Everybody live somewhere and you were telling us where we live in america the end of the suburbs. Can you tell us about your title . Guest of the main idea behind the book is that more than half a century of expansion into the suburbs the suburbs are at this sort of more than any other place the sort of cultural pillar of america. It embodies the American Dream. Its the image of suburbia that people strive for and where most people live but that is changing. Its changing pretty dramatically. These changes happen slowly over time but every indicator you look at a showing this. We are tiring of this way of life and the reasons behind that are numerous and they are complex and they have been kind of grinding away for a number of years. But, the data the indicators out there, the sense of the American People who live in the suburbs we are really looking at a seismic change in how and where we live. I just thought there was a really momentous trends and one worth delving into so i did. Host i will be interested to hear about these indicators but first i wanted to know what inspired you to write this book to look at this momentous grand . Guest i caught a headline about census data showing this for housing data showing that. This sort of percolated into my radar a little bit and i thought this is interesting. Theres something bigger they are so i started looking into it and it was sort of a case where every stone i turned over yielded some other fresh demonstrative fruits that something was changes that are housing preferences were changing and their migratory patterns are changing our demographics are changing. Every aspect i came out and looked at. Everything was sorted moving away from conventional suburbia and towards not the city though we can talk about that a little bit later but there is a Huge Movement happening. I am fascinated by a societal trends, trends that really shaped how and where we live. Trends that sort of you know kind of hit us through the zeitgeist. Im really fascinated by those kinds of trends when they are rooted in Economic Data and here i had a onetwo punch. I had this topic i thought was so allconsuming and affects everyone so i decided to really and research it and and write a book about it. Host everyone has a relationship to the suburbs either by popular media for having with it themselves or a relative that lives there. So you talk about a shift. Tell us about the old normal and tell us about the new normal. Guest you know whats really funny is everywhere he went Everyone Wants to talk about this topic. I would go to cocktail parties and everybody is interested in the topic. Whether or not you live in the suppers. You either grow up there you know somebody at it and if you didnt grow there maybe youre curious about it or you have the opposite experience. Everyone is super interested in this and so one of the things i encountered was a lot of people that grew up in the 70s or earlier had this tremendous amount of nostalgia for the suburbs they grew up in. One of the things that document in the book is how we the suburbs of yesterday look nothing like the suburbs of today. Soundings and policy changes mass production being invented and taking over in the 1950s but if you think about some of the older suburbs a lot of the suburbs in the northeast or in other places around the country i would say before world war ii date grew up, they tended to grow up around streetcar stations. Those were built before the car was broke. There was a nucleus where the Public Transportation dropped off. There was no car at the time period there was really no walking distance to that town. There was a new type of sounding that came to be and i go to it in great detail in the book but what i did was broke everything apart and mandated that all the stores are going to be here and all the houses are going to be over here. The industry is going to be over here and even the medical places are going to be over here. Its sort of spread everything apart and by that time the car is how everyone is getting around everywhere so instead of this lifestyle where you had to go from one place to the other to the other. That is sort of modernday suburbia but as modern suburbia involves the distances between those points grew longer and farther and farther apart. So many years between then and now but during that interim we kind of over expanded far apart from the cities, far apart from each other and very far away from the cities and the traditional definition of the suburb is a Residential Community outside of the suburbs. Many suburbs are hours away from the city so they overshot their mandate. Host would it be fair to take a Community Like new york city where we are for example. Yonkers or new rochelle or westchester and then you go farther and farther to the outer suburbs which could be as far as bucks county pennsylvania are way up states of this trend has made us move further out into the excerpts. Is that they are . Guest absolutely and that was happening anyway but then you have this housing boom that we went through starting in the 90s and the 2000 peaking in 2005 in 2006. I put the whole operation on steroids so what was considered excerpts 15 years ago are now considered intentional suburbs because during the housing boom you had people in new york city who would commit to commute to the poconos. This mania, there was this mania around getting the biggest house you could buy in the nicest house to get by in the living their Living Standards were so liberal that you could get a loan for almost nothing. We all remember that in because of the builtin layering of the American Dream playing such a role in peoples lives people wanted that. They wanted to get these loans that they wanted to put themselves in the best house that they could and oftentimes that meant going the furthest out. The further away you go the bigger house you can get. Its plain economics. There was a coinage for that behavior and it was called drive until you qualify. You cant get the house in the suburbs that is big and beautiful but the one way you can really get that. The community is the commute is not so bad and it will be fine but commuting is a whole other topic i spend a lot of time on in the book. 3. 