(lively music)
[Announcer] The area below will within the next two years
be the 10th largest city in the state of Pennsylvania,
a busy community of 70,000 people
living in a city which was completely planned
before the first house was built.
Let's rewind for a second.
There may be no more iconic view of the suburbs
than this one of Levittown, Pennsylvania in 1958.
What once represented progress today represents
just about everything wrong with the suburbs.
The question is, "Can they be fixed?"
If we're gonna talk about the suburbs,
why not go straight to the source?
And the source in this case is Levittown.
There are actually three Levittowns,
and I'm in the one here in Pennsylvania.
I gotta say, I'm super excited to be here
because I've only read about Levittowns in books,
so it's really cool to walk around.
And if you do walk around, you'll notice that
it's actually just a pretty ordinary suburb,
which makes it great for talking
about the suburbs generally.
But Levittowns have a fascinating history,
so let's buckle up for story time for a second.
Levittown solved a major problem.
Not enough housing had been built
during the Great Depression and during World War II.
After the war, GIs got married
and wanted to move out of their parents' houses
and start a family.
They wanted the American dream:
a house, a green lawn, modern appliances,
and most importantly, a modern home that reflected
the social values at the time.
Prior to Levittowns, most of the families
that lived in American suburbs were wealthy,
but now even factory workers could afford
to buy their own home with a yard.
They could afford these new houses because Levitt & Sons
used an efficient assembly line technique
for building houses, something that hadn't been done
at this scale before.
The process had 27 steps that allowed a house
to be built within a day.
This is why so many Levitt houses are the same;
they prioritized low cost and efficiency
over a design and customization.
Each construction worker had a single task
they would complete on each house,
so they all became really good at one task.
At their peak, Levitt & Son's finished construction
of a new house every 16 minutes.
In their first Levittown on Long Island,
they built 17,447 single family houses.
At the time, it was the largest undertaking of its kind
by a single developer in the U.S.,
and the public was impressed by how fast
and efficient Levitt houses were built.
The land for Levittown, Pennsylvania, where I am,
was purchased in 1951 from broccoli and spinach farmers.
Construction began in 1952 and all of 17,311 homes
were completed in just six years.
All of these homes are one of six single family models
and different models were grouped in specific neighborhoods
which in turn sorted residents by income level.
Levittowns were also famously segregated by race.
William Levitt, president of Levitt & Sons,
proclaimed, "We can solve the housing problem
or we can solve the racial problem,
but we cannot combine the two."
In the standard lease for all
the first residents of Levittown,
Clause 25 stated that
"the tenant agrees not to permit the premises to be sued
or occupied by any person
other than members of the Caucasian race."
At first, this practice was legal
but even after it was deemed unconstitutional,
the Levitts would continue to reject black home buyers
again and again.
Eventually, the Meyers, a Black family,
bought a Levittown Pennsylvania house in 1957,
making history as the first black family
to move into a Levitt suburb.
Riots of hundreds of violent people ensued,
which caused months of harassment
and damage to the family's property.
Now, the overall land use mix was almost as homogenous
as the residents themselves.
Levitt & Sons set aside land for some community amenities
like a pool, shopping center, religious buildings,
schools, parks, and sports areas.
Levittown's biggest impact might be
its influence on subsequent suburbs,
which adopted the same mass-produced building techniques
and overall bland sameness.
Okay, so that's the story of Levittown,
and I'm gonna use Levittown as an example
in this video quite a lot, but let's get down to it.
What are the problems of the suburbs
that need to get fixed?
Well, here's a list.
First, they're low density.
This kind of space was seen as a good thing
back in the Levittown days and certainly before.
Prior to the car and the streetcar suburbs,
people had to live within walking distance to work,
resulting in overcrowded conditions.
The idea of a house with a yard and fresh air
sounded like paradise.
It's still the American dream for many today.
Second, they're single use homes only.
Most residential developers are just that:
residential developers, they specialize.
And adding shopping, coffee shops,
and offices to a neighborhood design
and then renting those spaces
or selling them is outside of their business model.
Much easier just to bulldoze a large area
and put up the same home over and over again
and market them all to a specific demographic
and income group.
Third, they're car oriented.
Again, this was not seen as a bad thing initially
and many don't consider it a bad thing now
but cars contribute to air pollution, road deaths,
obesity, and traffic.
The suburbs make it so you basically have
to own a car to live there,
which can exclude people who can't afford a car
or can't drive one due to disability.
Fourth, they tend to segregate people.
I already talked about this as it relates to Levittowns,
but the suburbs today are still segregated
particularly at the level of the neighborhood.
Finally, they're bland and cookie cutter.
Levittown laid out a model for suburban development
that relies on economies of scale
to produce low-cost housing at a profit.
It doesn't matter that the neighborhood is bland.
Now that we've talked about problems,
we can start talking about solutions.
That's the best part.
The nice thing is that there are policy solutions
to just about every problem I've mentioned
and a few of them are on display here in Levittown.
So let's get into it after the bike bell.
