland empire is its a very where a lot of the housing expansion happened during the housing boom, and so they found a great house there, they intended to also find work there but they couldnt because the job market was not good, so they said for a year well keep our jobs in Orange County and commute every day. No big deal. And they did that. And it was this really terrible commute. They would have to set their alarms at 4 00 in the morning, leave at 4 15, and only at that time would the commute be an hour and 15 minutes. Any other time it would be two or three hours. So they would drive from temecula into Orange County. They would be so early for their jobs they would park the car in the mcdonalds parking lot, recline their seats and set their cell phone alarm and take a newscast. When she was by herself she didnt want to sleep in the mcdonalds working lot so she would go to her classroom and sleep under the desks and she said she felt like george cass stanza on jerry seinfeld, and when she would get ready for her job in the bathroom. And the commute home was even worse. She would spend two or three hours in the car, get home and plop down on the bed for 30 minutes. They were different because they were trying to get through a situation where they lived and worked in the same place and they ultimately did. But she quit her job before finding another one. She said i cant do this again. This is soulsucking. This is not good. And they ultimately did find jobs in temecula, but in the interim she left her very, very good teaching job, for which she had gone to graduate school, and she started tutoring for eight or den dollars an hour and that was better than doing the commute. Host now, you say thats sort of the dark side or downturn of the suburbs, and this book you declare the end of the suburbs but you say you personally are not against the suburbs. You have nothing against the suburbs. Tell us about the defensiveness in favor of the suburbs you encounter . Guest its funny. I didnt want to dish i am not an antisuburb person who thinks Everybody Needs to live in new york system was very sensitive to coming across as a sort of espresso sipping, elitist of some kind. I understand why people like the suburbs. I get fed up with a lot of daily life in new york city a lot. I was more drawn the trends were just so undeniable and the fact there is a shift in the way suburban americaer is perceived by the people who live there is too big a story to ignore. I had a wonderful experience growing up in sub ubra in media pennsylvania, an adorable town, prewar, all these ingredients you dont ever see anymore in even small towns. It has trolley, a courthouse, a lively main street, it has all these events. It was great. We could walk to the town from my neighborhood. Great annual fourth of july picnic. Idyllic, but thats the kind of suburbs people are nostalgic for and that doesnt jibe with the way people live today. One interesting stat i came across is that the average age of Housing Stock in the country is 1974. So you think which is pretty new. You think about older communities being so charming, but most people dont live in those communities. Most people prefer newer communities, the newer housing. People like new houses. But those house are built differently and those communities look and feel differently than the ones like many people grew up in. So, i was just very maybe not defensive but i just wanted to put it out there that i had a wonderful experience and i can see why a lot of people want to live there, but im telling you, this is changing. Host the people are perceiving the changes. Before we talk about the changes, do you watch house and Garden Television . Guest sometimes. Host okay. I dont own a television but when i sneak to my sisters house, ill watch these househunting shows and im curious, what do you think as a housing expert what do you think is behind this boom in popularity of these househunting shows, flip my house, find my house . Guest there are different kinds of pockets. The flip my house, that is a product of the housing bubble. And the housing mania where everyone thought they could become a millionaire from buying the right house and flipping it, and so that time is over. When the Housing Market comes back, its not going to come back like that. Thats one aspect of it. Another is this there is this obsession with a fantasy house and building it or improving it or making it better, and its okay to like where you live and want your house to be the nicest it can be, or your apartment. I want my little apartment to be really nice and cute on the inside. And so i care a lot about what goes in it and fixing its it. But if you look at the trend how were fixing up our houses and what we care about in our houses, those are changing, too much the average size of a house is going down, although the data doesnt totally show that. Its skewed because for a while only wealthy people were buying houses and that skewed the data a little bit. But living rooms and dining rooms, i have one person in the book who basically said, the living room is an endangered species. The way we live in our house is changing and these shows reflect that. Everybody wants a great room, an open kitchen. Youre seeing more of an interest in efficiency, where you maybe have a have slightly less space but you use more of it. So think about i mean in my house growing up, we hardly ever used the dining room. We used it on holidays and even then we would sometimes set up a buffet and take our plates and go into the living room. My mother started a business once and called it drt productions because