Are bedroom communities in their twillight years?
THE SUBURBS ARE CHANGING, ESPECIALLY IN CONNECTICUT
The U.S. census tells us that over 80 percent of Connecticut residents live in an “urban center.” It is safe to say that most of the 20 percent who live outside cities like Stamford or Bridgeport live in “suburbia.” It’s become conventional wisdom that homeowners are moving back to the city. So what is the future of suburbia?
The 20thcentury failure of farming in Connecticut made all that deforested land for singlefamily homes. The Eisenhower Federal Highway System made much of mid20th century Connecticut a place of new and greatly expanding towns. The average home size, which was around 1,000 square feet since the 19th century, grew to over 2,500 square feet. These new homes were a new crop on those plots of land, untethered to a city’s street grid, and with the last generation exploded onto McMansion scale.
But the Greatest Generation and their children, the Baby Boomers who built this wave of houses, are now aging out of dominating the housing market. The children of we Boomers have left all those homes built for them, and they are taking longer to get married, if at all, and living with roommates in rentals well into their 30’s, abandoning cars and working on the internet, rejecting the commuter life their parents created. More and more adults are fully connected by that Internet, not to any physical community or proximity.
These cultural realities spell doom for the classic “bedroom community” idyll two generations of homeowners fully dedicated their domestic lives to in the ’burbs. Additionally, practical realities spell change to the suburban lifestyle, as well. President Trump’s Federal Tax reform ended the deductibility of local real estate taxes for millions of homeowners, especially devastating to the singlefamily home model of living found in hightax places like Connecticut.
“Density” is now a buzz word in green/sustainable policies. Presidential candidates like Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker are all looking to make homes more affordable by allowing zoning laws to increase density to have more households share the cost of infrastructure, land, and yes, taxes. Land use law is changing, and in Connecticut that is a townbytown phenomenon.
This is not about “affordable housing,” a cause that has been part of our zoning evolution since the suburbs exploded. A generation ago, at the height of the suburban boom, creating “work force housing” became a priority — allowing increasing density to affordable homes in affluent places so that teachers, firefighters and police could live near where they worked. Then “active senior” demographics were used to allow greater density for who do not have schoolaged children stressing out town budgets.
But the new changes coming to the suburbs are not about desired social outcomes. These changes recognize a central change in the demographics of the housing market. Large, isolated homes are a hard misfit for more and more people who want to own houses.
Arthur C. Nelson, a professor at the University of Arizona, advocates subdividing existing unsellable McMansions into three or four new versions of “townhouse” units.
Many towns which once rejected any second or third homes on sites designed for singlefamily use are now encouraging the creation of accessory apartments to allow for independent, multiple occupants on existing sites.
Homeshare platforms has changed entire communityuse patterns once used for singlefamily zoning. Additionally, technology now allows for greater density, as new septic systems are allowing for less area and poorer soils in waste accommodation, increasing the capacity of existing sites to harbor more people without central septic systems.
When combined with many towns actively rewriting zoning laws to accommodate apartments over stores and offices, the future of suburbia is shifting to a place that might end up functioning more like 19thcentury towns and villages: fewer cars, but more buildings and people per acre.
What was old, is new, again.