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LEIGH GALLAGHER: Thank you for having us.
This is really exciting.
Thanks to Jacob and to Google.
It's great to be here.
I run our "best companies to work for" list, among many
other things, at Fortune.
And you guys are always a stalwart, if not the winner.
So it's great to be here and see it all in action.
So when people ask me-- when I tell people I'm writing this
book, or when I was writing the book, and I would say, oh,
I'm writing a book about the end of the suburbs--
I have a section in the book, actually, where I talk a lot
about this, because everybody has some kind of emotional
connection to this topic and this argument.
The argument's very clear when I tell them what the book is
called, "The End of the Suburbs."
And so everyone's--
I got a lot of high fives, good for you.
That's awesome.
That's great.
I got a lot of, I live in the suburbs.
I hate it there.
I got a lot of, I live in the suburbs but
I have to be there.
Without kind of asking for this reaction, I got a
tremendous amount of people's pent up
issues about the suburbs.
And I'm not anti-suburb.
I wrote this book for a number of reasons, not because I
think that the suburbs are bad and evil, and I'm a
condo-dwelling, espresso-drinking urbanist.
JESSI HEMPEL: But you are.
LEIGH GALLAGHER: It's not technically a condo.
But I was shocked at the response I got while I was
reporting this book.
And towards the end--
I say this in the book-- towards the end of the
process, I would be out at cocktail parties or wherever
and small talk-- this project would come up.
And in addition to people's opinions about it, people had
lots of questions about it.
And people wanted to engage about it.
And people wanted to talk about it.
And as I approached my deadline, I stopped bringing
it up on purpose, because I knew that if I brought it up,
it would mean I would be in conversation for another 45
minutes when I really had to get home and finish the book.
So it struck a chord.
It struck kind of a lightning rod.
But not a negative one.
I was telling Jessi in the car over, I've gotten a lot less
hate mail than I thought I would.
JESSI HEMPEL: So we're going to get to
the hate mail question.
Let's back up.
I mean, I don't want to presume that we understand the
thesis from the title of your book.
LEIGH GALLAGHER: Sure, yes.
JESSI HEMPEL: What are you trying to
say about the suburbs?
LEIGH GALLAGHER: Well, the thesis of the book is a little
bit more nuanced than the title.
What happened was I started observing--
there was the very sort of whiffs of census data had come
out that sort of had the framework of a very big story
that I thought wasn't being told.
And the gist of the thesis is basically that we are, as an
American people, really tired of the suburban lifestyle for
a number of reasons.
And the suburban lifestyle is actually how most people in
this country live.
That's starting to change, but in terms of percentage, number
of homes, number of people, we are a suburban country.
So I thought, if that's true that our sort of love affair
with the American suburbs is peaking, that is a
very, very big deal.
And that's worth exploring.
So then I set out in exploring it.
So the reasons we're tiring from it are numerous.
And they're complicated.
And it's not because of the financial crisis.
It's because of--
or the housing crisis.
It's because of a number of other longer-term forces.
But the thesis is that people are tiring what has been held
up as this pillar of the iconic American dream.
The thesis is not that everyone's going to live in a
skyscraper in New York City.
That's impractical.
That's not the way most people in this country want to live.
So the thesis is more one of kind of urbanism everywhere.
People want to live in a place where they can walk to get a
cup of coffee.
That's basically the thesis.
JESSI HEMPEL: So we understand that you're addressing a bunch
of structural issues.
To really understand the shift, let's go back to the
idea of what a suburb was supposed to be
in the first place.
As a child of the '70s and '80s, I thought until I was an
adult that suburbs were the de facto way that people lived.
But they're actually fairly recent, right?
LEIGH GALLAGHER: Yeah, they really--
our modern suburbs are the product of a series of
policies and a sort of particular perfect storm of
where we were as a country right after World War II.
So I spend a lot of time in the book talking about the
history of how the suburbs came to be.
And it's really fascinating.
And it just very much mirrors where we were as a country.
So there were suburbs--
I actually go back to Mesopotamia in the beginning
of the book, but don't let that sway you.
We had suburbs--
our first real suburbs were these sort pre-war, in the
1800s, villages that sprouted up kind of organically around
train stations.
Our housing pattern is always arranged around our
transportation, because you have to be able to get around.
So when the only way to get around was by rail or by
street car, and then on your own two feet, towns were
designed a lot differently.
They were--
here was the rail station.
And the towns kind of came up organically around traditional
urban planning design, which was a grid pattern, which had
been that from the days going back into antiquity.
And the densest area was right around the station.
And that's where the villages shops set up shop--
the shops set up, because that was the easiest place for
people to get off the train and do their errands
and then walk home.
And so as a result, these towns had a very organic feel.
And it's a very pleasant feel.
These are towns that we see now in a lot of the suburbs
around New York City that are older--
have that kind of design.
They're all over the country.
But it really has more to do with age than anything else,
because they were built around people and
people's day-to-day needs.
And then--
JESSI HEMPEL: Well, so right there, you said they do their
errands and then they walk home.
It seems like a lot changed when walking
was replaced by driving.
LEIGH GALLAGHER: Yeah.
That's what kind of blew up the entire model and led to
something else.
And that happened after-- well, a number of things.
The car was invented in the early 1900's.
But it didn't really take off, and didn't really catch hold
with the middle class, until right after--
well, I don't know-- the '30s, the '40s.
But the whole explosion happened after World War II,
when we had all these returning GIs coming back from
the war, millions of them.
We had a housing shortage, which is hard to even imagine
now, because we have the exact opposite problem now.
But after World War II, we had 16 million GIs coming home and
nowhere to put them.
People were living with their parents, living in dining
rooms-- people were living all over the place.
So we had this housing problem.
And at the same time, the car had just taken off.