(bell dings)
I'm gonna give on-location Dave a break for a second
as I had a pretty bad cold back then
and it was very difficult for me to talk to camera-
so in-studio Dave is gonna take it from here.
And while I have you, I wanted to point out
that this video is all about fixing existing suburbs
and not so much about designing new ones,
though some of the same lessons may apply.
Okay, if we're going to increase density
in the existing suburbs, some building will need to occur.
The difference is that it'll be through
accessory dwelling unit construction,
suburban infill, and demolitions and replacements.
But before any of that can occur,
suburbs need to have the legal framework to allow it.
Luckily, new policies are being adopted
by cities and states that allow as many
as four to six units on suburban lots.
Now, this isn't happening everywhere,
but could be coming to a suburb near you.
This is a key aspect of zoning reform:
changing the local law to allow for more units.
Out of curiosity, what's the zoning like in Levittown?
Well, Levittown isn't a city itself
and spans multiple jurisdictions.
The largest is Bristol Township,
and most of Levittown is actually zoned R3.
That allows for rowhouses, duplexes,
and even small apartment buildings.
But when I visited, I didn't notice any of that at all.
The zoning code says that the maximum allowable density
is five dwelling units per acre, or five homes per acre.
That means that if you had
an apartment building of five units,
it would've to be on a one acre lot.
Not super practical.
The devil is in the details when it comes to zoning.
This type of housing, often called missing middle housing,
would be great to add to a place like Levittown.
They can be more affordable than what's out there today
and provide additional income to the property owner.
Adding density like this can add challenges
and one of the most cited is parking.
Where will all of these new residents park?
Will someone adding an ADU
have to add a parking space as well?
That adds to the overall cost of housing.
Most neighborhoods like Levittown still have
excess capacity for cars on the street
and likely in driveways as well.
Parking could become scarce
if every house became a fourplex, but that's unlikely.
And if that were the case,
the neighborhood's overall density would allow
for mass transit to be a more viable alternative
for all of those new residents.
Residential density is great, but what about other uses?
The suburbs are all about the segregation of land uses.
Housing here, businesses there, industry way over there.
This is a problem because it increases
traffic and emissions.
It's also just really time-consuming
to hop in your car and drive 20 minutes
to get your regular Pokemon booster pack as we all do.
What if those cards were at the corner store
or right below you?
Much more convenient.
The same is true for neighborhood friendly businesses,
like coffee shops, ice cream parlors, hair salons,
and any other business with a local draw
that doesn't require a target-sized footprint.
I have a whole video on this particular topic
you can check out if you wanna learn more
about corner stores in the suburbs.
Mixed use can work great in the other direction too.
Cities can encourage new housing development to be added
to existing commercial zones in the suburbs.
And here in California, the state has stepped up
to ensure that local governments can do exactly this.
Through Senate Bill 6 and Assembly Bill 2011,
California now allows developers to build housing
on commercially zoned land by right
with an expedited permit process if a certain percentage
of the residential units are affordable housing.
Local governments don't want this as they get more
tax revenue from commercial uses than residential uses,
so they'd rather a commercial use just sit vacant
than filling it with residential or mixed uses.
Previously existing malls and strip malls
can also be retrofitted to better fit current needs
by converting stores into housing,
promoting infill development and parking spaces,
or reusing the land for entirely new developments.
Tiny Tim Plaza in Santa Ana, California did just this.
Previously, it was a small strip mall
with a parking lot and gas station.
But the new landowner got the property rezoned
and replaced the gas station
with 51 affordable housing units,
and refreshed the existing storefronts
to ensure ongoing business health for the community.
The site is within walking distance to two planned stations
of the Orange County Light rail line
set to open next year.
So the residents of those apartments will have
even more options for using public transit instead of cars.
It's unfortunate that Levittown never received
this mixed-use makeover.
In 1955, Levitt & Sons built Shop-O-Rama,
an L-shaped mall located at the edge of town
to attract shoppers from nearby residential areas.
At the time, it was the largest pedestrian mall
east of Mississippi.
While impressive, the mall turned out to be
a bit illogical for its desired use.
It filled the desire to stroll while shopping,
something typical of denser mixed use areas.
And yet, the pedestrian mall was located
in the middle of an enormous 6,000 car parking lot;
it was mainly accessible by a 5 to 10 minute drive.
While Shop-O-Rama was initially loved
by Levittown residents, it fell into a state
of disuse and disrepair by the early 2000s,
and it was demolished to make way
for a typical looking power center in 2003.
The large parking lot still remains,
and this newer commercial center is now
even less walkable than its predecessor.
No mixed-use here.
Suburbs are car oriented.
They're a seemingly endless expanse of wide fast roads
lined with fast food restaurants,
big box stores, and strip malls.
If you turn off those roads,
you're in a labyrinth of loops and cul-de-sacs
ironically designed to minimize the noise
and safety impact of cars on the houses along them.
Getting anywhere in the suburbs on foot or on a bike
can be inconvenient at best and dangerous at worst.
