The suburbs have taken a major bashing these last few years.
Could there be anything less fashionable in this age of new urbanism than a subdivision with two-car garages, porch-less homes, and a winding series of driveways that empty onto streets bereft of sidewalks and people?
The new thinking is that we should reconsider our entitlement to 3,000-square-foot houses and big cars, and Toronto documentary maker Gregory Greene explores that topic in his award-winning The End of Suburbia and its follow-up, The Resilient City. Mr. Greene presents The End of Suburbia at New York’s BMW Guggenheim Lab in early October. With Vancouver urban issues writer Charles Montgomery representing Canada on the Guggenheim Lab team, the interactive exhibit launched this summer in Manhattan’s East Village, with a lot of local press attention. It’s devoted to studying all aspects of urban density – and its antithesis, suburban sprawl, as part of a mobile lab that will travel to nine major cities in six years. It leaves Manhattan on Oct. 16 and travels to Berlin, then Mumbai.
Mr. Greene’s films look at the rising costs of fuel and the impact that cost will have on living far from urban centres, as well as the growing potential for shocks to the system, what with major population growth.
He says that if the suburbs are to survive, they will need to run as self-sufficient communities with excellent transit, instead of the old car-dependent subdivision.
And if the U.S. example is any indication, the era of the old-fashioned, entitled suburban lifestyle is coming to a close. We’ve already heard the news reports of suburban spots like Windy Ridge, in North Carolina, and Franklin Reserve, in California, sitting half empty and susceptible to looting.
“The suburbs in the U.S. are collapsing,” says Mr. Greene. “If you look at the housing crisis that started in 2008, it was a suburban housing crisis. It happened when oil went to $147 a barrel. Basically, the less urban density, the greater the housing crisis.”
Mr. Greene believes certain Canadian suburbs could also turn into ghost towns, especially those without decent transit, which would be made vulnerable by their dependence on the car. Monster homes, too, will become too expensive to heat.
“People will go, ‘Well, last winter it cost me $1,000 to heat my home. This winter it’s going to be $3,500 … I don’t want that.’ I think a lot of those homes are just going to lose their value because it’s really hard to heat a house that is stupidly big.”
And yet, despite the high price of fuel, the Canadian suburbs appear to be thriving.
“The suburbs in Canada are definitely thriving,” says Mr. Greene. “But Canadians are at record levels of debt … The possibility of a recession could really affect the suburbs because people would want those transit options, and they are going to be moving away from large-scale housing that they saw as an entitlement to middle-class living.”
A new HGTV Canada show that capitalizes on the very topic, Urban Suburban, premiered Wednesday. The show, produced by Vancouver’s Force Four Productions, involves homebuyers choosing between the big life in the ’burbs, or the contained life in the city.
Life in the ’burbs is still part of the natural evolution for many Canadians says Sarah Daniels, who co-hosts the show with brother Philip DuMoulin. Both hosts are real-life realtors. Consumers want more space for their dollar as they move along in life, says Ms. Daniels. That means moving further away from the urban core.
A homebuyer might start with a one-bedroom in Yaletown, but once the kids come along, they move out to Delta.