There were federal policies that had put in place the
Federal Highway Act, which lay the groundwork for 41,000
miles of paved roads for us to get to and from these towns.
We were sort of--
there was this wonder of mass production in the home
building industry and everywhere.
So the housing companies had just been able to perfect the
technique of mass producing single-family homes.
And the FHA had been created to fund long-term mortgages
and make home ownership a reality for everybody.
So all these things kind of combusted together and they
just led to this explosion in a different kind of
development, which was the cutting and pasting of these
much more modern subdivisions and suburban communities all
across the country.
And they have a very different design.
The streets are wider.
They're loopy.
It's like cul-de-sacs that feed into other connector
roads that feed into arterial roads.
There's a very specific blueprint
for the modern suburbs.
And that's what worked.
They thought this was the future and then everyone just
seized on it.
And that's why a lot of the towns that are a byproduct of
that era tend to look similar.
JESSI HEMPEL: So golden age for the suburb, like if you
could go back in time to a specific year and it was the
thing, what year would it be?
LEIGH GALLAGHER: People are obsessed with--
oh, gosh.
That's a really good question.
I would say--
I don't know, 1884.
The late 1800s.
JESSI HEMPEL: OK, that's the old suburbs.
I'm talking like Don Draper time.
LEIGH GALLAGHER: 19--
I have to look.
I have a couple stats in the book that--
there was a house that was built in like three hours.
I mean, this was really--
the machine was cranking on all cylinders.
And it was--
JESSI HEMPEL: I don't think any of us would want to live
in that house.
LEIGH GALLAGHER: No.
Although, we did it again during the housing boom.
Those houses were built pretty quickly too.
But it was probably the mid-1950s.
Levittown, the iconic suburb on Long Island, was built-- it
opened in 1946 or '47.
And that was sort of the first of these modern
subdivision-style, mass-produced suburbs.
That was the beginning of the modern suburban area.
And then from then on, I mean, that's still what we have.
And it worked very, very well.
I mean, look at all of us here who grew up in the suburbs.
This was the American way of life-- the '50s,
the '60s, the '70s--
I would say it started to change in the '80s, when we
just sort of jumped the shark a little bit in terms of the
development of the suburbs.
And we saw the beginning of real suburban sprawl, where
towns sort of ceased having a center and it was all sort of
about the strip mall and the office complex and the
commercial center.
And then the houses were somewhere different and very,
very far away from all that stuff.
JESSI HEMPEL: One thing you talk about in your book is
social isolation.
And it strikes me that that hasn't actually changed.
So I'm curious, what has changed around that over time?
I mean, it had to be true that the experience of living in
the suburbs in the '60s was fairly isolating, no?
LEIGH GALLAGHER: You know, yes and no.
It's funny, I mean, I think in the '60s the towns were--
the scale was still a little smaller.
There were still centers to a lot of these towns.
And it was this sort of happy "Wonder Years" era where
everyone had lots and lots of children.
And so there were more people in the communities.
And they did have a bit of a livelier feel.
But even back then--
I traced--
I spent a lot of time, this was really fun just looking--
when you're a writer, you just look for any
rabbit hole to go down.
And you're kind of procrastinating.
So I spent a lot of time going and looking at old YouTube
videos of "The Wonder Years" or all the pop culture
references to the suburbs in our culture, because they're
everywhere.
And one of the interesting things I found was that it's
kind of common now to take potshots at suburbia.
If you look at "Weeds" or "American Beauty" or
"Desperate Housewives" or "Suburgatory," all these kind
of things that poke fun at--
whether it's the cookie cutter nature or the dark underbelly,
that it looks so picture perfect
but people have issues.
That was also happening in the '50s.
I mean, there was this book called "The Crack in the
Picture Window." It was actually the basis for the
movie "Revolutionary Road" much later.
But it was sort of a very dark look at suburbia.
And then you had, even, "Blue Velvet"--
very, very dark look at it.
And then even this famous song-- the most famous song
about the suburbs, probably--
the song "Little Boxes," which was used as the theme song for
"Weeds" in an amazing way.
And with all these amazing covers.
JESSI HEMPEL: Everybody familiar with it?
LEIGH GALLAGHER: I wish we had audio here.
JESSI HEMPEL: Anybody want to sing it for us?
No volunteers.
LEIGH GALLAGHER: It's great.
It's a great song.
The original song is great.
But it was in 19--
was it '62--
very early on that this song came out that was just
completely pointing out how terrible the suburbs were.
And how everyone looks all the same and everyone went to the
same colleges.
And this is all--
it just was really, really dark.
And so very early on, people were pointing out that this
might not be the best way for our housing
landscape to be arranged.
JESSI HEMPEL: And of course, since then suburbs have become
exurbs and they've sprawled further out.
And gas prices have gone up.
So talk to us a little bit about the relationship between
the suburb and the car.
LEIGH GALLAGHER: Sure.
I have a whole chapter in the book about the suburb and the
car, because that's where the whole experiment
kind of went wrong.
I mean, I don't want to be such a suburb hater.
But that's really-- what a lot of people's problems with the
suburbs, and why people are leaving, relates to problems
they have with the suburbs.
And almost all of those problems relate to the suburbs
being designed around the car.
So there wouldn't be one without the other.
This was this magical idea that we were all going to
drive to these communities and use the car to get around and
everything.
But what that means is that people don't really walk in a
lot of suburbs.
I talked to a doctor who has spent a lot of time focusing
on-- he's a former director of the CDC who's now really,
really focused on this issue of our built environment.
That's the phrase people use to talk about your everyday--
the way our landscape is built--
and its impact on public health.
So he estimates that New Yorkers--
I put this in the book.
I don't want to come off like a *** New Yorker, but--
JESSI HEMPEL: She's not a *** New Yorker.
LEIGH GALLAGHER: But New Yorkers weigh on average six
or seven pounds less than the average suburban American
precisely because we have to walk everywhere.
