The sickness of Seattle's distant suburbs

Mark Hinshaw, a Seattle architect and urban planner and former architecture critic of The Seattle Times, leaves no doubt about his views. "The suburb might not be dead yet. But it's very ill indeed," he writes in a forceful article in Crosscut, an online periodical in Greater Seattle.

Hinshaw is the latest writer to look at the real estate collapse afflicting distant suburban subdivisions and conclude that something fundamental has changed in American development. His focus is on Snohomish County, a 713,000-population county north or Seattle that has been one of the fastest-growing in the state of Washington.

The county grew by more than one-sixth, or 107,000, between 2000 and 2010, the US Census reports. Now, according to Hinshaw, the newcomers to Snohomish are paying for rapid spread of so-called rural subdivisions — single-family houses that leave their residents utterly dependent on automobiles for supplying their daily needs.

"Snohomish County is now the reigning queen of short sales and foreclosures in the metropolitan area, by a good measure," Hinshaw says.  Thirty-eight percent of housing transactions in the county involve either foreclosures or short sales.

Hinshaw uses the county's current problems to argue that governments need to do a better job of managing their growth — something that Snohomish neglected to do during the boom years. He makes a persuasive case for stronger planning, and draws effectively from studies by organizations such as the Center for Neighborhood Technology and the National Resources Defense Council. Some of the most pervasive real estate problems, as Hinshaw demonstrates, seem to be in outlying areas that require a lot of driving.

On his other point—that the era of the suburbs is over — the evidence is more shaky, Crosscut readers argue. Hinshaw's article provoked numerous responses, with some people accusing him of reading too much into short-term trends. 

Dick Morrill, demographer for the CentralPuget Sound Research Report, says Hinshaw "extrapolates dramatically and wishfully from short-term recession and rising class inequality trends to fundamental change in the nature of American settlement." Morrill argues that "it is simply not the case, in Seattle or anywhere else, that the American population is generating fewer families with children, or that people's preferences have in any way changed." 

Can this be? Many cities in the past few years have been attracting young people at higher volumes than they used to. Lively, close-in locations are appealing to a large number of people who don't want to be far from the action. Morrill acknowledges that Seattle has a substantial number of young, childless professionals, who are providing a considerable market for denser, centrally located housing. But, he maintains, suburban and single-family housing will remain popular in the long term — even with some of the young professionals, once they marry and have children.

In Morrill's view, dubious financial practices — rather than a fundamental change in the economy and personal preferences — account for much of the foreclosure mess. 

Other readers applauded Hinshaw's article, noting that not just young people but also a sizable number of baby boomers want to be closer to amenities and work opportunities, and are moving closer in. That doesn't mean that all suburbs are fated to decline, one reader argued. First-tier suburban municipalities may do well, evolving into denser, more diverse communities, while other suburbs, with fewer advantages, will probably suffer.

What Hinshaw stirs up with his article is a fierce regional debate over how far-reaching the recently demonstrated changes in housing and locational preferences are likely to be. Will suburban school districts be able to continue offering free bus rides to school to all their students? Perhaps not; that's something worth pondering. One reader suggests that buying a house within walking distance of school will be a future trend. 

Hinshaw's article and the readers' responses are equally worth reading.