5 Million People in the country commute 90 minutes each way a day. Host hugh quote an expert who has this fascinating statement and he says this the sprawl demon is dead. Tell us what you found about this whole sprawl phenomenon. Guest its funny there are two camps of thought when it comes to sprawl and is it totally dead or just sort of quieted down because of the housing bust and is it really going to come back when the market comes back to ask the Housing Market is starting to come back. Those who say its dead say this was a failed social experiment. This did not work. Many are totally legitimate. When you look at demographic plants and the changing a tour of the American Family there is really a case to be made for the next build the next time expand its going to look a lot different. This particular source who said the sprawl demon is dead. Hes a former Civil Engineer in minnesota and he spent many years basically building sprawl. He put in place infrastructure that wired sewers and pipes and everything to suburbia. It costs a lot of money and costs a lot of resources to build suburbia and his major point is that the suburbs are financially unproductive. He thinks that they are basically a ponzi scheme because it costs so much money to lay those pipes and build that infrastructure that the tax revenue that you get from low density arrangement of singlefamily houses is not going to come close to paying for all that. Grants to fund the initial project of building the pipes which is hundreds of millions of dollars and the only way to fund that growth is to get more tax revenue coming in. That is his take on things and he really thinks we need to build communities that are financially productive. There is a financial angle to how the suburbs are built in addition to the angle psychointo that support the argument as to why they are not building in the smartest way. Host one of the elements i love about this book is its very careful and its very thorough. You describe suburbs as they once were. You describe the phenomenon out how people move further out into these masterplanned subdivisions and you are saying thats really dead and now we are moving towards a trend of urban i suburbs. Tell us what that means and now take us through the trends that transcend demographic phenomenon that explain why this is happening to us. Guest its funny looking at the topic when you think the suburbs are dying, its absolutely true. But the places that are going to do well this doesnt necessarily mean that everyone is going to rush to a skyscraper in new york city. Thats ludicrous in itself because a lot of people dont want to live that way either. There are a lot of people in this country that people say over my dead body in my going to live in the city but everybody 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. That is what is driving a lot of this to one of the things you are seeing is builders and developers and planners are sort of falling all over themselves to build these urban places. I hold this up as a paradigm in the book. Many of them are built on the old kind of suburbs that we have forgotten about. Host what are those . Guest of the urban burbs click summer of them are the older servers that have remained untouched. Places like montclair new jersey is a great example. It has the classic tom village. Those suburbs are going going to do okay some of them are literally highways is in the middle of suburbia with a couple of stores down below so people can walk to a restaurant and everything. Some of them are brandnew communities built on these older traditional planning principles so they are meant to replicate the prewar suburbs. In the book i spend a lot of time but one community which is in gaithersburg maryland and this community is a new urban community. New urbanists are a subset of the urban burbs universe and they have been lobbying this for years. Now they are seeing their moment in the sun because if they builders are trying to do what they have been doing all along. This community is really fascinating. Its far away, about 30 miles from d. C. And you drive and drive to get there and it drives to this conventional suburban strip mall place and then you make a left turn and you enter into this community. All of a sudden its these narrow streets. Its a little town center with sidewalk cafes and the houses are these federal townhouses adjacent to each other right near town and they get further apart as you go away. Its almost like an Older Community cut and pasted into the middle of suburbia. It almost feels like georgetown or park slope which is structured in the middle of suburbia. Klesko have actually been there. My parents and my brother lived near gaithersburg so i know this community with a walk ability in the town center, with the proximity of mixandmatch housing. Its fascinating the way you describe it and i mention that because a lot of your research is data and census driven but you also have these poignant storytelling of people you have met. For me one of the most memorable moments is when you speak of a woman who thought she wanted the American Dream in the suburbs but she moved there and she felt isolated. Tell us about the people you met in the stories you found and what were some of the most memorable moments of people you met . Guest guest koshy was one fo. This was a woman who had three Young Children at the time period she and her husband, they wanted the whole American Dream. They never lived in suburbia and she thought i want to do this. This was outside of boston. She thought if we are going to spend this much money with the housing thumb 300,000 for a house we wanted to be a really nice house so they went a little further. They started looking at the closer suburbs in boston and they were too expensive. They went further out and ended up getting a huge colonial enabler enabler thing subdivision and they