And New York, I think, is a very extreme example.
Where we walk here--
walking even one city block in New York City is more than
most people in this country walk in a given day.
And that's not an exaggeration.
I mean, it's like, if you've ever had friends come out of
town who live in LA or anywhere else and they--
this is for women-- but they pack their high heels and then
you go out.
And you lose them after like a half a block, because they're
like, what are we doing?
I mean, it's just--
People don't walk in the rest of the country.
And that's largely because of the way our residential
environment is designed.
And so there's a difference between living in a
community--
I read a lot about the suburb I grew up in,
which is an old suburb.
It has a really adorable downtown.
There's a trolley.
There's a courthouse.
There's a Main Street.
It's very-- it's kind of the ideal.
It's what a lot of people want to move to, and what a lot of
communities now want to be.
But when you live near a community like that, you don't
have to live where you can walk to it.
It's one thing--
you drive a mile to that community.
And then you get out and you have a pleasing place to walk.
But a lot of people live 10 or 15 miles from
any place like that.
And 10 or 15 miles from a place to even
buy a gallon of milk.
So that's just--
you're in your car all the time.
Atlanta's like this.
Thanks to the housing boom of the 2000s, every state has--
every urban center has a place like this, because the
development pushed so out into the fringe.
And so a lot of people are living where they are
commuting up to 70 miles one way, where they're--
JESSI HEMPEL: And you mentioned in the book-- and I
thought this was funny-- that everybody always
underestimates their commute.
Like, if I asked you--
I don't know, what's your commute to work?
Yeah, yours.
10 minutes.
OK, you probably have an exact count on that.
The close nature.
Some suburban in the audience, raise your hand.
Let's get one.
OK, how do you get to work?
AUDIENCE: I bike, I take the train, and I walk.
JESSI HEMPEL: How long do you think it takes you?
AUDIENCE: An hour and twenty minutes.
JESSI HEMPEL: An hour and 20 minutes every day, both ways.
Each way.
And so what Leigh--what you also discovered in your book
is that when you're estimating that time-- and I'm assuming
that at Google, giving your prowess in technology it's an
exact estimate.
But the rest of the world is sometimes a little bit off and
always underestimates that.
It always takes more time.
LEIGH GALLAGHER: Yeah, they do.
I mean, according to the census, the average commute
right now, I think, is 26 minutes one way.
That's a big average, so you're
factoring in lots of things.
But it's really hard to get the exact data, because people
do under report it.
And that's because they don't want to think that they've
made this decision to live so far away.
But wait, I had the perfect life.
I have the house with my yard and everything.
So there's a lot of data on commuting.
And it's really fascinating.
I mean, the things it does to people-- it's not good for,
one thing, just time.
And I think a lot of people move to the suburbs-- the
biggest reason by far is to prioritize schools and family
life for children.
JESSI HEMPEL: So you wrote about a family like that.
A family who lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts and
was having more children and decided this is it.
And they moved to a town close to my heart, Westborough,
Massachusetts, only because I grew up in the
town next to it.
And they didn't last very long.
So tell us the story of that family.
LEIGH GALLAGHER: Sure.
This is the woman--
I have a chapter in the book that's about the
suburbs and the car.
And the quote came from this woman-- the quote for the
title of the chapter.
It's called, "My Car Knows the Way to Gymnastics." And what
she meant by that was--
they'd moved--
I forget where they moved from, but they'd--
actually, her husband works at Google, I think.
But anyway--
we don't need to go into that.
But they had moved with their three children.
They had their fourth child shortly after they moved into
this colonial house in Westborough.
And the woman really wanted to try the American dream.
She said, I've never done this.
I really want to do it.
I want the car.
I want the minivan.
I want the house.
I want the whole deal.
And she was dissatisfied for a number of reasons.
But one of the biggest reasons was because she really
underestimated the amount of time she was going to spend in
her car every day, which ended up being close to 40 or 50
miles a day because she had four children.
And just to shuttle them around to all the activities
they need to be in--
I mean, if there's parents in the room, I'm sure you
understand this.
It's soccer practice, piano lessons, Hebrew lessons--
everything.
And so she was in her car from three to six every day,
traveling these vast distances to take her kids to all their
engagements.
And she just really thought that she was going to move to
a suburb and there was going to be serendipitous play
happening in the streets-- that kids would play in the
street or in the backyard with the swing set.
That was the whole point.
And they would play until it was time for dinner and then
they would come in.
And that just didn't happen.
She said to me, there's a playset in every backyard, but
you don't have access to that playset
unless you have a playdate.
So I think part of that is the whole playdate-centric culture
is also alive and well in cities.
I think that's also a result of how having two parents
working now-- we didn't have that back in
the '60s, '70s, '80s.
I think it's part of our--
I think the culture around parenting has
changed a little bit.
There's far more activities for everyone to do.
I don't know that that's just a suburban thing.
But that is one reason why children growing up in the
suburbs today have a very different childhood than I had
when I was growing up in the suburbs in the '70s, when we
did play outside until 6 o'clock and it was time for
dinner and when there were tons of
children running around.
And so she was really disaffected with that aspect,
and then with the aspect that nobody walked or--
they actually lived close to their school and she tried to
organize an effort to get the parents to walk a group of
kids to school every day.
And nobody would do it.
They didn't want do it.
JESSI HEMPEL: So tell me what happened.
So here's a family with four kids.
I mean, they don't fit into a two-bedroom apartment.
What did they decide to do?
LEIGH GALLAGHER: They ended up moving to Cambridge.
They pulled the kids out of school and
they found a row house.
It wasn't cheap.
They had to spend more money than-- they incurred a serious
financial burden to be able to do this.
And she was well aware that not everyone is able to just
change their mind like that, because the suburbs are more
economical given the schools and everything.
