I’ve been living in a suburb in America for the past 12 months, and there’s much to be said for it. Compared to anywhere I lived in the UK (London but also outside) there is an empowering sense of space allied with a reassuring comfortableness. By car it is very quick and easy to get anywhere I want to thanks to a road system in which small cul-de-sacs feed directly onto trunk roads which in turn link into major arterials. I don’t think anything of a 45-minute journey for breakfast on a weekend, or of driving five miles to the mall to buy a newspaper. At the very least, it is a good place to get to other places from. Conversely, most houses where I live have basements in which you will find bars, pool tables, home cinemas and music studios. You don’t need to go out to avoid going stir crazy.
And yet I cannot but help feel isolated. Unless I get in my car I am effectively restricted to a few identikit roads and a circular woodland path. If I take a walk from my house to the nearest shop it is almost two miles, for much of which there is no pavement, and the only people I will see will be in cars or jogging. All human interaction has to be planned. Kids can play outside, but they can’t go anywhere. From my window, I can see lots of trees and lots of cars, but little life.
The suburban house has always been a key part of the American dream. Since before the second world war, those Americans who could afford it left the dirt and the glamour of the city in search of the picket fence idyll. However, over the past few years the trend of suburbanisation has been reversed. The affluent have been buying homes in the very heart of cities from DC to San Francisco. The dream is still alive, but instead of tidy detached houses in leafy side streets with big drives and BBQs and basketball hoops, more people now aspire to live in communities where they can walk – or even cycle – to cafes, shops and bars, where they can bump into people they know without planning it weeks in advance, where they can just decide to go out and get up and go. The American dream used to be about having a load of kids hanging round the neighbours’ yards; now it’s about having one, maybe two, or maybe no children, and being somewhere accessible for museums and play dates and play barns.
There are unsurprisingly similarities in the UK. In the 1990s Leeds was the only major urban area that experienced any growth, but since the millennium all British cities have seen population increases. There are a number of reasons for this, including the reclaiming of city centres that were once no-go areas, an increasing number of graduates wanting – or needing – to stay nearer to home or where they went to university, and the higher birth rate of immigrant communities. But perhaps most importantly, just as the suburbs are no longer a core part of the American dream, aspirations in the UK have also changed. The post-baby boom generations don’t just delay getting married and having kids, they delay settling down full stop: concerts, festivals and wasted weekends are part of day-to-day life of people in their 30s and 40s, not just teenagers and students. And, while the suburbs are about security and family, cities are about creativity and decadence.
This shift of the affluent to cities has taken place alongside an exodus of the poor to the suburbs. In London the rise of the uber-wealthy living in the centre has been well documented: the global rich from Russia to Mumbai continue to adopt the UK capital as their home for the low taxes and quality lifestyles they can enjoy, while ever-escalating house prices – even during the recession – have ensured only the richest of natives can afford to live in zone one. Meanwhile changes in the UK welfare system, including the increased use of the private rented sector, and more recent cuts to housing benefit by the coalition, have also led to reduced poverty levels in central London alongside increased poverty rates in the suburbs. In Paris this process began in the 1970s when the banlieues (outskirts) became home to legions of poor and dispossessed and the central 20 arrondissements became a bastion for the rich and powerful.
This pattern has been repeated more recently in the US: according to a recent study from the Brookings Institute, the largest concentrations of American poor are neither in urban ghettoes nor isolated rural areas, but instead now reside in suburban wastelands. Between 2000 and 2010, the number of people living in poverty in the suburbs of major metropolitan areas increased by over 50 per cent. This is not the first time in US history that when those with money have chosen to pick up sticks and live elsewhere they have displaced those they found. Just shy of 130 years ago, at the culmination of the Indian wars, the Dawes Act was adopted by Congress and led to the forced purchase and parcelling up of native American lands. The tribes were coerced into signing land treaties, but it was not long after they had been forced to share their lands that the new European Americans began booting them out.
One likely impact of this trend is that it will be a good thing electorally for progressive parties: people who live in cities, where poor and rich, natives and immigrants, live cheek-by-jowl, are often more progressive in their thinking, and both Labour and the Democrats have always fared better in cities than outside. But this is not guaranteed: many people will always value security over freedom, and it is quite possible that there will be a rise in urban conservatism – that is, people who want to live in the city, but want to be surrounded by ‘their sort of person’, and feel safe from the harm that cities tend naturally to give rise to.
So what should be the view of a progressive party in relation to this trend of urbanisation of the rich and suburbanisation of the poor? Does it lead to greater tolerance and pluralism? Does it strengthen community, or harm it? Should government play a role in enabling people to live where they choose, or leave market forces to decide where workers need to live? And should government be active in ensuring those who live in cities now are not priced out over the coming decades and forced instead to move into dying suburbs?
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Jel McGill is a member of Progress
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