The End Of The Suburbs Sparknotes

Some people love living in the suburbs, others would rather live amidst the action in a big city, and some people just are where they are and don't think about it at all. While we used to consider the American Dream as having a traditional family, living in a home with a white picket fence on a cul-de-sac with neighborhood kids riding bikes and playing hide and go seek, the current generation of emerging adults - millennials - see things a little differently.

The End of the Suburbs by Leigh Gallagher is an easy and entertaining read that illustrates the U.S. housing trends from the suburban sprawl to the renewal of urban cities. Gallagher does a great job using history, economics and personal experience to explain how our country has developed and more importantly, what's coming next; and I myself, as a millennial, think that she is spot on.

The End of the Suburbs begins by painting a picture of Media, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia, and Gallagher's home town. She describes her childhood memories of Media as "sepia-toned", with

neighborhoods lined with large oak trees, surrounding the "Triangle" where kids would play, and the annual Fourth of July picnic would be held, all of which were within walking distance of State Street, Media's "main drag" downtown area. State Street was lined with boutiques, restaurants, bars, and a massive courthouse which brought lawyers and workers to town each day. The book then lays out the historic events that led to each "era" of housing development.
For quite some time we have considered the suburbs as the place to be when it comes to raising a family, but during the Middle Ages and Renaissance, the suburbs were primarily a home for the poor.

Everything took place in the center cities; art, culture, merchants, politicians, and the elite lived amongst it all. Everyone wanted to live in the city, close to where they worked, and eventually, cities like New York became crowded, noisy, and extremely dirty. By 1910, the population of Manhattan reached 2.3 million, beginning the gradual movement away from the overcrowded downtown areas and resulting in pockets of nicer, quieter neighborhoods popping up outside the major cities. Gallagher describes how economic shortcomings such as World War II and the more recent Great Recession, as well as advances of transportation technology, from the street car to the reliance on the automobile, directly enabled new phases of

development.
The majority of the book focuses on the aspects of suburban living versus life in a larger city. Suburban life permits privacy with large houses and yards, but often times involves long commutes, which tend to lead in the need to plan everything you do, and for some people that Gallagher spoke with, loneliness. In a center city, living spaces are smaller, and you are constantly surrounded by people, but you can walk or quickly drive most places you need to go, which many people conclude results in more free time. Baby boomers have mostly preferred suburban life while millennials seem to choose the latter. There is however, a newer concept of development, that lies somewhere in the middle. New Urbanism is an urban design movement that combines suburban and urban life with the creation of walkable neighborhoods of a wide range of housing types within close proximity to a downtown area containing plenty of entertainment and commercial entities of which provide an abundance of jobs.