But they-- they are living a much happier
life, all of them.
All six of them.
Their kids love it.
They walk to museums.
They go to a park across the street when they want to play.
They have a postage stamp backyard.
They have a row house, less space, but they have the kind
of life that they're really enjoying.
So that might not be for everybody.
But I found a whole lot of people who did something like
that, who actually move to the suburbs and then
moved back to cities.
I mean, it's one thing to have-- here in New York, we
have a lot of families who actually opt to stay in the
city and never go out to the suburbs.
But I found a lot of people who are moving back, and many
times even sending their kids to public school in cities.
JESSI HEMPEL: So how are cities changing to become more
friendly places to live?
LEIGH GALLAGHER: Well, it's funny.
I mean, there's a kind of reversal going on.
The cities are actually becoming
a little more suburban.
I mean, they're just much nicer places to live than they
were in the '70s and '80s when everyone rushed out and went
to the suburbs.
So the narrative around cities--
I'm sure everyone here has read stories or books about
this in the past couple years.
But cities are--
all over the country, except for Detroit--
Detroit is a real outlier.
And some of the other rust belt cities.
But cities are really wildly resurgent
for a number of reasons.
Crime has gone down.
Public and private investment has gone way up.
They're just vastly different places.
Industry has moved out.
I mean, one of the reasons why everyone left the cities was
because we had a lot of noxious factories, dating--
I mean, that goes way back to when we were more of a
manufacturing-based economy.
And you have--
cities now are--
JESSI HEMPEL: Now those noxious factories are
beautiful lofts.
LEIGH GALLAGHER: Yes, they are.
Exactly.
And expensive lofts.
I mean, look at--
the meat packing district is-- you wouldn't have gone there
even in the '80s and '90s.
And now it's like a casting call for "The Bachelorette." I
mean, it's like--
everyone goes there.
Everyone goes out.
Cities are like amusement parks now.
And so that's been a huge shift.
Its driven the prices up, especially in New York, but--
JESSI HEMPEL: So let's talk a little bit about the
economics of cities.
I mean, is what you're talking about a phenomenon that really
only affects the upper class and the very
upper middle class.
Can the middle class afford to live in cities?
LEIGH GALLAGHER: That's a good question.
It depends on the city.
Not New York City or not Manhattan for sure.
And the suburbs were originally a big solution for
our middle class.
And that's why they were built.
And our middle class is shrinking.
And so that's, I think, one reason we're seeing actually
really high levels of poverty in the suburbs now.
So it is a bit of an economic-- it's more expensive
to live in a city than a suburb, especially if you have
to pay for private schools.
But one of the big movements that's happening, and one of
the things I spend a lot of time on in the book is this
movement to sort of urbanize the suburbs.
People really want to go back to this model where there is
some sort of cute, lively town center.
And a pleasing place to go and bump into people.
And a lot of people want that.
Whether it's in the suburbs or the city,
that's all they want.
And so a lot of home builders and developers and planners
are kind of falling all over themselves right now to sort
of build these sort of utopian urban burbs.
And they don't really exist now.
I mean, they exist in a few different places, but there's
not nearly enough of them to suit the demand that's coming.
So the ideal does not have to be moving into a city.
People just want--
JESSI HEMPEL: Is this like the river towns, like
hipsturbias--
Terry Town and Hastings on Hudson?
LEIGH GALLAGHER: Yeah, that's close to it.
LEIGH GALLAGHER: I mean, the New York Times did this story
with the headline "Hipsturbia" back several months ago.
And it was all about how hipsters were-- the Brooklyn
class was now moving up to the river towns, which offer this
kind of really funky town where there's a Main Street
and a yoga studio and a coffee shop and all that stuff.
And they do, because those towns were built on the sort
of old urban bones.
Not just the river towns, but other New
York suburbs as well.
But it's funny.
I mean, I talked to a friend of mine who lives in Hastings.
And I said, oh, did you see?
You live in Hipsturbia.
And he sort of rolled his eyes.
He said, you know, this isn't hipsters.
He said this is like upstate with corporate lawyers.
Because it's really expensive there.
And he said you're still in your car a lot.
I mean, no matter what you're still in your car a lot when
you live in the suburbs.
But that is--
I think people are really starting to draw this
distinction between the "Weeds"-style,
cul-de-sac-heavy, big, cut-and-pasted suburb and the
one with more character.
And usually, those are a little bit older.
And we're starting to see a reversal in
valuations, where those--
in some places, neighborhoods that are older are retaining
their housing values more so than newer neighborhoods,
which-- in the past, that was always reversed.
People always want new.
And you're starting to see that revers a little bit.
It's one of a number of reversals in economic
valuations that play into this whole thesis.
JESSI HEMPEL: And so you talked in the book about a man
who launched an interesting experiment that essentially
got squashed when the housing bust happened.
But it was an experiment to give mortgages based on a
broader picture than basic pen-and-paper financial
ability to pay.
Can you talk a little bit about what
that experiment was?
LEIGH GALLAGHER: Sure.
This is this outfit out of Chicago called the Center for
Neighborhood Technologies.
And there's a guy there named Scott Bernstein who is just a
real kind of genius in this field.
And he had spent a lot of time-- his whole expertise,
and this organization's expertise, is quantifying how
much transportation costs eat up disposable income.
And so people think about the cost it takes to
fill up your gas tank.
But it's not just that.
I mean, anybody who owns a car knows this.
It's the cost of maintenance.
It's the cost of--
I mean, everything that goes into owning a car-- parking
and all that stuff.
And so he did a lot of calculations across the
country and found that in many markets, usually the market's
that are the farthest from the sort of urban center, the sort
of "drive to qualify" zone, as it was called during the
housing boom, because the people who could least afford
it were going the furthest to find the house they wanted.
