The Waning Demographics of Suburbia

I’m not sure how much success Fayetteville, Georgia will have in “retrofitting suburbia” but this point about demographics is dead-on:

That sense of urgency is understandable. The nation’s sprawling suburbs—home to as much as half of the U.S. population and more than 30 million people age 55-plus—may have been a good place to grow up. But the suburbs are proving a tough place to grow old.

Indeed, as the country ages, suburbia’s widely assumed benefits—privacy, elbow room, affordability—tend to vanish. Maintaining yards and homes requires more effort; driving everywhere, and for everything, becomes expensive and, eventually, impossible. (Research shows that men and women who reach their 70s, on average, outlive their ability to drive by six and 10 years, respectively.)

Insofar as the great appeal of suburbia is that people like to raise children in suburbs, then it makes sense that a country experiencing a declining number of families with kids and a rising number of people too old to drive will want to shift away from car-dependent suburbs as an exclusive mode of development. The good news for the built environment is that the U.S. is expected to experience non-trivial net population growth so a lower proportion of car-dependent suburban construction doesn’t mean we need to pave over all the suburbs we have. It just means that we need to add capacity in terms of other ways of living.