it was dining room table because that is where all the papers would go. So you see this in new homes. Home builders are incredibly responsive to all this. They design what we want. And if you look at homes that are being built and designed today, they are making more efficient use of space. Host space is such an outer reflection of our inner beings and needs as families, as individuals, and to write my book i posted as a home buyer to see where and how people were living, and you talk about space. Out of space, built space. Its fascinating. Thats just one trend you point out, is that we are living generally in smaller houses as defined by Square Footage than ten or 20 years ago. Guest thats true. And the trend in home size has been expanding ever since the 50s, the average size was 900 square feet. National that now. I can imagine that. I live in a little apartment. Thats big for me. But its shifting. Just starting to shift. But its funny. You look at other things starting to show up in houses. For a long time, everybody was into having a deck on the back of the house. A big part of the suburban movement was how a long time ago air conditioning went inside once everybody started having air conditioning. You didnt need to hang out on the porch. And then it became been the backyard and deck and grill and everything, and that was the focus of entertaining and everything. But youre starting to see poach porchessed come back, and theyre important because theres real social element to them. They draw people out when houses and communities all have porches, people communicate more. The way the houses have to be sort of close together for that to happen. You dont the way houses are spread far apart right now that done happen. One person said i know more about the person isay sat next to on the plane than the person i lived next door to for five years. Host its fascinate thing way people have become pseudo food experts because of the food network and we have all become more conscious of space and design than maybe a generation ago. Before we go on a break, one fascinating quote and devastating quote, you quote an expert who used to work at the cdc, who says its almost as though the suburbs were built to make america unhealthy. What did he mean . Tell us about that. Guest theres a huge health angle here, too. The way the modern suburbs were designed with these subdivisions and very friendly to the car, very inhospitable frequently to pedestrians. Theirs they modern suburbs and the old are suburbs. The older suburbs have the sidewalks, the narrow streets. The newer suburbs dont and people dont walk. People dont walk even when they can walk. The woman in boston tried to organize an effort to get the parents to walk the kids to school. They lived in a unique situation where the school was a tenminute walk april through a wooded past and nobody wanted to do it. People love their cars in the suburbs, and what this doctor doctor he said its not just good for our health. Spending all this time in our cars. Youre the adult youre driving, if you the child children are being raised in cars because theyre driven around rather ask hairs ha Health Consequence children dont walk to school as much as they did 40 years ago, or ride their bikes. Theyre not really active. When youre not kind of using your two feet to transport yourself around at all it does take a toll on your health. Walking is important for a number of things and i spend a lot of time getting into how the body functions when youre walking regularly in the book. But this is why he really thinks this is why we have so many escalated levels of diabetes. Heart disease and why children are seeing these diseases that were once limited to adults. Our environment has a huge amount to do with our Health Problems in the country, and he marshals a lot of data to show that, and its kind of logical. I if youre in the car and not walk walking youre going to put on weight. If youre spending three hours commuting, that would eat into your gym time. Host you cite diabetes and iles remember him citing depression. Guest yeah. Well, there dismiss data on this. Especially in Young Children. The sort of this is a cliche but the suburbs being boring for teenagers. Theres not much to do it. Is isolating until your have your drivers license because youre reliant on your parentses to drive you around. At the very moment where you need to separate, and a lot of theres a lot of people in the psychology field have studied this. And then among adults. A lot of adults moved to the suburbs and find it more isolating than they expected. The isnt to say there arent lively communities in the suburbs. There are. Many culdesacs are like a familial environment. Thats true. But many people are also surprised at how isolating the lifestyle is because youre attached to your car all the time and youre kind of youre driving everywhere and theres no encounters between people on the streets. So this is the kind of thing people want more of and the builderes are trying to provide for people. Host fantastic. Okay. Lets take a break. Guest great. Was we know this country experienced a housing bust and you can drive to certain communities where whole subdivisions seem to look abandoned. Tell us about the housing bust and what you discovered there. Guest well, we have many of these theyre called zombie subdivisions where they were built in many cases purely because of the housing boom, which was so where all this money and this lending, loans were arts officially inflate. And so these subdivisions were built further and further away, and so many people lost their