And actually, this woman in Boston said that too.
They went so far way because if you're going to spend, you
want it to be the best house you can buy.
And that's part of this house American dream psyche mania
that we have going.
But anyway, he found that in many communities, people were
spending as much or more of their disposable income, or
their monthly income, on their transportation costs as their
housing costs.
And that's largely because when you're doing a 70 mile
commute, or two per household, that's a lot of money.
And people don't think about that when they think about
their housing costs.
They really don't.
You just think of the house itself.
But that's eating up just tons and tons and tons of
people's-- it's taking a huge hit on people's wallets.
So anyway, he basically devised this idea for a
location-efficient mortgage, he called it, where the cost
of transportation was built and baked into
your monthly nut.
And to the kind of mortgage you were going
to be able to get.
And you would be able to qualify for a bigger mortgage
if you lived in a more responsible place.
So just actually baking in where the house was located
into the actual total cost of your house that the bank was
willing to lend for.
And kind of acknowledging that that was a huge part of the
expense of the house was going to be where it's built.
And so they did really well.
They did studies on these mortgages.
And in a study of 300 of them or something, there was one
that failed.
And it didn't even ever default.
They fixed it before it came to default.
So these have been proven to work.
And they're an idea that a lot of people think makes a whole
lot of sense.
But the housing bust and our economic crisis came around.
And they never-- they haven't really gotten traction.
It's very hard to get the banks to move on something
that doesn't act in their interests.
JESSI HEMPEL: That is indeed true.
Indeed true.
So you also address this startup doing something called
a walkability score.
LEIGH GALLAGHER: Yeah.
So this is a startup that people here might have heard
of called Walk Score.
And what Walk Score does is it uses all sorts of algorithms
to be able to give you a score from 1 to 100 on how walkable
your neighborhood is.
And you just plug in any address and it
will give you a score.
So I live on West 10th street in Manhattan.
And my walk score is 100, which means that I can
basically walk anywhere I need to go.
Where I grew up in Media, Pennsylvania--
I forget what the score is.
I think it's in the 20s.
But that's considered car dependent.
So you can do this anywhere.
So it's really fun to play around with.
And this company is really riding a wave of buzz in terms
of what people are demanding from their houses and their
neighborhoods.
So walkability is kind of this big new buzz word in real
estate circles.
And real estate agents are starting to use it.
It's being promoted everywhere--
new communities.
The walkability of a neighborhood is really seen as
a huge thing that people are looking for.
So 15,000 real estate agencies are now baking in the API to
their websites, because when you're shopping for a house,
in addition to what it looks like, how many bedrooms, is it
a colonial, whatever, people are interested
in what it's near.
And I think that really reflects a huge change in what
people are looking for from the places they live.
So it's a huge thing.
And those communities are going to be able to command
higher prices and do better.
We don't have enough of them.
So--
JESSI HEMPEL: So afterwards she'll give us all some
tutoring based on where to invest based on this, right?
LEIGH GALLAGHER: Somebody said I could open a consultancy and
advise people where to live, so--
JESSI HEMPEL: On that note, let's open up to the audience.
Do we have any questions in our audience?
All right, we've got somebody at the mic.
AUDIENCE: Good afternoon.
Thank you for coming.
I know a little bit about--
not I know about real estate, but I know a little bit about
real estate in the Central Valley of California and
Bakersfield.
And they have, for instance, this gigantic construction on
the grapevine called Fort Tejon Ranch, which is utterly
enormous in the middle of the highest point.
Just a terrible place to have a complex.
But also, in Bakersfield itself, a ton of new home
construction.
And it looks like a nice suburban area.
What I find interesting about these new homes is that
they're not actually selling the home.
It's a giant town home complex.
So you don't actually--
you don't own the home in the same way that I own my home.
I have the right to do whatever I want to the
exterior of my house.
And it seems like this is a way to bring the cost of the
house down for people in that area who
want to live in houses.
There are hardly any apartments in Bakersfield.
But I wonder if this is a trend that you've seen to make
housing more affordable, but less--
but really, you don't own the house in the same
way that you own--
again, in the same way that I do.
So I wonder what this trend means.
JESSI HEMPEL: So it's sort of like a New York City co-op.
LEIGH GALLAGHER: It does.
It's townhouses?
Sorry.
AUDIENCE: They're full-size homes.
They're full-size, multifamily homes.
Bakersfield has very few apartment buildings because
there's so much space to sprawl out.
Not unlike Los Angeles.
Well, Los Angeles is much more contained.
But it's just houses after houses.
And they're building and building and building.
And that paused for a while a few years ago.
But they're back in full force.
LEIGH GALLAGHER: Well, if this is some sort
of innovative way--
I don't quite know the structure here.
But people don't necessarily--
the home ownership rate is following.
And renting and other types of financial arrangements are
definitely gaining ground.
I don't know if this is a sort of communal setup or if it's--
I don't know exactly what the structure is.
But I thought you were going to say they were sort of town
homes, which is interesting because more urban kind of
style of development is coming everywhere, even in places
like Bakersfield, which is ground zero
for drive-to qualify.
Absolutely.
The people there do the longest
commutes in the country.
And I actually have an anecdote in my book about a
woman who had to leave her house at 4:00--
she got up at 3:50, left at 4:00.
Only then would the commute be only an hour and 15 minutes.
But then she'd get there at 5:15.
And so she and her husband, they were rare.
They actually commuted together.
And they would go and park in the McDonald's parking lot and
recline their seats and set their cellphones and just
sleep for an hour.
And on the days when she was alone, she would drive right
to her classroom--
she was a teacher--
and she would take a nap under her desk.
And then once it was time to get ready, she would get ready
in the ladies' room, and bring her flat iron and everything.
But she would literally sleep under her desk
for an hour or two.
She said she felt like George Costanza from
the Seinfeld episode.
