For generations, suburban development in the U.S. has largely followed the same simple formula, leading to virtually identical big box stores, drive-through restaurants, and McMansions across the country.
But that’s changing.
Outside Austin, Texas, a defunct shopping mall and its parking lots were turned into a dense neighborhood where people can navigate between offices, apartments, restaurants, parks, and educational spaces without a car.
Austin, Texas’s former Highland Mall was transformed into a walkable neighborhood anchored by a community college campus. (Image credits: BGK Architects (left), © Dror Baldinger, FAIA)
In Babylon, New York, a site containing a strip mall and parking lot was redeveloped to provide high-quality high-rise housing and amenities for residents of a poor community.
In an affluent suburb of Charlotte, North Carolina, a golf course was turned into a dense, walkable district complete with a park designed to reduce flood risk.
That’s all good news for the climate, because business-as-usual sprawl increases climate pollution and complicates efforts to adapt to extreme weather.
June Williamson, an architecture professor at the City College of New York, said projects like these are becoming so common that within a few decades, suburbia at large could look and function very differently.
“Over time, site by site, you’ll begin to see a pretty substantial transformation,” she said.
Business-as-usual suburban development is a climate problem
In the Charlotte suburb of Ballantyne, a golf course was replaced by a dense neighborhood and a park designed to reduce flood risk. (Image credits: Sarah Wesseler (left); courtesy of LandDesign)
The sheer scale of the American suburbs makes them an important focus for climate action. Car-centric suburbs account for the vast majority of the developed land in major American cities and, according to Williamson, house about 60% of the country’s residents.
“The United States is a suburban nation – has been for some time,” she said.
People living in these areas have higher carbon footprints than their city-center counterparts. Car dependency is partly to blame, as common suburban design features like cul-de-sacs, winding roads, and large parking lots lock in high rates of car use, helping make transportation the U.S.’s largest source of climate pollution.
And detached single-family houses – the only form of housing that’s legally permissible to build in many U.S. communities – require more energy to heat and cool than homes with shared walls, such as row houses and apartments.
These community designs also complicate efforts to adapt to climate change. On hot days, large paved surfaces like parking lots reflect heat instead of absorbing it, unlike natural surfaces like grass and soil. Paving also raises the risk of flooding by preventing rainwater from soaking into the ground.
What’s more, Williamson said, suburban developers have often built housing in floodplains, as well as on the fringes of wild areas, where fire risk can be higher. Both flooding and wildfires are getting more frequent and extreme because of climate change, increasing the danger to residents.
The rise of suburban retrofits
Williamson and Ellen Dunham-Jones, an architecture professor at Georgia Tech, have written several books about the growing wave of suburban development focused on existing sites, which they refer to as suburban retrofitting.
Created through a public-private partnership between the city of Austin and a real estate developer, Austin’s Mueller neighborhood replaced a defunct airport with a walkable community. (Image credit: Philip Jones)
Compared to developments that follow a standard template, these projects take a much more nuanced, customized approach, focusing on bringing specific benefits to their communities. Typically led by some combination of local governments and private-sector groups like property owners and developers, many of these projects are also supported, or even initiated, by local residents, as well as designers, nonprofits, and universities.
Collectively, these projects have adopted a more environmentally friendly approach than the suburban development template established in the wake of World War II, which relies heavily on cookie-cutter subdivisions and shopping centers fronted by large parking lots.
“When these suburbs were designed, almost nobody was using the word ‘sustainability’,” Dunham-Jones said.
But protecting the environment is often not the main driver for suburban retrofits. One common motive is raising public revenue. When developments like malls and office parks fail, they can leave a huge gap in their communities’ finances, prompting local governments to seek other uses for the sites.
“They desperately need the tax revenue,” Dunham-Jones explained.
Housing demand is also a factor.
“We’re in the biggest housing shortage in generations,” said Katharine Burgess, the vice president of programs and operations at Smart Growth America, a nonprofit focused on sustainable communities. “To accomplish some of the very ambitious housing goals that cities and regions have right now, we really need to look more broadly at opportunities for infill beyond just downtown-type sites.”
Infill refers to development that occurs within existing neighborhoods.
Reducing car dependency
High demand for communities where people can meet their daily needs without having to drive also plays a role. These projects can help offer the walkable lifestyles that Americans are hungry for, but that are available in only a tiny fraction of the country.
“People want alternatives,” said Williamson.
Another factor is the growing awareness that car dependency harms public health and reduces affordability.
The Pike District in Montgomery County, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, D.C., offers one example of an ambitious project aiming to reduce car dependency. Since 2010, the county government and local partners have been working to transform a four-mile-long suburban corridor into a walkable district combining residential buildings, offices, and commercial facilities. The project also provides residents, workers, and visitors access to trains, bus rapid transit service, and bike trails.
Increasingly ambitious projects
In the two decades that Dunham-Jones and Williamson have been studying suburban retrofits, ambitions for these projects have expanded in scope.
“Increasingly, communities are saying, ‘OK, while you’re reducing automobile dependency, what are you doing to improve public health, to support an aging population, especially in suburbia?’” Dunham-Jones said. “‘What are you doing to leverage social capital for equity? What are you doing to compete for jobs?’ And then the big one of climate change: ‘What are you doing to add water and energy resilience?’”
These challenges have complementary solutions. Creating denser developments with multifamily housing options close to common destinations like workplaces, schools, stores, and parks can help reduce car dependency, generate tax revenue, and support public health by enabling people to get more exercise walking and biking.
Thoughtful, community-centered project planning can support social equity and help people of all ages thrive, in part by reducing the need to own, maintain, and buy gas for expensive private cars that children and some older people can’t rely on to get around independently.
In Babylon, New York, a suburban site was redeveloped to provide high-quality housing and amenities for an economically disadvantaged population. The project team included local governments and a nonprofit sustainability group. (Image credit: Phillip Jones)
And the nation’s vast supply of existing suburban sites is a critical resource for helping communities meet their needs in the coming decades.
“We don’t have to tear down another tree, ever. We can accommodate our growth now,” Dunham-Jones said. “We have so much of this stuff.”
This article first appeared on Yale Climate Connections and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. ![""]("https://i0.wp.com/yaleclimateconnections.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/ycc-favicon.png?resize=100%2C100&ssl=1")