homes that now many of them are empty. Our overall Housing Inventory problemes better now. During the height and as we were recovering from the housing crisis but these zombie subdivisions are still out there. You can get a great deal on a house if you want one. Host all this overstock and what should we do with these abandoned houses or the overstock in these communes . Guest thats a good question. The real question is what is going to happen when housing reboundses. Are they going to repop late the house or be gone for good . And theres a lot of case to be made for the fact there isnt going to be the kind of demand for those houses in those locations ever again, and a lot of academics and economists have come up with a lot of ideas about what to do with those houses. One big push right now is to try to facilitate the buying up of them by Big Companies who can rent them out and turn them into rentals. So theres a big effort afoot to do that but there are theres going to be Economic Opportunity there for those kind of big institutional can landlord. But the communities are going to look different because when you have people who own the houses they take better care of them. So that presents some questions, and also are there enough people to populate them when theyre located so far from core centers. The other thing is people suggested maybe theyll be turned into subdivide these big houses and turn them into communities almost like each house becomes a place with four different apartments in it or Something Like that. But the problem is, zoning laws dont allow that. The houses werent built to last the way older houses were. So houses are going to deteriorate at some point anyway. So nobody really knows what is going to health there are a lot of people that think these houses will be the slums of tomorrow, and that alone would be interesting because it wasnt so long ago that cities were slums and there was a time in the 1800s andarm 1900s, if you said at the cities would be slums nobody would believe you because the cities were thriving centers of culture, and then look what happened in the 1970s. Everybody exited and went to the suburbs and the cities were destitute. And now its the reverse. Host some realtors believe the exbur bsll come back. So its fascinating to see whether its going to be these us early, permanently abandoned zombie communities or whether people will draw a stake in the ground and revive once the economy picks up. Guest thats the Million Dollar question. If you look at demographics, theyre a huge part of this conversation. If you look at the birth rate going down, what we come to think of as the American Family marked couple with two Young Children, the kind of historically been the predominant driver of suburbia, that family unit is totally shrinking in a big way, and so you haveo think these houses were built for basically families. They werent built for single People Living alone, which is one of the Fastest Growing household types. And they werent built for people with no children. The demographics around children in this country and the birth rate are striking, and as a result, you have suburbs that are aging, where theres more babybooms and seniors now. Statistically speaking. In the suburbs, than young families with children inch the book i talk about my father grew up in a community outside of philadelphia called drexel hill and it was populated with tons s and tons of kids and on his block alone, there were 41 children on that block when he was growing up. And now i actually hired a private investigator to go try and get me a number of how many kids there are now. And theres less than 15. And so that change is happening all over the place, and thats going to fuel this imbalance that is going to mean were going to have way too many of one type of house and not enough of another and the one type of house well have too much of are the houses in the zombie subdivisions and regular subdivisions. Your point that the Home Builders are many of them still believe theres still a market for conventional suburbia and there probably is still. They might be right but its going to be a dramatically reduced market. Tolle brothers i spoke with the ceo and he used the word moth ball. We have mothballed some communities and they mean theyre not building more. They dont open a community until its fully sold and populated. But the tolle brothers is so interesting. One of the biggest indicators that i found is that they are going like gangbusters building in new york system they have 30 buildings here. Theyre expanding to other cities. Theyre expanding to sao paulo and going completely urban. Its not the majority of their business but the Fastest Growing and one of the brightest spots in the company. Now condo buildings, 20 million penthouses. Its just stuff that ten or 15 years ago you never thought you would see. Host i have a twopart question for you. The first part is, we notice as we speak, detroits going bust. So, the first part of the question is, what cities are having the problems youre talking about and why do you think that is and then what cities are not . Guest our city story is a tail of tale of two cities and the detroit story is separate. One thing that is lost in the discussion about detroit and our cities is that cities economies and Fiscal Health are often times two Different Things. You look at new york city. New york is thriving by any definition. You look at neighborhoods like the meat packing district, in the 70s and 8ss you wouldnt be caught dead there now its so many 20 somethings on the weekend, the place to be, and that would