This is a New York audience.
You guys get that, right?
JESSI HEMPEL: All right, let's jump to this
question over here.
AUDIENCE: I was just wondering if in the course of your
research you reached any conclusions about the size of
new house construction and the impact it has on some of the
things you're describing.
Because I live in the suburbs.
One thing that I've noticed is that a house that's the normal
size house like my house, like 2000 square feet, they just
don't build houses like that anymore.
New construction is like 3,500 square feet, 3,800 square
feet, 4,200 square feet.
And I was just wondering if you'd seen any impact of that.
LEIGH GALLAGHER: That's a really good question.
That is changing.
The housing boom and bust really kind of changed the
psyche on the whole excess consumption and everything.
Statistically, the average size of a new home has not--
it's come down a little bit.
Then it went up a little bit in 2011 because for a really
long period of time--
or during the peak of the financial crisis, the only
people that were buying houses were very wealthy who were
paying cash.
So it skewed the numbers little bit.
But overall in the zeitgeist, and the home builders, are
changing the way they are building houses.
They don't ever use the word "small." It's not a word they
like to talk about.
So they will say our homes are now right size.
Or the floor plans are a little different.
And they're making more "efficient" use of space.
That's what everyone's talking about.
But anecdotally--
JESSI HEMPEL: Efficiency is such a good word.
LEIGH GALLAGHER: It is.
But that's--
people don't want houses where they're not using the space
that they bought and paid for.
It costs a lot to heat and cool.
And people are really starting to recognize this. that.
So you're seeing all these kind of interesting movements
come to be also, like life edited, which has gotten a lot
of coverage here in New York.
Graham Hill, who founded TreeHugger, has this new
movement about just reducing the amount of
stuff that you have.
And his TED talk got like two million views.
There is a movement in the homebuilding industry for the
not-so-big house movement.
There's an architect, Sarah Susanka-- or
she's a home designer.
And she advocates for building differently, so that you're
using more of the space every day.
And so we're definitely seeing a lot more interest in that.
And the types of communities people want, they tend to be
communities that have smaller houses.
JESSI HEMPEL: So let's pop over here for a question.
AUDIENCE: Hi.
I'm curious as to how--
I think there's sort of an elephant in the room in the
story you've been telling, because--
the things that you've been talking about, people moving
to the suburbs to go to good schools, people being in
cities having to buy private schools.
And the whole white flight of the '60s and '70s and the
urban decline thing is, in a lot of ways,
a story about race.
And I wonder how that ties in with the story of suburbia,
because it was an explicit policy in this country that
the newly built suburbs were going to be for white people.
And that was a really big factor in why
everybody moved out there.
I'm wondering how that figures into everything.
LEIGH GALLAGHER: Yeah, great question.
It's true.
Back when the FHA--
I won't get too bogged down in history.
But there was a process when homes were approved for
different kinds of mortgages.
And homes that were red lined--
it was explicit or inexplicit--
blacks were denied benefits that were flowing to whites
when it came to the kinds of houses they could buy and the
neighborhoods they could live.
Totally a huge part of our housing history.
As the suburbs grew and grew and grew, they got so big that
they became this jumble and began to reflect everything
about America.
So you now have suburbs in every shape, flavor, size,
style, economic class, race, ethnicity, and everything.
So they are much more reflective now of America in
sum than they were when they were born and created,
absolutely.
But the home ownership rate in this
country is 64% on average.
For whites, it's 74%.
And for blacks, it's 44%.
So the policies behind home ownership are still--
there's vast differences.
And so that's, I think, still a huge issue in our housing
market in general.
I don't think it plays so much a role into the migration
that's happening now.
I think it's a bit more everyone.
The trends I write about really impact everybody.
JESSI HEMPEL: Let's jump here.
AUDIENCE: Hi.
You talked a lot about people finding the urban lifestyle
more attractive and moving from suburbs to cities.
I'm curious, in your research, was there any data that
suggested the opposite move, from the suburbs to a more
rural environment, or to stand-alone towns that
wouldn't be considered a suburb, with just how easy it
is to be connected.
LEIGH GALLAGHER: That's a really good question.
Most of the research seems to suggest that people are
looking for more urban and more connection.
You can totally get that in the right kind
of small town, though.
I mean, the town I grew up in that I write a lot about is
very much a kind of Grover's Corners-esque type of place.
And what people want is connection and community.
And that was totally lost in the way we kind of ended up
maxing out our suburbs.
But it does exist in small towns, completely.
Another-- some people suggested to me that the
future is in dual home ownership, where you have--
you see a lot of that in New York, where you have your
urban dwelling and then you have your
place in the country.
And I think it's a rarefied slice of the population that
can live that way.
But this person was sort of saying, no, you can do it--
people at income levels that you'd be surprised at, this is
going to be kind of the way of the future.
So I don't know.
I think with rural--
I think the appeal of the small town
definitely plays a role.
One economist I talked to talked about--
He had a word for it.
Cities with 300,000 or less, he thinks that's going to be
the future.
So that's hardly small town.
That's hardly rural.
But smaller cities.
So that's one other aspect.
JESSI HEMPEL: Let's jump right over here.
AUDIENCE: So I grew up in Wisconsin.
And pretty much all of Wisconsin is either a suburb
or a rural area.
And one of the ways I'd always thought about suburbs--
I grew up in very much a cookie cutter suburb--
is sort of on the border between the
urban and the rural.
Sort of places that exist that--
sort of geographic in nature, just places adjacent to both
types of communities.
And I hadn't really thought about it from the lifestyle
perspective, or the choices, et cetera, I'm sure my parents
had thought about very deeply.
I guess if you extrapolate outwards the trends that
you're seeing, what happens to that place in between the
cities and the rural areas.
What do you call those and what function do they serve?