The good news is that all those roads,
roads outside of homeowners associations
and outside of state highway-use,
are owned and operated by local governments.
Reconfiguring roadways to accommodate pedestrians,
cyclists, and mass transit
takes funding and political will.
That's a challenge, but it doesn't rely
on the private market like building new ADUs.
How could you redesign suburban streets
to be better for all modes?
Let's start with the worst offenders: the arterial streets.
They divide neighborhoods and move traffic at high speeds.
They're also quite wide, which could be an asset.
Three lanes in each direction
could become two lanes in each direction for cars
with a dedicated bus lane
or a light rail line running in the center.
They could become multi-way boulevards
that allow for local traffic in the edge
and high-speed traffic in the center.
I have yet another video on that topic
if you're curious about those.
The city could also reconfigure the pedestrian space
or add pedestrian space to create
two-way shared-use paths along the road,
giving active transportation users
a high-quality dedicated space to travel.
These only work when intersections
along the route are reconfigured for safe crossings
and ideally when driveways are consolidated
to reduce conflict points with vehicles.
New transportation corridors could also be constructed
along abandoned rail lines
through rails to trails initiatives.
And some wildlife corridors, like along creeks,
could become linear parks that support a shared youth path.
The goal is to reconnect those separate uses.
So someone could say ride a bike to Target
to get those Pokemon cards until a shop opens
down the block.
And if a suburban community takes the other advice
talked about in this video and becomes more dense,
then transit could be an option in the suburbs,
particularly transit-oriented development.
Earlier, I mentioned how racism profoundly affected
who was initially allowed to be a homeowner in Levittown.
While the Levitts couldn't control
who the home would be sold to next,
their prejudice carried through to subsequent home-sellers
in the community as a whole.
In 1970, less than 2% of Levittown's population were Black,
even though only 20 miles away in Philadelphia,
the population was around 18% Black.
By 2000, very little had changed.
Only 2.4% of Levittown's residents were black.
1% were Asian, 2.2 were Latino, and 1.2 were mixed-race,
and that means the remaining 94.4% were white.
Clearly, segregation is not gonna be solved
in a YouTube video, and it gets more complicated
when you consider that residents
are also segregated by income.
As developers build subdivisions with the same house
over and over again at the same price point,
and the next neighborhood over built another unit
with a different price point over and over again.
So what then can be done
to dismantle suburban segregation?
Since the introduction of Levittown style suburbs,
several US laws of help reduce racism in home sales.
The 1968 Fair Housing Act prohibited discrimination
about the sale, rental and financing of residences
based on race, religion, national origin, sex,
and, as later amended, handicapped and family status.
This act legally ended the types
of discriminatory practices used by the Levitts.
But many institutionalized barriers still exist,
so the playing field isn't quite level yet.
Luckily, the suburbs are becoming
increasingly more diverse anyway.
Today, over half of black families in America
live in the suburbs.
Enforcement of the Fair Housing Act is spotty, though,
so discrimination still occurs.
Mixing income in the suburbs can be just as difficult,
particularly with HOA's limiting change
in established neighborhoods.
Luckily, laws allowing ADUs, for example,
can apply to those communities.
ADUs are typically more affordable
than the houses they're next to,
which adds some element of income diversity.
Now, one thing Levittown and many suburbs don't have
is visual diversity;
they have that cookie cutter look.
Now, I know we just talked about segregation,
which is a real serious topic,
and visual diversity is not nearly as important
but people call the suburbs boring and soulless
and I think there's something to that.
We as humans like to look
at different and interesting things.
That's part of what makes cities so great and exciting.
So how can we add visual diversity
to a place where the same house has been repeated
over and over again?
Well, it's called the passage of time.
Newly planted trees mature
into the leafy trees you see today
which can make it a lot harder to tell
that the houses are all similar models.
The houses themselves change too.
In Levittown, the original designs were pretty efficient,
meaning small, and many homeowners built additions.
They also painted their houses different colors
landscape their lawns differently, and made other changes.
It's not a miracle cure, Levittown is still kind of boring,
but you don't have the uniformity
you see in the old news reels.
This only occurred because there was
no rule restricting such change.
In communities with powerful homeowners associations,
this kind of change may not be possible.
Now, no homeowner association is powerful enough
to stop trees from growing,
but they can absolutely enforce cookie cutter sameness
for the houses and landscaping.
Now obviously, some people like the sameness,
but I think locking a place in like that
robs it of what makes a city so great;
the ability to grow and change
and reinvent itself over time.
Are suburbs a lost cause?
I don't think so, but it's gonna take a long time
to make them more diverse, dense,
sustainable, and interesting.
Obviously, building great places initially is a lot better
than trying to fix existing places,
which is why you're probably gonna love my next video
all about how we can build European style cities
here in the United States;
you know, the kind with narrow streets,
charming buildings, and no cars.
It might seem impossible,
but I look at examples that exist right now.
You have to wait a few weeks to see that on YouTube,
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