have never happened before. So new york is like an amusement park. The economy is doing very well. But new york has fiscal problems, too. Many of the same fiscal pension problems that detroit has. So those are two Different Things. Detroit is some of the rust belt cities are adjusting to as massive shift from an industrial economy to service economy. Other things happening as well but not all cities are resurgent the way new york is but many other. Places like detroit and maybe buffalo and others are the minority. Overall the kind of story about cities right now is more people are staying in them, more people moving to them, more people with families, young couples with children are host seattle is thriving and booming. Denver is thriving thriving and. Chicago is thriving and booming. What do these placees have in common . Guest its a living in a city and raising kids in a city is now an option, writ didnt where it didnt used to be and theres a number of reasons. The same thing driving the move from sub suburbia, people wanting a sense of lively has, gas prices, schools improving. The schools are still the big issue, scening a lot of people to the sending a lot of people to the suburbs but thats starting to change. A city like seattle or, say, austin, easy to have a suburban lifestyle in that city. And in fact youre living in a kind of denser, usually the neighborhoods with Single Family houses are denser and thats they have those characteristics. The people are also looking for in the suburbs and fining enemy the city. Host right. You outline the generational trends, the creating of the suburbs, the tastes of millenals, particularly consumer tastes. There are any racial dynamics to the phenomenonnan you putt out or to where the white people move or to the appeal of certain places . Guest its interesting. Race there is a lot of racial inequity in the housing mark. The Home Ownership rate right now is 65 the average Home Ownership rate and for whites its almost 74 and for africanamericans its 47 , and a lot of this goes way back to when our kind of federal policies that supported the Housing Market were put in place, way back after the depression you had the fha and the original kind of governmentbacked loans put in place to jump start the housing smart did that in spades in the 30s, and then in the 40s and 50s, a lot of the there was a process whereby neighborhoods were coded, red, blue, yellow, green, and almost all africanamerican communities were coded red. And those communities didnt get the fha would not back loans in those communities. So it was not the biases of the day, and those are gone now. But there are tremendous racial inequities in the Housing Market, and its the suburbs when they exploded in the 50s and 60s, they were primarily right and thats changed a lot. The suburbs have grown so much they really mirror america. Every kind of shape and flavor, wealthy, every kind of class and race, they really do resemble america much more than they did in the 50s and 60s and 70s. But people like to be around people like themselves. New york city, the housing prices are pricing out anybody but bankers. So its not so different. Host your neighborhood. Guest its the land of 25yearolds and 2,500 hand bags. Host i saw this transition you talk about firsthand. Where tolle brothers, the former suburban mostly Real Estate Developer is now going into the cities because they see money to be made, and these luxury condos look and in fact cost a fortune, so, also that flip, that racial flip, and gentrification. Guest that what made new york unaffordable for a lot of people. Host so tell us about the millenials. Lets talk about the millenials. How are they going to change how we live and where we live . Guest sure. Theyre so steady. Theyre poked and prodded. A study about literally everything they do. One study said millenial moms use the bathroom more than nonmillenial moms. But its really important because they are huge population, bigger than the babyboomeres and what theyre going to do is really going to determine a lot about the future of our housing mark. So right now, as has been welldocumented, a lot of them are still living at home. Theyre kind of having this failure to launch situation and thats maybe an overstatement but its try, statistically speaking more people of that age group in their early 20s are living at home still than any time since the 1940s, and thats because of the job market and other things. When they launch all of the study shows theyre not going to be in the suburbs. Theyre not getting drivers licenses at anywhere near the pace that you and i did when we turned 16. And they want to be where everything is nearby, and where they can walk everywhere, and that doesnt always mean the city. They like walking suburbs. Hip kind of walking suburbs but there arent enough of those places. Thats where the supply and demand comes in. They want that, everybody else wants that but theres not a lot of those communities. So the millenials a lot of them grew up in exurbss and they know what its like to drive ten miles for milk, and they attach third guys. You cant text when youre in the car, and you cant be doing their social networking when youre driving, and so they actually are huge users of Public Transportation. So, they just dont want any part of that. And this is maybe a vast stereo type but its been stud yesterday, and some people say, oh, thats fine, but wait until they have kids, and thats when they go to the suburbs but the birth rate for millenials is at an alltime low and theres a reason to believe theyre not going back out to there to culdesacs. Host