And I guess I'd just be interested to hear you sort of
look forward.
LEIGH GALLAGHER: Yeah.
Well, I mean what you're describing--
I mean, the suburbs, that's how they were designed.
It was like, here's cities.
Here's the country.
We're going to throw them together and come up with the
perfect mixture.
Like the perfect solution.
It's going to be--
bake them together and we'll have the best of both worlds.
But I think you're talking about more of the remote
suburbs that are closer to the rural farmland and stuff,
where farmers made a lot of money by selling their land to
developers.
And actually, now a lot of those farmers are making a lot
of money on the other end by buying them back for nothing.
They are.
JESSI HEMPEL: Oh, the irony.
LEIGH GALLAGHER: Yeah, it is.
It's great.
But there's a big question.
What happens to all these houses?
If people are going to migrate inward, what happens to them?
There's the theory of economics that if a price
falls low enough, it'll be of value to someone.
So maybe landlords will come in and try to
rent out those houses.
Maybe communities--
they'll become immigrant communities of a certain type.
Maybe big extended families will take
over these big houses.
Maybe they'll turn into artist lofts or something.
So there's all sorts of uses that have been proposed for
these houses that we have that are built far way.
And that arguably there won't be a market for in the future,
because we're also not having as many children, which is
another factor.
But that's anybody's guess.
I mean, a lot of enterprising investors are buying up
hundreds of single-family homes with the intent of
renting them out.
And it remains to be seen if that's going to be a
sustainable solution.
But very good question.
JESSI HEMPEL: Let's jump over here.
AUDIENCE: I wanted to ask you specifically
about Silicon Valley.
And I wanted to know if that fits into your general thesis
or if it's sort of an exception because of all of
the wealth creation and jobs that are there.
LEIGH GALLAGHER: That's a really good question.
It fits in.
I would say Palo Alto is a good example of the old burb.
It's got this quaint town.
It's got a real center.
It's a place that a lot of people want to be.
The neighborhood is built at scale.
The streets are narrow.
There's sidewalks.
The houses are built a little close together.
So it all has all the bones there that
make up a good suburb.
There was sprawl outside of San Francisco.
I mean, you saw it especially in the East Bay, but
all over the place.
So a lot of those things happen.
But San Francisco came up in my research a little bit.
A large part, I talk about what companies are doing.
And a lot of companies are moving back to opening in big
cities or shuttering their big suburban office parks and
opening in cities.
So in San Francisco, you see some of the hottest startups
in the past couple years have opened in the city instead of
in the valley.
I mean, Google is obviously the exception to that.
But look at where we are right now.
I mean, 20 years ago, Google would have probably decided to
locate in Mount Kisco.
I mean, it's just-- that's a really good example of how
things have changed.
This building that we're in right now, and the price that
was paid for it and how in demanded it
is, tells you a lot.
But Silicon Valley is interesting.
It does fit the trend in certain ways.
JESSI HEMPEL: Let's jump right over here.
AUDIENCE: You spoke a little bit about race as it pertains
to home ownership.
But I wonder a bit if--
if you know a bit about statistics about religious
preference or maybe immigrant communities that might find a
more isolated neighborhood to be preferable.
LEIGH GALLAGHER: One of the things I found--
I mean, people like to live around people like them.
So families like to live around other families.
People of different religious persuasions or beliefs or
whatever like to be around people that are like them.
Young single people like to be around other
young single people.
So that happens in the suburbs.
That happens in the cities.
I mean, you look at Williamsburg
and the Hasidic community.
So I think that's always going to be the case.
But those people might be moving to different places.
AUDIENCE: But I guess my point is that--
and I'm making an assumption here, which is that religious
groups and immigrant populations tend to have
larger families.
I don't know if those are true, but I
believe they're true.
LEIGH GALLAGHER: That's true.
That's true statistically.
And we need that.
We need those people.
The birth rate in this country is falling like a stone.
And that's a whole other reason--
I have a whole chapter on demographics.
We're not having children anymore.
I mean, it's not that dramatic, but it almost is.
I talk about-- this is not related to your question, but
my father grew up on a block in an inner spring suburb in
Philadelphia where there were 41 children on his block.
And this was in the '50s.
And I hired a private investigator to count how many
children there are in that block now.
And it's a little bit informal.
JESSI HEMPEL: Creepy.
LEIGH GALLAGHER: What?
JESSI HEMPEL: Creepy.
LEIGH GALLAGHER: I know.
But there's 15 or fewer.
And that's playing out all over this country.
So we need the immigrant population to sustain our
longevity as a country.
JESSI HEMPEL: OK, right over here.
AUDIENCE: As you mentioned in that story you told earlier,
you had a couple that moved out to the suburbs for the
space and the schools, obviously.
What are the trends with urban schools?
Are they getting better?
LEIGH GALLAGHER: That's the huge issue, because
it's like, oh, great.
Everyone wants to live in a city.
Well, the schools have to be good for that to happen--
to draw the young families.
And they're--
I talked to a developer here who owns a company based in--
it's Jonathan Rose Company.
He's a big developer.
And he said that all his young people-- all his employees
live in the city.
They're all making it work.
They're all finding schools, whether its magnet schools or
public schools that are good or whatever, because not
everybody can afford private schools.
JESSI HEMPEL: Is that in New York specifically?
LEIGH GALLAGHER: That's in New York.
He's in New York.
But I talked to someone else in Philadelphia who's bringing
their kids back and looking at a sort of
magnet school situation.
That's a big question mark.
And I think the schools need to get better.
I think they are getting better.
But on the other hand, I think schools in the suburbs are
going to face continuing challenges going forward.
You're seeing a lot of them--
as suburbs depopulate and as suburbs age because of this
declining birth rate, a lot of schools are having to merge or
close and they're seeing their
taxpayer-funded resources decline.
And that trend is going to accelerate.