thought it would be great. They were really disappointed with the quality of their lifestyle. A lot of things about the way they lived their days were really different than what they expected. I think one of the biggest things for this woman diana rosen was her name, she didnt realize how much time she would be spending in her car. I found this over and over again. Meet many people that move to the suburbs think they are going to have this life like they had in the suburbs where you open the door and the kids run out for three hours after school. They all play together and you call them in for dinner. That doesnt happen anymore. It does in some places but if it does its rare. We are in this played a culture where everything is scheduled. This isnt necessarily just the suburbs. This happens with parents in new york city who do this also. Its more of a lifestyle. Dual parent and working households. This mother of three found herself from 3 00 p. M. To 6 00 p. M. Every day 40 to 50 miles driving all the kids to soccer practice and hebrew lessons and this or that and this is what they had to do. It was an inspiration for one of my chapters in the book called the mike cars the way to gymnastics. That is what she did every day. She also founded isolating. She didnt like that the community was very, it was not the first in peoples ages. Everyone was between the ages of 30 and 50 and raising Young Children. A lot of people will say when you live in the city or an older suburb maybe and one thing the new urbanists lobby for us this diversity of age group being a mixture of people. You want older and younger people and everything in between. It makes for a more vibrant community rather than everyone having a single purpose which is raising their kids. There is nothing wrong with that but a lot of people seek more of a mixture. Host with this age homogenate he and these long commutes and with this ponzi scheme of the financial on 10 ability but other complaints do you find about the suburbs and talking to people around the country . Guest of the commute is a big part of it. One the most interesting stories that i found was i talked to a woman who is is an Orange County in california and she and her husband moved, they wanted to move to the inland empire to a town. An empire is where a lot of the housing expansion happened during the housing boom. They intended to find work there but they couldnt because the job market was not good. They said we will keep our jobs in Orange County and commute every day no big deal. They did that and it was this really terrible commute. They would have to set their alarms for 4 00 in the morning leave at that for 15 and only at that time at the commute be one hour and 15 minutes. Any other time it would be two or three hours so they would drive from temecula to Orange County and they would leave so early that they would park the car in the mcdonalds parking lot recline their seats and set their cell phone alarms to take a nap. On the day she had to come in by herself she would want to sleep in a mcdonalds parking lot by herself so she would go to her classroom. She was asleep under her desk and she said to me at felt like george a. Reference to the seinfeld she would bring her flat iron and get ready for school in the bathroom. Then the commute home was even worse. She would spend two or three hours in her car and get home plop down on her bed. They were different because they were trying to get to 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 not good so they ultimately did find jobs and to make you a bit in the interim she left her very good teaching job for which she had gone to graduate school and she started tutoring for eight to 10 an hour. That was better than doing this for any longer. Host that is sort of the dark side or the downturn of the suburbs and in this book you declare the end of the suburbs but you say personally you are not against the suburbs. You have nothing against the suburbs. Tell us about the defensiveness and the flavor of the suburbs that you encountered. Guests go its funny, i am not some sort of antisuburb person who thinks that Everyone Needs to live in new york city that is not why i did this book. I understand why people like the suburbs. I get fed up with a lot of daily life in new york city. I was more drawn to the trends which are so undeniable and the fact that theres a shift in the way suburban america is received by the people who live there. Its too big of a story to ignore. I had a wonderful experience growing up in suburbia. I grew up in a town in pennsylvania. Its an adorable town. It was prewar. It had all of these greens that you dont see any more. It has a trolley and a test of courthouse. It has a lively main street and all these events. We could walk to the town for my neighborhood for a great annual fourth of july event. It was really idyllic. These are the people are nostalgic for and that doesnt jibe with the way people live today. One piece of data that i came across is the average age in this country is so its pretty new. You think about older communities being so charming that most people dont live in those communities. People like new houses that those houses are built differently and those communities look and feel differently than the ones that many people grew up in. 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 people want to live there but im telling you its changing. People are perceiving the changes but before we talk about the changes i wanted to ask you do you watch housing television . Guest sometimes. Plus though i dont own a television but when ice pick away to my sisters house i will watch all these shows. Im just curious what you think is behind this booming popularity of these shows flip my house, turn my house, find my house . Guest i think this was my house is a product of the housing bubble and the housing mania where everyone thought they could become a millionaire from buying a house and flipping it. That time is over. When the Housing Market comes back its not going to come back like that. Tha