Suburban Nation - Andres Duany [22]
THE SEGREGATION OF SOCIETY BY INCOME
There are many characteristics of contemporary suburban housing that distinguish it from its traditional counterpart. Perhaps the strangest and most troubling of these is the way that new housing is distributed. The photo at right shows a typical suburban landscape, this one composed of three different housing pods, or clusters. One cluster consists entirely of houses that sell for $350,000 and up. The second cluster contains houses costing about $200,000. The third cluster is made up of apartments priced at less than $100,000. This sort of organization, a suburban invention, represents a relatively recent phenomenon in this country. Our history is fraught with many different types of segregation—by race, by class, by how recently one has immigrated—but for the first time we are now experiencing ruthless segregation by minute gradations of income. There have always been better and worse neighborhoods, and the rich have often taken refuge from the poor, but never with such precision. It would appear that, for many, there is little distinction between someone slightly less wealthy than themselves and a Skid Row bum. To prove this point, one need only to attempt to build a $200,000 house on an empty lot in the $350,000 cluster; the homeowners’ association will immediately sue. Certainly, any mention of the word affordability is enough to elicit all manner of objections in the new suburbs.
The segregation of housing by “market segment” is a phenomenon that was invented by developers who, lacking a meaningful way to distinguish their mass-produced merchandise, began selling the concept of exclusivity: If you live within these gates, you can consider yourself a success. The real estate business caters to this elitism so relentlessly that even some mobile home parks are marketed in this way.
The landscape of income segregation: gated homogeneous housing pods
In such a Darwinian pecking order—in which each house is sold with bragging rights attached—homeowners are prone to get a bit panicky about the value of the house next door. They fear that if a neighbor chooses the wrong paint color, neglects to mow the lawn, or owns an overweight dog, their own property value will plummet. And, since the average American moves every six years,1 property value is difficult to ignore.
Moving is a well-established tradition in America, and moving up constitutes a significant part of the American dream. Not only is working one’s way to a bigger house central to our ethos but it makes sense functionally as families bring children into the world. But why must the move to a larger or more luxurious house bring with it the abandonment of one’s neighbors, community groups, and often even schoolmates? The suburban pod system causes people to move not just from house to house but from community to community. Only in a traditionally organized neighborhood of varied incomes can a family significantly alter its housing without going very far. In the new suburbs, you can’t move up without moving out.u
It doesn’t take a sociology degree to predict the sort of culture that this pattern of income-segregated housing creates. There is plenty of evidence in California, Florida, and the other Sun Belt states: the people in the gated pods are the ones consistently voting down necessary taxes. Not one penny more to support the inner city, schools, parks, or even for the maintenance of the public realm at large. Meanwhile, these people often pay hundreds, sometimes thousands, of dollars