Saving Suburbia

By Tim Padgett/Chapel Hill

Everybody, at least once in his life, wants to live in a nice small town, right? One with sidewalks, neighbors waving from their porches and a bustling central square within biking distance of your house? Trouble is, despite the growth of telecommuting, most jobs are still in cities and suburbs. That's why the late-'80s experiment of building cute little instant towns in places like Seaside, Fla., never really caught on: many of the communities were too far from major job centers. So now developers are chasing a new fashion. Rather than offer an escape from the suburbs, they're struggling to reinvent them by building cute little instant towns near major cities.

They're finding eager pioneers among couples like Amanda and Michael Hale. The Hales think sprawl is too kind a word for conditions they rejected around Atlanta. They call it suburban blight, a strip-malled world void of rituals like walking to a store or enjoying an attractive building. "We want our four children to grow up in a community, not at a highway exit," says Amanda, 33, a nurse. Michael, 34, director of a charter school in Durham, N.C., says their yen to escape grew urgent this year as alienated kids shot up suburban schools in Colorado and Georgia.

This summer the Hale family moved to a 300-acre development in Chapel Hill, N.C., called Southern Village. Here, as in other neotraditional neighborhoods, residents accept smaller lots than they might find elsewhere, in return for shared amenities like parks and day care, and a livable scale to things. Conveniences like a dry cleaner and cafe are but a stroll away in the village center. Southern Village's public elementary school sports a columned red brick facade and gabled roof. The homes, built in a variety of styles, from Charleston single to Georgian town house, have porches reaching out to tree-lined sidewalks and narrower streets with slower traffic. It all invites suburbanites to get out of their Toyota Camrys and interact for a change.

If this sounds too much like Mayberry to be practical, think again. The environmental and cultural damage caused by sprawl has become an issue in the presidential campaign. And the idea behind Southern Village--traditional neighborhood development, or TND--could reshape the outskirts of cities from North Carolina to Oregon. "I've had to relearn everything we've forgotten since World War II," says D.R. Bryan, developer of Southern Village. "But I do want to start building communities for people instead of for cars."

Five years ago, few neotraditional neighborhoods existed in the U.S. Today more than 100 are up and running, with an additional 200 on the drawing board. The movement's journal, the New Urban News, says investment in them has nearly doubled, from $1.2 billion in 1997 to $2.1 billion last year. Moreover, local planning boards in sprawl-plagued areas like Miami's Dade County are creating zones dedicated solely to such development.

But because they run counter to many Americans' worship of wide-open living spaces, TNDs are stirring controversy. This summer a proposal for Miami's southwest suburbs, called Salamanca, is in a bitter fight to win government approval. The neo-Mediterranean plan was designed by two architectural gurus of neotraditional neighborhood development, the husband-wife team of Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk of Miami. It mixes town houses, schools, businesses and parks within walking distance of family homes. The aim is to reduce the constant car trips, wasteful land use, ugly strip malls and the bland homogeneity of ranch houses and office compounds that produce suburban blight in South Florida, where bumper stickers now read LEAVING MIAMI? PLEASE TAKE A DEVELOPER WITH YOU!

But Salamanca has met angry resistance from homeowners in nearby sprawl developments, who fear that its greater density will mean more congestion and declining property values. Dade County commissioners postponed their vote on the project until next month, even though they had already zoned the 160 acres specifically for TND.

Whatever the verdict, Duany insists that neotraditional neighborhoods have a strong future. "Americans are terribly pragmatic," he says. "This idea sells because conventional suburbia failed to deliver on its lifestyle promises." One sign of TND's viability: Salamanca is bankrolled by America's largest residential builder, Pulte Homes, which says that homeowners in its focus groups consistently endorse the development's design.

Suburbia's original allure was an escape from city problems such as crime and congestion. But, according to Pulte surveys, the main appeal of neotraditional neighborhoods is their renewed sense of community space. Unlike cul-de-sac subdivisions, Southern Village's streets try to create small-town connections that lead somewhere--like the hilltop village square, which has a church and will soon open public spots like a four-screen cinema, grocery and restaurant--essentials of any neotraditional neighborhood that residents say they're getting impatient to see Bryan complete. Each morning residents gather at the cafe to chat over bagels and eggs with owner Joe Storch. "But if I'm going to keep their loyalty," he says, tacking notices on a bulletin board, "I've got to be more loyal to the neighborhood than Starbucks."

The prospect of a tighter social fabric appeals to many parents who are trying to fathom recent suburban school shootings. Stunned residents of Littleton, Colo., and Conyers, Ga., say raising children may now take a little help from the rest of the village, be it a shopkeeper, a beat cop or Southern Village retirees, who tutor local kids. Kentlands, a neotraditional neighborhood in Gaithersburg, Md., has erected a youth center, cinema, CD store, pizza parlor and skating rink, giving kids alternatives to faraway malls and bedroom computer games. "I was worried that my kids wouldn't want to hang out so close to home like that," says resident Diane Dorney, 42, "until I noticed how often their friends from outside Kentlands keep coming here." Dorney's teens don't have to drive a car to get a life--important in a country where the number of suburban teen drivers killed in auto accidents is four times that of urban teens killed by guns.

But neotraditional neighborhoods still have to prove that they can deliver on their promises, especially since amenities like community pools can add more than 10% to the cost of homes. It's also tough to sell a $250,000 house on half the lot space available in sprawl developments. Neotraditional neighborhoods need to fill their housing before small retailers commit to moving in, which can spell a considerable lag time before that cozy wineshop arrives.

For now, though, the Hales are hopeful. And they have company. Developer Paul Estridge Jr. expected 200 prospects to attend the unveiling in June of Centennial, a New England-style TND near Indianapolis, Ind. But 2,000 showed up--ready to buy into the new small town of their dreams.