Remodeling the Dream

Remodeling the Dream

Is a house with a yard and a white picket fence still what suburban dwellers really want?

A generation ago — or, perhaps more accurately, a Greatest Generation ago — servicemen returning from World War II faced a housing shortage that no one had anticipated. William Levitt stepped in with a solution: a preplanned, prefab community that was almost literally built overnight. The Long Island starter suburb, the first of William Levitt's eponymous Levittowns, essentially served as an American dream starter kit, right down to each home's easy-to-assemble white picket fence.

Levitt, frequently called "the King of Suburbia" — without an ounce of hyperbole — was also a Pied Piper of sorts, leading GIs and young families out of cramped, overpriced apartment buildings and into his affordable, fresh-off-the-assembly-line community. Thanks to Levittown, thousands of newlyweds and new parents could swap the narrow stairwells of the city for neatly intersecting sidewalks and their own backyards. That, perhaps, is Levitt’s most important contribution: He made home ownership a reality, not just a dream. By 1951, Levittown and the surrounding area boasted over 17,000 homes that had been constructed by Levitt & Sons.

"Levitt saw what few people saw or had the technical skills, financial means or political prowess to address," writes Paul Manton, a Levittown historian. "[It was] the greatest housing shortage in American history, in confluence with a demographic surge that created a demand for new housing. He addressed the problem in a manner that's legendary, and rightly so."

Sixty years later, Levittown still exists. The current residents have added what could be considered architectural icing to their once cookie-cutter-style houses, but new additions aside, the community is largely the same. It remains part of a sprawling suburban area full of single-family homes, and its residents — some 52,000 of them — still face lengthy commutes into the city.

Is that still what the typical American family wants? (Assuming it's even possible to quantify a “typical” family anymore.) Is Levittown the same American dream community it was at the midpoint of the last century? To many Americans of a new generation, the concept of the suburbs as they once were seems impractical and outdated, right down to that once-treasured white picket fence. But at the same time, moving back to cramped quarters in the city with kids and dog in tow can seem like something out of a nightmare.

That's where visionaries like Ellen Dunham-Jones and John F. Wasik come in. Dunham-Jones, a professor of architecture and urban design at Georgia Tech, is promoting the idea of “retrofitting the suburbs,” which means finding ways of using and adapting their existing infrastructure to make them greener, more sustainable and — most important — more walkable.

"If you can establish a walkable network of streets, that's when you're really going to establish a ripple effect in changing suburban patterns," Dunham-Jones told The Atlantic.

Bloomberg writer Wasik has a name for those patterns: “Cul-de-Sac Syndrome.” This “disorder” — which is also the name of his book on the subject — is a condition that results from being exiled to the suburbs, the ones dotted with increasingly empty storefronts and vacant shopping malls, and punctuated with profanity born from jaw-clenching commutes and rising fuel costs.

Wasik describes some suburbs as being like fading idol Norma Desmond from “Sunset Boulevard”— "a star from another era trying to stay on her feet."

That's not an inaccurate metaphor. The suburbs themselves have changed, but so have the families who live there. As gas prices continue to rise, commutes to work become even more miserable. As big-box retailers continue to close, it becomes even more inconvenient to drive elsewhere for groceries and other necessities. And the suburbs can feel isolating when your only interaction with your neighbors is a wave shared from opposite sides of the car window.

The first step toward a solution, according to both Dunham-Jones and Wasik, is to make these communities more walkable. Less time spent, as Sting and the Police so accurately put it, "packed like lemmings into shiny metal boxes," and more spent outside on wide sidewalks, enjoying publicly shared green spaces and commuting via easily accessible public transportation.

Walkable neighborhoods are "the building blocks of a sustainable community," and parks and other natural areas can "encourage frequent encounters between citizens." The key is to adopt, adapt and improve the existing infrastructure, especially the increasingly shrinking green parts.

One of the country's first retrofits was Mashpee Commons in Mashpee, Massachusetts, where an aging strip mall was reinvented — and reinvigorated — into a more "traditional" downtown area. Big-box retailers were swapped for "mom and pop" retailers, and other empty spaces quickly filled with more than 100 different stores, not to mention a church, a library, a senior center and studio apartments nestled above retail spaces.

These kinds of changes don't happen overnight. Sprawling Tysons Corner, Virginia, has settled into an "extreme makeover" that will add miles of lighted sidewalks and provide additional public transportation options for those who work in the D.C. suburb. The downside? It's expected to take at least 30 years to complete.

But suburban residents don't have to stand idly by and wait for someone else to improve the health of their communities. Richard Jackson, the host of PBS' “Designing Healthy Communities,” urges citizens to band together to enact small changes in their own neighborhoods, contacting their homeowners association or city council to press for the sidewalks, bike lanes and streetlights that will make walking a more attractive (and safer) prospect.

Unlike building Levittown, remodeling these existing suburbs won't seemingly happen with the snap of a developer's fingers. But while there's no starter kit for the American dream 2.0, following in the footsteps of innovators like Dunham-Jones and Wasik could lead us in the right direction.