Last week, I read an op-ed in the Claremont Independent (CI) titled “In Defense of the Suburbs,” written by a classmate and acquaintance of mine. At first glance, it is hard to say exactly what concept the author defends in his article beyond his own unpopular Reddit comment. It is similarly left to the reader’s imagination what sort of assault he might be defending against, other than people downvoting his Reddit comment.
The article does reflect the underappreciated reality that many Americans — myself among them — happily grew up in suburban areas and love their neighborhoods. However, the author’s misleading use of those arguments is a cautionary example of how easily culture-war generalizations can cast neighbors who depend on one another as bitter enemies.
‘City’ and ‘suburb’ are not opposed concepts; one cannot exist without the other. To have any hope of improving either, we must be prepared to have honest discussions about improving both. In ignoring this, the author deprives urbanites and suburbanites alike of the agency they deserve over the communities in which they live.
The premise of the article is that urbanism, a broad movement to revitalize and expand human-scale, pedestrian-friendly built environments in city planning, is a political, cultural and personal “assault on American suburbia.” The author objects to what he sees as primarily aesthetic condemnations of his and many Americans’ way of life, arguing that “what they lose in form, they make up for in function.”
The article is wrong on the merits — many suburbs can be unhealthy for people, economies and the environment alike — but it also fundamentally misunderstands what a suburb is. The author conflates the suburbs with a very specific type of planned community consisting of nothing but single-family homes on large lots. Of course, there are many lovely neighborhoods of single-family homes, as well as many quite unpleasant ones, but from a practical perspective, no entire community looks like this.
Even in the most sprawling areas, residents need groceries, and commuters passing through need places to stop. People want to live at least within easy driving distance of restaurants, hospitals, barbershops and many other types of services. These centers of employment and spending help governments raise tax revenues to maintain services like roads and plumbing. And hopefully, most communities will also provide libraries, parks and schools so that residents can live fulfilling lives and raise families.
Suburbs include all these land uses and more, along with single-family homes. Further, many cities have highly suburban areas within them, and many suburbs have urbanized centers featuring commercial strips, offices and even dense housing. It is through abusing these nuances and selectively employing contradictory definitions of ‘suburban’ that the author of the article conjures statistics that allegedly support his claim that building only single-family residential sprawl solves urban problems like crime and even, improbably, long commute times.
Living in Claremont, a city about as undeniably suburban as they come, we should all be aware of the nuance inherent in ‘suburban-ness.’ Though the quaint Claremont village and its idyllic surrounding neighborhoods don’t form the sort of obvious suburban skyline seen throughout American metropolitan areas, they do create a compact, dense and walkable area combining many land uses.
Like many older suburban areas, they also feature a wide selection of housing types. Not just single-family homes, but duplexes, small apartment buildings and larger mixed-use communities with apartments, townhomes and amenities. Despite my fedora, I may not speak for all the vitriolic urbanist Reddit users referenced in the CI’s article — but I know that real-life urbanists appreciate the nuanced variety of housing options many suburbs already have and only hope to enhance that range of choices, not to destroy the suburbs.
However, many urbanists living in the suburbs — including myself — hope that more suburban neighborhoods can take cues from the lively, walkable neighborhoods that already exist in the suburbs and throughout our cities and move away from relying too heavily on car-oriented, single-family residential sprawl. The reasons for this are not merely aesthetic. The design of many single-family residential areas is not just unhealthy and oppressive but financially and environmentally unsustainable.
Much of our housing crisis across the United States stems from a lack of housing that accommodates people’s different needs. While some may prioritize quiet and a large backyard, others prefer an apartment within walking distance of where they work. Not everyone is raising a family right now, and not everyone who wants high-quality housing and a secure lifestyle wants to buy a home right now. The CI article strikingly ignores this diversity — for example, by listing “the most important residential considerations Americans have” on the sole basis of a 2021 National Association of Realtors blog post about post-COVID-19 homebuyer demand. In doing so, the author conflates all Americans who want housing with the much smaller group of Americans actively searching to buy a home.
Low-density housing is also very expensive in the long term. When homes are far apart, the infrastructure connecting them costs more: for example, roads and sewer lines have to be longer. Likewise, an almost exclusively residential area takes in much less tax revenue from commercial or industrial land use. In this way, certain types of suburbs — the very types praised by the CI article — can actually raise your taxes and create economically fragile communities. This is another reason why so many metropolitan areas are experiencing an affordability crisis.
Urbanists hope that, over time, we can address many of these issues by adding more variety to the suburbs. For example, medium-density housing — such as townhouses and small apartment buildings — already exists in the parts of suburbs where land uses transition. We believe more of this ‘missing middle housing’ could be added to greatly increase our supply of units without radically changing the character of existing communities. Additionally, many new suburbs feature lovely paths that make it easier for people to walk or bike through neighborhoods without, as the article notes, spending thirty minutes traversing winding, monotonous streets designed to prevent cars from traveling through.
Do urbanists want to replace single-family homes with skyscrapers? In certain very limited areas, many of us do. Before transferring to Claremont McKenna College, I lived in Washington, D.C. for a year; many of the suburbs there were built around Metro stops, and some featured impressive high-rise developments and cosmopolitan commercial districts flanking the station exits. Yet even a fifteen-minute walk from most of these stations, you can find beautiful brick homes with large, verdant lots. In between, you can find many intermediate housing options, all easily accessible by reliable public transportation.
As a Los Angeles native, I certainly wouldn’t mind if some parts of my own famously congested and unaffordable city looked more like that. But in most areas, suburban urbanism looks like revitalizing what already exists to create more neighborhoods like Claremont, which lies somewhere in between the concentrated density of a high-rise suburban ‘edge city’ and the dystopian monotony cheered by the CI article.
I know there are many suburb defenders out there. Sometimes I count myself among them, and other times I would love to find common cause with them. At the same time, we may earnestly disagree on many policy issues. Nevertheless, I hope we can all acknowledge that there is not one right answer to what makes a great place for an American family to live — and that those committed to making room for diverse communities in the suburbs can begin to count themselves among us urbanists as well.
Nicholas Steinman CM ’28 hopes to remake Los Angeles in his own image when he grows up. On his frequent multi-hour walks, he has covered all the ground between Claremont, downtown Los Angeles and the beach and loved every block. His plans to attend the opening of three subway stations near Downtown with the author of “In Defense of the Suburbs” last year fell through.