that changes the Housing Market for everybody. Guest that creates this incredible imbalance where we have all these houses built in one way and all these people coming up that want a different kind of house and a different kind of place, and theres this tremendous i mean, one expert i quote in the book thinks we have an oversupply of millions some millions of Single Family large lot houses, and what is going to be done with that . Whats going to come of that when the babyboomers who are living in them now, the natural time to turn the houses over happens, this Younger Generation isnt going to want to move into them. So as much of an imbalance now, its going to get worse. Host over an editor so just win through and i nobody is listening. Lets be real. In terms of bang for your buck, financial val eurasian in terms of quality of life, where would you recommend folks move, given all these research you have done, all these places you have seen, begin your understanding of the market . Guest not a city, you said. Host yes. Guest okay. An urban burb and those are different shapes and sizes. Many of them in the book. I can kind of maybe shy open up some sort of consulting service. Host i love it. Guest i could hang a shingle. But around new york, the suburbs that have any kind offeror kind of organic village. Montclair, most o them have that kind of Village Place on long island beau thats were older suburbs. Theres an interesting correlation between age of community and sense of liveliness. People have studied this and found that. So, or a place where theres a town center that is cool and interesting and a place you want to go and walk around and be in and where that place is within a couple miles of where you live. You dont have to be able to walk from your house put that place should be a mile or two and not 10 or 15. So thats everything. I have someone the book who says its no longer location, location, location, its access, access, access,. Host access to what. Guest to stuff to what you want to do every day. Access to other people, to commerce, to a town center, access to things that will in the end save you time. Aberdeen says everybody says the one thing money cant buy is time. So lets take away the 45 minutes you spend in your car, give that back to you and put you somewhere where everything you need maybe not your josh but everything maybe not your job but everything you need is within a couple miles where you live. Host there was one place in colorado. Guest this is an interesting example of what some people are doing with dying malls. Another indicator of what is happening to suburbia is what is happening to big giant suburban Shopping Malls which were such an institution in the 80s but new ones have not been built in years and people dont want to shop like that anymore and theyre dedaying and dying. But theyre massive structures. You cant raze them. So theres a movement to turn them into villages, and one of these neighborhoods is happening in colorado, and lakewood colorado, and they turned thats abandoned Shopping Mall into a Pedestrian Community with 1100 houses and a whole promenade with stores and a ice skating link and Movie Theater and turn into this community where a lot of people have moved, and thats an extreme example. I dont know everybody wants to live that way but it accomplishes a lot of Different Things at the same time, which it puts that space to use, builds a community where people can be walking more, and have this sort of urbanized lifestyle in the suburbs. Host okay. Now, you tell us where physically the future is moving. But tell us what you think the American Dream is moving . I think for my thinking thats the provocation of this book. Its very provocative. You declare the end of the suburbs because theres such a link in our thinking between the suburbs and the American Dream, as you said. So lets talk first about what do you think the future of the American Dream is . Guest its totally in flux. Complete my in flux. Is the dream going to be a kind of lifestyle and not even a house . Who said that the dream had to be a structure . We did that ourselves. The original james adams who wrote the American Dream it was not meant to be a house. We just sort of were so fascinate with the house and the notion of suburbia it fused on to mean a life of a house and a picket fence and a lawn and all that and a car and everything. So, its changing. Mine, the american i mean is the American Dream going to be a condo and a highrise . I dont see that happening necessarily. But i think it will be a lifestyle where theres more community, theres more i use this word so much in the book but liveliness. Sort of the dream is not necessarily just about the house itself. Its about what you do with your day and the people you surround yourself with, and i think thats going to play a role more in where People Choose to live and how they choose to live. So might just be a smaller house in a community that has sidewalks and that is not too far from a Little Village center. Thats not so different. But in many ways its completely different from the way people have been living. Host its a fascinating thought. The American Dream doesnt necessarily have to have a structure. But what is poignant for me is they did a study and a lot of young people think they will not have it better off than their parents did. So, if you if one believes northwestern dream means doing better than your parents did, in that sense, the American Dream for some people is on a decline. But its fascinating in the book the way you say, okay, the American Dream isnt the suburbs but it could