So I think it might even out a little bit
more than people think.
JESSI HEMPEL: Right over here.
AUDIENCE: So the suburbs grew out of World War II.
And part of that growth, too, was television and
advertising.
And we see television viewership on decline.
I think it's near all-time lows.
Can you say anything about the American consumer?
And if the end of the suburbs is coming, will that also
portend the end of the American economy?
Where are the lawn tractors going to go to?
All the stuff we get out of Home Depot.
LEIGH GALLAGHER: Yeah, that's a good point.
Good point.
I mean, I think it's changing.
So right, in the '50s, suburbia was baked into every
single consumer marketing image you could imagine,
whether it's TV commercial or an add on a
billboard or whatever.
So now we're just seeing those images in different places.
And those images might be changing.
So maybe the American dream is not a lawnmower and a yard.
But it's a great Wi-Fi connection and a really cool
place for entertaining your friends.
And there's different kind--
it's true.
I mean, that's what the millennials want.
I mean, that's a lot of you in the room here.
But people are poking and prodding and studying the
millennials to see how they want to live and where they
want to live.
And how they want to live their lives, because that is
going to answer the question you just asked of what is the
consuming economy going to look like.
And the studies show that they don't want a car, which is a
whole other story.
The number of kids getting their driver's licenses is
dropping, which is really weird to anybody who grew up
in the '70s or earlier.
And they want other things.
So they want devices.
They want their gadgets.
They want their smartphones.
They want their Google everything.
So that's the difference.
JESSI HEMPEL: Leigh, another--you and I were
talking about this on the way over.
Another way to sort of frame that idea and to really tie
what you were talking about to your thesis is to think about
what was going on in the 20th century.
I mean, the 20th century was about mass, right?
It was about mass production.
It was broadcast media.
It was producing things at scale.
And the internet came along and really disrupted that at
the end of the 20th century.
And so the 21st century is about technology in search of
personalization.
So all of our models are breaking down on every level.
LEIGH GALLAGHER: Yep.
I think that's a great way to put it.
That's exactly right.
I mean, everything was broadcast instead of cable and
everything.
And so now people want that same kind of customization
from their communities.
Why should you have to just choose from A or B, cul-de-sac
or skyscraper?
For a long time, that was kind of our
choices in this country.
I'm not really exaggerating that much.
And so now people want lots of different options.
And that's why this is really a positive story, because
people are going to be able to pick and choose and have a lot
more options at their disposal when it comes to where they
want to live, how they want to live, how they want to spend
their time, which is a huge part of where you live.
And I think that totally replicates the kind of
changing narrative of what's happening in our country.
That is a great way to put it, Jesse.
JESSI HEMPEL: So we have time for one more question.
AUDIENCE: So I was curious when you were doing your
research if you got into at all what I would characterize
as sort of the dysfunctionality or
schizophrenia of a lot of these suburban towns and their
governments.
Like in the town I live in, and it's very common the area
I live in, there are these endless fights about the
school budget and about funding different things.
And about, should we have green space or should we let
that space be developed, because then that would lead
to more ratables?
Or you can be in one town and your taxes can be 30% lower
than the town next to you because the town next to you
has some big company like IBM in it or something like that.
And I was wondering if you got into at all sort of their
whole suburban model of local government and whether it's
going to work going forward.
LEIGH GALLAGHER: You know, that's a really good question.
I didn't spend too much time on that.
I mean, I did want to go and sit in on
one of those meetings.
I think that would have been something really fun to do.
But I didn't get the chance to.
You know, that may change.
I mean, I think we're going to have--
the taxpayer base is going to increasingly shift in the
suburbs to older people.
And it's going to become a bigger, kind of more diverse
mix as the suburbs become kind of jumbled up and as people
see their incomes decline.
I think those fights are going to get worse because you're
not going to have one faction that only wants the
schools to be good.
You're going to have multiple factions.
So I don't see that changing.
I think I see it getting worse.
JESSI HEMPEL: Do you think that people are less involved
in their town or city government when they live in
cities as opposed to suburbs?
Do they feel less ownership over it?
LEIGH GALLAGHER: Well, cities work in kind of micro
communities anyway.
So that's a really-- that's a good question.
I mean, Robert Putnam wrote great book, "Bowling Alone,"
in the '80s or so.
And a lot of people suggest that sprawl actually makes
people less connected and feel less sense of community, even
though that's what the suburbs were
designed to kind of foster.
So I think you see a lot of community activism in cities.
JESSI HEMPEL: So last question, Leigh.
You've been all over the United States and the world in
reporting this book.
Do you have a suggestion for those of us who are being
priced out of Brooklyn?
Des Moines or Birmingham?
LEIGH GALLAGHER: Well, I always say in New York we're
really lucky because we have a lot of those older
suburbs around us.
So if you do want to move to the suburbs here, you have
some great choices.
But I'm still looking for that perfect utopia where you kind
of cut and paste Brooklyn and you put it somewhere else
that's cheaper and more affordable.
JESSI HEMPEL: Well, thank you to Google for having us in.
And thanks to Leigh.
LEIGH GALLAGHER: Thanks so much.
JESSI HEMPEL: And the big question I'm sure you're all
wondering--
I can't believe I almost got off the stage without telling
you this, but there are many ways to get
Leigh's book, in fact.
You could buy it, you could download it on Google Play, or
you could ask for it for Christmas from a loved one who
could get it for everyone.
LEIGH GALLAGHER: Great idea, Jessi.
JESSI HEMPEL: What do you think?
LEIGH GALLAGHER: That is great.
And I think there are a limited number back there, but
they might--
I don't know if they're still up there or not, but
there are some here.
So feel free to take one or buy one.
JESSI HEMPEL: Thank you.
LEIGH GALLAGHER: Thanks again, everybody.
Thanks for great questions.