be this, this and this, and its very persuasive the way you lay that out. Guest well, yes. That is one thing. But you made a really important point, which is the suburbs blossomed at a time when our economy was booming, when the middle class was booming, and when there was this hope and opportunity as far as the eye could see, and were living in a different time right now. I mean, im optimistic about the u. S. Economy. Were in a row. But the declining middle class is a huge trend, and that plays a role here. The middle class is engine that grew the suburbs and thats going to show up in the Housing Market in the way we arrange our landscape in the future. So thats a huge part. Dont really need to be negative and say there isnt an American Dream anymore because we dont have any i dont believe that. But its certainly doesnt hold the place in the psyche it used to. Host i dont believe that either but a lot of young people feel their prospects on the decline. The book reads very well. So live limit what did you enjoy the most about writing it . Guest i loved writing this book. I liked talking to people and hearing their experiences in the suburbs and what they liked and didnt like. I liked building my own experience into it and tracing the narrative of our country through the suburbs, which is just its really tells the story almost naturally. So i like that and i liked all the individual people i talked to, and hearing kind of crazy stories about how people live and about how some people love it, some people hate them. Encountered a wide variety of viewpoints. Some people love exactly what other people hate about them. I talked to one whom was in a community where the houses were built so far apart that on halloween they didnt want their kids to trickortreat because it would exhaust them. They wouldnt get any candy, and so they thought it wasnt safe to the parents decided to go and drive to a school and park cars and kids would trickortreat car to car. Some people her the story and say that sounds horrifying. The parents in this community were like, lets great, bring the wine, decorate or cars but they werecraft this faux density, this faux community because they lived too far apart to have it organically. This woman was really interesting. She said i dont need to walk every. I have five kids. If i could walk to the Grocery Store you think im going to be able to walk back . People have a lot to say about this and that was my favorite part, hearing people talk about their own experience. Host how long to write the book . Guest i did a year and a half of research and maybe a year of writing. So i could have spent more time on it. This i went down so many rabbit holes. So much history. Could i have its true what people say about authors you see how people can spend years and year0s an book and never finish. Host youre both a writer and also an editor and thats reflected in the book. Its balanced and you say, this is what is happening and im just presenting it. So thats the book. Just between you and i, just tell us honestly, you talk about prefab, isolate, cooky cutter suburbs and you just present the information. But here and now are you sure youre not saying good riddance, are you sure youre not glad that is a thing of the past . Guest im glad some is a thing of the past. I think the way we built our residential communities were inhospitable to relationships and not good and i think people thought there was a wonder and beauty to that. And i think they felt like they were sold a false bill of goods and if they didnt its very hard to find people who are who love everything about suburbia. On twitter i looked and found so many people who said i hate the suburbs, and i found one person, one person in all of twitters billions of tweets that had hash take love the suburbs. So some is good rid dance. Ll say that here and now with you. Absolutely. Host and so beginning to conclude, what were you most surprised to learn and what do you think your readers will be the most surprised to learn . Guest i was most surprised to learn just how stark the changes are that is health for years a lot of people have said, oh, the suburbs are bad. Theyre homogenous, boring, whatever. You dont have to good far to find home to complain about the suburbs. This is the first time irwas surprised by the amount of data i saw that was supporting this argument and by the movement on behalf of the Home Builders to find a solution. Theres so much happening right now about how to build houses we want to live in in place ises we want to live in. I was surprised by that itch started this on the whiff of a couple of data points. I lad no idea it was happening, and the more i looked the more i found, study after study, that just showed most interesting things. I mean, it all comes back to older communities built on different bones being better, better for our house, happiness, relationships, for our wallets, everything. So, thats what was surprising to me. Host fantastic. Well, thank you. Thanks for your time. Guest thank you for having me here. Its been a delight to talk about this with you. Host as well. That was after words, book tvs Signature Program where authors are interviewed by journalists, public policymakers. After word airs every weekend on book tv on 10 00 p. M. On saturday, 12 00 and 89 00 p. M. On sunday and 12 00 a. M. On monday. You can witch afterwards online, go to booktv. Org and click on afterword. We have more coverage of nonfiction books every weekend on booktv. We are social libertarians, economic libertarian. Maximum freedom. Little government interference as possible. Were not an